Made it past 10k

Made it to 10,621 words yesterday, and also ended the first story. I also remembered to make a backup copy of it in RPoL Detroit.

There's already an obvious sequel setup with Adrian and Johan going to the wetlands where the Dahan are about to get pushed by Keeper into the jungle of C1, sweeping them along for the ride, and then there'll be a massive ravage. I'm going to need some Dahan characters for that though, starting with how to name them. I guess pick from various Polynesian.

After that, the third story is on the opposite side of the map, so I'll probably have to come up with alternate characters that end up going that way.

The next game with Sharp Fangs is off to a nice start. Sharp Fangs is already responsible for helping clear three lands, so that should make for some interesting stories involving jungle monsters. It'll be a while before I get to it though.

Bottom of the 13th

8388 words.

1933 words just now, which is sadly my highest word count day so far.

The words flow pretty well when I write, I just haven't had very many writing sessions. Lots going on in the rest of life. The ex-flatmate became an ex-flatmate, and he still hasn't paid up on his share of bills and probably never will, which means I have to prepare to take him to Tribunal. They're preparing the house for selling, and I'm looking for somewhere else to live. I also have to prepare to move out, including packing up my own stuff and also cleaning out all of everyone else's stuff that they left here.

Meanwhile, the PhD project is going pretty well. The first draft of the MRIO table is getting constructed over the next month, and meanwhile I've turned my attention to the various risk weights.

I've reached the part of the timeline in the story where I'm about to destroy the second town - but not in the same way as the first town. The first town was destroyed with Sacrosanct Wilderness. This one is getting destroyed by Punish Those Who Trespass. I haven't worked out yet what that looks like. That'll be the main course of the next writing session.

Bottom of the 9th

5183 words.

I'm not doing great at racking up tons of words, but I do manage to get words written quickly when I'm writing. It's a very different process to just write thoughts about what I'm writing into the story as I go along. It definitely adds more words that way, and I don't end up stopping to worldbuild and etc instead.

I'm still in Round 1 of 4 for the story of Keeper wiping out all the invaders in its home jungle. I think part of what's keeping me slowed down is that it's not a very exciting story. I might skip to a story about a different spirit when I'm done with this one.

The game that I'm writing from is going to end soon. We are one fear card away from Terror Level 3, and there are only 3 cities on the map. We probably won't have too much trouble taking them out, once everyone figures out what they're doing.

Bottom of Day 6

2611 words so far.

I came up with a couple characters that can talk to each other, and now I'm rewriting my way through the same narrative as I wrote up in the overview. It's a lot more words when there are characters talking.

The game that I took the story from has continued on, and there are now two other big turns that Keeper has been involved in that I could write about next. It'll be a while before I'm done with the current story though. So far I'm still in Round 1, and the whole thing is four rounds long.

The next story (a sequel maybe) will be about Keeper wiping out another jungle on the edge of the island, by pushing around a whole bunch of Dahan. Thunderspeaker is also present, but doesn't do anything in that particular land, just removes some of the Dahan later to go wipe out somewhere else.

Then the one after that (we're currently playing through it), is about wiping out a mountain. That'll take two turns to finish, which means 20 years.

I guess the biggest challenge is just in getting the timeframe to stretch. I'm pretty good at writing minute-by-minute things via conversations and etc. between characters. Not so much with "time passes."

I'm not sure Keeper is the most exciting possible spirit to write stories about. Either that or I don't have enough imagination to make "wilds" more exciting than a bunch of trees. I'll have to think on it some more I guess, especially when I get to the mountain which won't have as many trees.

Welp, Day One

767 words.

I basically have no particular attachment to anything I've ever written before at this point. So I'm doing fanfic of Spirit Island instead. I figure, aim for a whole bunch of short stories based on things going on in various play-by-forum games, or if anything exciting happens in an in-person game.

So far I've written a fairly vague, overview-like narrative of the current story for Keeper, in PBF 035 at the Spirit Island forum on  Board Game Geek.

I guess we'll see how the rest of the month goes. I'll need to come up with more to write about if I'm going to get anywhere near 50k.

Well, it's almost time for Nanowrimo 2019...

So I guess to catch things up from where I last left off a year ago: my flat situation is more or less stabilized, and my shipped stuff eventually did arrive two months later - right before I left for Sydney for three months. But it's all here in my new flat that I picked out specifically because there's enough space in here for it, at a rate that I can afford (provided I have at least one flatmate to pay half the rent and utilities, which at the moment I do). Aside from that, a whole lot of travel and first-year PhD stuff happened in the past year, and I didn't have much time to think about fiction.

Things are also going very well with Brett, the guy I met last year. Our relationship is pretty stable, and I should be able to do Nanowrimo this year and maybe even get him to try it too. He's not much of a writer though.

So, what to do this year?

I don't have any brand new ideas since the last time I tossed out a bunch. I could work on Triangle II part 3, like I was planning to last year. I could work on The Celestines. I could work on Vengeance. I could fanfic Spirit Island. Or even Cosmic Potato, which for some reason on the latest version of the Nanowrimo site, is pinned to the top of my profile and I can't get it off.

I guess I have almost a month to figure it out. Other people will probably start talking about potential projects to work on, and maybe we can build up some excitement.

