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This post originally appeared as a guest blog at OwlReviewaBook.







BE A JERK AND YOUR CHARACTERS WILL THANK YOU FOR IT


Bethany asked me to write a little something about character development, so here I am attempting to write a little something about character development.

There’s one major problem.

I honestly don’t know anything about character development.

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating just a little bit for the sake of comedy.

The truth is that I don’t know anything that I’m supposed to know about character development. Plus, I’ve always found it a bit weird for me when someone asks me to write about the “craft” of anything.

The only real “craft” I have any right lecturing on is Kraft Macaroni and Cheese – which happens to be the only food in existence with a taste wholly dependant on your mood. If you’re depressed it’s awesome. If you’re happy, it’ll make you depressed.

That should be their slogan.

The only real bit of advice I can offer up when it comes to your characters is this: Be a jerk.

As a writer you’re in control of every aspect of your character’s lives and it’s pretty safe to assume that you feel a certain love for them. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s great actually. You should love them. If you don’t love them, the fact that you’re going to spend endless hours and upwards of a 100,000 words writing about them would just be silly.

A problem arises when you love them so much that you start treating them the way you want them to be treated, rather than the way they need to be treated.

If it makes sense for them to get hurt, be prepared to hurt them. If they have to die to get across your point, I suggest you find yourself a sturdy tree and pull out the hangman’s noose.

Remember that great story where everything always worked out for everyone and everything was fantastic all of the time?

No?

That’s because it doesn’t exist.

You can’t be a good friend to your characters. You have to be a terrible friend. It’s a necessity of the relationship. At some point you’re going to make them hurt. You’re going to drag them through the mud and make them cry. You’re going to take them to the lowest of lows and just when they think you’re done hurting them, you’ll slap on some more.

It’s for their own good.

It has to be done and you’re the heartless jerk that has to do it.

In my opinion the love you feel for the characters you create has be a tough love. Anything else is a detriment to your story. It does them an injustice, it does you an injustice, and it does the term injustice, injustice.

Wait…

That last part didn’t make any sense.

Ignore the fact that I typed it.

Love your characters and love your story enough to be the jerk they need you to be.

Wow, that almost sounded like I knew what I was talking about – a little bit anyway. And I wasn’t even ruminating on the pros and cons of Velveeta Shells and Cheese as opposed to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

Don’t even get me started on that battle of the unhealthy titans.

We’d be here for hours.

Steven

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By Edward Zelinsky

It is noteworthy when eight ideologically diverse justices of the U.S. Supreme Court all decide a First Amendment case the same way. Thus, Snyder v. Phelps is a noteworthy decision. The Westboro Baptist Church is well-known for its demonstrations at military funerals. Indeed, the Westboro Church, led by (and, some say, principally consisting of) the Phelps family, has the rare distinction of having been denounced by both Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee.

Members of the Westboro Church demonstrated near the Maryland funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, killed in action in Iraq. Mr. Albert Snyder, the corporal’s father, sued the Westboro Church and its members for various torts including intentional infliction of emotional distress. Mr. Snyder prevailed in a jury trial. In invalidating the jury’s verdict, the U.S. Supreme Court, except for Justice Alito, said that the Church and its members were exercising their free speech rights in a constitutionally-protected fashion.

As the Court described the facts of the case, it is hard to disagree with this conclusion. According to those facts, the Westboro Church and its members told the local authorities of their intention to demonstrate at the time of the Snyder funeral and “complied with police instructions in staging their demonstration.” The Westboro demonstrators stayed “behind a temporary fence…approximately 1,000 feet from the church where the funeral was held.” The demonstrators went neither to the church where the funeral was held nor to the cemetery, and were nonviolent throughout their demonstration.

On these facts, the message conveyed by the Westboro Church is obnoxious (“God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “Thank God for IEDs,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”) but constitutionally protected.

