Author: Kyle A. Massa (Page 21 of 28)

Why I Use WordPress

WordPress Logo

Want to start a blog or a website? If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, free, and customizable platform, I recommend WordPress. Here’s why:

It’s Easy to Use

If I had to code my website, I wouldn’t have a website. Which is a big reason I dig WordPress.

To be fair, there are many other platforms out there that allow you to create websites without coding knowledge. And, to be even more fair, I haven’t used any aside from WordPress. But I’m thrilled with what I’ve gotten out of the ol’ Press.

I set up this WordPress blog way back in 2011, and it was easy. I got started for free, chose a website name and then I was pretty much set. Easy stuff. I didn’t need to do much of anything to start blogging; the interface was (and still is) easy to use. I just wrote up my draft, saved it, and published when ready.

It’s Free

Blogging is essential for many writers. And saving money is essential for pretty much everybody. If you want a blog, you’d better do it on the cheap.

With WordPress, there’s no cost to get started and no charges to keep your blog going. As long as you’ve got “.wordpress.com” in your URL, you don’t need to pay anybody anything. And if you’d like to drop that part of the domain like I have, it’s only 25 bucks a year.

Don’t think I need to say much more about this one. Save your dough for something else.

It’s Customizable

I drive a Honda Element. I’ve been driving it for a few years now and I love it. It’s spacious, reliable, good in the snow, great for transporting objects of all sizes. But it’s also shaped like a shoebox. I love that car, but sometimes I wish I could change the exterior.

WordPress makes it easy to change how your site looks. There are tons of templates to choose from, most of which are free, some of which cost 60 or 70 bucks. You can also add additional pages to your website and open ecommerce platforms. All in all, it’s simple to get your site looking the way you want it to.

If you’re already on WordPress, you probably already know the wonders of using it. If not, I hope I’ve convinced you. Give it a try and see how you like it.

The Power of “What If?”

Futuristic City

For writers, the future is fascinating.

Whether it’s Le Guin, Bradbury, or any number of other writers, one question has been at the heart of pretty much every story set in the future: “What if?”

When of my favorite “What If?” questions came from my dad: “What if every future film is made on a computer?” He thinks computer images are becoming so sophisticated that soon they’ll be indistinguishable from reality. Meaning it will eventually be far cheaper to draw an actor on a computer than to hire one. At which point, real actors will become obsolete.

I decided to explore this idea in fiction. It took a few drafts and some much needed criticism, but this idea eventually turned into a short story. It’s called “Thespian: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in Three Acts.”

This story was a lot of fun to write. It’s about a theater actor who loses his job to a computer. In this story, just as my dad predicted, technology has become so good that real actors have become obsolete. Our protagonist spends the rest of the story trying to get even with technology in general. Spoiler alert: things don’t go quite as planned.

With this piece, I wanted to inject a little satire into the whole dystopian future thing. I enjoy those stories, but I feel that most are a bit too somber. “Thespian” is more lighthearted, a little less concerned with doom and gloom and more interested in poking fun. It’s one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, and I really enjoyed working on it.

Next time you sit down to write, try coming up with your own answer to “What if?” I think you’ll be impressed with the results.

The Value of Joining a Writing Group

Writing Group

Moscow’s Sreda Literary Gathering, 1902 – Wikipedia

Just the other day, I finished a first draft of a piece I was working on and thought to myself, This is pretty darn good. I brought that piece to my writing group a week later, and after fifteen minutes of critiquing, I was reminded of this fact:

The first draft is never, ever good enough.

Little reminders like this are why writing groups are so valuable. Writing alone and never sharing anything with anyone works for some people, but if you want to write professionally, that’s not really an option. Somebody’s going to read your work, whether that be family members, beta readers, or your editor. And, as solitary as writing can be, sometimes it’s nice to get some outside input.

