Tag Archives: reading

Canvas Blues – LXXV: Yesteryears

11 Wednesday Aug 2021

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

LXXV: Yesteryears

Saturday came with a sprinkle, leaving yellow pollen outlines to mark parked cars even long after they’d driven off. Brendon’s father decided to replace the mailbox—“Been pooling water for months ever since those stupid kids batted a three hundred down the street”—and his mother had gone off shopping with Aunt Laurel, leaving Brendon alone during that auspicious morning.

Had he been able to go back, just not answered the door, remained crossed-legged on his bed sketching out a thirty-by-thirty-inch spaceship on cheap poster board…

But he hadn’t known, had he?

Casey scowled when Brendon opened the door. “What’s this I hear about you writing comics with Robbie?”

“I—”

“Is that where you are all these nights? Not actually doing homework?”

“We only meet up like once or twice a week. I didn’t think you’d care. Aren’t the two of you friends again?”

“Friends?” Casey scoffed and tossed his hair out of his eyes distractedly. “He’s no friend of mine.”

Brendon sagged against the door frame. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Unless you mean my boyfriend is chilling at a stuck-up douche’s house when I call.” Continue reading →

Canvas Blues – LXXIV: Present

04 Wednesday Aug 2021

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

LXXIV: Present

“This is Casey,” Orion mused. He pressed a finger against the raised paint from where a different painting had ripped the wall when Brendon had removed it. “But he’s not normally here. The lines from the frame are the wrong size, don’t match up with what was here originally.”

Brendon shoved his hands deep into his pockets and did his best not to look self-conscious.

“You were trying it.” Orion met his gaze after an unsettling glance across Brendon’s bedroom. “Did it work?”

With a slow shake of his head Brendon turned away.

“He’s young in this painting. Younger than I’d have imagined. You were friends for a long while? Had to be. First relationship. He bail on you? I can’t imagine you wanting to revisit him were it the other way around.”

Brendon cleared his throat, but didn’t say anything.

“You’re like a painting yourself, Brendon.” Orion moved closer, his voice going deeper, smoother. “All facing outward, your emotions like strokes across your skin. Dark, but not shadowy, yet hiding bits of yourself inside all the business of your work.”

Brendon took a step back, needing the space as his world shrank, zeroing in on Casey where he smiled on the wall and Orion’s steady, steely presence. “I wanted it to be real. I wanted to believe you. But it’s not. It didn’t work.”

Orion only nodded and turned back to Casey’s painting. “That is interesting. That had been another theory of mine. If it wasn’t the artist’s intentions, perhaps it’s the viewer’s.” He ran a finger through the air, miming stroking Casey’s cheek. Then he raised an eyebrow at Brendon. “Maybe the artist as viewer is immune.”

Brendon sank onto the edge of his bed, a visceral feeling clutching at his gut. The bed sagged as Orion sat next to him, the mattress too old to remain firm, pressing their thighs together as they dipped toward one another. Orion made no move to pull away. So Brendon didn’t either. Continue reading →

Canvas Blues – LXXIII: Yesteryears

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

LXXIII: Yesteryears

Funny thing about floating about in the middle, no one ever thinks of you like that. It’s either one side or the other. The if-you’re-not-with-me-you’re-against-me mentality. Active imaginations thinking gossip, gossip, gossip, about the person not around. Over-sensitivity, youthfulness, anxieties all working to destroy what rationalism some might have possessed otherwise.

Brendon tried, he truly did, desperate to continue clinging to the two friends he’d raced down Grant’s Lorry Road with in the summer, the two friends he’d met in an old car cemetery time after time to play hide and seek among the rusted fenders and rotted rubber and butterfly gatherings.

Sure Casey got the bulk of his time, the most of his focus, his teenaged mind lost to hormones and new sensations. Robbie got his own time though, the two of them sitting at Robbie’s expansive dining room table, sketches and outlines spread across two thirds of the space. They worked on two comics concurrently.

The first one was to be a serialized fantasy about a spiderling who controlled the minds of a typical dungeon-crawling party. Each comic somewhat separate with occasional short arcs deep within specific dungeons or inside particular taverns, but generally individual in nature ala Sunday morning funnies.

The second one took far more of Brendon’s artistic chops, for the humorous alterations in character and setting just would not do, the space stations and exoplanets and marauders needing to have a realistic flare within their design. Robbie set the stage, his countless notes on plot arcs and character traits exposing a sweet naivety in their creation, but filled with so much passion, so much love, that the flaws disappeared.

They’d completed almost fifty individual panes of the fantasy comic—It’s All Under Control—and a measly, but gorgeous, fourteen panes of the grimdark sci-fi—Stars Avast—when Casey found out. Continue reading →

Canvas Blues – LXXII: Yesteryears

21 Wednesday Jul 2021

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

LXXII: Yesteryears

Junior year boasted one of those moments that would forever be commemorated in a 5k walk/run title, but it started innocently enough with a local news reporter who fancied himself a hot shot journalist. The man—Tony Kepuchar—did a spotlight piece on cop favoritism. Election year and all that, with the sheriff being incumbent and his friends and family like an ant network spread about the county. Kepuchar did his research, no one could fault him for that, and yet, one little line and the word “allegation” was enough to set off a chain of events that would forever haunt Brendon’s neighborhood.

