“When Galaxies Collide….”

Over a span of some thirty years, I’ve probably written scores, maybe hundreds of stories.  Many of them don’t deserve to see the light of day.  Some are pretty good.  I’ve recently collected the best of my shorter works into a volume entitled Colliding Galaxies.  The volume comes out in May of this year.

Here’s a little about the collection, from the Introduction:

When galaxies collide in outer space, nothing much happens for a very long time.  Surely, when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies merge in about four billion years, as astronomers insist they will, it will be one of the most epochal events in our cosmos.  Yet you’d probably fall asleep watching it, if you could live long enough to witness the whole event.

That’s because galaxies are mostly empty space.

Yet when galaxies collide, and dust gets stirred up, strange and violent things do occur, given enough time.  Dust clouds collapse.  Gravity builds up.  Matter gets compressed.  Before you know it, the thing ignites.  A star is born.  And it burns hot and bright for billions of years.

Words are like that too…whether on a piece of paper or arrayed as bits on a disk.  When put together the right way, words get compressed.  They ignite.  Light and heat follow.  Readers exposed to all this find new ideas, like new elements, bubbling to the surface.  Illumination follows, if the writer did his job and pushed the words together the right way.

My hope is that something like this will happen while you’re reading the stories gathered in this collection.  Something sparks.  Boom!  A new idea…something you never thought of before pops into your head.  I’m not content just to entertain or divert you from your troubles for a few hours, though there’s nothing wrong with that.  I want to start a fire in your head.  I want to slam atoms together, compress them and create something new…a whole new world. 

I’m leery of themes in story collections.  If there’s any theme in Colliding Galaxies, it’s that they were all written by the same writer.  Here, you’ll find a strange bunch of people, ostensibly normal in their backgrounds: an architect, a detective, a kid with a life-threatening disease, a physicist and a group of nursing home residents—but all of them eventually get smashed into new realities like planets pulled into a black hole.  Here, you’ll find angels, aquadapts, atomgrabbers and archeologists, each drawn to their own personal event horizons, some wide-eyed and eager, some fighting all the way. 

What I’m trying to say is that free will ain’t what it used to be. 

These stories, as originally written, span nearly thirty years of my literary life, from fresh out of college (Georgia Tech, class of ’75. Industrial Engineering, thank you very much) to as recently as a year ago.  That’s a span that encompasses Richard Nixon and Watergate and the arrival of Donald Trump in the Oval Office.  In this time frame, we’ve landed on the Moon, created Lady Gaga and sold a few billion I-phones around the world.

Many of these stories started out one way and changed dramatically in the writing.  That happens to a lot of writers.  Sometimes, the author is the most surprised one of all.  Many of the characters in these stories, like Detective Lieutenant Stan Benecky of ‘The Cold, Hard Facts,’ are explorers and discoverers.  Most of them discover things about themselves too.  And what they discover is not always what they wanted to learn.

Recently, in my blog The Word Shed, I wrote about research into why we love stories so much…neurological research that’s taking advantage of new neuro-imaging techniques, along with some pretty cleverly designed experiments. 

In October 2014, neurobiologist Paul Zak wrote these words in a journal devoted to brain research:

“As social creatures, we depend on others for our survival and happiness. A decade ago, my lab discovered that a neurochemical called oxytocin is a key “it’s safe to approach others” signal in the brain. Oxytocin is produced when we are trusted or shown a kindness, and it motivates cooperation with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others’ emotions. Empathy is important for social creatures because it allows us to understand how others are likely to react to a situation, including those with whom we work.”

The truth is that oxytocin is one key reason for why humans are hard-wired to love and respond to stories.   Much of what Dr. Zak has found in his lab supports what writers and editors and readers have known for generations.  Tell a rip-roaring story full of action, involving sympathetic and believable characters and you’ll hook your audience for the duration.

Dr. Zak goes to report on neurobiological evidence that supports what we’ve all know about telling good stories….

“More recently my lab wondered if we could “hack” the oxytocin system to motivate people to engage in cooperative behaviors. To do this, we tested if narratives shot on video, rather than face-to-face interactions, would cause the brain to make oxytocin. By taking blood draws before and after the narrative, we found that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis. Further, the amount of oxytocin released by the brain predicted how much people were willing to help others; for example, donating money to a charity associated with the narrative.

