- My Blog Has Moved!
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markmurata- March 11th, 2011
- 100 Word Writing Contest
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- markmurata
- January 29th, 2011
Literary agent Janet Reid, over at her blog, is having a writing contest that ends tonight. Entries must be short stories of 100 words or less that include the following words: sushi heater squibs tingo firefly. Below is my entry. How'd I do?
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The three fairies swooped down in a daring line attack, a firefly trapped in each bonnet for illumination. Tingo glanced back once to indicate she was ready, her goggled eyes showing no expression. Then in she dove, using the purloined spark-heater to set off the squibs. The barb flew straight and true, burying itself with a clang in the hideous metal leg. Then the three flew round and round, wrapping all three legs with their silver cord. The Martian war machine tripped and fell into the water, like a child’s top in its last spin.
“Eat sushi!” cried Tingo.
- Possible Agent!
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- markmurata
- January 20th, 2011
An influential agency in the science fiction/fantasy field asked for the first 50-75 pages of one of my novels! Below is the query letter that intrigued them. I can only wait and hope.
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Dear (influential agency):
I have heard strong recommendations for your agency at different Worldcons, and I would be delighted if you would consider representing my young adult science fiction novel Tica Manus: Ensign Extraordinaire.
Tica Manus and her posse at the Academy have a perfect record -- they've never been caught at their pranks, whether it's hauling a toilet onto a dorm ledge or hacking into a campus monitor to watch live transmissions from the Fleet. Eager to leave Earth and join the Fleet to tour the colonized worlds, Tica can't wait to initiate their final eye-catching pranks at graduation. But when graduation day does come, Tica and their whole civilization are horrified by a broadcast of nuclear weapons destroying their outermost colony.
Thrust into a Fleet that is suddenly more serious, Tica has to catch up fast when she finds factions onboard her ship, vying for power and ready to undercut the captain. When a faction tries to recruit her, she realizes they're grown-up versions of the posses back in school, only more serious -- determining the glide path of one's career in the Fleet. Though she was warned to leave her prankster past behind, Tica's trickster nature may be the key to smacking down the posses that are fracturing the ship.
Tica Manus: Ensign Extraordinaire is complete and the word count is 69,456.
- It's a CHILDREN'S Movie, you idiots!
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- markmurata
- December 26th, 2010
(To get an idea of how large this poster is, notice the railing below for puny humans to walk by.
Two large field lights are above the poster.)
Happy St. Stephens' Day.
Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is a wonderful movie. I certainly enjoyed watching the ship as it sailed, and the exploits of the little mouse warrior. The younger brother and sister are growing up, and they undergo serious temptation.
What bothered me is a lot of reviewers panned it because it wasn't all dark and serious, the way they wanted it to be. Hey, this isn't The Lord of the Rings, which was meant for adults. And it isn't Harry Potter, where the stories get darker as the children get older. This is Narnia! The Narnia stories are CHILDREN'S stories. I liked this movie much better than Prince Caspian, which was too dark and depressing for my taste. It's fun, it's a children's movie that adults can also enjoy, and it's thrilling when a certain lion appears and brings about change in a character that the character could not do for himself (sorry, no spoiler here).
What's funny is that some of the same reviewers who panned it admitted that children will like it. Yes, just put down in print that you don't get it.
My job here is done.
- Miley Sucks, Kinect Rocks
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- markmurata
- November 18th, 2010
The Microsoft Store opened in Bellevue Square today! To kick it off, the first three thousand people would get free tickets to a Miley Cyrus concert. (I know. What’s the connection?)
I figured if I got there early enough, I could score tickets and become a hero to a couple families I know with teenage daughters. But when I got there . . .
We love Miley!
That’s right, the end of the line had teenage girls camped out there for who knows how long. What burns me up is that Minneapolis also had a Microsoft Store open, and they were giving out Kelly Clarkson tickets! I would have gone there really early for that!
I missed the moment they opened the doors, though.
Why? Because of my adventure with Microsoft Kinect.
( Click here to read on! )
- Surrey Conference
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- markmurata
- November 3rd, 2010
The Surrey Writers’ Conference was at the end of October, up in Canada. I had a “blue pencil café” appointment with a professional writer, Jacqui Banaszynski. She read the first several pages of my science fiction manuscript, Day 10K, and she was impressed by the writing. She liked the characters, especially the fourteen year-old girl who appears at the start of the story. She pointed out a couple instances of repetition, but overall she said I had a clean writing style.
Over five hundred people registered for the conference this year. Here are some of them in the banquet room.
The most interesting workshop is their Surrey Idol. Like American Idol, it allows wannabes to be judged. The four judges this year were Laurie McLean, Nephele Tempest, Sorche Fairbank, and Joanna Stampfel-Volpe.
