Tag: aliens

Who is your audience?

Who is your audience?

At some point, the discovery writer (pantster) must decide who their audience is?

Plotters have the advantage of planning to create a story for a group of people.

For instance, if I were to write a picture book, my audience would be young children.

If I were to write a romance, ladies would be the audience. Sure, some men also appreciate Hallmark-type stories.

As an example, I wrote a story called Jupiter’s Song. I targeted science fiction buffs, however… It is really a coming-of-age story that belongs on the Hallmark Channel. Almost any ‘nerd’ will commiserate with Ralph.

A young child (nerd) finds that his interest in science puts him at odds with society. That makes him a target of bullies. How Ralph navigates the social world of ‘humanity’ is the focus of this short story which is available in our writer’s group anthology on my amazon author site.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Scott-Taylor/author/B0BQCX3SRH

Marketing your book is critical to the process.

From the inception of your idea, an author needs to remember who their audience is. Most YA is written in the first person.

Many subject matter experts (SMEs) tend to put what they know in their stories.

One writer I know wrote a novel where they put tons of information on bicycles in the narrative. The story has nothing to do with that subject other than one of the characters rides one as a hobby. Does it move the story along? Is technical information on different types a distraction? Does it help or hurt the story? Do we care about the brand and the specifics of the brand when it adds zero value to the story? The focus of the book is aliens.

No, that is where a content editor is worth what you pay for. Whoever they used failed at their job.

‘Predators and editors’ is another topic I will cover in the future.

Another author is an SME on guns. What they ‘show off’ in their narrative has nothing to do with the story, plot, or what will happen. Those are just two examples of what not to do.

I don’t think we can pinpoint who coined the phrase ‘Kill Your Darlings,’ but they are correct.

In the movie industry, there is something called the cutting room floor. What ends up there are parts of the movie that don’t move the show along. Killing your darlings are things that the author loves but either detract from the plot or don’t move the story along.

Earth’s Last Hope is a science fiction fantasy with a strong female lead.

Romantic involvement as the subplot introduces the reader to the protagonist. Advanced writers will recognize the negative arc before it turns positive. There is no muddy middle, and I would start this book early in the day, so you are not up all night.

As a side note, I completely destroy the Earth, kill off 8 billion people, and we have a happy ending. In fact, you will love the finish. Don’t spoil it by attempting to read the ending first, as you won’t get it.

Read it one page at a time, and just enjoy it.

From that description, who is my audience?

I will give you a hint. It is written for today. 2023

In our anthology, I have a story called The Star People. ‘The Star People’ is the introduction to Dr. S. Richards. The negative arc comes from her brokenness from her dysfunctional family life as a child. The story in the anthology is a PG version of those chapters in Earth’s Last Hope.

If you are a writer, author, or want-to-be, I am the Carrollton League of Writers Executive Director. We meet in person and on Zoom.

After the pandemic, we decided to keep Zoom. Streaming services such as Zoom allow us to reach speakers, authors, and other creative types from around the globe.

If you want to speak with our group, please drop me an e-mail.

Frequently we have authors join us to talk about their work, how they got there, and so on.

I had a thought as I was closing this blog. Isn’t it odd that the UFO they shot down in Roswell in 1947 was later claimed to be a balloon? Where is that guy with the wild hair that screams Aliens? It seems we have a history with UFOs and balloons.

Staylor823@gmail.com

-Best

Scott Taylor

The case of the misfit hand tool.

Image

The following is my guess to what this company is searching for. Hope you enjoy the tale..

https://www.facebook.com/OldeCrowAntiquesPrimitives

After searching servers throughout the world, I came across a wiki leaks article dated from 1947.

It seems as though a man was found wondering aimlessly through the New Mexico desert. He had no memory of how he had gotten there but, was visibly agitated when a small lizard scurried by his feet, while talking to authorities.

He was brought to the local hospital for observation and treatment for dehydration and exposure. Days later, while he was getting his clothes back on, he noticed something in his pocket. Plucking it out revealed a strange looking device. Not knowing what it was or how it got there, he put it back into his pocket and made his way down to the cafeteria in the hospital.

Later he was greeted by a Doctor who used hypnosis to bring back memories, so they could find out who this guy was and where he belonged.

Once under hypnosis (so the story goes) he told of wild things, crazy things, he told about being taken from his car in the middle of the night and brought aboard some sort of craft. He was so visibly shaken by the retelling of the events that the therapist had to stop the session and awaken the man for fear of a seizure or other such malady.

The two met again and again, day after day; each time getting a little more information. The good Doctor was either putting the pieces of an extraordinary puzzle together or, the twisted mind of a seriously ill man. Either way he wanted to continue as this was by far the most interesting case that this doctor had ever dealt with.

As the sessions progressed, the man told of being on a table where these creatures which stood on two feet and looked somewhat like lizards, were bringing instruments over his body to “examine” him. At this instance with incredible lucidity the man looks at the “probes” and other devices and tells the creatures “Aw Hell No!” and with much surprise breaks the constraints on the table and escapes the examining room to find himself in a maze of corridors and hallways.

