Madeline Turnipseed - Author

Happy Friday, friends!  This week my blog topped 4k views for all time, so thanks for all the love! jinx-star This post is a follow-up from last week's .  The Neif do a ton of things with their hands, like we do, but they also use them for something we don't:  having sex.  Sure, we can get our hands involved  in all kinds of sexy stuff, but for the Neif, their hands are their reproductive organs.  That's it. I'm in the process of writing a Neif sex scene.  I technically start my story with one (check out a version here ) but this is different.  The opening scene is a Lifegiving, where there will be a birth immediately following the hand-holding.  In the one I'm currently writing, it's a first sexual encounter for two young Neif.  They are alone, in private, contrasted with the Lifegiving which is in front of the whole village and needs the First Elder in order to produce offspring.   The Lifegiving scene is meant to re...

Hello friends! I've put about 2000 words on to The Neif this week. That probably doesn't sound like much, but I'm glad to have any progress.  I fleshed out the bits of outline remaining in the story, rearranged some pieces, cut others. I'm still a ways from done. One of the most difficult parts of writing about my sugar people is the fact that they aren't human. They still experience the full range of human emotion, but they express themselves differently. They don't have lungs. They don't eat, so they don't have teeth. They don't have hair or eyebrows.  They don't have internal organs. They live in a pre-industrial society so many of our turns of phrase would be lost on them. They don't speak English. Their hands function as their reproductive organs and they don't have the genitals we would recognize. Basically I'm writing them like they're an alien race.  The problem with this is that if I write them exactly like the...

Hello friends.  I had lots of reasons why I shouldn't write a blog post today, none of which were legitimate enough to give myself a pass.  I'm labeling this as a review even though I'm only halfway through the book (Reason #6 or 7), but I think you'll forgive me. My husband has been getting into blade smithing over the past year, which has put me in a position to learn new stuff without really trying.  I love it when that happens.  One of the main impressions I have gotten from catching the occasional snatches of a youtube tutorial or seeing him out in the garage working is:  making knives is hard work.  It takes lots of time.  It takes lots of practice.  Some mistakes can be corrected.  Some mistakes mean that you have to scrap your project and start completely over.  While it might save a lot of time to cut your knife blank out of your steel billet in the exact shape that you want the finished knife to be, its terribly impractical. ...

Hello friends!  This week I'd like to show you an exercise to help you work on your plot doctoring skills.  I do a lot of critiquing and part of that is considering how satisfactory an overall story is. It can be difficult to separate yourself from your own story, so I encourage you to start with a story that isn't yours.  For simplicity's sake, I'd also suggest picking a movie.  Most tend to follow a formula and that makes it easy to fit the story-line into a few paragraphs.  If you can make the plot simple to think about, this makes it that much easier to adjust. pacificrim.wikia.com For my example, I will be using a movie that came out last year.  This is a movie I loved, but I had major problems with.  I recommend you pick a movie that you take issue with.  If you thought it was perfect, there isn't anything for you to play with.  Unless you decide to make the protagonist decide to have the opposite reaction to the inciting event...

Happy Friday!  I only added about 500 words on to The Neif this week, putting me at a total of 67,437 words according to the Camp NaNoWriMo site and 64,744 words according to Scriptito .  Nowhere close to my 100,000 word goal for the month, and not even close to my amended 75,000 word goal.  But I added words and I made progress.  I will keep working on it for the remainder of this month and updating you guys with my progress. On to what you actually clicked through for.  I'm changing my mind and previewing this year's project for you guys a month early.  I'm still not going to start research until September, though, no worries. Origins Like most of you, I went to go see Iron Man 3 when it came out last year.  I thought it was okay, but at the end, I pretty much felt EXACTLY this way:  at 2:49. (Interesting side note:  If you read the comments here , you'll see an argument that Pepper was always the real hero, since she played cru...