Tra la la ...

So it's December now ... where am I? Let's see. Looking back at my Tying Up Loose Ends post back in January, how many loose ends have I tied?

... none. :p But I've made some progress on some of them!

I barely even looked at the scientific paper I need to submit. Meanwhile, the other one I mentioned - with my former boss - is also no closer to publication. So I suppose the race is still sort of on. The other one has been submitted and rejected twice more this year, and now it's on its way to a fourth journal. It looks like it might make it, as one of the editors has already said (unofficially) that he likes it.

I haven't finished the Starcraft single-player missions, though I only have one more left (the very last one). This fall I bought the battlechest pack again and finally had the original game's worth of missions, so I played through a large number of those recently too. Haven't done all of them the second time through yet.

Unpacking? Well ... I did that. Sort of. The problem is that now everything is in *cough* "temporary" *cough* holding patterns, rather than in their final resting places. I got stalled out when I ran into the paperwork problem. All the stuff I need to throw away and/or shred (but I did buy a paper shredder!), followed by all the stuff that needs to get filed into the opened up places in my filing cabinets. I also need to figure out where to put all my books - there are two big bookshelves chock full of stuff that aren't books, while meanwhile my textbooks are sitting in a corner, most of them in a single stack that's 5 feet tall.

Getting my 2004 Nano novel to a presentable shape? *cough cough hack splutter wheeze* Yeah umm ... maybe I'll attempt to edit that mess during Nanoedmo 2006. I suspect I should probably not even try to do anything useful with the 2005 Nano novel messes I made, until 2007. ;) In general, I'm beginning to think I need to have first drafts of everything in the entire series, before I can get down to revising things.

Then there's cleaning. Which wasn't on the list in January, but has tacked itself onto the end of it now. I never clean. I also don't make a mess, so for the past few years my basic housework philosophy is to just not get anything dirty, and therefore not need to clean. So my cleaning behavior is fairly minimal (but not nonexistent!). And I'm not so disgusting as to have rotting food scattered everywhere, like some horror stories I've heard before. Sadly, though, this philosophy doesn't work out so well as a permanent solution, and one can only last for so long by doing only the laundry and dishes and occasionally the toilets. By now it's getting to the point where even I can't stand it anymore. So I suspect I'm going to be doing a whole big whirlwind effort fairly soon.

Especially if I once again skip visiting relatives for Christmas. It's a 12 hour drive, one way, and I don't really want to go. But I didn't see them last year either, so I probably should. I can stand my family for up to 4 days at a time. Gas prices are starting to reach reasonable again. It's snowing up there, dammit! Bleh. Haven't decided yet.

Meanwhile, I have another work cruise coming up. Sunday to Thursday, middle of December when it's freezing cold and stormy, which means I'll be sick for the first 14 hours. I'm looking forward to it. ;) What can I say, I'm a field scientist and therefore a glutton for punishment by definition...

Roleplaying is no less of a load than it ever is, even though I whine constantly about having to cut down on it. My current count is 14 characters in 8 games, GMing one game, helping GM one game, and one game on my list of things to join (possibly two soon, as I've heard through the grapevine that someone is considering inviting me to join an invite-only game). It's not actually as bad as it first appears, though, because 4 of those games (with 7 characters) only ever run intermittently. My favorite GM has been vanishing more often lately, for longer periods. Two other games are throwaway "useless oneliner" couldn't-care-less about whether it lives or dies. There are only three games that I focus on - the one I run, the one I'm helping run, and the high-writing-quality one (3 characters). Those three rotate as my top priority games. The 4 games by one GM are my "drop everything and play there when the GM is present" category. And the one I'm considering joining would alternate with those four as to whether or not I play much, if I did join. And if I were really smart, I wouldn't join it. :p

I guess that sums everything up about the state of my life at the moment.

Nanowrimo: Last Day

Well, it's Nov. 30. My final wordcounts are:

Amulet II - 55,042 words
Taint/Amulet I - 20,569 words
Total: 75,611 words

I wrote about 4k words toward Taint tonight, to finish off my month. Taint actually could continue taking off and expanding onwards in a big mush of melodrama. I've figured out part of the problem with that one. I've been working on writing the climax scenes. But the climax needs to take place in the *middle* of the novel, after a whole lot of buildup so that the average reader will actually care enough about the characters that it *won't* look like melodrama by the time they get to reading the climax scenes. This means I need to write the beginning ... what's going into the beginning? I have some fuzzy ideas forming, but nothing solid enough to write yet. This is going to take some thinking.