We would all submit the first few pages of a manuscript. Jack Whyte (not pictured to the right) would read from the stack for the judges. The judges would stop him when they would have stopped reading the manuscript themselves, then they gave critiques. Only a few were read past the first page. Many were stopped after a few sentences, or even the first sentence, so this is not for the faint of heart. But it’s a great way to get feedback.
During one of the lunches . . . ( Click to read on! )
- Athena Query
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- markmurata
- October 24th, 2010
Caption: Zeus says, "Send me your first fifty pages!"
Below is the query letter for my historical fantasy novel.
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Athena yearns to fight alongside the father she’s never known, to use her strength to fight the forces of chaos with sword and spear. But who is she? Why is she so much stronger than the men who have trained her for battle? And why won’t her mother tell her who her father is?
Her desire to serve her absent father will take her past the servants who spar with her, to the glittering palaces of Mount Olympus whose inhabitants are cruel and indifferent, and to the deserts of Libya, where she must compete against another young woman for a place among the Olympians. Along the way, she must decide whether her competitor is a hostile, vile person who tells lies about the cunning nature of their immortal relatives, or is possibly a friend she can rely on.
Athena: Ready to Fight is the story of a young Athena who learns cruel wisdom as she comes to grips with the world around her and the immortals who reign over it. Athena and her Olympian relatives resemble superheroes in their ability to fly and hurl boulders, but she quickly finds she is not part of a family of do-gooders. They are also known as daimonion, and the lesson learned over the years by mortals is, “The daimonion are cruel.” Despite her misgivings, Athena competes for the last throne on Mount Olympus, learning more about who she is along the way.
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Although I did not meet with Joanna Stampfel-Volpe at the Surrey Conference, she gave this blog advice on what agents' want in a query letter: "Introduce us to the characters, state the conflict, show tone, and how do the stakes get raised? That’s it in a nutshell."
How'd I do?
- Day 10K Query
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- markmurata
- October 24th, 2010
I'll report on the Surrey Conference within a few days. First, I realized I hadn't put much about the actual contents of my stories on this blog. Below is my query letter for my science fiction novel I'm sending around:
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Ensign Nakajima knew he was risking his career, but he refused to tolerate his senior officers’ decision to abandon the colony on the planet below -- a colony on the edge of collapse. His reward was to get booted off the Fleet ship, down to the growing chaos.
Now his landing craft has been shot down with the help of a teenage girl whose family fled to the countryside to ride out the crisis. But when resistance groups tell him the colony’s government will use the crisis to give itself tyrannical powers, his allies are few: A younger officer who’s worried he’ll get caught for having a gambling pool going on the colony’s collapse. An older lieutenant who has pretty much seen it all but wonders if her judgment is beginning to slip. And the teenage girl.
It’s hard enough dealing with a colony that has reverted to a twentieth-century level of technology -- land rovers, bank machines, toilet paper. But if the computers freeze up because they don’t have enough digits to recognize the upcoming Day 10,000, Nakajima will have to find a way to prevent mass panic. Even worse, the colony government will use such a panic as an excuse to invite a rival fleet in to “restore order.” He and his shipmates don’t have much time -- it’s less than twenty-four hours to Day 10K.
Day 10K is complete, and the word count is 93,553. I have had a short story published in the Strange New Worlds V anthology, and you can read the first few pages using Amazon’s Search Inside feature. Also, my blog is at http://markmurata.livejournal.com/
Thank you for this opportunity.
Sincerely,
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How did that turn out? Did the sentence explaining the nature of the Day 10K problem sound okay?
- Off to Surrey
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- markmurata
- October 21st, 2010
I'm leaving tomorrow for the Surrey Writers' Conference in British Columbia. From what professional writers say and from my own experience, it's the best writers' conference on the continent.
I've scheduled a meeting time to have a professional writer look at the first few pages of my science fiction manuscript. Also, I'm going to put the first pages of one of my Athena novels in the Surrey Idol contest. More on that when I get back.
In the meanwhile, I highly recommend Veronica Roth's blog. She has the best writing blog I know of.
She looks like that all day. Just ask her, and she'll tell you.
- Issaquah Salmon Days
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- markmurata
- October 2nd, 2010
I went to the Issaquah Salmon Days festival today. Basically, it's a celebration of the return of Pacific salmon swimming upstream to Issaquah, Washington. It's turned into a gigantic street fair featuring rows of food booths and arts & crafts booths. The most exotic thing I ate was curried goat. That's right, goat. It amazes me how many people go to a festival like that and just eat ordinary things like frankfurters. I also had fried clams on a stick - very messy.
