Tag: Scott W. Baker

“Blog Faith” and other stories not yet written

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

I commented on another blog (comments seem to have vanished) about some ideas for stories, particularly story titles.  It is interesting because a coworker recently was telling me that he would love to write and he feels he has the mastery of language to do so, but he has no ideas.  Maybe I’m blessed with an overabundance of ideas (not all good, but ideas galore), and I am constantly finding new inspirations.

One place I found ideas calling to me is the WordPress global tags list (http://en.wordpress.com/tags/)  This is an especially interesting place for me since the list is perpetually changing.  If you read through the tags two or three at a time, story title s are hidden there.  The ideas to accompany them must come from the mind (or soul or whatever), but it’s a kick start.

At this moment, these titles appear consecutively on the page, inspiring stories I will summarize in a line or two.  I have no fear of sharing this tactic or even the stories I think up since even if my story was directly stolen from here, my story and your story would be nothing alike.  So feel free, borrow my thoughts.  (How cool would it be to find your story by one of these titles in a mag?  Almost as cool as finding my own.)  I won’t be likely to write the stories to go with these anyway.  This is purely for my own amusement and hopefully yours.

  1. “Mp3 Kids”: There a re a couple ways to tae this one.  How far a stretch is it for a generation of kids to be addicted to Mp3s so much that all information must be transmitted this way?  Almost like uploading directly to their brains.  Or more creatively, women who can’t have children (or empty-nesters or whoever) start downloading children to their portable devices.  They care for them, teach them, discipline them, a lot like a Sims game or something.  The whole obsession could get out of control.  This is actually a lot like my story “Glow Baby” (currently seeking a market).
  2. “Real Estate Animals”: An Animal Farm-like satire where wild animals sue in court for the property rights for their habitat.  They could get insects involved and tie up some major construction project for decades, each species suing in turn.  Then the corporation files to have the cases consolidated and the animals pack the courtroom with their ilk (or elk).  Wacky hijinks ensue (pun intended).
  3. “Fiction Theology”:  Fairy tale characters (or other characters) gather to discuss their positions on God and religion.  The discussion might do well to focus on a hot topic (gay marriage? abortion?).  This could be done cleverly or very poorly.
  4. “Blog Faith”:  Protagonist searches the internet for signs from God, focusing perhaps on specific blog sites.  He/she might find hidden patterns in the postings (similar to the films A Beautiful Mind and The Number 23) and pursues a life change based on them.  Or maybe it’s all based on one post that is completely misinterpreted.  Can you imagine someone mistaking something here as a holy sign?  Let’s hope it isn’t from my Morally Unusual post.
  5. “Random Personal Thoughts”:  A pretty but naive teenage girl starts picking up thoughts from classmates.  She starts with guys: checking her out, thinking…teenage guy thoughts, maybe trying to look up her skirt.  Then she starts receiving them from girls: jealous thoughts, insecure thoughts.  Each thought might get progressively more personal, first amusing her, then scaring her, finally spurring her to action for someone’s benefit.  Basically and early psychic manifestation.  This might be a good one for me to write considering my daily proximity to teenage minds (rather their bodies are proximal…who knows where their minds are?).

I feel like there were more amusing options the first time I tried it.  Of course you could mix and match words from anywhere on the page to develop your own combination, changing nouns to adjectives and such as needed.  This is basically the same as opening a dictionary to two random words or Damon Kight’s connecting index terms on pages of a SF catalogue (the origin of his story “Stranger Station” according to Creating Short Fiction).  The PARSEC Wrighting Contest uses a prompt similar to this, as I suspect do many others.  (I advertise this one because my 2004 entry, “Chasers” was published in their anthology, Triangulation, even though it did not place in the contest.)  Try your own variation and get writing.

Greetings to all my fans: past, present, and especially future.

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

…and then, against all odds, something crawled out of the primordial internet and became Oso’s Blog.

If you found your way here without knowing who I am, good for you.  I currently publish under the name Scott W. Baker.  That being my actual name, it seemed a good choice.  I am toying with the idea of publishing under a nom de plume, or maybe even a pen name, but as yet I am not convinced this would be wise.  For instance, how would the dozens of people who have read my previous stories connect my past works to my current and future works?  If I did adopt a pseudomymn, I have pretty well decided it should be Oso Baker.  It’s a nice combination between my real name and my internet identity.

I guess my first post here should explain the origins of “Oso Muerte” in their entirety.  As so many nerdy nicknames do, it started with a character in a role playing game.  I wanted something tough, but my friends decided the character class I had selected resembled a dead bear.  Being that my character was supposed to be South American, I named him “Dead Bear” in Spanish.  Rather I tried to — it came out Oso Muerte: “bear death”.  Anyway, the character was fun and resembled me in more ways than anyone cares to hear, so the nickname stuck to me, at least with that very specific clique.  Seeing as no one else was absurd enough to use such a name, it became my go-to username for anything online.  Try Googling it, see if anything other than me comes up.  You’ll get my Amazon profile, maybe my MySpace page, maybe a few pages in Spanish about endangered ursines.

Still, the name comes across too Spanish for a pen name, especially considering my considerable ignorance of Spanish or Hispanic cultures.

I have maintained a blog on MySpace for a short time, but that didn’t quite suit my needs.  So I am moving in here at WordPress, growing up and getting a place of my own in the http://www.  I may move those old blog posts over to catch people up on the dizzying pace of my writing career (currently composed mostly of waiting).  Until then, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to:

CLARION!

Don’t get too excited, I am just in the application stage.  Actually I am past the application stage and into the clawing-my-eyes-out-while-I-wait-to-hear-something stage.  But currently my Clarion applications are the foremost issues in my daily writer-life.

For those who do not know, Clarion is THE workshop for budding speculative fiction writers.  It’s a six-week bootcamp taught by five professional writers and one editor, usually award winners and often workshop  graduates themselves.  All other big-time workshops are built off its model.  I have applied to both the American incarnations of Clarion: Clarion West and plain old Clarion (often called Clarion East despite its recent transplant to San Diego).  There are other workshops — Odyssey, Viable Paradise, Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp — but I can’t bring myself to take serious time away from my wife and two-year-old daughter unless I truly believed the workshop could kick start my career.  Not every Clarionite becomes a pro, but their track record is exceptional.

The story I submitted to Clarion West just earned an Honorable Mention from L. Ron Hubbard’s “Writers of the Future” contest.  A higher placing would have inspired more confidence, but HM tells me I did something right.  A simple rejection from the contest would have discouraged my hopes of attending Clarion.  Still, there are no guarantees until there are guarantees.

I submitted that same story (entitled “Leech Run”) to Clarion East as well as a more recent work (“Glow Baby”), which was inspired by my daughter’s night light.  Both stories were between five and six thousand words, though one was Firefly-esque space opera and the other is more SF invading modern life.  Both these stories are making the rounds through different markets, though I may let “Glow Baby” take a pass at the Writers of the Future contest, too.

As soon as I hear anything about either workshop, I’ll be sure to post the outcome here.  Well, maybe not right away.  First I will have to hyperventilate, tell my wife, dance around the room, call my mother, cry a little, and then I can post here.  Bad news will simply post without fanfare.

I am not basing my career on acceptance or rejection from Clarion (or CW).  I will write come workshop or high water.  But man, I could use the kick in the keyboard these workshops represent.

This blog will not be all about Clarion.  It may not all be about writing or SF, either.  It’s a blog and I’ll throw you whatever scurries though my odd little head.  Right now my head is full of Clarion.  (It has been accused of less savory fillings.)  Come back to see what other stuff I might say.

-Oso