“Taylor Lee Barry, grandson to County Sheriff Joseph Barry, is one such example, having been implicated in illegal street races, but never charged, with an allegation against him of heroin dealing that has, interestingly, not been investigated.”

Casey’s father threw that paper across the living room, smacking a row of DVDs to the ground in a haphazard cascade of porn and 90s flicks. Then he went on a rampage, the alcohol singing in his veins. He found Casey in the garage, fiddling with replacing the Mustang’s water pump, and proceeded to beat him with the first thing that came to hand—the rubber serpentine belt Casey had removed and not yet returned.

“No good druggie! I knew that man was bad news!”

Though the hits remained weak, they came fast and no amount of confused questions, and then later, insistences that Casey had never participated, would assuage his father’s self-righteous fury.

Casey showed up on Brendon’s doorstep on foot, bruises starting to show across his neck and shoulders, but he paid them no heed, instead ranting and raging as loud and crass as his father had the hour earlier before finally calling his mother and—partially in demand and partially begging—asked to move in with her and Becks.

“It’s not like we’re doing anything together. The Mustang’s been done and in my name, not his and I can drive the extra fifteen minutes to school in the morning, no biggie.”

Brendon listened with a palm against Casey’s back and cheek to Casey’s shoulder, gently though, afraid of hurting him further.

“I don’t care if it’s a closet, Mom. Could be a fucking couch for all I care.” Then a muttered, “Sorry.” Probably on account of the cussing. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What do writers sell?

19 Monday Jul 2021

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What do writers sell?

Writers sell licenses. That’s it. Or at least that should be it.

Writers OWN copyright. But writers should not be SELLING copyright. Copyright is ownership. It’s the “these words are mine and no, you can’t use them without my permission” bit.

So when writers sign contracts, they aren’t signing away copyright; they’re signing away the license, or right, to use, disseminate, print, or publish those words. The words themselves remain belonging to the writer.

There are a few places (actually, there are many more than a few places, unfortunately) that have awful contracts where the author actually does sign away copyright, giving all the words they’d written to a company. There are even places that demand ownership of your publishing name, disallowing a writer to publish under that particular name anywhere but with that company. [Please don’t sign these.]

The only time you should, as a writer, be selling copyright, is when you are ghostwriting (because during ghostwriting you’re paid a lump sum to writer someone else’s story for them, so they get the copyright of it) or during some form of shared-world ownership situation. (Think DnD, DragonLance, Forgotten Realms, TV show tie-ins, though even then, very often, the copyright remains with the author and they simply have incredibly strict contracts on what they’re allowed to write).

So please check your contracts over carefully! Make sure you’re not giving away something you shouldn’t be, particularly in smaller press or magazines where the publishers might not be fully aware of what they’re asking for.

~Emmi

Canvas Blues – LXXI: Present

14 Wednesday Jul 2021

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

LXXI: Present

Tell me about this Casey. As if Casey could be expressed in simple words.

Brendon poured them both another round of the old whiskey. Too much probably, but Evelyn Yert remained on the mind. Again, too much so. He swallowed, gaze darting about the room, catching on his sketches, wondered whether he should tear them all down, start fresh, blank walls, clean slate.

“Brendon?” Orion’s voice so soft, a gentle, coaxing sound from a man who could be so hard and unyielding.

“You have a high school love? Not a crush or a fling, but an actual love affair.”

Orion studied Brendon closely. “The kind where you find yourself crying in the shower and pretend it’s just the water?”

Brendon opened his hands in an approximation of a shrug. For him it hadn’t been the shower; it’d been his easel over at Llama Park, just out of sight of the lakeside hiking trail, where a little gurgling brook that fed into the lake happily ignored the angry paint smears and harsh words.

“It’s like you fall in love with a person one day and wake up the next to discover that that person never actually existed at all.”

Orion nodded slowly. “Heartbreak hits even the coldest of us.”

“Right. I’m not saying I’m somehow different.” Brendon stood abruptly, paced the small living room, knowing that Orion stared but unable to stop himself from moving, needing the action, the fingers not holding his glass twitching with the desire to hold a paintbrush. “Things just look different when you’re younger.”

“Emotions are heightened,” began Orion.

“No, not that. Well, yes, you’re right, but that’s not what I’m referring to.” It’s all about perspective. “You see people one way when seeing things through a child’s eyes.”

“And then you grow up to realize your parents’ flaws or grow away from friends.”

“He was…”

Orion remained quiet, unmoving in the armchair that backed against the far wall. Along the wall beyond his head there were sketches of crabs, of cattails, of many, many lined boat drawings because Brendon had been practicing ripples, ripples and more ripples. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: Removing large-scale defaults in my work

31 Monday May 2021

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Removing large-scale defaults in my work

I feel like who I am as a writer is always in flux. Which I think is a really good thing and I hope I always keep pushing myself. These are just a few ways that aspects of my writing have moved beyond a norm I’d instinctively set for myself.

