A Brand New Bag

I just read Morpheus' latest story, "Inexplicable," over at Fictionmania. It took a little effort to get into, but was a great read once I did.

What struck me most about it is that unlike many TG authors, he doesn't lean on sex as a plot crutch. In TG, you can't ever really get away from the sex 100%, but the quality writers always seem to be more about the characters and the situations than they are about the X rated stuff.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I think that we might be on the cusp of a change in the genre. Up until now, there has been a lot of focus on sex. More and more, I see the best talents in TG writing either walking away from it as unsatisfying, or writing less for the audience and more to please themselves on a less base level. I think we might be approaching the same moment Science Fiction writing reached in the mid 20th century, where a Rubicon is crossed, leaving our pulp past behind us. On the other shore is a bright future where the craft of writing and the quality of the story are more important than the necessity of including erotic content.

I think the audience is both listening and ready.

Morph It!

I forgot to post before now about a breakthrough of sorts that occurred last week. I was fooling around with Morpheus - the software I use to make morphs - and discovered by accident that I could load a recently edited / cropped video file made with Virtual Dub. With that discovery, I now have the power to make the files I need to do video morphing!

As if that wasn't exciting enough, the next day, I found software (RAD Video Tools) that lets me convert .MOV files to .AVI files. This means I can shoot short video clips on my cell phone, move them to my computer using a micro SD card, convert them from Quicktime to WMV (Windows Media Video, for those not in the know) and then do a video morph using footage I've made myself.

As a test, I found some footage online that I'm going to work on over the next few days / weeks / months. The source video is an audition tape for runway models. It has many different models, both male and female, doing the same walk against a neutral, white background. I chose a male and a female model that were dressed somewhat similarly and made two shorter videos using Virtual Dub, one for each model. I loaded them into Morpheus and now have a nice crossfade with no morphing of the man into the woman. I expect a nice result once I've had a chance to begin the real work of getting the morph set up.

Wish me luck!

Ode to FictionMania

FictionMania is down. It has been down for months.

I trust that it will return at some point in the near future. Hopefully within the next five seconds or so. You see, until it was gone, I did not realize how important this icon of TG fiction was. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was huge. It was - and is, even in its absence - the 800 pound gorilla of TG fiction. Be sure to imagine the gorilla in a dress, of course.

I was already a big reader and a wannabe writer before I found the site back in the late 1990's. I turned to it for inspiration. I would read each story with an eye for its strengths and weaknesses, which helped me grow as a writer. Some stories infuriated me by mingling an intriguing concept with poor form. Some were exceptionally well writen, yet managed to bore me to tears. Other stories made me scratch my head, wondering why I liked them so much when they were so badly written. In each story, I found something that I could learn from, even if it was an example of what clearly didn't work. When I was especially lucky, an author would "wow" me with both concept and execution. Morpheus, for one, seems to have endless depths of creativity and talent on which to draw.

Yes, it will return. Sure, there are other sites with stories to view in the meantime. I know I should be writing my own fiction rather than weeping in my blog, but somehow, this glaring absence has left a hole in my sense of community.

Come back soon, dear friend.