Opportunity is knocking. Are you listening?

Opportunity can be like being the 50,000th customer and getting one of those giant checks, balloons, and confetti as door prizes. The right place at the right time. If you're anything like me, that never happens. I don't even score the free breakfast sandwiches in McDonald's yearly Monopoly game. (Which really sucks because those Sausage Egg McMuffins are addictive!)

I don't have time to see if I'll roll double sixes and land on Boardwalk. Just deal out the properties and lets get on with it! I abduct Luck; I have to make my own luck...or lead it where I want it to go.

Today, my Ranters, I'm going to teach you how.

Rule Number 1: Don't Be Afraid

Too often I meet people who don't try to cross the road without a crosswalk. They don't take risks. They're too afraid to let people see who they really are or what they want. They're too afraid to ask mom for a cookie out of the cookie jar.

How can you get anything sweet if you don't go for it? Maybe it's telling the hot guy that holds the door for you when you walk into the office in the AM, (you know the one...you don't say anything because you're too busy wiping up that spindle of drool hanging off your lip) that you like him. Maybe it's applying for that dream job your after--for the sixth time. Maybe it's sending the Facebook invite to your ex and attaching a personal note calling for a truce. Maybe it's none of those, but it's important to you.

The point is if you're too afraid to throw the line in, you're never going to catch any fish.

Rule Number 2: Don't Take No for an Answer

OK you told the hot guy you like him and he turned you down. OK so you didn't get the job you wanted--for the sixth time. And, OK fine, maybe your ex wrote you back and said "he's not giving you your unique collection of sea glass back (Because he used it to tile a table for his living room). Yes, those all suck. But you don't have to take 'em lying down!

Next time hot guy holds the door for you, walk through backwards shaking your head. Accessorize it with your, "see what you're missing out on" face. If he doesn't rethink his, no, he'll at least know you're making a statement. It might be the wearing white after Labor Day statement, but it's a statement. Hold your head up. Even the hottest guy in the world isn't worth looking at your feet.

If you didn't get that job you wanted. Try again. Keep trying until they run out of options. Don't be rude. Don't tell them they made a mistake. But keep on them! Don't give up. Show them you're not afraid of a little 'no.' Show them you're not embarrassed they rejected you. Rejection-smection. They'll either realized what they missed or in the process you'll discover another path that's even sweeter.

And if your ex used your sea glass to make a table, have one of your mutual friends "accidentally" knock it over at his next Super Bowl party. We both know he's lazy and won't go through the trouble to fix it. You'll have that sea glass back in no time.

Rule Number 3: Be Flexible

One of the best ways to make your own luck is to have 8 lobsters on the boil. Have more than one goal. More than one dream. Don't get stuck on one if it doesn't work out. Be open. If you're open to what the Universe is throwing at you, you'll start to see all the [metaphorical] $20 bills sticking out of the muddy puddle on the side of the road. Good things happen when you collect enough of them.

Hot guy my not be so hot in 20 years. Hot guy might someday be fat and bald. It happens to the best of them. But the really nice guy in Accounting (The one who needs a new hair cut and someone to burn his purple paisley shirt) is always going to be nice. And with a new hair cut and a green stripped shirt he might just be a super hot guy incognito.

And your ex? Let's face it. He wasn't treating you like his $2,000 golf clubs. More like the left overs he had for lunch--plus he forgot to wash the plastic to-go container. Gross! You didn't need to put up with him then any more than you need to now. The longer he's weighing you down...the longer it's going to take before you can get Accounting Guy a new hair cut.


In Short: Just be Happy...by any means necessary.

I confess! I have a Fan Fiction Addiction!

The last year or so I've really become addicted to fan fiction of a particular German television show. It's not the first time I've read fan fiction in fandoms, but this is probably the one that I've stuck around with the longest.

However, as much as I enjoy reading a good fan fiction there are things I absolutely abhor. Since I am a writer I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the pros and cons of fan fiction and the things that bug me the most.


