dannedmind

FREE STORY: THE PIN

Dear Potential Reader,

Do you ever plan to do something later? When you get the time? When your finances are finally in order? When you finally have a day off? In this month’s Tale of the Hatchback Woman, a young mechanic finds out what he’s been putting off in THE PIN.

CLICK HERE TO READ

Sometimes, I wish I could take my own advice. But we’re all creatures who secretly crave both the known and the routine. We’re conditioned to stay on a path because of some inherent fear of the unknown. How much do we hold our own selves back because it is simply easier not to rock the boat?

I won’t rock your boat too much, as with the past few months, check in every First Friday of every month for another Tale of the Hatchback Woman.

Hope you enjoy.

All the best,

DAN JIRE

WRITING TIPS: WHY I LOVE THIRD PERSON LIMITED POINT OF VIEW

I used to write in first person, almost exclusively. It was very hard when I attempted my first novel to switch to third person perspective so that I could juggle all the different characters and scenes.

But then I got my first notes back from friends and family. I was too omniscient, jumping from one character’s head to the next depending on the line (not chapter).

Luckily, I was steered in the correct path, and a few drafts later, I realized the benefits of THIRD PERSON LIMITED.

By choosing one character to write about in the third person, the reader can get into their head, look out from their eyes, yet also be standing away from them to see what happens.

The writing becomes similar to a suspense film, where the camera might not show you what is lurking off screen or just left of the frame. Your character can be surprised. Someone can stand behind them, and they can tell you how that felt. They can present the characters around them as they see them.

Now, jumping from who your third person limited perspective belongs to from chapter to chapter won’t be too distracting to a reader, and is nice because the change in point-of-view can shed details on this or that character whose head we were just in. How does this person really feel about the other?

Either way, if you haven’t tried THIRD PERSON LIMITED, give it a shot. I think it balances third person omniscient and first person perfectly.

FREE SHORT STORY: THE AIR

Dear Potential Reader,

THE AIR is Another tale of the Hatchback Woman is set at a party hosted by a scout leader hoping to teach his scouts a very important lesson. But that couldn’t go as planned, not when one of the Lady’s gifts is present . . .

CLICK HERE TO READ

The following short story is one of the many Hatchback Woman stories where i tried to hide the formula and approach the ‘telling’ in a different way. In this case, I used a flashback, so the structure is B-A-C instead of the straightforward A-B-C of a normally told tale. Whether this enhances the story is always up for debate.

Hope you enjoy.

All the best,

DAN JIRE

WRITING TIPS: WRITE WHAT YOU . . .

There are two ways to complete this sentence and you’ve heard both before, I’m sure of it. Somewhere someone sometime gave you the advice to write what you . . .

A) KNOW

B) WANT

They are rather similar even if you don’t think so right away.

Writing what you ‘know’ isn’t writing about a wannabe author trapped in his room all day wishing he could be rich so that all he had to do was wake up and write.

What you ‘know’ isn’t the story. It’s what you bring to the story. Your knowledge of emotions. Your recollections of the details of a scene or facts you researched. That’s what you ‘know.’ All those things you’ve observed other people doing, all those aspects of a summer’s day. Those are the things you know.

And this goes hand-in-hand with writing what you ‘want.’

Writing what you want isn’t just pulling that story out of your imagination. It’s knowing how to pull it out of your imagination. It’s wanting to know how to write it. It’s knowing the details that’ll make your fantasy world feel real to your readers.

You should research, especially if you are writing about a topic that’s not plucked from your imagination. And if it sounds daunting to learn a new subject, then it’s probably not what you want to be writing anyways.

If you want to right it, learning what you need to know will come easily.

BEHIND THE SCENES: THE HATCHBACK WOMAN

This year I’m sharing 12 short stories surrounding the mystery of the Hatchback Woman, aka The Lady. In 2022, I also posted 2 other tales of hers. So, I thought I’d give you all a peak behind the curtain in a new series (that’ll be rather irregular) that looks at the making of and my reasoning behind the stories. If you don’t like to see how the sausage is made, read no further . . .

The Hatchback Woman had to wait on the sidelines, wondering where she fit into the JIREverse when I first began collecting the stories that existed in the same universe. Because I had published her under another name many years before, I was just assuming she didn’t really fit in.

But she does.

And thankfully, it wasn’t even a stretch once I realized that her ‘oh so can’t be disclosed motive’ tied directly into some of the other key happenings in the JIREverse.

It wasn’t that she needed to be fit into the JIREverse–she had help construct it with her objects the imbue the users with strange powers.

Mirroring the some of the other entities I’ve introduced in short stories and novels, The Hatchback Woman is someone helping another one of the other dimensional entities cross over into our world.

Maybe that was a spoiler. But if you’re reading this BEHIND THE SCENES, you are interested enough in the inner workings of the stories to accept you’re going to read something that might spoil another story.

The conception of the HBW tales was a writing exercise. I created a formula for a series of stories:

Someone gets a magical object (has to be different way each time)
The object has a magical power (has to be different power each time)
The object either makes their life better or worse

Pretty simple. And with that, I knocked out a dozen tales (a few weren’t good enough to see the light of day or were revised into something different). Another author I traded stories with became a big fan, and suddenly I found myself investing more time into the mythology.

There was a time when it was going to play out more like a novel, with a Mulder/Scully team tracking her down and there are remnants of some of those chapters and characters. But my test readers didn’t like this direct approach.

In truth, the mystery of her actions, is she good or evil, is part of the fun for me to write. Is she helping or hurting?

27 tales were published through 2016, while dozens more awaited either another collection or my final judgement call whether or not they steered the story in the direction I wanted. But while I moved onto other projects, I’d write at least 1 HATCHBACK WOMAN tale per year, always pleased to return to the formula/world.

Around the time of story #27, I remember thinking it would be cool to have 100 Hatchback Woman tales. And hopefully, one day there will be. I don’t plan to give up her story so easily.

Even though I know the end game and keep trying to complete the prequel story as a novel, she’s constantly evolving and by accepting a place in the greater continuity of the JIREverse, I’m excited to let her story unfold as it may in the background of other characters’ stories and how their interaction with her changes their lives.

To see the free-to-read tales, click here and begin the mystery if you haven’t already . . . and remember . . .

SHE HAS SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE