The best parts:

–The locations, the vistas, the action, the people — none of them are digital.  This is all location and real people riding real horses.  It does look different, and so much better, I do say.

–The landscape, as one expects, has the leading role in Mongol.   You will not be disappointed.  Vistas of snow, of arid slopes, green rolling spring grass, doesn’t seem foreign to someone who grew up on the Great Plains, though, no we didn’t have mountains where I grew up.  But I did visit the Black Hills, which are really mountains, often on family summer vacations, and the Badlands, in both South Dakota and North Dakota.  The Missouri-Platt system meanders through parts of both these states on their way to the Mississippi, so I saw those too on summer vacations.  These are true vistas and landscapes, from my own life, and the lives of these characters in

When writing a first person short story is it possible to over use the words, “I” and “myself” when actually referring to yourself. Is there anything else you can write in it’s place?

Yes, it is possible to overuse I when writing first person, just as it’s possible to overuse he or she in third person or any other word that gets stuck in the brainpan. Unfortunately I seems to glare in readers’ eyes like undimmed headlights, and ruin their appreciation of my own personal favorite storytelling “person.” It’s certainly something I have to watch. If you can’t see it for yourself, try reading your work aloud (always a good technique anyway) and listen.

You’ve said that you are conscious of the problem and work on varying your sentence structure, but here are a few other things to consider.

1. Search for instances of I thought, I felt, I saw, I heard, I knew, and the like, as well as the ubiquitous, I said. Many, many of them are unnecessary and can be deleted. You are telling the story from this person’s point of view. Of course the sights are things he sees; the sounds are things she hears. The narrative voice incorporates your POV character’s thoughts. No need to hammer it home.

Unless you have some particular need for emphasis, you can change
“I heard the nightingale singing.”
to
“The nightingale sang.”
(or something more interesting!) and we’ll know you POV character is the one who heard it.

2. Try to recast an I-sentence with some other noun as the subject. Often the effort will produce something more interesting and reflect your character’s “voice.”

You could replace:
“I didn’t believe Gerald was telling the truth.”
with
“Gerald couldn’t tell the truth if his granny were on fire.”

3. You can also “tone down” an I-sentence by leading with a modifying phrase.

You can reshape
“I had lived in awe of Kajetan’s magic throughout my boyhood.”
as
“As a new student, a boy of fifteen, I had lived in awe of Kajetan’s magic.”

4. Make sure your character is focused on external events and not overly on herself/himself ; remember, the narration itself can reveal your character.

“I had ever reveled in nature’s glory.”
could be
“The dew hung on the leaf tip, poised to…”

or
“I watched the prince riding and knew he was the lord for me.”
could become
“The prince rode as a man worthy of his destiny. My heart swelled.”
or
“The prince sat his horse like the First Outlaw. Any dude with a heart would follow him over a cliff.”

OK, you get the idea.

Any more techniques out there?

As for use of myself, it should be very rare anyway. Make sure you’re not using myself when me or I or is correct or when nothing at all would do just as well.

Incorrect: “He argued with Jim, Slim, Tim, and myself.”
Correct: “He argued with Jim, Slim, Tim, and me.”

Myself can be used as a reflexive pronoun when I is the subject of the clause, such as:

“I injured myself.”
or
“I grumbled to myself.”

But why not just “I grumbled?” Is anyone else there?

But if myself is popping up everywhere, perhaps you can recast the first example as:
“I sliced my finger to the bone.”

Myself can also be used (and overused!) for emphasis.

“I myself must tell the tale.”

Hope this feeds thought…

Carol

Then the stupid door buzzer goes off.  Another delivery.

BUT!  It’s the arrival of Sherwood Smith’s new novel, the sequel to Inda and The Fox — King’s Shield!   So, something really good happened already today, because it wasn’t even 2:30 p.m. yet.

The official publication date is July 1, 2008.

Consider the end of THE RETURN OF THE KING. It would have been possible for Tolkien to leave out the bit where the ring goes into Mt. Doom. He could have kept the point of view on the battlefield with the other main characters, waiting and hoping — until suddenly, off in the distance, the volcano blows. Someone could cry “Frodo’s done it, he’s destroyed the ring!” I suspect a great many readers, myself included, would have muttered something most unflattering to the author at that point and perhaps even flung the book across the room.

Obligatory scenes can occur at other places in a book than the end, of course. Another example from a fantasy novel: two characters are riding toward an important destination. Alas, the only road runs through the mountains in a pass known to be infested by bandits. What’s more, the enemies of the two characters are probably waiting there to ambush them. They head into the pass. Chapter Break! They are riding out of the pass, quite beaten up, to be sure, and talking about what a stiff fight they had, there in the pass. Why the editor allowed this writer to get away with this lapse, I don’t know. I sure wasn’t impressed enough to read another book in that series.

Nor does the obligatory scene have to be a large or violent confrontation or action sequence. It can be a simple emotional moment or a conversation. For instance, in real life history, Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I never met. On stage (Sardou, I think) and in many movies, they have met, because hell, they really should have, and the audience wants to see it.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514

Too many people think that everything digital is “the future” and thus somehow good. You know, the future could turn out kind of crummy. It has in the past.

How can I avoid that? How can I create fully-fledged, rich, three-dimensional, fat, happy characters with plenty of iron in their blood?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Problem is, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much time and effort you spend, what you’re really doing when you create fictional characters is pure illusion. It’s mimicry. Writers in college who have just discovered Plato get hooked on the idea that characters already exist out there in some nebulous Elysian Fields of the mind, and all you have to do is channel them. But that’s simply not true, and it’s not a particularly helpful metaphor.