In subsequent studies we have been able to deepen our understanding of why stories motivate voluntary cooperation. (This research was given a boost when, with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, we developed ways to measure oxytocin release noninvasively at up to one thousand times per second.) We discovered that, in order to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first sustain attention – a scarce resource in the brain – by developing tension during the narrative. If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters. This explains the feeling of dominance you have after James Bond saves the world, and your motivation to work out after watching the Spartans fight in (the movie) 300.”

Why does our brain love stories so much?  In an article from the Greater Good Science Center (University of California, Berkeley) in December 2013, Zak says this: The first part of the answer is that as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts. Think of this as the “car accident effect.” You don’t really want to see injured people, but you just have to sneak a peek as you drive by. Brain mechanisms engage saying there might be something valuable for you to learn, since car accidents are rarely seen by most of us but involve an activity we do daily. That is why you feel compelled to rubberneck. To understand how this works in the brain, we have intensively studied the brain response that watching (compelling video) produces. We have used this to build a predictive model that explains why after watching the video, about half of viewers donate to a charity. We want to know why some people respond to a story while others do not, and how to create highly engaging stories. We discovered that there are two key aspects to an effective story. First, it must capture and hold our attention. The second thing an effective story does is “transport” us into the characters’ world.”

Grabbing and maintaining attention and building empathy for your characters are thus two critically important jobs that any storyteller has to complete.  There is now strong neural evidence to support this. 

I said before that I wasn’t a big fan of big themes but it is a fact that there is some subject commonality among these stories.  Two of them deal with time travel (‘Star-Crossed in Voidtime’ and ‘The Time Garden’).  Four of them deal with the ramifications of a technology that has long fascinated me…the advent of nanoscale robotic assemblers with the ability to mass and swarm into all sorts of interesting formations.  The stories dealing with this technology are ‘Homo Roboticus’, ‘Atomgrabbers’, ‘The Cold, Hard Facts’, and ‘The Better Angels.’  The onset of this technology, which we may well see in our lifetimes, is something I would rank with human-level AI…something so fraught with consequences and so potentially horrific that I have found myself lying awake at night just trying to put the demons to bed when I consider all the uses this technology might be put to.

In any case, I hope you’ll find the stories herein both enjoyable and thought-provoking….more of the latter.

Read on, my friend.  And do keep the lights burning tonight….

Colliding Galaxies will be uploaded to Smashwords this May.  Look for it with fine ebook retailers everywhere.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 6, 2017.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

“Why Johnny Winger isn’t Tom Swift Jr….But Maybe Should Have Been”

For many years, I have been working with a continuing character I created for two different series, Tales of the Quantum Corps and Nanotroopers.

His name is Johnny Winger.  Although I have consciously patterned these series stories after the Tom Swift Jr. books, Tom Swift is not Johnny Winger…but maybe he should have been.

Serial characters are both fun and a challenge to write.  Over the course of the series, you want to see them grow and evolve, confront problems and overcome them.  You want your reader to identify with them and like an old flannel shirt, become comfortable with all their idiosyncracies and nuances.  Think James Bond, Captain Kirk and Spock, Jason Bourne, Harry Potter and so on.  Just the mention of a well-known series character can evoke all kind of memories and expectations.  Building a series character is like building a brand name.  Readers like that because they know what they’re getting when they buy a book.

Think about Tom Swift Jr and what comes to mind?  An eternal teen-ager.  A boy genius who never ages.  An inventor of some cool and some rather ridiculous inventions.  An adventurer who’s always up to his armpits in problems with devious foreign governments, wicked crooks, space beings, you name it.  Tom Swift Jr, as written in the series, is the quintessential, blond, crew-cut all-American boy.  Well raised, courteous, respects his elders, tries to do the right thing.  I could almost imagine him as an altar boy or acolyte at a medium-sized Methodist church.

Jeff Duntemann has written a background study of Tom Swift in his Tom Swift Jr : An Appreciation: To wit:

Tom Swift was perpetually eighteen, an age far enough removed from where my nerd friends and I were to be beyond understanding, but close enough for us to think we might just get there someday. He didn't seem to go to school, and there was no indication as to how he learned all he knew. Hey, he was a genius. My friend Larry could play any song he heard on the piano, immediately, with both hands—and had never taken a single lesson. He was just born with it. So, apparently, was Tom Swift.

