Melanie Anne Phillips

 

Tarnished Karma is my stage name for the music I compose. This may be the very first tape ever recorded of Tarnished Karma's original music back in high school days. It is one of a series of tapes of garage recording sessions containing demos, melody lines, hooks, and riffs that were documented for further development in future studio sessions. No one has heard them in almost exactly fifty years, including me! I found the cassettes in a box of old items last week, transferred this first one to digital and threw it onto a video. Its a bit scratchy, but hey - what a find! I'll publish more as I get them transferred to digital. Enjoy!

  Been away from this blog for a while, but I'm back!  I'm 68 now and eager to document and share my body of work everywhere I can so that it might live longer than I do.  Everybody likes their own stuff, and I'm no exception.  So, you'll find it here, there, and everywhere - all my favorites from nearly 2/3 of a century of creative efforts. Enjoy!

The  Master Storyteller Method  has four parts: Part One: Create A Story World What is a story world? Think: the world of Harry Potter or the Star Wars universe. Whether you are planning a single story or a whole series, creating a diverse and detailed story world will enrich and inform each story you draw from it. Part Two: Draw Out Your Storyline While a story world describes the environment, situation, and issues that will define your story, it is not a story itself. Drawing on this material, you will create a storyline for your Main Character / Protagonist that will begin with something that upsets the status quo, follows a quest (both personal and logistic) and concludes with a choice that will determine success or failure. Part Three: Incorporate Story Points Though your storyline may make sense and feel as it it touches all the bases, often a number of important story points may be missing, hidden behind the passion of your storytelling and vision. Here you...

Perhaps the greatest hurdle in writing is the attempt to bring structure to a story without putting your Muse in a straight jacket. Often structure is brought into the picture too soon, clamping your passion into an iron maiden that pierces it more deeply with every turn of a structural screw until it bleeds out entirely. In contrast, writing with purposeless abandon creates a jellyfish of a story: an amorphous blob of subject matter with no spine, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The  Master Storyteller Method  was designed to bring passion and structure together seamlessly, at the right place and the right time in the story development process. When first starting to write, our ideas usually come fast and furious. Many of them are little snippets: a notion for a line of dialog, a location in which some action will take place, the basic concept for a character, or perhaps a plot twist. Sometimes, we begin with no more than a period of history or a topic...

WRITING SOFTWARE SALE - By Special Arrangement! By special arrangement with Write Brothers, Storymind is pleased to announce a limited time sale of Write Brothers writing software including Dramatica Pro, Dramatica Story Expert, Movie Magic Screenwriter, and Outline 4D. - Click the link below for details! Just enter Coupon Code WRITEBROS when you order to receive the lowest prices we have ever offered on Write Brothers products - SO LOW we can't publish them here. Before you purchase, you'll see your special price after entering the coupon code. Click for Sale Details or to Order...

Does your story suffer from "Multiple Personality Disorder?"   Find out in this short article that gets to the heart of your story's identity.   Psychoanalyze Your Story!