The problem is: Those were not all the facts of the case. Only Justice Alito confronted this reality. After the funeral, a member of the Westboro Church posted on the Church’s website a hate-filled message aimed specifically at the Snyder family. Among its other assertions, this website message accused Mr. and Mrs. Snyder of having “raised [Matthew] for the devil.” The Snyders, the web message continued, “taught Matthew to defy his Creator, to divorce, and to commit adultery.” Then the Snyders sent their son “to fight for the United States of Sodom, a filthy country that is in lock step with his evil, wicked, and sinful manner of life.”

Media accounts of the Court’s decision have largely ignored this web-based attack on the Snyders. Media accounts have also largely ignored the eight Justices’ acknowledgment that, if this web-based attack is considered, Westboro and its members may indeed have stepped over the line, forfeiting First Amendment protection by this vicious internet attack on the Snyder family. As Chief Justice Roberts put it in a footnote to his majority opinion, this “Internet posting may raise distinct issues in this context,” issues which the Court declined to consider because of the failure of the Snyders to press this point in their petition to the high court.

Justice Alito disagreed with his colleagues in his willingness to confront the facts of the case as they were presented to the jury: Westboro and

I absolutely HATE text language. Nothing in the world annoys me more than seeing someone type in text language. Okay, I do use the occasional text language phrase like ‘you’ becomes ‘u’ and ‘are’ becomes ‘r’. I do use the occasional acronym like ‘to be honest’ becomes ‘tbh’, ‘laughing out loud’ becomes ‘lol’ and ‘by the way’ becomes ‘btw’. I think a text language vocabulary of up to 20 words should be tolerated. (Mine only reaches like 5 which is better but…! ) But when situations worsen to a point where you see someone write ‘I am busy right now’ in text language and it looks like ‘i m bc ryt nw’, at that point, you really want to bang your head on the nearest wall until your eyes pop out and even Homer Simpson seems as attractive as Brad Pitt.

Here is my list of why text language spelling should officially be allowed to get a criminal record (or better still - imprisonment) if exceeded by 20 words in its vocabulary list:

1. It makes you sound like a 2 year old. 2 year olds can’t type and when you type text spelling, it looks like you can’t type, thus making you look like a 2 year old.
2. It makes you sound illiterate. It feels like your mum and dad denied you the basic education you should have deserved.
3. It makes you look like you are so poverty stricken that your keyboard has been bashed by a cow but you still won’t replace it.
4. Text spelling seems to worm its way to exam papers and other official pieces of papers and THAT is despicable.
5. It looks like jumbled letters. It really looks like you are trying to teach little Molly how to read and write.
6. Using text language is denying other people the right to read. When they look at random letters, no punctuation and no use of the teensiest bit of decent grammar, then their mind goes into delirium whether what they are reading is proper or not, thus corrupting their minds.
7. Children will become weird because of text language and will take over the world with signs and posters and literally everything sounding that way.
8. Teachers won’t be able to correct exam papers because if the students use text spelling and the teachers can’t (I’m pretty sure half the teachers think ‘lol’ means lolling about because we find something funny, which really, makes no sense at all) that’s illiteracy stepped up a notch and a waste of doing exams anyway. As it is, the British government education folk are worried exams are getting easier by the second.
9. On a much more realistic note, text spelling is going out of fashion. More and more people shun it and funnily enough shun those who still use it, so if you use it, stop. Or you’ll find yourself tied to a pole near the bus stop getting thrashed by a bunch of geekily cool teenagers.

I know that was a pretty angry rant but, let’s face the facts, text language spelling isn’t great! If anything at all, it is wasteful. People say it reduces the effort to type but it increases the effort to read. Let’s all type decently and read decently and not become slaves to ‘txt lngage splng’ (or for normal people, text language spelling).