The writing group I’m a member of meets in Boulder every two weeks. Though we all write speculative fiction, everyone brings a differing perspective; we’ve got a pharmacist and mother of two, a couple retirees, a computer programmer, a landscaper, a guy who sells fruit in the midwest for four months out of the year so he can write for the other eight.

It’s these unique personalities that make our critique sessions so beneficial. For example, we’ve got one member who can find something to like in every piece and another member who can, without fail, pinpoint exactly what isn’t working.

Having these diverse perspectives in a writing group is key. “I liked it” is great and it makes you feel good, but it doesn’t improve your piece. Likewise, “You need to change everything because I hated it” doesn’t give you much to work with, either. The best writing groups are specific with feedback and judicious with both praise and criticism.

In addition, you’ll find that your fellow writers tend to have unique backgrounds that can help you out. The programmer in our group, for instance, challenged me on a character description in one of my stories: “The man who lived in A-2 looked like he’d just gotten home from work. Probably worked at a software company, from the look of his clothes; white and blue checkered shirt, along with a red tie and black pants.”

That’s a bit of a stereotypical description for someone in the computing field, now that I look at it. At the time I was writing it, however, I thought nothing of it. Good thing the folks in my writing group had my back!

Which brings me to my next point, the fellow writers in your group will see everything in your piece that you didn’t. They’ll see the inconsistencies that you missed, the subplot you forgot to resolve, even that killer theme that you didn’t realize you’ve woven into your narrative. It’s because writers often get too close to their work, to the point that they don’t even see the fine details anymore.

Writing groups can be hard to find, however, especially if you live in a small town. I found my group through Meetup.com, which has a whole category for writers. There’s also Codex—I’ve never used it, but I understand it’s an online community for writers. However, Codex does require that its members meet certain criteria, and it’s a specifically speculative fiction community. If you don’t meet the requirements or aren’t writing in a speculative genre, you might try a similar community like WritersCafe.

Also, Googling “writing groups” works pretty darn well, too.

So get out there, meet some fellow writers, and share your work. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Looking Good

Bananas

Bartrum had the distinct feeling that he was changing in a way that he probably shouldn’t be. Still, he wasn’t sure there was much he could do about it.

Bartrum was not the type of person who changed. That didn’t feel like him. That felt like other people, people who were open-minded and who sought out new experiences and who were, in general, interesting. Bartrum did none of those things. And he most certainly wasn’t interesting. And that was what he found most appealing about himself.

But, he had to admit, the way in which he was changing was…odd. Little nubs seemed to be sprouting from his ribcage, sort of like extra nipples, only slimier and more pink. And nipples generally didn’t move on their own, did they? When he pinched them, it hurt.

And another thing: Bartrum’s face seemed to be drooping. Which, in and of itself, wasn’t all that surprising; his face had been drooping for the past five years or so, as faces invariably do when they grow older. But this was a little more dramatic—in fact, when he’d gone into town to buy some eggs that morning, people stopped and stared at him. When he glanced in the mirror in the bathroom in the grocery store he understood why: his chin now ended in a flabby disc somewhere near his belly button. It looked like someone had grabbed hold of the skin and given it a good yank.

Hmm. When had that happened?

Bartrum thought he should probably be concerned, but mostly he chalked it up to old age and went on with his day.

As a general rule, Bartrum was distrustful of doctors, so he didn’t bother going to see one. Instead, he figured he’d take a few more vitamins each day. He thought he’d eat an additional banana with breakfast as well as with dinner, just to make sure he was in tip-top shape.

Old age, he decided, was very mysterious. Sometimes it gives you grey hairs. Sometimes, as in his case, it gives you tentacles. Oh, that was the other thing—the nubs on his chest had been growing. Quite a bit, actually.

And by the by, was Bartrum’s left hand now turning into something strikingly similar to a starfish? Hmm, possibly. He preferred not to dwell on it too much.

