Kam Oi Lee

The end, and other stories

Kam Oi Lee — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:14:06 +0000

I wrote the end of Sweet Heart Catalyst yesterday! Now all I have to do is write the, ahem, pesky middle part

But before I do that, I have to finish up that shortie about my bad guy who’s bad, bad, bad, and how he got that way. It’s about 1700 words so far. For now, the working title is Sergio after the main character, but I hope I can come up with something that sounds a little more badass. (Side note: I apparently really like the name “Sergio”; I just realized that I also have a “Sergei” in another, unrelated story.)

Short stories Encounter on Planet 352 and Desert Walker are temporarily on the back burner.

I recently discovered She Writes, a site for, by and about women writers (thanks to my friend Kat for the heads-up!) It’s a great resource with an active community of writers. I’d like to encourage all you writer folks on my list to join me there. (Men are welcome too, though the site is female-focused).

I had to write an intro blurb for one of the groups I joined on SW, and one of the questions was about our current WIP. So it forced me to think about just what the frell this thing is that I’m writing, anyway. Here’s what I came up with: “A twisted mutant hybrid of near-future biopunk-ish science fiction and political/crime thriller”. Heheh! … although I forgot to add, “with a delicious coating of dark chocolate”.

What I’ve been working on lately

Kam Oi Lee — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:21:48 +0000

Sweet Heart Catalyst progress. Slow, but better than going backwards!

Thanks to my writing group, I’ve received some very useful feedback on my first draft of the Wallwalker short story, which I’m now calling Encounter on Planet 352. Looks like I have my de-tripe-ification work cut out for me

I started writing a new short story that I’m calling Desert Walker. After being on a snow, ice and cold kick for so long, I’m apparently on a desert kick now; Encounter on Planet 352 also takes place in a desert. Although the desert in Desert Walker is considerably more aggro. As in “melt your shoes off, hide in holes in the ground during the day & only travel at night”. Oh, and I apparently also have a thing for characters who, heheh, walk

Also, I spotted a call for submissions for stories about characters who are just bad, bad, bad, and unredeemably evil. I believe I have a character who fits the bill, and I actually have his “origin story” already written. So I’m going to brush that up this week.

Maps

Kam Oi Lee — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:21:05 +0000

I’ve noticed that a few of my writer friends have been making maps lately. It’s inspired to make my own—something I needed to do anyway.

Here’s the area map for Sweet Heart Catalyst, showing three countries: Katro, Ochoroa, and Prima. The Charemi is a disputed territory claimed by both Katro and Ochoroa. My main character hails from Prima, the smallest and southernmost country. Specifically, he’s from “The Island”—a place owned and controlled by his family, who have more money than God. I’m going to make up a name for it eventually, but right now it’s just called “The Island”.

And here’s the map of Katro City and Staura, two cities separated by a river. The Estribi isn’t another country, it’s just the name for the mountain range backing the two cities. It’s a place of contradictions, great beauty and even greater squalor. TechParadise is a sprawling, crime-ridden urban area, the cross-hatched areas (The Environs) are slums, and Aselba is a huge garbage dump.

Consider this wall… walked!

Kam Oi Lee — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:34:54 +0000

I finished the rough draft of Wallwalker yesterday! It feels good to actually finish a piece. I had been feeling a bit disheartened about my writing lately, for various reasons, and yesterday I finally realized that the only thing to do was to keep at it–which inspired me to bang out the rest of the story. So there!

Incidentally, all of the main characters in the story are cats. After finishing the story, I found myself looking at my own cats differently. Particularly Luba, our Siamese, who reminds me a bit of the character of Dark Tiger… I know, I’m a weirdo

I definitely want to come up with a better title, but for now I’m just calling it Wallwalker after the main character. Now–on to the whittling and polishing!

* * *

Oh, and I’ve made some progress on Sweet Heart Catalyst too:

* * *

And last but not least, I haz some new research books (and an excuse to try out the OpenBook plugin):

Police Procedure & Investigation: A Guide For Writers (Howdunit)

Lee Lofland; Writers Digest Books 2007

WorldCat⋅LibraryThing⋅Google Books⋅BookFinder

Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers For The FBI (St. Martin's True Crime Library)

Robert K. Ressler, Thomas Schachtman; St. Martin's Paperbacks 1993

WorldCat⋅LibraryThing⋅Google Books⋅BookFinder

Writing the sweet things first

Kam Oi Lee — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:23:33 +0000

The Sweet Heart Catalyst progress bar is still moving, however slowly. My new “write everything out of order, in small chunks, and in response to random prompts” approach makes me feel like I’m moving at a glacial pace and in a disorganized fashion–but on the plus side, it feels like almost everything I write, comes out as an intense, pivotal scene. It’s like I get to write all of the sweet parts (haha!), while skipping (1) the boring stuff and (2) the parts where I have no idea what happens, LOL. I just write the chunks I feel like writing, and then add them to my master file in chronological order, with titles like “Scene where Thing A happens”. In between, I have notes in all caps, like “ADD THE SCENE WHERE CHARACTER B DOES THING C”. It’s going to be a really weird first draft when it’s done, but I’m not going to worry about that right now.

