Category: Craft (Page 2 of 4)

Sometime in the middle of July, I started the book Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz. I bought the book because it looked to be about the Marine General Smedley Butler, and his experiences leading up to the time he was invited to join a proposed coup against then president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I had two reasons for picking up the book. First was to learn more about Butler, and his apparent involvement with the coup. Second was to get a deeper understanding of the series of small actions in the Caribbean at the beginning of the twentieth century referred to as the Banana Wars. I knew a little about the Banana Wars from a visit to the Marine Corps Museum at Quantico some years ago, but outside of the documentation in the Marine Corps Archives, I hadn’t found out much about the Banana Wars, or the planned coup.

In the back of my mind was a novel, or series of novels about Marines in the Banana Wars with a central character present in all the books. I fully admit the idea for this came from my reading of W. E. B. Griffin’s series The Corps and his main character Ken McCoy. I even wrote an opening chapter about the 4th Marine Regiment deploying to Dominica from New Orleans.

Katz’s book jumps from relating one part of Smedley Butler’s service to that same area today – the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti etc. – and documenting the failings and excesses of the US as an Imperial power.

I haven’t yet read enough beyond Gangsters of Capitalism to form a proper opinion on Katz’s view of the history he tells. However, there was enough there for me to pause and think about the Banana Wars series. If I write the stories without reference to the excesses that took place, and which were apparently condoned all the way to the White House regardless of its occupant, I’m painting a false picture of the times. A picture that’s likely unjust to everyone involved.

Dean Wesley Smith reminds me regularly that writer’s are, at heart, entertainers. Staying anywhere close to reality means these stories wouldn’t be entertainment. So, for the moment, the Banana Wars idea is on indefinite hold.

Over this past weekend, I was browsing the DepositPhotos web site looking for images I can license for book covers. I have a couple of projects currently in their early stages, but I have a fairly clear vision of how I want the covers to look to fit into that genre.

One of those visions is to have a New York image as a background with the characters in the foreground.

Easy enough you’d think, except there are several hundred thousand images of New York on DepositPhotos. They range from instantly recognizable landmarks like Central Park or the Empire State Building to street and alleyway scenes you’d only recognize if you lived close by.

I’m getting better and refining the searches and quite quickly found an image I liked that fit what I was looking for. When I clicked on the image for more details, it came up, and there was a white callout box above the image that said Editorial Use Only. Interesting, I thought. What does that mean? Fortunately, there was a pop-up box along with the callout to explain Editorial Use Only.

Essentially these images can only be used for non-commercial purposes and their use in any published work that involves the payment or receipt of a fee is prohibited.

Bummer, but as I said with several hundred thousand images it just took another few minutes to find something I could use without the Editorial Use Only restriction. The cover mockup looked good as well.

Before finishing a quick recap on Pro-Writing Aid Everywhere. I am getting to better grips with it. There are still some areas that feel a little clunky, but overall it has removed a step from my editing workflow.

Late last week, I took a pause in my current work-in-progress to look for a piece of writing that fit in with the work, and which I was sure I had scribbled down at some point in the past.

I have two Scrivener projects I use for notes. One is called Thoughts, and the other is Writing Projects. Thoughts really is for random jottings, notes and ideas. Writing Projects was originally conceived as a placeholder for new story ideas. Some things still get in there but not quite in the way I envisioned initially. I find it easier now to set up a complete Scrivener project and drop all the thoughts in there as they occur to me.

As you’re probably gathering, I didn’t find what I was looking for in those Scrivener projects. Where else to look?

Quite often I’ll take a scene or situation from a larger story idea and write a sort story covering that incident. I didn’t think I’d done that in this case, but worth a look inside the Scrivener project that stores all my short stories.

I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a completed three-thousand word short story that, according to the timestamp, I wrote about four years ago. The characters have appeared in other stories so they were familiar. The story itself not so much. I looked through my submissions log, and found I had never submitted the story to an editor, which made sense as I couldn’t find a proper manuscript document anywhere.

The piece of writing I was looking for remains elusive, but it was a nice surprise to discover something from the past – something I wrote and forgot about.

I’m wondering how many other stories I have that are like that.