Everyone grows older, he thought. And each day, everyone changes, usually in slight ways, but sometimes in leaps and bounds. His changes just represented an Olympic long-jump, so to speak. It made him wonder what the future held. Made him wonder what he’d look like tomorrow.

Bartrum wondered, mostly with impassivity, whether or not he’d even recognize himself. And then he decided to go buy those bananas.

Subconflict, and Lots of It

ConflictNovels are cool, but they’re tough to write.

I’ve been working on manuscript about a rock and roll star who inexplicably rises from the dead. Think Mick Jagger meets Jesus Christ. I think the premise is interesting and I like the characters, but once I really got into it, I found that the story was slowing down. It just wasn’t interesting to me anymore.

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my story until some time later, while I was reading Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (all hail his majesty). I got about a hundred pages in and realized the key difference between King’s book and mine: he had tons of subconflict, and I didn’t.

Of course, conflict is one of the cornerstones of story. If people aren’t fighting about something, then you don’t have much of a plot. I don’t think I quite realized just how much conflict you really need to sustain a reader’s interest for three, four, or five hundred pages.

Let’s look at Lisey’s Story for a moment. As you might’ve guessed, it’s a story about Lisey Landon, wife of late author Scott Landon. As I mentioned before, there’s a lot going on in Lisey’s life. She’s still coming to terms with the loss of her husband, while also figuring out what to do with his estate. In addition, her sister Amanda is on suicide watch. Also, a mysterious whacko is after Scott’s supposed lost manuscripts. Oh, and Lisey’s also being stalked by some kind of cosmic monster which only appears in reflective surfaces.

I count five separate conflicts in there. And those are just the most prominent ones.

Managing all this conflict can be pretty tough. On the one hand, once you set up your dominos, you should probably give them a push, right?

But here’s the tricky part: oftentimes, some conflicts should go unanswered. When books resolve all their conflicts neatly, you might feel like everything was a bit too easy.

For example, at the end of Lisey’s Story (spoilers ahead!), Lisey never defeats the monster that plagued her late husband and has now set its sights on her. In fact, by the end of the book, the creature might very well still get her at any time.

That might sound like a loose knot, but it really isn’t. It works because some of the best fiction mirrors life, and in life, there are some conflicts you’re just never going to solve. (Although hopefully if you’re being stalked by a cosmic horror, you can figure that one out.) Plus, I think it’s a mistake to answer all your readers’ questions. Don’t leave them satisfied—leave them wanting more!

When it comes to conflict, the challenge is to balance resolution with open-endedness. I think you’ll like the results.

Tips for Writers on Getting Started

Writing Getting Started

For many writers, there are few things less inspiring than a blank page.

Filling that space is one of the most difficult parts of writing. I know I’m not alone in thinking this; a lot of folks do just fine once they have something written. The issue is putting words on the page in the first place.

So what are some ways to get started? Here are some suggestions.

Don’t Think, Just Write

One of my favorite kickstarter techniques is to write anything. Promise yourself that you’re going to start with a five hundred word piece that won’t be seen or read by anyone ever again. Don’t worry about whether or not it’s good—it probably won’t be. The purpose here is not necessarily to write something great. The purpose is to warm up for the main event.

How does one discover a topic for this warmup piece? Get it from anywhere. The other morning I was drinking coffee from a mug with a turtle on it, so my story was about turtles. Just look around, pick out something you like, and roll with it. Sometimes that gives you exactly the spontaneity you need to get some words down.

Try a Writing Prompt

While I don’t especially dig these, a lot of writers find them helpful. Just type “writing prompt” into Google and see what comes up. You’ll probably find something to the effect of this: “You woke up to find you’ve switched bodies with your pet turtle, Butterton. What do you do?” Find a prompt you like and start writing.

Again, these don’t need to be exceptionally great pieces you’re coming up with. The point is that you’re writing, and that you’re doing some form of cognitive stretching. Keep it up and you’ll be ready for the heavy lifting.

