The Ninjas Entry

By now you've probably realized I am a filthy liar and posting schedule? What posting schedule? That could never, ever happen.

That said, I was getting out of the bath this morning when I suddenly remembered a scene from a cartoon I liked as a kid. (And still like, actually, but my Peter Pan syndrome is neither here nor there.) The Fairly Oddparents.

Now, I don't remember what the episode was even about, but this one scene has always stuck with me. Wanda produces a magical typewriter from hammerspace and starts working on "that novel she always meant to write". As the scene cuts out you hear her narrating what she's writing:

"It was dawn. I was in my towel when the ninjas attacked."

Clearly meant to be comical, right? But you know...I actually think about that scene a lot. It legitimately bothers me why there are ninjas attacking this person in a towel so early in the morning. I mean, don't ninjas want to sleep in, too? And if she's (I'm assuming she because Wanda was writing it, let's not think too far into this) in her towel this early in the morning clearly she has something to do, what if those rascally ninjas make her late for work?

...you know, I really want to know what that story was about.

And, damn it, I want more beginnings like that one!

Maybe not necessarily with comical ninjas, but slamming right in. You know who does that really well? Jim Butcher. And not just at the beginning of the book, either, almost every scene is like being thrown into ice water from the get go.

Is it a little pulpy? Maybe. But you wanna hear a confession? I love it.

Don't get me wrong, literary fiction probably has its merits, it's just not my cup of tea.

There's an argument my boyfriend and I always have about our respective tastes in stories, both movies and books. He likes nonstop action and I like a little more character development and social type drama. It's hard for us to find things to agree on because of it.

Partially, this is because I feel like nonstop action is just as boring as three pages describing how a wilting flower on a windowsill is representative of Ramona's breaking heart. I tend to skim fight scenes like most people do descriptive passages if they last too long and nothing is going on with them.

I realize a lot of people think it's a major no-no to have characters talk to each other during sex scenes and fighting scenes because it's "not realistic", but I'll take "interesting" over "realistic" any day. If that fight scene is going to stretch three pages, I say go ahead and have the hero and his adversary screaming at each other while its happening.

Almost lost the point there.

What I'm saying is, I want stuff to happen.

Not wilting flowers. I don't care about wilting flowers unless the entire kingdom is pinning its hopes on this plant to eventually provide the cure to some kind of plague or it's Beauty and the Beast or something. Give me actual stuff happening.

Whatever your ninjas are, give me ninjas.

Fortune Favors,
Megan R. Miller

The Tarot Entry

So, I am a writer. And this is meant to be a writing blog. But for the moment I can't think of a single writing-based thing to blog about, however, I do know a few other things that might be beneficial and this is one of those things that drives me bat-shit whenever I see handled poorly in fiction.

Tarot Cards: the staple method of divining information. Want to make a character appear mysterious and magical? Slap a deck into their hands and have them say a few cryptic words, right?

Except a lot of people decide to write a psychic reading and don't bother doing any research on how the Tarot actually works.

Have I made this post sound relevant yet?

Oh, good.

Tarot Basics:

There are 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana. That means 78 cards in a Tarot deck.

The Major Arcana are the ones that are most typically used in tarot readings in fiction. These are cards like "The Fool", "Death" and "The Wheel of Fortune". Suffice to say some of them just sound ominous enough that when you sprinkle it in it makes everything all arcane and creepy. Foreshadowing!

Except contrary to popular belief, people that read tarot cards are not just a bunch of charlatans that make things up as they go along. The cards have real meanings and not all of them are what they appear to be at a glance.

The Minor Arcana are broken up into suits. Those suits are as follows:

Cups
Rods (or Staffs or Wands)
Swords
Coins (or Pentacles)

There are 14 cards in each suit, for those of you who, like me, are too lazy to do basic division while reading a blog entry but would still wonder if they didn't already know. From now on, rather than mention the alternate names for the suits, I'm just going to refer to them as the ones I called them first, respectively.

Minor Arcana: The Suits

They're not used nearly enough, totally underrated, but each suit has its own meaning that can help a person remember what the numbered (1-10) and court (Page, Knight, Queen and King) cards mean. I'm just going to give a quick cheat-sheet style peek at the suits here:

Cups - Water - Summer - Emotions and good things. Cups could also represent alcohol.
Rods - Fire - Autumn - Mental endeavors and creativity.
Swords - Air - Winter - Sharp logic and cruelty, often without good connotations.
Coins - Earth - Spring - Business endeavors, money, practical and materialistic things.