On a side note: while driving to work this morning, it occurred to me that my character’s coworkers nickname him “Spooky” (because it sorta fits him, and it’s a play on his last name, Spinney). I’m also toying with the idea that even though this is a technologically advanced society, many people are very superstitious, and they really do believe that people like him are “touched by the gods”, and not necessarily in a good way. His coworkers also (initially) think that he can do stuff like (1) getting “impressions” off of physical objects (such as a knife that might be a murder weapon) or locations, and (2) being able to “see” the winning lottery numbers. So he has to disabuse them of these beliefs, and reiterate that his ability only works on people. Living, breathing, thinking people.

* * *

Oh, and one more thing: I also have progress to report on Wallwalker, which I’ve been working on as a side-project, for whenever I get stuck or need a break from SHC. Yep, I’m doing it, I’m writing a short story!

things are moving… slowly…

Kam Oi Lee — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:44:50 +0000

Wow, that really doesn’t look like much progress since the last time I posted a progress bar, does it?

I’ve become a big fan of the Stuff You Should Know podcast. It’s a really good resource when you don’t know much about a topic, and need to find out the basics in like, 20 or 30 minutes. I’ve been listening to all the episodes I find especially relevant for the purposes of this story, such as “How SWAT Teams Work”, “Are there people who feel others’ pain?”, “The Real Jack the Ripper”, “How Witness Protection Works”, “How Hostage Negotiation Works”, “How Body Armor Works”, “What’s the best place on your body to get shot?”, and of course, “How Rigor Mortis Works”.

Too bad research doesn’t count as wordage.

Learning to read people’s thoughts and turn invisible

Kam Oi Lee — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:23:17 +0000

I’m starting to realize something about Sweet Heart Catalyst: I’ve bitten off a really big chunk to chew. Or however the saying goes. It feels like my last story was so simple by comparison; all I had to worry about was cold weather, ice roads, iron mining, heavy equipment, a space station, and two guys in a truck. With this current story, in addition to cops, guns & serial killers, I also have different countries & cultures, different languages, vast social inequality, an ugly and longstanding conflict over land and resources, a couple of terrorist groups, drugs, human trafficking… well, at least the weather’s nice there.

I don’t know why, but I don’t seem to be very good at coming up with ideas that will fit inside a short story. It’s what I ought to be doing–writing more short stories, and submitting them, so that I can maybe get a few more publishing credits under my belt. Instead, I always seem to come up with stories that are complicated and huge, and will take me eons to write.

One of the things I did to make this story more complicated was, I made my main character a psychic. So in addition to being able to see, hear, smell, touch & taste just like regular humans, he also has this extra sense with which to perceive the world. I decided that it’s not magic, that there’s a scientific explanation for it (I’ll let everyone know what it is, just as soon as I figure it out). I also decided that it’s not some all-encompassing, omnipotent super-power (because that kind of stuff just bores the snot out of me). It’s more like this: imagine if you are the only person who can hear, while everyone else around you is deaf. You have an advantage over other people, sure, but it’s not like you can be listening/paying attention to every single sound in the world, all at the same time. It doesn’t make you invulnerable or invincible.

So that was all well and good–except that I’m not really psychic, so I didn’t have any idea what the world would really “sound” like to my character. So I had to start learning. I decided to use the metaphor of sound, so that in his world, there’s conventional, auditory sound, and then there’s also psychic sound. Then I had to learn the rules of psychic hearing and speaking. I’ve decided that everybody emanates thoughts and feelings, but only those with special abilities are able to hear them, and to control their own emanations, to be quiet when they wish to. The rest of us are just mindlessly babbling along, loud and proud without even knowing it, and we can’t hear anyone else either.

All that noise would drive my character nuts if he had to hear it 24-7, so therefore he has “shields”, which are kind of like earplugs, but with a volume knob, so he can “listen” a lot, or a little, or not at all. Then there’s the matter of different “channels”–can he listen to one person nearby while ignoring everyone else, or “speak” to another person without having everybody else hear it? Yes–but it just takes skill and concentration. And the hardest skill is to not just “speak”, but to project a thought, emotion or suggestion into somebody else’s head in such a smooth, unobtrusive way that they don’t even realize it’s “foreign”. My character knows how to do this, but in only one way–he can “turn invisible”. Or rather, he can make the people around him believe that he has disappeared. It’s not easy; it’s not like all he has to do is press some figurative mental button, and bingo, he’s gone. It involves intense concentration. It took me a while to figure it out. But now I know how he does it.

