Including today, we have six days left to fund this project.

The next few days are going to be very important. In six days, I celebrate the end of this campaign, whether it is a success or a failure. I’ve already pulled out the bottles of celebratory whisky. The results of the campaign will decide if I’ll be drinking from the first bottle, or the second.

After some recent discussions, I felt the need to post this to the project page and send it as an update.

What this Book is NOT:

First, this is not a book meant to answer all the questions.  This world the story takes place in is a complicated place where everything has changed owing to the cataclysmic event.  As a result, everything you know about society, religion, politics, genders, gender roles, and much more has changed.  Second, this book is not "women can’t go on without men."  Having lived for 500 years without them, clearly they can.  This book is an exploration of that idea: what would it be like if you take the most basic form of diversity and remove it?  And then what might happen if you reintroduce it?  How would society react?  Third, this is not an anti-feminist diatribe.  It is also not a Complementarian manifesto.  The idea here is NOT to declare one gender is better than the other, or that they can only exist together if they exist in a specific mold.  The idea behind it is to explore what would happen if such an event were to occur, not pass judgment on you or anyone else for how they view or believe on this subject.  Finally, this book is not going to tell you what to believe or accept about it.  This will have a lot of ambiguity in it ON PURPOSE.  This is not to avoid conflict, but to avoid "leading the witness."  The narrative is going to have a lot of opportunities to make small and big statements throughout.  Places where we can hit you right in the face with something just because we want to.  We won’t be doing that.  The idea here is to create a setting where all of these preconceived notions we carry into our interactions with each other have all fundamentally been altered or vanished.  We all are going to approach this story with differing world views and beliefs.  That is fine.  The goal of this story is to take you as you are and, on the other end, leave you where you choose to be after contemplating the ideas and possibilities herein.  

Greetings Jackolytes,

Elan Samuel at The Warbler was good enough to include me as a featured author on his well-respected blog. You can check the article at Featured Author: Peter Ryan While you are there take a look and perhaps subscribe – he does great work!

For those of you that are still yet to pre-order, you can help the drive for 300. You can find the Sync City link here. Feel free to share it with others!

Cheers,

Peter

Oh, glorious Saturday!

Yesterday was one of the proudest days in my life; Seeking the Elephant was chosen as Break the Bechdel with Strong Female Characters Syndicate’s book of the month for April! I really wasn’t sure what kind of chance we possible had, Seeking the Elephant is a relative newbie to Inkshares, and we’re less than 3 weeks into our pre-order campaign. The was amazing, and I want to thank the Janna Grace & the Syndicate! 

"Molisani’s Seeking the Elephant is not only a wonderful story with ghosts and ancient gods in a post-apocalyptic America, but we explore this world through the eyes of a female character you’ll never forget. She is fully developed, flawed and strong, and will draw you in from the first page."

Now, to celebrate! I promised, earlier in the week that I would write a short-story, set in the universe of Seeking the Elephant, specifically as a thank-you gift for the members of Break the Bechdel with Strong Female Characters Syndicate. Jealous? Well you should have been a member! 

No, I’m not that mean! I will ALSO give this story, once complete, to ANY pre-orders who come in this weekend! I’d love to 8 more sales before Monday so we can hit an even 80 orders! So jump in quick folks! Help us celebrate this wonderful weekend NOW! 

 

                                      Happy Weekend spring heeled Ripper fans! 

Okay, I’ve reached 225 pre-orders, which means I’m only 25 from being at the Quill border and finally getting published.

 I have over 200 followers now, some of you have been very kind and purchased a copy of Louisiana Blood…others are supporting me through some kind of astral projection that keeps me motivated.  Now much as I love cosmic love, I’m still very keen prise a few more pre-orders from you and close my funding. This will allow me to just focus on editing before I hand over my manuscript to the powers that be on INKSHARES.

The next 25 pre-orders get not only an entry into the $100 raffle but also a copy of the script that inspired the book.