Keep An Idea Notebook

Yet another way to fill the blank page is to reuse your old ideas. My mom encouraged me to do this and I think it’s brilliant. Buy a pocket-sized notebook and take notes on anything (no really, anything) that interests you. Jot down an interesting phrase you heard someone use, an idea for a story that wanders into your head, a weird news headline that would make for a great book. Whatever it is, write it down before you forget.

Revisit these ideas later. Use them as your own personal writing prompts. They’ll oftentimes give you a great starting point, and maybe, if you’re lucky, a piece you can be proud of.

Defeating the blank page is all about choosing methods that work for you. Likewise, it’s just as important to determine what doesn’t work for you. Discover your process, write, and repeat. And don’t let that empty page scare you.

SEO for Bloggers: A Crash Course, Featuring Wombats

A Wombat

So you’ve decided to start a blog about wombats. I salute you.

It’s a great blog. You’ve got some killer costume ideas for wombats, your favorite baby wombat pics, your top 10 favorite songs by The Wombats. This site is amazing.

Only problem is, you can’t seem to get anyone to visit it. It’s not that the content is poor—everyone loves wombats. It’s just that no matter how good your content is, no one will ever know about it unless they can find it. That’s where SEO comes in.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s just a fancy term for improving your website so that it appears on the first few pages of search engine results. The better your SEO, the more likely folks are going to find your website when they search Google.

How Do I Get Started?

SEO might sound intimidating, but it’s actually pretty easy. Just use words on your website and in your posts that people are likely to search for.

In the case of your wombat blog, your top search term is probably going to be “wombat.” But what else are people searching for when they search for wombats?

As a shortcut, let’s head to Google and type your keyword into the search bar, then see what comes up.

Wombat 1

Okay, now we’ve got some good data. Make sure to have some of these terms on the your pages, because these seem to be terms commonly associated with wombats.

Bonus: this is a great way to come up with some post ideas. For example: “Do Wombats Make Good Pets?” Or, even better, “What is Your Wombat’s Poop Telling You?”

Myth: SEO Is About Repeating the Same Words Over and Over

Allow me to digress for a moment. Once upon a time, I was fresh out of college and I was looking for a job—preferably one in writing. I found a company that defined themselves as “reputation management,” something like that. The basic idea was that clients hired them to flood the internet with positive content about the client in order to suppress negative stories that might be floating around the internet.

So yeah. Kinda shady stuff. I didn’t end up working for them.

Anyway, their SEO approach wasn’t the greatest. They were trying to get their stuff on the front page of Google results by packing each post with the client’s name and a few specific keywords repeated over and over again.

At one point, this might’ve worked—posts used to be ranked based on the number of relevant keywords they contained. But search engine sites quickly found that keyword packing generally yielded poor content. After all, one can only read the phrase “wombat poop” so many times before it becomes overwhelming.

The better approach is to find the right keywords, and then place them strategically throughout a webpage. Plus a little more. Let’s take a look at some other tips.

What Are Some of the Best Tools?

Google Trends is a great place to start. Just type in your topic and you’ll get a nifty graph that looks something like this:

Wombat 2

This is perfect for tracking the popularity of searches throughout the year. Though nothing really jumps out from this graph, you can see that wombat Google searches were at their peak in August of 2014. That probably means this month will be a good time to post as many wombat stories as possible.

Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find related searches. This is another goldmine for keyword data—sort of like our search bar trick from before, only wombattier.

Wombat 3

The more of these terms you include in your pages, the better your results will be. But remember: don’t force keywords into a post if they lessen the quality. SEO will help people find your content, but if they don’t like what they find, they won’t come back.

What Else?

Here are some other random SEO tips:

  • Use alt text on every image – As we know, Google indexes search results based on words. So if you’ve got an image with no words associated with it, Google won’t quite know what to do with it. When you upload your images, help Google out by entering alt text that describes the picture.
  • Link to Other Pages – Google places greater value on pages that have more links pointing to them. Obviously, you can’t force other people to link to your stuff, but if you write good content, they’re more likely to do so. Furthermore, if you link your own posts to each other, that still counts. Just don’t go overboard—at most three per post should do the trick.
  • Use search keywords in the title of your post – This is one of the first places Google looks when it’s indexing results for a search. It’s essential to have your top terms right there, front and center.