Well, there went Nano 2018

177 words. I added a bit to the end of the ritual scene that Aaron was doing in Vengeance, and I'm still not sure what should happen next. After that I got distracted. >.>

More or less, I met a guy, and decided that it was more important to get our relationship off to a good start. There's always a tricky transition period between when we're still just friends, and when we've stabilized into happy dating. For us this was a couple weeks long, right in the middle of the month of course, but relationships in general can't really be scheduled - they happen when it's time for them to happen.

 I also moved flats and had to do a bunch of shopping for stuff I didn't need at the original flat but do now. My shipped stuff was supposed to arrive, but so far it still isn't here.

 I guess I'll try again on the fiction front next year.

Not doing so good so far...

It's almost the end of Day 3, and I haven't written anything yet. I tried to start, and read over a bunch of previous work, but it turns out that I'm not feeling Triangle II at all.

Not sure what else I'd rather write. Maybe some other part of Fortress Launne? I looked back over my previous posts about how I should add more about Arthur Glorian to Amulet II, but not sure how I want to do that yet either. I guess the most obvious way to do it without changing what I already have too much, is to do it from the Eenin perspective. That would probably mean adding a whole new storyline though.

Or I could go look at more Celestines. Or take another stab at Cosmic Potato. Or see if Rumen is around to let me write more on the Vengeance stories. Or do something completely different. I have an inkling to fanfic some Spirit Island (a board game), i.e. what's it like to be Dahan and pushed around by all these nature spirits all the time?

I'll think of something eventually, I hope.

Prepping for Nanowrimo 2018!

It's been a busy year since last Nanowrimo, and very little of it had anything to do with fiction writing. I applied for and got accepted into a PhD program at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Then I severely downsized my possessions to less than a quarter of what I had at this time last year, packed the surviving stuff into a U-Haul trailer that was just slightly less than the total weight that a Prius V could haul, drove it from Alabama to California, shipped it, sold the car, and got on a plane. And now I'm living in Nelson, NZ. The shipped stuff should arrive next month, by which time I will hopefully be living in a flat big enough to hold all of it without having to rent extra storage.

Needless to say, I haven't thought much about fiction in the last year. I did start cabins for Camp Nanowrimo both times, but mostly just watched the rest of my cabin mates write lots of words and cheered them on.  I'm relatively settled at the moment however (up until I move again and sort in my shipped stuff at least), so I took a look at the situation here.

On the Nanowrimo site, Nelson is under "New Zealand - Elsewhere" - which is basically everywhere that isn't a big city. So far no one has posted from the south island except me, so I assume I won't be going to any write-ins. (And even if there were people on the south island participating on the forum, I still probably wouldn't be able to go - it's a big island and I have no car).

So. What to work on this year. The two leading contenders are to continue with the Celestines project that I started last year, or to do more work on Fortress Launne. I'm leaning in the direction of the latter. About a third of Amulet II is getting moved into Triangle II Part 3, so the obvious next step is to write a full coherent version of Triangle II Part 3. I'm not sure I'll have anywhere near 50k words by the time I'm done, so I figure I'll do like last year and continue the Celestines from where I left off (if I have time).

The synopsis I just posted on Nanowrimo:

Triangle II is a three-part story where I've written most of the first draft material for the first two parts as parts of previous Nanos and other writing events, though mostly with the idea that they would be parts of other things than Triangle II, which didn't exist as an entity until after I'd written them (and large amounts of other Fortress Launne).

In Triangle II Part 1, the story follows Janis as she goes deep into the swamps to find a mythical medicine man named Aliacorba, because the city of Fortress Launne has a severe plague going on. Aliacorba agrees to come out and help. In the process he becomes Thomas Cougar.

In Triangle II Part 2, the king of Fortress Launne finds out about Thomas. Due to various political complexities, Thomas is (more or less) kidnapped away from Janis, and the royal intention is that they'll never see each other again. Thomas then goes on to finish solving the plague with all the resources of the king and court.

Triangle II Part 3 goes back to following Janis, who is not happy at all about Thomas's disappearance. Up until last year I didn't have any good ideas of what she was going to do next. I knew where things were supposed to end up, but not how to get there. Last year while preparing to rewrite Amulet II, I noticed that a good third of the first draft material would work a lot better if it was part of Triangle II instead.

So, this year I plan to properly write up Triangle II Part 3. Like last year, it might not be 50k words long (if it works the same way as for previous novel parts, the final result will be around 20-25k). If I have time at the end and still need words, I'll tack in work on something unrelated.

Thus Endeth Nano 2017

9500 total words on The Celestines, according to the official validator (Scrivener says 9494).
40,277 total words for Nanowrimo 2017.

Well, I didn't officially win, but I still accomplished a lot. :) Amulet II has a beginning, middle, and end now. The Celestines is off to a good start, and there's interest locally in continuing to do weekly write-ins even though November is over, so probably I'll keep working on that one as time goes on.

I think basically what most motivates me to write The Celestines is that it's my way of responding to how the real world seems to be crashing and burning, as the U.S. slowly spirals down into the Dark Ages. :p

I started off the story the way I was figuring to do it back in October. A squad of soldiers get captured and taken into a Celestine outpost. The story then follows one of the soldiers around while he finds out what the Celestines are all about. At the moment, I'm not sure there's much actual story there, so much as a guy just wandering around exploring. He's out of stuff to look at in a basic exploratory outpost though, so maybe I should ship him off to an established city soon. Either that or some plot needs to actually happen.

Most of my names for people and places are coming from a random sci-fi name generator, which speeds things up quite a bit.