 Why don’t I give you a mug,  a hand embroidered snuggle blanket, a Ferrari or an evening out with Brad Pitt or Kim Kardashian? 

 I’ll tell you why…because my gratitude is worth far more to your Karma than mere earthly spoils.

 I’m not going to insult your intelligence with tawdry trifles that will be consigned to a garage sale in the near future…whereas my gratitude will burn like an eternal flame forever…well, as long as I can tap at a keyboard J

 Anyway, I’m hoping that at least 25 of you with a sense of humour and a grasp of irony will splurge out and close the funding…if not for my sake, for all my friends who are now hiding from me whenever I see them in the street J

 I have been heavily supported by some authors who I have become friends with on the INKSHARES site and if you are in the reading frame of mind you can do worse than checking out their books after you have pre-ordered LOUISIANA BLOOD.

Check out Peter Ryan’s SYNC CITY and Joni Dee’s THE WOLF SHALL DWELL, both of them are fantastic examples of the thriller and mystery genre!

Here we are almost two weeks ahead of schedule and my re-writes and fixes for The Bones of the Past are finished! Not only that, but after struggling with my acknowledgements, I have finished all the associated paperwork and writing Inkshares and Girl Friday Productions need to get the ball rolling on their end. All of this means I should have a schedule for edits and even a tentative publication date sometime in the next few weeks!

I had also been toying with the idea of including a map but hadn’t managed to find an artist that felt like the right fit for my book. Little did I know he was in front of me the whole time. My amazing map was drawn by non-other than John Robin, the author of Blood Dawn (if you haven’t pre-ordered his book yet you can and should do that HERE!). The hand-drawn style perfectly fits with the flavor of my world. I hope you like it!

Thank you all once again!

The last three tips are going to roll in your inboxes, I hope you have taken something of value from my advice and your own pens are hard at work!

SCREENWRITING TIP #5: THEME

I can hear you now – “Where is the theme in ‘Transformers One through Twelve?’  ‘Mall Cop?’”  But just because a film is lacking in something doesn’t mean you aim your own efforts to that level.  All sorts of films make a lot of money with incoherent plots, atrocious dialogue, characters thinner than Saran Wrap.  But this is not an excuse to turn out an equally bad screenplay.

And often they probably started out as decent scripts.  You must always be prepared for the meddling and watering down of what you wrote by a whole bunch of people, some well intentioned, some clueless.  That’s the problem with the collaborative process that is filmmaking, there is a lot of input from a lot of people, from the producer to the wardrobe person.  If they are all geniuses you are in good shape.  If they are not…

Having a good solid theme in your script is one of the buttresses you have any control over.  A good theme, a deep strong simple metaphor or universal truth can stand all sorts of assaults.  It also serves as a touchstone you can use in the writing of your screenplay, the editing and the re-writing.  Whenever you are in trouble you can ask the question – what is this story about?

As you write, every character, scene, bit of dialogue, or story point can be tested against your theme.  Courage?  Guilt?  A mother’s love?  The possibilities are endless.  Just choose one.

Plus having a good idea of what the whole thing is about will help you defend your choices against the forces who are going to question your work.  Or to inform the director, producer, actor who is smart enough to ask you.  This way you can relay certain information that you conceived and they are either misunderstanding or not finding clear.  Then it is your job to fix it, because if they miss the point then so will the final viewing audience.

If you have an overall theme to your story then every character should be an aspect of that theme.  “Courage Under Fire”, funny thing, is about courage.  Every character reacts to their fear in combat in a different manner – drugs, over compensating macho bullshit, drinking, defining themselves by their courage or lack of it.  “Mr. Holland’s Opus” is about aspirations, etc. The theme gives your story a unity and strength.

Hopefully a good theme can withstand the bad dialogue rewrites by the directors girlfriend, on camera improvisations by the actors, dropped or added scenes or subplots, whatever is thrown at your screenplay in the long torturous road to the theater or TV screen.