I think it’s more useful to think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up. (Additive sculpture, my Art History major wife informs me, is the type where you pile up stuff to build your object, whereas subtractive sculpture is where you start with an existing hunk of something and chisel away the stuff you don’t need.) Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself.

So okay, you’re asking yourself, if building characters is like creating sculpture, what ingredients do I need to add to the mix? Glad you asked. Here’s my list of things that good, full characters need. (And keep in mind that these are the ingredients for major characters in your story; minor characters don’t necessarily need such attention.)

1. Motivation. What do your characters want? Even the surly innkeeper who pops up for two paragraphs to serve the villain a plate of waffles has something on his mind. Whether spoken or unspoken, expressed or implied, characters should have plausible reasons for the actions they take. People shouldn’t just show up in your story and randomly do things that suit the plot you’re trying to construct. Every time your characters reach a decision point, don’t think about what you want your character to do in order to fulfill your expectations for the story; you should be asking yourself what your character would do at that point, based on what you know about them. If the action you want the character to take doesn’t suit the character, you’ve got two main options: a) figure out something else for the character to do that suits your plot, or b) backfill details earlier in your story to make the action suit the character.
2. Attitudes. A related but subtly different concept than motivation. If you’ve got a group of four main characters, how do all of the main characters relate to each one of the others? How does each character feel about the town they’re in, the situation they’ve ended up in, the object of their quest? Do they all agree about the urgency of what they’re doing? Is the tall guy with the scar always so quiet because he’s bored stiff, or fed up? The attitudes your characters have about their surroundings and their situation don’t need to be bold and dramatic on every page. Sometimes people just have an amiable indifference to what’s going on around them. But you as storyteller need to know and decide when your characters have that amiable indifference.
3. A character arc. In real life, people often go through life without changing. We make the same mistakes we made twenty years ago, and we curse ourselves for failing to learn from them. But the subject of story is change. You can’t have a story without something happening, and you make things happen in stories largely to show how your characters react. So if you’re going to spend any time focusing on a character, generally you’re going to want that character to grow or change in some way through the course of your story. This doesn’t mean you need to tie up every story with an Important Life Lesson™, and it doesn’t mean that every character needs to experience a life-changing epiphany by the time you hit the back cover. But if your characters don’t change in some fashion, your readers are going to wonder what the point of your story is.
4. A thematic purpose. Why did you decide to put this character in the story? You should have a reason for every character you’re going to put on paper. If you take the classic Star Wars trilogy, you’ll see that every major character serves a purpose vis-a-vis our protagonist, Luke Skywalker. Darth Vader represents what will happen to Luke if he continues down the path of anger and impetuosity; Leia stands for the home, family, and society he’s trying to defend; Han Solo represents the temptation to abandon community and responsibility; and so on. Often you don’t know the purpose of a character when they first leap through your fingers onto the keyboard, and you don’t necessarily need to map their utility on a Campbellian grid to know their purpose. A character’s purpose isn’t always a grand one either — after all, why do C-3PO and R2-D2 exist, except to provide comic relief and POV characters for certain crucial plot elements?
5. A sense of history. I would argue that people behave how they behave because of three main things: (a) genetics, (b) environment, and (c) experience. Han Solo didn’t spring into existence the moment Luke and Obi-Wan walked into the cantina. You could hear from that flinty Lucas dialogue that the man had been scarred from experience, that he’d had a few run-ins with the law, that this wasn’t the first time some old man had hired him to hustle his kid out of town in a hurry. You as the author should have some idea of the general contours of your characters’ lives, even if the bulk of it gets left on the cutting room floor, so to speak.
6. Quirks and mannerisms. Everyone has quirks, every single person who ever lived. Sprinkling some quasi-random idiosyncrasies on your characters helps readers build a unique-yet-consistent picture of them. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to fit absolutely everything about your character into some thematic template. Your heroine might have a nervous habit of scratching her ear, and that doesn’t have to tie in her deep-rooted ambivalence about the father who abandoned her thirty years ago. She might just have itchy ears.

There’s my list. Of course, you’ll want to take all of the above with a fist-sized hunk of salt, given that my two books to date have been accused of having characters that are two-dimensional, stereotyped — oh, all of the things listed in the first paragraph. I vigorously disagree, of course, but in the end that’s for you, the readers, to decide.

So what’s missing from the list?

* * *

(Photo of a sculptor named Brian Moneypenny taken from the website of Moneypenny Fine Arts.)

So I was wondering, what do you all want in an ending? What are some of your favorite endings to long books or series? Which ones annoyed the hell out of you or disappointed you? Any thoughts on why you had these reactions?

Danton Burroughs, the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs, just died, in Tarzana. 

[  Burroughs, who had been battling Parkinson's disease, died of heart failure a day after a fire at his home destroyed a room filled with family memorabilia.   ]

Here’s the Burroughs website.

From what I’d heard elsewhere, he’d been working on selling the Mars books as a series for a television network like GRRM did ASOIAF to HBO, or a movie franchise, like Indiana Jones.

I’d quite like to see a good HBO series of the Mars books, done in the style of the period in which they were written.  If done well, needless to say.

Love C.

(a) science fiction and fantasy site not quite like any you’ve seen before, mixing news, commentary, original stories and art, your own comments and conversations, and more.

They’ve also been offering free downloads of titles from their backlist to anyone who registers.

This week’s title is, indeed, my novel Spirit Gate.

Seriously, if you haven’t read the book, you can go hence, register, and get the download.

It’s kind of like living in the 21st century.