I absolutely HATE text language. Nothing in the world annoys me more than seeing someone type in text language. Okay, I do use the occasional text language phrase like ‘you’ becomes ‘u’ and ‘are’ becomes ‘r’. I do use the occasional acronym like ‘to be honest’ becomes ‘tbh’, ‘laughing out loud’ becomes ‘lol’ and ‘by the way’ becomes ‘btw’. I think a text language vocabulary of up to 20 words should be tolerated. (Mine only reaches like 5 which is better but…! ) But when situations worsen to a point where you see someone write ‘I am busy right now’ in text language and it looks like ‘i m bc ryt nw’, at that point, you really want to bang your head on the nearest wall until your eyes pop out and even Homer Simpson seems as attractive as Brad Pitt.

Here is my list of why text language spelling should officially be allowed to get a criminal record (or better still - imprisonment) if exceeded by 20 words in its vocabulary list:

1. It makes you sound like a 2 year old. 2 year olds can’t type and when you type text spelling, it looks like you can’t type, thus making you look like a 2 year old.
2. It makes you sound illiterate. It feels like your mum and dad denied you the basic education you should have deserved.
3. It makes you look like you are so poverty stricken that your keyboard has been bashed by a cow but you still won’t replace it.
4. Text spelling seems to worm its way to exam papers and other official pieces of papers and THAT is despicable.
5. It looks like jumbled letters. It really looks like you are trying to teach little Molly how to read and write.
6. Using text language is denying other people the right to read. When they look at random letters, no punctuation and no use of the teensiest bit of decent grammar, then their mind goes into delirium whether what they are reading is proper or not, thus corrupting their minds.
7. Children will become weird because of text language and will take over the world with signs and posters and literally everything sounding that way.
8. Teachers won’t be able to correct exam papers because if the students use text spelling and the teachers can’t (I’m pretty sure half the teachers think ‘lol’ means lolling about because we find something funny, which really, makes no sense at all) that’s illiteracy stepped up a notch and a waste of doing exams anyway. As it is, the British government education folk are worried exams are getting easier by the second.
9. On a much more realistic note, text spelling is going out of fashion. More and more people shun it and funnily enough shun those who still use it, so if you use it, stop. Or you’ll find yourself tied to a pole near the bus stop getting thrashed by a bunch of geekily cool teenagers.

I know that was a pretty angry rant but, let’s face the facts, text language spelling isn’t great! If anything at all, it is wasteful. People say it reduces the effort to type but it increases the effort to read. Let’s all type decently and read decently and not become slaves to ‘txt lngage splng’ (or for normal people, text language spelling).

The ten things I hate about our world the way it is today, often interact with each other.  There are:

              1)  Corrupt political systems

              2)  Corrupt Criminal Justice System

              3)  Corporate Corruption

              4)  Poverty

              5)  Pollution

              6)  Greed

              7)  Abuses of all kinds, people and animals

              8)  government waste and oppression

              9)  Political Correctness

Our political leaders are responsible for many ills of our world. They are the ones who are elected to oversee our welbeing, and ironically it is their own welbeing that they end up overseeing. The addiction to power, wealth and control, rots their common sense, and concern for those who look up to them. They get submerged into self concern and greed. They quickly forget the purpose of their authority as soon as they are given the freedom to rule.

Corporate big wigs work together with politicians in schemes that will reap them fortunes at the expense of those they are in charge of overseeing. All this self interest leads into a chain reaction of all the other things. Political power is what steers every facet of society.  Nothing can be done without government  being involved in some way.

There is no such thing as privacy or freedom anymore. The evils of governments the world over have managed to destroy the world, by allowing corporations to manipulate and pollute at will, for their own benefit. Our social security numbers are used to track our every move. We can not get utilities turned on without giving our social security numbers. We now can not even stay at a hotel, rent a car or make a phone call on a public phone without having a credit or bank card.

All these agencies and companies sell our personal information to each other, If we move to another State and get a new phone number, all these people phone us before we even unpack.  We are all being SPIED on, all the time.  Our personal information is spread across the computer for the world to find. If a hit man were looking for us, they would have no trouble finding us.

