Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Author Blog Challenge - Day 17 (Guest Writer)

For today's blog post, instead of the daily prompt I asked a Virgil Moore, author of Demon Vampire to be a guest writer and I'm very glad to post the first of them. I just started reading Demon Vampire, and so far I think it's great, very reminiscent to Anne Rice's earlier work. OK, so here is Virgil's post:

Of all the things that might have developed from writing a book, I never imagined that I'd break my keyboard in doing so.


When I was young, I used to write poetry. Lovie-dovie whims of a reclusive teenager scrawled into a notepad with a certain inner satisfaction for it all. The length of which was no more than twenty lines a pop.
          
Transitioning into stories took a good decade. I always found it too hard to write for long periods of time due to my hands getting tired from gripping the pencil too hard. - A bad incident with a kitchen stove when I was eight. My first laptop changed all that. Within six months I had written fifty thousand words. The flow came to me after I realized that all that had been holding me back was the limitations of my fingers. It's from there that things became different. A grotesque urge to write filled my being, and the words poured as liquid iron from my mind, cast into beauty before my eyes.
          
The next year saw the creation of my first published novel, Demon Vampire. A story that had originally been slatted for about 120,000 words. - That goal however was a damning one.
         
Six months came to pass and I was well over my mark. I was less than halfway through with the plot and more words kept flowing. I found it hard to limit my output. I've heard well of writers having difficulty continuing their novels, but I had come to let my story walk itself instead. This is how I broke my keyboard in this process.

1.7 million keystrokes was the magic number at the time that two of the keys fell off. The right shift key and the enter tab popped off half way. I found it morbidly funny that I killed my keyboard by repetitively pressing and lifting my fingers against it. Exactly what it was designed to have done to it.

242,000+ words rounded out Demon Vampire. It was entirely due to my character dialogue. All of them had a lot to say. Other authors might force plot on their novels, pushing and bending the characters to fit a scenario. I do the opposite. I create my characters in a way that lets them react to a situation I provide. In that way, I only instigate a scene and let my creations play it out. In that it would be fair to say that I let my masterpiece runaway with itself a bit. Through that choice, my actions killed my keyboard and landed my writing permanently in the epic category. 




Virgil Allen Moore
http://demonvampire.com
http://www.facebook.com/virgilallenmoore
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0062F60O2
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5231992.Virgil_Allen_Moore
https://twitter.com/#!/demongift/
https://twitter.com/#!/Demon_Vampire
https://twitter.com/#!/Virgil_A_Moore



No comments:

Post a Comment