Catching my breath . . .

Most of you know I was fortunate enough to attend HorrorHound Weekend Cincinnati last weekend. It wasn't something I would normally would have been able to do, but Brenda scrubbed the internet, found one or two travel websites and shook them until they gave her a really good deal on airfare, and as an early birthday present, she sent me to HHW.

I had a great time meeting old friends and making new ones. The horror celebrities were incredibly friendly, and the hotel was extremely accommodating (although I would have loved to heard the conversations between hotel employees the day after we left - horror geeks, horror drunks, a wedding, celebrities, a random hula hoop session at 2:00am in one of the lobbies, lots of booze, folks dressed as zombies and monsters, women dressed in varying . . . degrees . . . it was definitely an interesting mix of occasionally loud folks!). And I mention in my HHW coverage in Mail Order Zombie #96, the coffee the hotel restaurant served was surprisingly good! (If you listen to the episode, or follow me on Twitter, you'll also find out how I almost didn't make it back on the plane to get home!)

I'll be posting my pics from the event in a few days. I've been running fairly nonstop since flying in Monday night and just haven't had a chance to fully catch my breath. Back to work on Monday, unpacking, catching up on laundry, getting ready for Thanksgiving, getting the guest room for Brenda's sister, producing MOZ #96, etc., etc., etc. . . . at least I got to sleep in today!

I'm off from work tomorrow as well, and I think I'll be spending that day programming the rest of this year's episodes of Mail Order Zombie, organizing the computer mess I've let build up over the past few months, and maybe even throw some words down.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Where do stories come from?

Bren and I are working on some writing projects together. We're not co-writing; we're both working on different similarly-lengthed fiction projects, and we had an interesting conversation the other night that still has me asking myself a few questions.

She identified a HUGE difference in our approaches to storytelling. She prefers to come up with an overarching story - she referred to it as the "fiber" of the tale - and then she'll start to flesh out the pieces inside that "fiber," tackling things like character, setting, etc.

My approach has evolved over the years. For a long time, an image or a visual would pop into my mind, and I would try to build a story around that. (My early movie-making efforts are filled with stories like this. "Wouldn't it be cool if I set myself on fire?" "Wouldn't it be cool if my friend Mike's face melted?") These days, I find myself building characters, and then finding scenarios in which to plug these characters.

I don't know if one approach is better than the other, but it certainly speaks to what might be a problem I'm running into with my own writing project. I've got a character - a character whose entire life story I could tell you over a few cups of coffee, a character I've been spending a lot of time with as I sketch his history and build his relationships with the world, a character whose been swimming in the murky depths of my dark imagination for years - and I want to take him out for a spin . . . but I'm finding myself questioning just WHERE I'd want to take that spin.

We spoke further, and Bren and I both think that maybe this approach to character-building-before-fiber-building comes from my history reading superhero comics in which the characters are typically reactionary as opposed to proactive, as well as my background as a tabletop role-playing game player, even though I haven't thrown the dice in years.

So to you few readers of this new blog, I pose to you a question - what comes first for you? The fiber or the character? Or something else all together?

Back to blogging . . .

I used to blog quite a bit, and my old LiveJournal page and my old MySpace blog are still around, as is my even older Blogger page, but I wanted to start fresh with something new so when I decided to jump back in, I decided to start with this page - House Improbabilia, the pretentious-sounding "official" blog of Derek M. Koch. Here, I'll blog mostly about my creative endeavors - my writing (of various types), my podcasting, etc., as well as anything that inspires me.

I imagine I'll post something new here two or three times a week. Feel free to point your reader at http://feeds.feedburner.com/improbabilia to subscribe if you're not a Blogspot user.