None of that bothered us at all. Similarly, it was no bother that Tom Swift as a character was almost completely devoid of distinguishing personality traits. He was brilliant, strong, patriotic, hard-working, and respected his parents—and beyond that was as featureless as a billiard ball. In one sense that was because Tom Swift was a sort of Halloween costume that we donned in our imaginations, and any specifics that clashed too strongly with our specifics might have made this identification difficult. (I had this problem with numerous other characters in later SF, which made me more a spectator than a participant in the action.) Grosset & Dunlap knew what they were selling, and it wasn't literature.

I did consciously have Tom Swift Jr. in mind (or at least his adventures) when I created Johnny Winger but there are some notable differences in their personas.

Winger has undergone personal tragedy in his young life, in the death of his Mom and the depression of his Dad.  We don’t know what Tom Swift did before the stories; Grossett and Dunlap writers never tell us.  Tom Swift Jr inherits his father’s business (Swift Enterprises) and apparently his genius and plucky approach to life.  Johnny Winger joins Quantum Corps to get away from his life and live a different way.

In my series, Johnny Winger is in military service, with all that implies.  Tom Swift is a civilian, though he has close relations with various government departments.  Johnny Winger is no genius inventor, but he does have latent and initially unrealized skills as an atomgrabber, which makes him a special commodity to his superiors at Quantum Corps.   It also gets him into trouble at times.  Plus, throughout the series, Johnny Winger sometimes imbues his nanobotic devices with personalities and qualities he can’t seem to find in his human relations. 

In my series, I have endeavored to have Winger grow in his responsibilities.  The reader can see Winger progress in the ranks from a Lieutenant right out of nog school all the way to a flag officer, a General and Commander-in-Chief of Quantum Corps  (CINCQUANT).  At the end, he even allows himself to be deconstructed  into a para-human swarm entity (aka, an angel) to better fight off the evil criminal cartel Red Hammer and their otherworldly benefactors.  Tom Swift never did that.

Have I shown any other changes, growth or evolution in Johnny Winger?  Well, I tried.  He gets married, to another nanotrooper.  They have kids.  He loses his wife to a religious cult called the Church of Assimilation.   But like the creators of Tom Swift, I never let Winger’s need to grow get in the way of the story.  At least, he doesn’t remain eighteen years old forever.

One challenge of creating and using a continuing series character is having to write around the facts of what you have written before.  That can be both a challenge and an impediment.  You find yourself reading and re-reading earlier writing to keep up with what you’ve already said.  If nothing else, you want your series character to be consistent across the stories…readers will give up quickly on your stories if you’re not.  Ian Fleming always took pains to portray James Bond as essentially the same person from story to story…shaken but not stirred.  And we readers found some comfort in that. 

Johnny Winger is not Tom Swift because their backgrounds and their story environments are completely different.  But I did often have Tom in my mind as I drew up adventures and problems for Johnny to face.  What happened to Johnny Winger often happens to characters that authors create…he took on a life of his own and drove the stories in unexpected directions.

And that’s not a bad thing.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 27, 2017.  In this post, I'll provide details about an upcoming collection of short works, called Colliding Galaxies.

See you then.

Phil B.

“Writing an Action-Adventure Series”

When I originally conceived Johnny Winger, I very much had Tom Swift Jr in mind.  By that I mean I wanted to do an action-adventure series with a strong emphasis on scientifically oriented action, with lots of gadgets and gizmos and with a military dimension as well. 

Accessibility, consistency and escalation (easily remembered as ACE) are the main ingredients in your secret sauce, so make sure you have a generous portion of each when writing your action-adventure series.

Accessibility

The first book in your series sets out your characters, their motivations and personalities, and makes the reader care what happens next. But what if your reader misses the first book and begins with the second? Are your characters still compelling if your reader only meets them in book two? And how much time should you spend fleshing out characters many readers will already know?