Now I just have to worry about figuring out the rest of that big list in the beginning of this post

lookee, progress!

Kam Oi Lee — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:01:58 +0000

I’ve made some progress on Sweet Heart Catalyst. I’ve been writing this thing in a different way than I usually do. Instead of starting at the beginning and writing each chapter or scene in succession, I’ve been using prompts to spark my imagination, and then writing the scenes as they come to me, which is often totally out of order. Maybe not the most efficient way to work, but I think it’s been stimulating my writing brain in new and different ways, and that can only be a Good Thing™.

I’ve also come to the realization that I need to do some research on some topics that I never thought I’d need to research: cops, guns, and serial killers. Yep, apparently my science fiction story is just chock full of ‘em. So now I need to find out the answers to all the questions that I never paid much attention to in the Nanowrimo forums: What procedures do they follow when investigating a crime scene? Who’s in charge of the investigation: local police, state police, or the feds? All of ‘em? What kind of guns do cops carry? What the frell does the inside of the police station look like? How does a police interrogation work? And of course, how does it feel to get shot? My story is set on a different world, so I have some leeway to make stuff up, but real world analogues will be both helpful and necessary. One thing’s for certain, at some point I’ll be falling down into a deep research hole. Back when I was in the early stages of writing Algae, I once spent almost an entire weekend reading about hydraulic cylinders. I foresee something like that in my future. Except for “hydraulic cylinders”, substitute “the Reid technique of interviewing and interrogation”. Or something.

A new home for my drawings

Kam Oi Lee — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 06:14:35 +0000

For the last few years I’ve been posting my drawings on Deviantart. But from now on I’ll be putting them in a gallery on this site instead. Most of my drawings are of my fictional characters, so to present them here, in the context of my fiction writing, makes a lot more sense than to put them on Deviantart, where nobody really cares what you post anyway, unless of course you have mad skillz, which I certainly don’t. So there

Spring 2010 update

Kam Oi Lee — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:35:44 +0000

Accepted!

Algae, my story about love, art, and iron mining on the frigidly cold planet Diamanta, was recently accepted to the Distant Worlds anthology of novella-length science fiction (to be published by The Library of Science Fiction and Fantasy Press). This will be my second published story, and my first story to appear in print format (there will be an ebook version as well). Needless to say, I couldn’t be more stoked! The Distant Worlds anthology also contains novellas by Patty Jansen, A.L. Sirois, Michael C. Pennington, and Aleksandar Žiljak.

What I’m working on

Right now I’m writing the first draft of a novel, Sweet Heart Catalyst. My main character is one of a series of twenty-six identical clones who were genetically engineered to have telepathic and empathic abilities as well as unusual physical strength and resilience. So theoretically, he should be awesome at everything, right? Well… maybe not so much. He’s also young, and insecure, and so desperate to prove himself in his chosen field of law enforcement, that he ends up making a major mistake: he violates the rights of a suspect in custody. In doing so, he not only breaks the law, but his own personal code of ethics, and the biological software inside his head. Suddenly everything becomes a colossal mess, and he has to fix it–or else governments will fall, peace treaties will fail, bullets will fly, and a kidnapped little girl will die. How does he put everything right? I’m working on that

In case anybody’s wondering what happened to my other novel project, The Outerlands, it’s on the back burner right now.

Rebirth of this blog

This blog has been quiet for a while, mainly because I found the effort of posting here too daunting. See, I got too caught up in feeling like any public posts I made had to be “worthy” of some standard. I was always reading things about how writers need to blog in order to generate more interest in their work, and draw more potential readers to their site, and “build their brand”, and so forth. Which are all great things. But I found that whenever I sat down, with those goals in mind, to write some sort of well thought-out, articulate, intelligent, writing-related article, it would (1) take me forever, and (2) leave me feeling tapped out, like I’d shot my wad writing about writing… instead of, you know, WRITING!

There are people out there who are doing amazing things with their blogs: discussing the exciting and challenging aspects of the writing craft, creating communities of mutual interest while getting their own names out there, and all the while managing to write and create and submit and publish. However (*giant light bulb*), I am not one of those people. Therefore I’ve decided that from now on, my main focus will be on the types of posts that come more naturally to me: progress on my WIPs, character art, neato things I found while doing research for stories, plus occasional tweets of a sentence from a WIP. Things that are probably not terribly exciting to anyone else, but that help energize and sustain my creative process. If this somehow peripherally results in one or two more people becoming interested in what I’m doing, why then, that’d be swell too. But for me to worry too much about “building my brand” seems a bit premature. Maybe when I finish story #3