As the lizard people had much shorter legs than him and long since lost their ability to run on all fours; he was able to outrun them and for several hours lurked around the bowels of the ship. While in one room, he saw all sorts of gadgets and other meters and lights and what have you as well as strange looking shafts of light, emanating from the floor to the ceiling the light pulsed with a low droning noise coming from somewhere in the ship.

He told of watching their “people” adjusting a device that they called the Quantum entanglement regulator or QER. (The precursor to the flux capacitor I am sure.) When they adjusted the QER correctly the pulsed light coalesced into a nice steady rhythm. After the two “aliens” working on the QER left; our hero went up to the QER, grabbed the “tool” off of the table and “tweaked” the QER just a little bit, as to cause the pulses of light to flash more erratically; after which, he put the tool into his pocket and left the room.

As the tool that adjusts it is made from the same metal that the QER is made from, and at the same time, the tool and the device are a match both metallurgically as well as atomically. Any other device used to adjust the QER would result in immediate destruction of the device, or so they thought.

It was not long before our hero was discovered wandering the hallways and brought back to the examining room. Once there, they wiped his memory of the events and deposited him in the middle of the desert, many miles from where they took him from.

As the aliens were really not familiar with the concept of clothing, they also did not know about pockets. Had they known, they might have searched him before they sent him back to the planets surface.

After the doctor awakens his patient he asked him about the tool. With little more than a blank look, the abductee reaches into his pocket and retrieves the tool, and hands it to the doctor.

While there is nothing visibly exceptional about the tool the good doctor laughs and tells the guy that it looks like a really poorly designed nutcracker, and hands it back to our hero. Our good doctor was now convinced that the mans’ time in the desert had left him lost in episodes of delirium and there was little more that he could do other than to get the paper to see if they could help discover who this guy really is.

News of the person found in the desert reached the media of the day, and it was not long after that before he was reunited with his loved ones. The tool ended up in the back of a junk drawer where it sat, collecting dust, until the man’s death several years later. His children then had an estate sale and the tool was sold with the “lot” of the contents of the junk drawer.

Meanwhile, when the aliens tried to leave orbit, they discovered that their Quantum Entanglement hyper drive was not “regulated” correctly and immediately dispatched a crew to regulate it. When the tool to do so could not be found they were forced to stay on our planet much longer than they had planned for. A brash decision was made to attempt to regulate the QER with something other than the correct tool, and in July of 1947, as a result of that decision, there was a crash of one alien craft inhabited by “lizard people” in Roswell…

Somewhere in a dungeon at Write Patterson Air Force base lies the remains of the craft which our people have tried for years to reverse engineer. So far the only technology that they could replicate is fiber optics and Velcro, and some claim the laser, but I tend to think we did that one.

The QER is still out of sync and because of the signals that it is emanating, had to be put several stories under ground to keep the Russians from picking it up on their spy satellites.

If they only knew that in some small antique shop lives the key to unlimited power, space travel; not only at incredible speeds, but also time, they would be ecstatic! Yes the QEHD (Quantum Entanglement Hyper Drive) also allows for easy travel both forwards and backwards in time.

Can you imagine what would happen if General Wainright at the pentagon, were to read this story on the internet and find the key to power beyond his wildest dreams, and it lives in a small antique shop? He will never see it however; as security is so tight that no computer can ever be connected to the public internet, ergo he will never read about this on Facebook. All the unlimited power that this tool controls will be lost to all of mankind forever!

Another fun fact is about the aliens themselves. Unlike the media hype, several survived and have been working in the skunk-works programs at Write Patterson and Area 51. Our government did not force them into this; they found that after getting to know us, that we are not really all that bad. As the matter of fact, one of those aliens is a celebrity of sorts; you see him on TV, selling insurance. You just think that he is CGI…..

I would also be totally remiss if I did not entertain the other theory, that this is simply a poorly designed nut cracker, so poorly designed in fact, that few were made as the nuts and or shells escaped, putting people’s eyes out. The company abandoned the idea of making this model and this is the one, the prototype that survived going back into the crucible, to be made into something more useful, like pull tabs on beer cans.

The story, people and depictions in this “article” are a complete creation of an over active imagination, and should be looked at as “entertainment.” Or are they….? The Truth is out there, and, I Want to Believe…

Update: 10-14-14

Mystery solved!

Some time ago this picture was placed on Face Book by a company that sells antiques and other one off things.  Nobody had a clue what this was or what it was used for.  We guessed that it was a tool but for what. I frequent antique stores as this type of thing interest me.

While digging around I found something that looked very similar and on the handle was a tag describing it.  This device was used to turn the flu in a stovepipe off or on, or adjust it as it would be hot.  I still like my story better but alas, the truth is out there…

-Best to you and those that you care about.