Author: Desmond White

Blog: www.desmondwrite.com Twitter: @desmondwrite Instagram: @desmondwrite
Writing Process

Naming Rune Bear

Posted on by Desmond White

My hench-editors (it’s my wife, Stuart, and his wife) and I kept rejecting names for a literary genres-remix website we were envisioning (and one poor guy had been building pro bono). For the longest time we had our fat hearts set on Idiosync (short for ‘idiosyncrasy’) but the title was too lazy and it sounded like ‘Idiot Sink.’ Then we wanted Idiot Sink, but that impulse didn’t last. AstroLack was too spacey. Los Orcus was too fantasy. We wanted less swords-and-sorcery and more swords-and-sandworms. No to Wyrdfic (is ‘weird’ gender-biased or something?), Grot Gear, Desmorious (I was down), Wristcanon (people would think we spelled ‘cannon’ wrong), Battle Droid (‘droid’ is trademarked by LucasFilm Ltd.).

For a while we settled on Rune Beard. We wondered if Nordic facial hair would evoke a space pirate captain firing plasma bolts at sword-wielding mechs on distant asteroids (it was the Warhammer 40,000 side of us that connected runes with sci-fi in the first place), but instead our test audience pictured a neckbeard playing WoW, and incidentally, they weren’t wrong. Dumping Rune Beard was emotional for me, because Alyssa, Stuart, and I had devised an awesome icon to accompany our logo—a bewhiskered Odinesque whose face was comprised of two Anglo-Saxon runes that corresponded with our initials (the scarred-eye is the jera, or j-rune, and my first name is Jared; the crooked nose is the sigel, or s-rune, i.e. Stuart). Being boys, we didn’t consider adding a rune for Alyssa.

Here’s Alyssa’s mock-up:

However, while I was pining over Rune Beard in my notebook, I noticed that without the “D” there was another great name for our mag—Rune Bear. The domain wasn’t taken, and there weren’t any rune bears out there except for the Runeclaw Bear in Magic the Gathering. The others were hesitant but the name grew on them. I went ahead and drew a rough sketch of what I was envisioning for the mascot. (Although these details weren’t in the sketch, I knew the bear had to be blue and have a rune in its mouth).

I finally turned to an old friend of mine, Phil Kiner, to create the mascot we have today:

Writing

Nonfiction — “The Elemental Darkness”

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My philosophy is a lone night, with the wife far-flung on the couch watching videos about tape worms. I’ve gone to bed early, and the rain is caught by the tree canopy, except for a black fall from the roof that taps the cement. In the dark it could be the crackle of fire. My philosophy is my beating heart compared to her’s. I can only imagine she still lives, eyes fixed on the doctor’s spool, trapped by elemental darkness.

Writing Process

Filler

Posted on by Desmond White

We needed filler content for a literary magazine we’re creating, i.e. stuff of no consequence that will be deleted once we publish. So I wrote this.

“The Robot” by Botswana Brokeball

There is a girl who is a robot. She wakes up in the wastelands but doesn’t remember who she is (actually she’s a secret human). All the humans are dead but she doesn’t know until she meets communists called the Rainbow Riders. Their symbol is the rainbow. In my story all robots are rainbow stripe colors. The girl-robot-secret-human is named Eve, the first human. She’s actually the first human cryogenically frozen by Adam to be awakened when the technology has developed to de-freeze cryogenically frozen women. Eve decides to rename herself Even Stevens. After a lot of walking in the dust-broke wastes, her CPU glitches, and her hard drive crashes, and her URL is hacked. She was a robot the whole time! The story ends with a vulture digging a nest into her brain and finding pink gummy brains to its delight and surprise. She was a human the whole time too! In the end I show up in the book to congratulate the reader on finding the secret, then I tip my fedora and walk off the page. I was the monster at the end of the book!

Author Bio

I am from Remdonesia which is a small independent nation-state in the offshore drilling waters of California, America. Don’t be alarmed if I send you intimate details about my body via Facebook. I am only testing the ability of humans to communicate over long distances via Facebook. Shout out to nail clippers. Y’all the real heroes.

Life

Desmond, Write

Posted on by Desmond White

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I’d like Desmond, Write to be an exercise machine for working out my writing muscles. Through endless reps, I want to build up my grills, err, skills, and see more definition and tone. Naturally, to stay flexible, I’ll be stretching through sketching and keeping my brain healthy with a well-balanced literary diet. When I feel the burn, I hope it won’t be from throwing my manuscript into a flaming barrel, but the heat rising from my smoking hot body of work.

Writing Process

Writ in Water Updates

Posted on by Desmond White

Last year I launched a student magazine, Writ in Water, through HBU’s Academic Success Center. At the time I was the center’s Writing Coordinator, a position that involved working with staff and tutors to assist students with academic writing. That was, after all, the mission of the ASC—”to facilitate student academic success.” But I also wanted to promote student success through creative writing. All throughout Fall and Winter, I worked diligently with my Assistant Director, Samantha Bottoms, and a dedicated corps of tutors to set up a submission and reading period and finally a physical print of the magazine.

After I graduated from Houston Baptist University, I stepped down from my role as the Writing Coordinator and redevoted my full attention to my career as a high school teacher. Call it a year of rest where I no longer had to be a teacher by day, student by night, and writing coordinator in-between. Along with my ASC retirement, I passed on Writ in Water, a campus literary magazine that I founded, to an amazing dude named Seth Grant.

This semester I’ve been sneaking into a Roman History course (all right, fine, I’m not that cool—the professor lets me swing by), and just imagine my profound sense of place when I discovered that HBU will be continuing the Writ in Water series!


I’m excited.

Life, Writing (Published)

Published — “Saamiya”

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I’m proud to announce that “Saamiya” was published in Issue 4 of HeartWood Magazine. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that “Saamiya” is about a depressed Muslim girl who encounters the brave but fatal heroism of Piggy from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and finds common ground, perhaps inspiration. There are elements in this story I find important, including the guidance we receive from stories and the healing we receive from storytelling.

HeartWood is a digital magazine which publishes biannually in April and October. The editors prefer writing that “pushes into… its own truth” and “that takes emotional risks, that gets to the heart of the matter.” Because the magazine is run by the MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College, its voice has a very strong Appalachian presence. Luckily, they found enough merit in my short story to include it as well.

Writing Process

Author Interview at Theme of Absence

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Theme of Absence runs an author interview series alongside its original fiction called, well, Theme of Absence Author Interviews. These dialogues employ the same questions every week, allowing readers to scan questions and spend more time on author replies. If you want a mixture of pragmatic and wild writing advice, I recommend a chai tea with a pinch of milk (I guess I’m not sure how milk works?), a comfy chair or lap, and one hour spent (c’mon, don’t be cheap) in the magazine’s archive (located here).

Oh, and don’t forget to read my interview for “The Spheres.”

Life, Scifi, Writing (Published)

Published — “Spheres”

Posted on by Desmond White

Theme of Absence just published my comedic take on extraterrestrial nihilism (the story’s called “Spheres“). The digital magazine is devoted to speculative flash fiction, and primarily posts original fiction on Fridays. These pieces are accompanied by a Q&A with the author, which I think is a really smart move on the editor’s part because then readers can come for writing and/or writing advice. And if that’s not enough for the literary enthusiast, the editor and owner of Theme of Absence also runs Write Good Books, a blog dedicated to producing useful writing resources and articles.