Try these tips and see how they work for you. Also, if you see a wombat, pet it.

Whatever’s Left

Dessert

There’s an hourglass somewhere in the world with the rest of your life slipping through it. That’s what my friend Jib says, anyway.

He says he found his hourglass when he got lost out in the Dunes. Got to traveling out there and couldn’t find his way back. “Abandoned by my bearings,” is how he puts it. Jib’s got a lot of funny phrases like that.

The way he tells it, he came to a house as night was falling, a house all by itself out in the desert. The front door was locked, and there was someone standing next to it, smoking a pipe. A doorman.

He tells a lot of stories, does Jib. Always has. When we were kids, he told me fake ones and laughed about it later. Now that we’re older, I can usually tell when he’s lying. In this case, I can’t.

Jib doesn’t say much about the doorman—just that the doorman asked him for something. A bribe. Not money, though. It had to be something precious, a wedding ring or a watch handed down from his grandfather or a picture of his kids. In the words of Jib, “Something worth something to me.”

He never did tell me what he gave away. Must’ve been worth enough, though, because he was allowed in. He said the doorman turned a key in the lock on the front door, and pushed. And Jib stepped inside.

The house didn’t look like any house he’d been in before. There was no furniture, sparse light, many paintings on the wall. Each one was a portrait of a different person, though Jib couldn’t see any of their faces; they all had their backs turned. And he says he could hear music, the same four notes over and over again, though he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Also, everything was very clean. And there was a staircase.

He took that staircase up, and another, and a third, and another, and another, and finally he lost count of how many staircases he’d climbed. Jib asks me how it’s possible for a house to have two stories on the outside, yet room for ten, twenty flights of stairs on the inside. I can’t explain it. He can’t either.

At the top of the stairs, there was a room. An immense room, limitless, vast enough so that he couldn’t see the ceiling or the opposite walls. “A room that shouldn’t exist”—that’s how he puts it.

It wasn’t empty. There were hourglasses.

They weren’t little ones, these hourglasses. If you believe Jib’s story, they were as tall as him, some even taller. And no one would ever call Jib a short guy.

He claims that these hourglasses went on for miles, that each one had a name on it. Some had nice fat pockets of sand left in them, some didn’t. Some were all done running and sat there silently, like old bones.

Jib said it was quiet in that room, but not totally silent. The only sound you could hear, and only if you stood perfectly still, was the hiss of infinite grains of sand as they slipped through the narrow part of the glass, down into the chamber below.

He claims he walked through the rows of hourglasses for an entire day, just wandering around looking for his name. He says they weren’t in any kind of order he could figure. They were just there.

He came across a familiar name on one of the hourglasses, after a while. Lynn Graves. She was a friend of a friend of ours. I use the past tense because Lynn would still be our friend’s friend today, were she not deceased. She passed on not long after Jib came back from this supposed journey, of a busted belly. And Jib, the insensitive bastard, insists that the hourglass with her name on it was almost empty when he found it. So he thinks he knew she was going to die, or something.

He kept on wandering through the hourglasses, and by now he tells me his heart was thumping, was “rattling like a rock inside a can.” He was going to find out how much longer he had to live.

When he found his hourglass, it had his full name on it and everything, right down to the “Jib” in quotes between his first name and his last.

Even while he tells me the story, I can read the guilty relief on his face. His hourglass, he says, was almost as full as it could be. Which means that, according to him, he has a long, long time left to live.

And maybe that could’ve been the end of it. But I guess he didn’t leave quite yet. He found another hourglass with another name. Mine.