There are also certain meanings for the numbers, and much of the time the trick is in taking the meaning of the number and just matching it to the suit it belongs to, and while each card has its own set of meanings and suggestions, for writing a tarot reading that should be enough.

Aces - Beginnings, origins.
Twos - Duality, balance and imbalance.
Threes - Stability, trinity, skill
Fours - Staying the course, waiting
Fives - Disruption, entrapment
Sixes - Departure, a journey beginning or ending
Sevens - Waiting and not waiting.
Eights - Movement, travel
Nines - Almost completion
Tens - Completion
Page - A young woman or girl
Knight - A young man or boy
Queen - An older woman
King - An older man

Major Arcana

Now, when the majority of the cards in a spread are major arcana, as they often are in fiction, it means the querant likely cannot change the outcome of the situation. That can make for some really boring fiction, at times, and these cards are the most often to be read wrong.

0 - The Fool - The beginning of a journey, bliss

I - The Magician - Creation, bringing together of things, magic

II - The High Priestess - Knowledge, wisdom

III - The Empress - Motherhood, fertility, women in authority

IV - The Emperor - Fatherhood, men in authority

V - The Heirophant - Tradition, marriage

VI - The Lovers - Could be literal lovers, is more often a choice to be made

VII - The Chariot - Being pulled in two directions, chaos, travel

VIII - Strength - Most often strength through gentleness, quiet power

IX - The Hermit - Wandering, seeking something.

X - The Wheel of Fortune - Chance

XI - Justice - Balance, getting what you deserve . Exactly what it says on the tin.

XII - The Hanged Man - Lack of mobility, boredom, stagnancy

XIII - Death - NOT LITERAL DEATH. Rebirth, new beginnings, reincarnation.

XIV - Temperance - Balance, zen, watering down of things

XV - The Devil - Being stuck, bound to something, trapped

XVI - The Tower - Disaster, everything falling apart

XVII - The Star - Inspiration

XVIII - The Moon - Night, things hidden, secrets

XIX - The Sun - Day, truths, joy

XX - Judgement - Culmination, karma

XXI - The World - Everything

There are a lot of other nuances, but this is the very basic of the basics. If you don't know about tarot and want to write a tarot scene, you could quick reference this and get it past most tarot readers as long as you don't embellish too much.

I'm not saying don't write without doing the research, do that at your own peril. I'm saying if you do people will notice. AKA me. I will notice. Quit that.

Fortune Favors,
Megan R. Miller

The First Entry

It has been a long while since I've had a blog. At least, since I've had a blog that wasn't connected to something else (I use my deviantart journal almost religiously). Recently, though, I've opened several accounts surrounding my writing and most of them ask for a link to a personal site or a blog.

And if most of them have that, guess what I should probably have?

So here I am. I'll drop in here now and again to rant and rave bout the things I'm interested in, most of it is probably going to have to do with literature. I'll avoid personal problems if I can because that's what my other journals are for.

This one, though, is for my writing.

My first book goes up on December 1st. That's a little under two weeks from now. I've been writing back and forth with my cover artist, seen a couple of potential designs for the cover, and I'm elbow deep in the editing process. Right now, as I type this.

I'm also a procrastinator. I'm trying to kick that habit, but if I set a deadline for myself I meet it. So I'm writing this out as an introduction of sorts. Which means I should probably introduce myself.

Hi, I'm Megan. I'm not quite 24 (I'll be 24 before my book comes out though), and I've been telling stories since I was 6. I wish I was joking; we had show and tell every week in the first grade and I would always forget my show and tell object so I just stood there and made a story up off the top of my head. The other kids loved it, but for some reason I was still convinced I wanted to be a paleontologist until I was in the sixth grade.

I've written a novel, but I still haven't discovered any new dinosaurs, so you can see which field I went into.

I have two younger brothers that live in the same house I do, and three sisters that do not. I have a cat that everyone thinks is a girl because he's fluffy, but he's not. I have a programmer boyfriend that you can just tell is nuts the second you see his massively curly hair and realize he has it that way on purpose. That's okay, though, because most people think I'm more nuts than he is.

So there's the first entry. From here on in I'm going to try to be a little more focused and try to find a posting schedule that works for me. It might be a little bit sketchy for the first few weeks while I try to hit an equilibrium, but when I do you'll know.

Fortune Favors,

Megan R. Miller