You don’t have to obsess over recapping what’s gone before. Only a few past events are going to be vital to what comes next, so try and identify what a new reader really needs to know. What went before might have been integral to the story in the first book, but resist the urge to frogmarch your new reader through everything they’ve missed.

If a reader is swept along by your story, they won’t care if there are some references they don’t understand. Take Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as an example: the students of a magical school are being picked off by a giant monster; no-one’s stopping to wonder what Harry’s life was like before he became a wizard. While your writing should make readers want to go back and find out how something happened, if you’ve made the consequences clear, they shouldn’t need to go back.

For things the new reader needs to know, consider introducing a new character who wasn’t around for the previous book’s events. Returning readers will be intrigued by a fresh face and new readers can catch up alongside the character. Terry Pratchett utilizes this device in his incredibly accessible Discworld series, establishing Sam Vimes’ bad temper with lines such as:

You know how you feel when you wake up if you’ve been [drinking] all night, Nobby? Well, he feels like that all the time. (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)

Readers are a clever, experienced bunch and they’ll infer a lot of backstory on their own as long as your series has consistency.

Consistency

Every world and character you create has its own set of internal rules, the consistent application of which allows readers to accept them as ‘real’. Readers are willing to trust the worlds you create and the characters you introduce as long as the facts and rules are consistently applied across each book in the series. Readers will accept flying, purple, singing horses before they buy a pathologically honest character lying for no other reason than to serve the plot.

Consistency applies to character behavior, story events and even themes. In Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series, the protagonist is a sociopathic serial killer who harnesses his urges to knock off other killers. The reader understands Dexter’s world to be just like our own but in the third book of the series, Dexter in the Dark, it’s revealed that Dexter’s urges are the influence of an ancient demon named Moloch. The inclusion of a mystical theme is jarring not because it’s unusual but because it’s incompatible with the world Lindsay created in the first two books.

Consistency becomes more difficult across multiple books, as the story takes the author to places they didn’t anticipate when they initially designed their world and characters. Many authors write themselves into situations which can only be resolved by contradicting already established facts, so make sure you recognize the rules that define your story and don’t lose sight of them as you continue with each book.

In Stephen King’s Misery, the terrifying Annie Wilkes rages about a chapter play which altered established events to resolve an impossible cliffhanger:

This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! (Stephen King, Misery)

Your own readers won’t be much more forgiving. Knowing why your rules apply will help consistency; if you know what your cynical character went through to make them so jaded you’re less likely to throw in a jarring moment of optimism.

Consistency most often goes out of the window when an author hasn’t planned their series’ escalation.

Escalation

Your story needs to evolve and develop from book to book. This might be in terms of how much your reader knows or cares about a character or in the importance of events that happen in the narrative. Just as you wouldn’t reveal everything about a character in the first chapter of a book, you can’t have your characters face their greatest obstacles in the first book of a series.

The Harry Potter series has a very direct escalation of obstacles:

• Troll and depowered evil wizard
• Huge, venomous monster with death glare
• Werewolf and army of soul stealing ghouls
• Dragons, mer-people and reborn supreme evil wizard
• Supreme evil wizard, army of evil wizards and army of soul stealing ghouls (again)
  If you’re telling a romantic story, then a character can meet their love interest, break-up, get married, have children, as long as events build. Planning your escalation is essential to a good series; if you just keep upping the stakes without thinking ahead, eventually you’ll have to subvert the series’ consistency to either present or overcome an unrealistically big obstacle. Harry Potter’s main villain is unable to touch the protagonist until the end of the fourth book. Building in advantages or allies that can be stripped away as the series progresses gives you lots of opportunities to escalate.
  As always, there are exceptions
  As is the case with all writing advice, there is always the addendum ‘…unless it works’. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire successfully trades accessibility for intricacy. The complex plot makes it impossible for Martin to continually reiterate the vast array of character relationships and motivations without slowing the story to a crawl.
  Of course, you don’t need to obey the ACE principles slavishly, but keeping them in mind when plotting your series will help avoid common problems and give you as many choices as possible as your series progresses.
  And that’s some good advice on writing an action-adventure series.
  The next post to The Word Shed will come on February 20, 2017.
  See you then.
  Phil B.
   