This search, he claims, didn’t take as long as when he was searching for his own. The search took no time at all, in fact, because my hourglass was right next to his. Like whoever had put them there knew Jib and I were close, or something like that.

Jib saw whatever’s left in my hourglass. He tells me he knows how much longer I’m going to live.

He says it’s a man’s right to know when he’s going to die. But it’s also his right not to know. So he leaves it up to me to decide. He’ll tell me if I ask him, and if I don’t, he never will.

And I wonder. And I think. And I ask myself, almost every moment of every day, I ask myself: Should I? 

###

© Kyle A. Massa, 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this short story may be duplicated or distributed in any form or by any means without expressed written consent from the author.

If you’d like to read more of my fiction, you can find it here.

There’s No Such Thing as Writing Too Much

A fact about writing: no one ever gets it right on the first try.

Trimming the fat is an essential part of the process. Every first draft has suboptimal word choices, hanging plotlines, bad dialogue, or even just too much writing. It’s this last one I’d like to focus on: if we know that we’re going to have to cut a scene, why even bother writing it?

Easy. Because cutting a few thousand words from a rough draft doesn’t mean the impact of those words won’t resonate in the final draft. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Pen and PaperFor example, let’s say you’re writing a conversation between two characters. We’ll call them Roscoe and Winifred, because those names are fun to say.

Roscoe and Winifred decide to take a trip together, and they stop along the highway for dinner. Which reminds Winifred about this one time when she met an alien at a rest stop in Tucson. The alien informed her that an intergalactic fleet would be along on the first day of 2017, which just so happens to be the day Winifred and Roscoe are having this conversation. They pay for their meal, step outside, and boom…there’s the intergalactic alien fleet, waiting in line for milkshakes.

Success! You’ve set up a story—albeit a weird one.

But what if you extend Roscoe and Winifred’s conversation a little, just to see where it goes? Maybe Roscoe reveals that when he was a kid, he told all the other kids at school that an alien landed in his backyard, just so they would pay attention to him. He was lying, of course, but he confesses that it was nice to be popular, at least for a little while.

Is Roscoe’s confession entirely relevant to this chapter? Probably not—this scene is about Winifred and an alien landing, not Roscoe. But still, you’ve discovered something about your character that you didn’t know before: Roscoe was a shy kid longing for attention, and he was imaginative enough to manufacture it.Short Story Writer

As in this example, overwriting is a great way to flesh out supporting characters that might not get the attention your main characters get. Secondary characters are important, but there’s rarely enough space in a manuscript to lend to their backstory. So don’t be afraid to overwrite a little for the sake of supporting characters, and then cut it back later. The more you write about them, the more you’ll learn about them. And that will help them feel authentic to your readers.

Writing more than we think we need is never a waste of time. It’s like digging in the sand at a beach; there’s no telling what we’ll discover.

I mean, without Winifred and Roscoe, we’d never know that aliens like milkshakes.

New Flash Fiction Piece is Out!

Homer

I’m very happy to say that I’ve got a new flash fiction piece published with Five on the Fifth.

As the name suggests, Five on the Fifth publishes five pieces of short fiction on the fifth day of every month. One of my favorite things about them is their flexibility. Some publications have pretty rigid guidelines for the types of stories they’ll take, but Five on the Fifth publishes all different genres, subject matter, and length.

Also, they were nice enough to publish my stuff. So as far as I’m concerned, they’re the greatest online magazine of all time.

My story is called “Wings,” and it’s a little on the creepy side. It’s only about 600 words, though I hope it still tells a complete story. It’s about a character’s obsession with flight, a creepy doctor with a thing for Mozart, and, more generally, it’s about the lengths that people will go to to get what they want.

I wrote this one a while ago, so it’s a little darker than what I like to write now. Still, I think it has a nice atmosphere and some suitably creepy moments. Also, flash fiction is cool and everyone should read more of it.

Click here to read “Wings.” It’s only 600 words, so why not give it a try?

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