The salmon themselves are very impressive - sometimes just resting in the waters of Issaquah Creek, sometimes with their upper fins visible as they swim, sometimes bursting out of the water as they fight their way upstream. I should've taken my camera along, but on the other hand, I don't know how well the pictures would show for this blog. The salmon are quite dark beneath the dark waters of the shallow stream, so they might have just looked like shadowy shapes.
A little girl to my right was quite excited to see the salmon. A young woman to my left was less excited. She answered her cell phone and said in a flat voice, "I'm looking at a salmon in a river." I think she then went on to talk about shoes, because she said, "I already have a black pair, I don't need another." The little girl to my right gave her a sour look.
This was good research, since I plan on having a scene in my vampire parody take place at the Issaquah Salmon Days. For now, I'll eat some guacamole, to offset the greasy fried clams.
- Athena Novels
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- markmurata
- September 29th, 2010
Caption: Zeus says, "Release the novels!"
I'm finishing up my second Athena novel, while going back and tightening up the start of my first Athena novel. I had already deleted some of the slow parts from the start, but I'm surprised at how much more gets deleted with a more thorough look. Uh, did I really need the line concerning Odysseus, "he used this brief respite from the pull of the tide to contemplate these last moments of his life" in the first paragraph? If I were a more established writer, I could get away with that. But the idea of contemplation slows down the pace, and as a new author, I need to grab the reader's attention and not let go.
I believe Stephen King said a writer should count on deleting about twenty percent of his first chapter when going over it again, but I thought that was just for people who didn't write tightly in the first place. I'm surprised how accurate he is.
In his book On Writing, I'm not that interested in the parts on his personal life, but just by skimming through it, a writer can find practical tips for any genre of writing from a guy who's had some success in the business.
- What If . . .
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- markmurata
- September 11th, 2010
I saw a pleasant movie today called What If . . . It tells the story of Ben Walker (Kevin Sorbo), who makes the greatest mistake of his life when he decides to temporarily leave his girlfriend Wendy (Kristy Swanson) to go to the big city to accomplish some things before heading to seminary. We abruptly see him fifteen years later, an immensely successful man who never did go to seminary or get back to Wendy. Instead, he is preoccupied with materialism and engaged to a fiancee who is mainly interested in the huge diamond ring he can give her.
But things change.
( Read more... )
- Inception - Sources of the Movie
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- markmurata
- August 14th, 2010
Alice: I should sue for royalties. Too bad I'm not real.
The movie Inception is very pretty, but very boring, so while I was watching the movie I took the time to crack the code on where the characters came from.
Come on, you should know this. The characters are: A madman, a prim young woman, an authoritative person who hacks a lot, a nervous person who leads others on a chase, someone who smiles and changes appearances, an odd person who seems a little druggy, and a minor character who gets hauled off to punishment. As a hint, these characters are going down into a strange realm where our laws of reality do not apply.
Let's start with the main character, Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He's constantly at the point of going mad over his children and his dead wife, his hair is one big cowlick, and he has this wild idea of delving into different levels of dreams, with time running differently on each level.
Yes, he's derived from The Mad Hatter. It might seem somewhat comical to compare Cobb's hair to the hat, but the resemblance is there. And The Hatter spoke in riddles about time, and said that time could be sped up or made to stay at the same point indefinitely. What can throw the viewing audience off is that it's some equivalent of The Hatter who is the main character, rather than --
Ariadne (played by Ellen Page). She is a comparatively proper young woman, who disapproves of the madness she sees around her. As the naive character, she needs things explained to her. Also, she uses a pawn chess piece as her link to reality.
She is obviously Alice, the young woman who constantly reproves the odd people she sees in Wonderland. And, of course, the odd characters she meets explain themselves and the surroundings to her, often in nonsensical terms. When she goes Through the Looking Glass, she starts out as a pawn and eventually becomes queen on a chessboard. And when you think of someone like Alice, you think of someone like --
( Read more... )
- NASFiC
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- markmurata
- August 9th, 2010
I just got back from the North American Science Fiction Convention, held in Raleigh, NC this year. On the positive side, I managed to talk to and get an autograph from John Hemry (who currently writes as Jack Campbell), author of The Lost Fleet series. John Hemry is a friendly guy who is able to talk at length during panel discussions about his experience in the military, and how this bears on his science fiction writing.
Also of interest was Catherine Asaro, whom I've never seen in person before. Among other things, she's a physicist, a SIGMA adviser to the government on security issues, and a rock and jazz singer. In other words, she's a female version of Buckaroo Banzai.
( Read more... )
- Vampire Parody
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- markmurata
- August 5th, 2010
I'm heading off for ReCONstruction, the big science fiction convention in North Carolina. But first, here's the trailer for the vampire parody coming out soon.
Since I'm writing a vampire parody myself, perhaps I'll catch the wave of this backlash.