Everyone wants a credit or bank card instead of cash. That way they have access to your bank funds, and they legally commit fraud by taking out more then you allow them to, and they get away with it. The banks are in it with them. If you tell a store, or car rental etc. not to take out more than a certain amount for whatever, because you know that you will bounce checks and be in a mess if they do, they agree to not do it, then they do it anyway.

They invent charges that they did not tell you about, and simply get them out your account. When your checks begin to bounce and you, try to talk to the bank, they only say that “YOU gave the company your account number or bank card, and they have nothing to do with it.” The bank rips you off with high over drawn fees, and the people who demand the cards, take what they want and never get punished for it. We are cohurst into becoming victims, and we can’t do anything about it. But let us steal like that from them, and we go straight to prison for years.

Many employers are now getting in on this band wagon. They require direct deposit in order to pay you your wages. We do not have the freedom for ourselves, to decide if we want to pay cash to avoid all the rip off schemes that are being used, by way of credit and bank cards.

Landlords are also culprits of greed. They charge a non refundable fee to fill our an application to rent an apartment. If ten people fill out the application and they find reason to deny them, they keep all that free money for themselves. They charge between $20.00 to $50.00, and sometimes even more for this rip off game.

Landlords now require tenants to sign a lease that is usually for a year. This is holding the tenant HOSTAGE to the lease, so the landlord can be guaranteed rent money for a year, whether the tenants wants to stay there that long or not. If the tenant moves out they break the lease, and the landlord can garnish their pay check to get the rest of the rent money for the remainder of the lease. 

That is not enough greed on the part of the landlord. They also require a large deposit, and the first and last months rent, before the tenant can even move in. If you want your beloved pet to move in with you, they can refuse that you have a pet, or they charge you an outrageous deposit, and an added amount on your rent, to keep a pet. A poor person can not afford all these fees and rip offs.

Landlords have all sorts of loop holes to do as they please. They can make up things to evict you, and it’s your word against the landlords, and the courts always side for the landlord. Once you are evicted, you are placed on a black list so that other landlords can charge you higher rent for being on the list,and slumlords become like vultures who come to the rescue of those on the list, allowing them to move into their deplorable housing  as if you are a criminal, and they are giving you a break. Then they charge the same rents as the decent apartments go for.

Landlords keep your deposit, claiming all sorts of damages that were not your fault. The courts also side for landlords if you dare to take them to court to get your deposit back.  Judges don’t even want to hear witnesses or look at pictures that you may provide to defend your side. They don’t care. Landlords are Slave master to Tenant Slaves. Then they wonder why former tenants come back to break out windows and destroy the place.

Everyone is trying to ride the gravy train on the backs of those who are just trying to do their best to survive. Deceitfulness and greed has spread like a cancer everywhere. Poverty and homelessness has become epidemic. It has become a dog eat dog world, and the strong survive. The root of all evil has taken over with the “love” of money.

Poverty is the result of those who commit evil. Poverty is created because of GREED. Those who have financial security resent sharing with those who struggle to survive. There is no fairness or justice for the poor. Instead of seeking ways to repair the damage man has done on this earth, the wealthy in politics waste billions to fight useless wars, and explore space.  They do not even appreciate the beautiful earth we have right here. They want to go and find another planet that they can destroy, like they are doing to this one.  Those are the things I hate about this world.

Everything is so mushy out there today. I realized that as much as I love some things, I really despise others. And I'm not ashamed to say I love to hate those things. Just to be different, here's a list:

• peas (any kind)


• cooked carrots (I like raw ones)


• broccoli on my pizza


• pineapple


• boogers


• war


• dirty diapers


• western movies


• racism


• cockroaches


• indifference


• conformity


• the smell of gasoline


• the word - moist (yuk even writing it makes me cringe)


• snorts


• liver (not the organ, just the food)


• puddles (of anything)


• touching bathroom stall doors


• commercials (unless it the SuperBowl)


• drama (unless its YA of course)


• people in character suits


• humidity (mostly b/c of my hair)


• smell of trash


• hearing someone gag


• waking up to a dirty kitchen


• touching old food


• fighting


• driving a stick shift on hills


• seeing blood (as long as its in my body its ok)


• mold in the shower (not that I have any!)