“Essentials of Plot and Telling a Good Yarn”

In this post, I want to review some essentials of how I construct story plots and some of the critical elements that go into the making of a memorable story.  Most of this is Storytelling 101, but sometimes authors forget things, to their and their reader’s detriments.  Readers tend to reward poorly constructed and plotted stories with the ultimate insult…tossing the book before it’s finished.

In the near future, I hope to begin a short story/novelette called “In Plutonian Seas.”  One of the very first things I do when constructing a story is to flesh out just what happens, in rough chronological order.  Here’s an example, from this upcoming story:

1. Commander Joe Skellen on Trident’s command deck, dozing off after studying an unrolled printed copy of an ancient sea chart, when a sonar contact alarm goes off.  It’s some kind of wreckage, dead ahead. 
2. Exploratory submersible FCS Trident (Frontier Corps Ship) is cruising Pluto’s subsurface ocean.  There is a 4-person crew and Mission Commander Joe Skellen.  There is also a small research station in orbit around Pluto, to study it and its moons.  It’s called Fort Apache by the crews stationed there.
3. While underway, Trident encounters a submerged wreck at a great depth, near Trident’s crush depth.  Investigating, Skellen and his crew find that the wreckage is a very close facsimile of their own ship, complete with dead crewmember bodies, that closely resemble the crew of a previous subsurface mission on Europa that Skellen commanded…a mission that ended in near disaster.
4. What Trident’s crew doesn’t (yet) realize is that soon after they landed and were trundling across the icy surface of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia prior to boring through the ice and diving into the ocean, their ship and crew were ‘infested’ by nanoscale robotic devices resembling ice mist…a form of indigenous life on Pluto that has heretofore been unknown to anyone.  The only evidence of anything unusual noticed by the crew was the onset of some severe headaches right after landing…the Bugs (as they come to be called by the crew) had penetrated the lander and began their infestation. 
5. And so forth…
    
   Right away, if I follow this outline (and it goes on for two pages like this), I’ve got a setting, a main character and a problem.  In fact, I’m one author who particularly likes dropping the reader right in the middle of the action, then backing up later to explain what’s going on.
    
   The website novel-writing-help.com offers a ten step process for constructing a plot that’s worth taking a look at.  Here’s an excerpt:
    

The Beginning

Broadly speaking, the beginning of a plot concerns dumping a problem on the leading character's shoulders and making them decide to take action to solve it. Although it is a little more complicated than that, of course. It involves these three steps...

• Step 1: Start With the Status Quo. We first meet the character in their ordinary world. Nothing has happened yet.
• Step 2: And Then Something Happens. The action kicks in when the status quo is disrupted (the boy meets the girl, the airplane develops engine trouble, etc.)
• Step 3: The Character Makes a Decision to Act. Before this, there may be a period of hesitation (e.g., the retired cop doesn't want to take on the new case. But eventually, they'll commit.
  The Tricky Middle
  If the start of a plot is all about making a character take action to solve a problem, the middle deals with the action itself - or, more precisely, a whole series of mini actions.

• Step 4: The First Mini Plot. Or the first small thing the character must achieve to succeed in their overall goal. Needless to say, it goes horribly wrong and leaves them in a worse position!
• Step 5: More Mini Plots. The character keeps pushing forward and experiences small victories and small setbacks. Overall, the tension rises as they get closer to the object of their quest.
• Step 6: Rock Bottom. The middle ends at a moment of disaster, when all is seemingly lost. This is the most intense point of the novel.
  The Ending
  The ending deals with the consequences of the action. And on the basis that fiction is so much neater than real life, it is also about tidying up the loose ends and leaving the audience satisfied.

• Step 7: Reaction. The character reacts emotionally to the devastating blow they have just received and the apparent death of their dream.
• Step 8: Rebirth. But they then experience a sort of epiphany, or a realization of where they have been going wrong and what they must now do to put it right. This is the point at which the character changes.
• Step 9: Seizing the Prize. Strengthened by their epiphany, the characters go on to fight the final battle... and win. Or in a twist on this, they can decide that they no longer want what they thought they did.
   
