Five magics

Five magics

What's a warm up?

Four walled world

Four walled world

What's a warm up?

Hole in the sky

Hidden Beach, Mexico

10 Ways to Make Everyone Root for Your Amoral Protagonist by Charlie Jane Anders

I've thought about creating a list of how writers have created dastardly main characters that you nonetheless, well, don't necessarily like but enjoy following.

But Charlie Jane Anders has come up with a great list so I can stop trying now! :-) While her list is below, she's expanded each item at the link to her post. With pretty pictures! Any kudos for the list please do leave at her post. :-)

10 Ways to Make Everyone Root for Your Amoral Protagonist
by Charlie Jane Anders

1) Make their ends noble (or neutral) even if their means are evil
2) A line they won't cross
3) Someone or something they care about
4) Show us how they lost their moral compass
5) Make everyone else worse
6) A sense of humor is worth a thousand pardons
7) Make them lose
8) Falsely accuse them of worse crimes
9) Make everyone hate them
10) Let us see them doing something unforgivable

Third eye

Third eye

What's a warm up?

Woolly Bully

In other words

Four Seasons by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Describe a character using words you might use to describe one of the following:

Death
A garden
Abundance
A car
Toast
An orchestra
Winter
A dinosaur
Time
A painting
An approaching storm
A fire

You can pick one theme to describe one character (including dialog if you wish). Or write a single sentence description of a different character for each word.

Two steps from Hell

Two steps from Hell

What's a warm up?

The night house

Haus in Schwarz

The Muse Convention

It's the annual Writing Muse Convention held December 1st, the day following National Novel Writers Month. All the writing muses have gathered to chat, to attend panel discussions, to meet and greet the muses of famous writers.

The muses feed their writers the wild ideas, but it's up to the writers to turn the ideas into readable prose or poetry. It can be a struggle for a muse whose writer can't do justice to her ideas. It can be envy inducing when it's generally whispered that a muse is taking more credit for a writer's success than is felt he deserves.

The panels this year include:

• What to do when your writer won't write?
  
  
• Has Fate assigned you a talentless hack? How to stay creative. And sane.
  
  
• You are not your writer.
  
  
• When writers think their ideas are better.
  
  
• Who wrote Shakespeare? Shakespeare or Shakespeare's Muse?
  
  
• So your writer has switched genres? When to stick it out and when to ask for reassignment.
  
  
• How to work with other muses. The special challenges of musing song writers, ballet creators, performance artists and other multi-art endeavors.
  
  
• Inside the mind of a writer

Just some possibilities that might feed your own muse.  Or let your muse take it wherever he, she or it wants to.

Create the titles of more panel discussions.

Write the summarizing paragraph of one or more of the panel discussions.

Write the lunch break conversation between two muses. They might be brand new muses. Or rival muses. Or muses of once famous writers now saddled with obscure writers. Or ...

(Sorry, been busy so I've fallen a bit behind! I've got a bunch of warm ups queued and I'll work on queuing the picture prompts so creating the Wednesday prompts is easier to squeeze in :-))