Shouts From Down Under

Alive! I'm still alive!! Lego, ammo and lateral vegetables

http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/family-life/great-kids/12yo-builds-braille-printe...

This is an example of someone who used lateral thinking.

If you don't already know what that is, a crude demonstration would be if you'd locked your keys in the car, but the boot lid (trunk) was open, and you figured to climb in there, wriggle between the two folding leaves of the back seat, and open the door from the inside.

What's another one? OK, let's say you are writing a novel. You tootle along quite nicely with your plot, and you're one of those writers (like me, a bit rebellious) and you haven't started with much of a rigid framework, so you could end up anywhere, even painted into a corner. That's why you should have a framework so you know what the ending will be, in the first place, right?
Well, even if you do, sometimes you can get off the track, become caught up in the excitement of creating those scenes, lives, dialogue and most importantly, conflict
.
So here you are, keyboarding and mousing along, your dudes and dude-esses are having their fist fights, slanging matches, cloak and dagger deciders, or smooching in that romantic part, and you find yourself at a dead end. Yes, you've manipulated all your characters and what-not into a blind alley from which there seems no escape.

Lateral thinking, and I don't mean have a big bomb go off and they are all carried out on stretchers. (laterally?), is where you think sideways, out of the box, creatively, original and hopefully clever nutting out of a new, plausible and downright fun way of changing an impossible situation, into not only possible, but you now have that TWIST.

You now have made a reward for your reader. They were there with you. Yes, tagging along like obedient book buyers, having shelled out their pocket money for your book, and have read up to the brick wall-can't-continue bit.
Then they realise that there WAS a way out all along. You clever author! they think.
And you? Well, you had the advantage of time and patience, but most of all, you had the lesson of lateral thinking.

Sometimes if I'm sitting bored out of my brain somewhere, and no choice but to stay there, I think about stuff that needs lateral thinking.
My wife is usually patient with me, but with this sort of thing she feels it's a waste of time, and I'm just coming up with stupid ideas that are mostly rot.
She's probably right, but it's this sort of thinking that I'm on about here that might help with people's writing.

And there's where you get your magical twists. But that's probably not the ideal way to feature those in your story, is it?

You are better off planning them in the first place.
That's what I like about writing. You have all the time in the world to get it right. Forget about procrastination, and lack of self esteem, self worth, self diagnosis of some vague mental condition that you may or may not have, forget your self opinions of maybe a lack of skill or talent, or hopeless punctuation, grammar and spelling knowledge.

You have all the time to get things right, and can always employ an editor once you've done your best with it. They'll soon tell you and help you to put things right. You may be lucky enough to find a volunteer to do this.

Tomorrow I'll talk on another writing topic, an intangible one that I feel I only partly understand. I battle to get this subconscious feathering technique into my writing and will battle to blog about it.

BUT, I know it exists.

And it makes the difference in your story between something ordinary or at best somewhat interesting, changes it to being very exciting, emotionally engaging, perhaps I could even venture; life changing.

All because of something that I can barely put into words. I sometimes think some more courses in English etc are needed.



Today I began a gradual weeding schedule of mum and dad's various gardens. Confusion reigns as I try to differentiate between obvious noxious weeds, nasty dirty rotten stinging-slicing-stabbing-poking-biting inhabitants, and the other type that as mum said "take a heck of a lot of getting to grow in the first place" here because of the dry climate.
This is on the edge of semi desert climate here. Only a couple hundred or less kilometres directly west, and the arid country side is evident.
A another hundred or two kilometres and you are closing on places like Bourke, Tibooburra and The Birdsville Track.

Mistakes out there that would be nothing here, such as not checking your oil or water, or not taking enough supplies, and not notifying authorities of your intentions and destination, mean you die. It's that simple.

And so it is when I'm weeding in the veggie patch. One mistake and the plant dies. So mum came out and helped where she could for a brief time. She's not so strong or feeling very bright at the moment. The last doctor's report was bad.

I'm mattock-ing away, churning up the dust and throwing weeds when something caused me to pause...and stop.

Now, I'm not averse to a lively round of the garden, or find it a chore to go up the garden path once in a while, but this could have turned out much differently.

There was a live round in the potash tipped from the heater into the veggie plot. It appears to be smaller than .303 or .308.
Yet it's too big to be a .22 250 or a magnum.

Yes, I don't know the size, but it appears to be very much intact, live and ready for sparky action.
I'm glad the mattock didn't bang the end of it, the detonator end. I'm glad of this.
And it appears that the round went through the heater fire as it was among the ashes. Amazing it didn't let loose in mum and dad's heater.
The heater glass window leaves about 270 degrees of steel box that probably would have contained the shell.
That's the thing with a loose round. If it did explode by some chance, the projectile wouldn't likely go far, but the bits of shrapnel left of the brass casing would. Nasty results if it hit someone eh?


To celebrate not being injured or killed in what I thought would be a peaceful stint of weeding, I sat down to a mug of coffee and a splurge of chocolate chip cookies. Almost worth being in the range of a bit of ammo...




Sparky