Perspective

There was a time when every story I wrote was in third person perspective. Everything. I didn’t even consider writing in first person because I didn’t tend to like first person stories as much. You can get pretty close to a character even in third person, so I never thought much about it. There was even an interview I read by another author who said she only wrote in first person because she didn’t think she could get as close in third and I thought…”how silly” and “I would hate to only write in first.”

Slowly, I’ve gone beyond third person. I’ve written plenty of stories in first and even in second person (though I’m still iffy on doing whole novels in second because you need to have a really good reason for it). When I sit down to write a new story, I’m far more likely to truly consider perspective and decide which one will be best for the story I want to tell rather than default to the one I use the most often.

Setting

I also used to only write secondary world/high fantasy or distant science-fiction. I still default to distant time science-fiction if I write sci-fi because near future seems synonymous with hard science-fiction to a lot of people and I’m much more of a “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “who cares if it’s impossible” type of writer. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: Do you finish everything you start?

17 Monday May 2021

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Do you finish everything you start?

My half a million WIPS say no :P

Okay, in all seriousness, the answer is yes, if we’re talking projects I’ve truly started. However, projects tend to fall into one of three categories:

1) The I-started-but-can’t-figure-out-what-to-do-with-it

This is the category of stories where I’ve jotted a beginning, maybe even got a few pages in, or, in one horrible rare case, I’d gotten chapters in, and realized I have no idea what’s going on. Or I realize that the story is fundamentally broken. Or I realize that the character makes no sense. Mostly though I realize that I was just writing to write and that there isn’t really a story here.

These ones feel more like writing exercises. I’m stretching my brain, I’m doing a little character creation or description or jotting down part of a dream I had. I like doing this sometimes with dialogue between two characters because of the fun it is to play people off one another.

A lot of these get lost amidst the world of notebooks. But often enough, some of these jotted creations will find new life later when I’m flipping through old notebooks and see something that gets my gears going.

2) The I-started-and-immediately-finished

These are the ones I wish happened every time. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What writing website do you visit the most?

10 Monday May 2021

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What writing website do you visit the most?

There are a lot of great sites out there for writing-related topics. Some of them are kept up by writers who have been in the industry for a long time. Some of them are kept up by people with almost no experience or knowledge (looking at you, random youtubers who pretend to be grade A agents or successful authors yet have no examples of their work).

But for the most part, at some point, whether you realize it or not, advice sites are a sinkhole rather than a help.

The absolute best writing site I’ve found is called: 4the words.com.

I remember writing about a site called Fighter’s Bloc before, but if you aren’t aware of what it was, it was a site crafted where you fight a little monster by finishing words. Every time you stopped writing, your avatar took damage. Too much damage, you die. But if you go until you accomplish your target word count, you win!

4thewords is a similar site, except in all way better. It essentially gamifies writing.

You have an avatar you can customize. A map you can travel through. A quest book. There’s a main story line. Side quests. Basically anything you tend to see in an easy app game, this site has crafted. Your job is to travel into the wilderness and battle monsters, each with a different target goal and different drops, leading you to craft better weapons, better armor, etc.

There’s also an Inn that works as a forum, but I really don’t recommend going there. Forums are time dumps generally. Ignore them as best you can. I’ve never actually read a single post on 4thewords and haven’t started my own despite there being a quest to do to because that’s not the purpose I want for my account.

On the writing side, the site allows you to create as many files as you want, which you can organize into different projects. Each project can be divided into different sections, holding whatever files you need. All the files and projects can be customized, by color and shape, allowing you to easily see at a glance the files you’re looking for.

In terms of actual productivity, the monsters you battle each give a different incentive. Some are word count battles, where you are given a certain amount of time to accomplish a certain amount of words. For instance, the Wignow makes you write 250 words in a 30 minute time frame. Each monster is a different type of challenge, some giving you a relaxed time frame, some giving you a tighter one. There are also monsters who are endurance battles, more similar to the little 2-bit monsters you would have battled on Figher’s Bloc. These fights are really good for brainstorming sessions or dumping sessions where you’re just trying to get words out in order to push yourself into the zone.

All in all, I find the site really helpful as a writer :)

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: What’s your take on copyright law? (2 of 2)

26 Monday Apr 2021

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What’s your take on copyright law?

Last week, I began talking about copyright law, what it is, generally how it works, and compared the intellectual property to other types of property so it would be clear that we are, in fact, talking property.

Now, I would like to explain why certain people dislike the length of time the copyright lasts:

1) They hate big corps like Disney who use their copyright to force people not to use their characters, their movies, etc. Companies as big as Disney are happy to tackle anyone who breathes near their copyright (if you try to sell T-shirts with Jiminiy Cricket on them, for example).

2) Many people presume all authors are rich

3) Many people presume books/words only make money in the first few years of being sold/published.

4) Some people just want free shit. They hate paying for anything and think they’re entitled to anything anyone else works hard on (like the “this is mine” meme)

Let me address each of these in turn. Continue reading →