• old soggy soap with a hair on it


• scratchy towels


• combs (its a danger to my natural curly hair)


• bad coffee (Yes, I am a coffee snob)


• touching other people's feet (Sorry honey!)


• getting up early (before 8)


• when I'm out of creamer


• talking to utility companies on the phone


• junk mail


• negativity


• people who take themselves WAY TO SERIOUSLY


• greedy companies


• alligators (they freak me out!)


• bread crust


• the water that first comes out of ketchup bottles (YUK!)


• crust on a milk jug


• people who carry on a really long inappropriate convo on their cell phone in Starbucks. I'm talking like non-stop


• cracked heels


• cellulite (not that I have any!)


• ear hair


• people who pick up the phone to sat they are busy


• stepping in dog poo or gum


• finding tissues in the dryer (means someone blew their nose and my clothes were washed in it)


• littering


• smell of cooked beef, fish or eggs


• wilted lettuce


• slow computers


• chain letters


• running up hills


• poppyseeds


• blackheads


• lists


• a long bad joke


• people who talk about themselves


• politicial rhetoric


• when it rains hard while I'm driving on the highway


• airport or hospital food


• reading about tragedies (unless its Shakespeare)


• traffic (unless its blog traffic! Then I say, Jam on!)


• long toenails
• round-abouts (who goes first?!)

How about you? What grosses you out?

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Not a whole heck of a lot to report today. The above concept sketch is from a recent project I picked up recently. Guy watches bird, giant dinosaur watches guy - fairly simple concept, no?

I hit a brick wall in the writing of my novel last night. Suddenly everything that I write is little more than a pile of poop, stacked on top of another pile of poop. Hopefully taking a few days away from it will clear my head and help me finish this thing. I've started so many novels in the past and have ALWAYS had problems when coming down the home stretch. Some of them I ended up finishing, but absolutely hating, while others I never touched again. I really would like to finish this one - so I need to get my act together.

In other wonderful news I have this weird thing growing on my eyelid. It sort of looks like a zit, but not really - it's a bit more like Quato from "Total Recall." I keep waiting for it to grow arms and tell me that I need to "start the reactor," but it hasn't happened yet.

Steve~

Holy toledo things have been busy lately!

Lots of work and lots of family stuff has made it a wee bit difficult to get around to posting on the ol' illustration blog. Add all of that to the fact that I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping and you've got a recipe for disaster more annoying than a weekend long marathon of Ben Affleck movies.

Anyway, hopefully I'm entering a bit of a downspell and hopefully that'll mean throwing something up on here more often.

Hopefully.

I don't like making promises, so we'll just stick with hopefully.

Anyway, my wife has been snapping some pictures of me early in the morning and we think that we've discovered the reason I'm not getting any sleep.

The stupid cats seem to think my head is their bed.

(Don't give me any guff on the black and white stripped quilt. I've had it since I was a kid, it's ugly as sin, it needs to be thrown away, I've heard it all from my wife more than once. I'll tell you the same thing I tell her...it's not going anywhere. That's right, I'm a thirty year old Linus. Deal with it.)

Steve~

To celebrate the holidays we asked some of our favorite people in publishing what their favorite book was. Let us know in the comments what your favorite book is and be sure to check back throughout the week for more “favorites”.

Bethany Heitman is an Associate Editor at Cosmopolitan Magazine.

I first read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood about ten years ago. I’ve since reread it about a half dozen times. The true story of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and how they brutally murdered a family in Kansas is chilling enough on its own. But it’s the brilliant and revolutionary way in which Capote pens this tale that makes it my favorite. (more…)

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