• Step 10: The New Status Quo. The conflict is over and all is well in the jungle again. Take this opportunity to tie any loose ends and highlight what has changed between the beginning and the end.
  While I’m not in full agreement with all these points, like No. 1, where you show the main character in their ordinary setting, as a general rule, these are good practices to follow. 
  Although the above excerpt is intended for novelists, most of these steps apply to shorter stories as well.  This is good story-telling practice.
  In my own case, after I have written a basic outline, much of my plot development consists of adding details to this same outline, grouping the details into likely chapters, then re-writing the entire outline in a series of what I called Chapter and Scene Details.  Here’s an excerpt from my latest novel in the series Tales of the Quantum Corps, to show how a plotted chapter in my finished outline would look:
  CHAPTER 2 (March 26, 2155) UNIFORCE Hqs, the Quartier-General, Paris
              General Lamar Quint is in the middle of composing a report to UNSAC about what Sentinel has detected beyond Pluto when an apparition appears in the corner of his office.  At first, Quint thinks he is imagining this, but the apparition grows into a recognizable human form.  It’s clearly a swarm that has somehow breached UNIFORCE security screens.  That alone is cause for concern and just as Quint is about to sound the alarm, the form becomes recognizably Johnny Winger…a blast from the past.  Winger was thought to have died on Europa in 2121, during the Jovian Hammer mission.  But here is a swarm likeness, an angel, showing up 34 years later.
              The angel appears real and insists it is Johnny Winger, in fact.  But Quint is dubious, to say the least.  The angel reports that Winger is alive and well and working as a spy and saboteur inside the mother swarm of the Old Ones, to prevent the Old Ones from destroying or absorbing Earth .   The angel wants to deliver some intel on the intentions of the Old Ones in the coming months, now that the mother swarm has reached the outer solar system.  Winger describes the Prime Key and what it will mean for Earth and all life on the planet, and also describes the Old Ones’ plans to build a forward base on Mercury and a ring to intercept much of the Sun’s output to facilitate their disassembly and absorption of the solar system.  He indicates that he has some room to maneuver inside the mother swarm and that he can do things to sabotage these plans.  But the intel needs to get to UNSAC and plans should be gotten underway to equip and launch an expedition to stop these efforts.
              Quint is dubious, thinking he’s dreaming or had too much to drink, but promises the angel that he’ll pass this intel on to UNSAC.  When and how can he be in contact in the future? The Winger angel says he’ll let Quint know; he’s running a grave risk doing even this much, but he has to do what he can to stop the Old Ones.  Then, the Winger angel disperses and Quint is left wondering if any of what happened actually happened.
              He goes upstairs to UNSAC’s suite and requests a meeting with Angelika Komar, the Security Affairs Commissioner.  Quint is shown into the UNSAC suite of offices and Komar offers him a drink.  Nighttime Paris is on display outside and they step out onto a veranda, protected by the faint veil of a nanobotic barrier.  Quint describes what has just happened.  Komar is doubtful and thinks Quint has imagined the whole scenario.  She tells Quint it’s either a trap laid by elements of the Old Ones or a stress reaction to all that’s going on.  “Sign yourself into sick bay tomorrow for a checkup, Lamar,” she orders.  “We need our top staff whole and hearty for the days ahead.”
              Quint leaves.  He thinks maybe UNSAC’s right.  “I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately.  And with what Sentinel is now reporting, anybody would be spooked.”
              He resolves to do as UNSAC has suggested and returns to his quarters, intending to take something to help him sleep. 
              As this is going on, Dana Polansky has arrived at the doorsteps of the Assimilationist church to find her daughter, whom she thought was caught in a MOBnet, nowhere in sight.  She goes into the church, asks some questions, receives noncommittal and evasive answers, and comes back outside with the dawning suspicion that Jana has already gone off somewhere and been assimilated.  But how to find her?  How to find out?  Dana is frantic.  She decides to follow the recorded footage of the dronecam.  Studying this, she finds that several people from the church have collapsed the MOBnet, rescued Jana and taken her inside the church.  The church claims not to know anything about her.  But the video evidence proves otherwise.
              Furious, determined to get to the bottom of this and rescue her daughter, Dana barges back inside the church.
  Spend time on your plot.  It can be tedious and hard work but when you have a well-developed outline that follows the storytelling practices above, you’ve done more than half the work. 
  The next post to The Word Shed comes on February 13, 2017.
  See you then.
  Phil B.