Fan Fiction is a great way to test your writing skills. It's a genre of writing to find out how well can you craft a sentence, how well can you generate plot, how well can you describe, and how well you're able to show and not tell. It's also a great way to practice formatting and other areas of the writing craft.

However it also seems to be place were people ramble on for pages with absolute dribble. It's a place where people often spew out a plot that is absolutely nothing like anything resembling the source material. There's no excuse for this!

Writing fan fiction takes away a lot of the really hard stuff. Your characters are already developed. You already know what they look like and how old they are. You know what motivates them. You know this because someone else figured this out for you.

Now, I've seen some great fan fictions that have taken characters and put them in a whole other world and time period where the characters are different from the source material...because they have to be. However, the world is so convincing and well put together it doesn't matter how off the characters might be...they work in this new construct.

What doesn't work, however, is when you take a hard character and make him soft. When you take a soft character and make him hard. Now you're just messing with the foundations. I get that maybe you want to see (or read) these hard characters have a break... but if you're going to write it needs to be believable. There has to be a strong set up and strong motivation to change a character's core.

I cannot stand reading fan fiction where the characters I have come to know and love say things they would NEVER say and CRY at things they would NEVER cry about. Or just randomly CRY when they never would.

Fan fiction or not, I cannot stand writing where plots are forced. Plots should never be so bad I have to choke them down.

Last night, I was finishing up Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. There is a small hole in my wall where the corner of my book met with the drywall. I threw my book. Not because I didn't like the book, but because I was so invested in the book and in the characters and in the world that when I read chapter 103 I was SO PISSED at Dan Brown I hurled my book at the wall. That's good writing! To get that mad at an author means the author did his/her job. It means I cared. (And eventually, I cared enough to keep going and love Dan Brown again in chapter 112.)

There are VERY FEW fan fiction writers or REAL fiction writers who can accomplish this. It takes practice. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. It takes studying the craft and not just writing down a bunch of words. It takes writing sentences and not just a bunch of fragments that pretend to be sentences.


Fan Fiction (and fiction writers in general) HEED THIS ADVICE!


There's no excuse for bad formatting!

There is a proper way to write dialog. Every other way is wrong. Go to the library and get a writing text book. They're not hard to find.

Every time a new person speaks, they get a new paragraph. You cannot! have two people talking in the same paragraph. You HAVE to break it up. There are comma rules and quotation rules you need to follow.

Dialog needs to sound like the way people actually talk! And your characters need to sound like themselves. It's one of the few times where fragments are permissible.

Use transitions! There is a natural flow to story telling that people just seem to skip in their writing. Things have to flow from one thing to the next. In film they use visual cues or voice overs to tell you when there is a change. They'll do a fast cut or a ten second fade. In writing, you have to get your reader there with words. Again, and I can't say this enough, a good writing text book will help you with this.

SHOW DON'T TELL! There are times when you absolutely have to tell but that's not the majority. Don't tell me how a character is feeling. SHOW ME! Which is more powerful?

A) Christian felt sad.

B) In the darkened living room, Christian let his body drop heavily onto the couch. Letting out a deep sigh, he reached for a pillow in which to bury his face.

Just as it is in real life, actions speak louder than words.

EDIT!*

In a world with spell checkers and online grammar sources... your fan fiction should be near perfect, if not perfect, before you hit "publish." Know the difference between Two, Too and To. Know when to use their, there and they're. Use the correct words. Yes, I'll know what you mean... but I'll probably lose a little respect for you if you mix up loose and lose. Just sayin'



If you're going to write. WRITE.

If you're writing for you then... fine OK, you're allowed to write crap. But if you're publishing your fiction for an audience to read.............then put some effort into it. Ask a writer you respect for feedback. Put together a critique group. A good critique group is going to give you honest feedback without making you feel stupid.

And please, know your audience.

*I don't get worked up about this in an IM conversations or on sites like Twitter. That's a different mode of communication all together and just like the spoken English it's modeled after... it's not always perfect.