Meanwhile, Amulet II is nowhere near done. Unfortunately, I need to reread what I have so far and write up a good cliffs notes version to myself, make a coherent outline, and probably list all the characters and their motivations. Otherwise I really don't have a clue how it's supposed to end. And there are dozens of tiny plotholes developing everywhere, too. I need to address all of those.

As for Amulet I, it seems to be on hold indefinitely, until I get my act together on Taint and Amulet II. It's way too fuzzy right now to pin down in actual writing. One of the two MCs turns out not to have a very plausible personality. Normally when I start writing a character for the first time, breath life into them, they take over almost immediately. Not so for poor Edward Duchene. He seems to be stillborn. So I need to rethink a few things.

All three of these novels have overlapping scenes with each other. I'm not quite sure how exactly it'll all break down into different novels at this point. A whole lot of Taint might actually work well as part of Amulet II, and the rest of it in Amulet I, and therefore I don't need a whole separate novel. But I don't know that for sure yet, as it's a fairly hefty set of plotlines with the two MCs involved for Taint, that aren't really *that* integral to the other main plotlines.

Meanwhile I'm already itching to begin getting the groundwork set up for Triangle, Fall of Myan, and Birthright ...

But the top of the priority list for things to finish must be Stranger on a Bus. The Labor Day Novel that I never did get around to finishing off. There's still the same 3 chapters left that I had before. I wrote the first half of chapter 10 at the end of September, and then never got back to it after that.

To help prod me along on all of these things, I signed up for NaNoFiMo at http://www.nanofimo.org . It's being run by pookel off of Nanowrimo. The basic idea is to use December as National Novel Finishing Month. Write 30k new words toward a novel-in-progress, though starting a brand new one from scratch is also allowed. The rules didn't specify whether I could spread those 30k words around to several different novels, but that's what I'd end up doing.

Meanwhile, I'm badly overcommitted with online roleplaying again. Which is bizarre, considering that I took all of November off from roleplaying. But somehow I managed to get sucked into still more new projects (and one recycled one that suddenly came back to life out of nowhere). Running my own Dark Ages game is at the top of the priority list there, of course, followed by the game where I do lots of wordcrafting. Followed by the game that I'm helping some other people run. Then there's 6-8 other games that I play in, or am considering playing in. I guess I'm going to be rotating which ones I pay attention to on a weekly basis. Then I also volunteered to help out the website as a whole with its portrait gallery. I really need to stop making friends. :p

Nanowrimo: Done-ish!

Wordcounts now are:
52,514 words on Amulet II
16,644 words on ... umm, the other one ...
68,722 total words

I'm thinking I'll probably manage to get to 75k words by the end of November. It will probably all be on Amulet II, as the story is nowhere near done. I wrote what I had originally figured as the end climax scenes, and they turned out to be middle scenes instead, that caused more plot development. The end is still nowhere in sight.

If I somehow miraculously get to 100k words by writing Amulet II, I think I'll go validate it on Nerwen anyway. That's unlikely, though. Realistic aim is 75-80k.

Congrats to Ellsea and Veronnika for their purple bars! :) Hoping to see more of them start lighting up that way as we get down to the final stretch. Emiko is pretty close, Robert will get there with one more good writing day, and I'm rooting for Poetmage to get a second wind too! :) And for Sheba to make it to 10k! :) Gogogo team!

In other news ... my internet has been excessively glitchy for most of the week. The whole city seems to be having issues, though, so it's not a problem on my end. It just means that everything is extremely slow and laggy, and sometimes it cuts out entirely for hours at a time. I called and complained a bunch, and they said they would credit my next bill for the downed days.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who is in the U.S. too. ;) I didn't celebrate that, though I did enjoy the long weekend. Sleep, write, sleep, write, occasional meal here and there ... I'm out of junk food. :( And I'm really not ready to go back to work tomorrow, either.

Nanowrimo: One week left!

Current wordcounts:
Amulet I - 16,644 words
Amulet II - 40,952 words
Total: 57,596 words

Amulet I has been renamed to "Mostly Taint" by now, as that's a much more accurate description of what I'm actually writing.

On the other hand, what I'm actually writing is not exactly how I envisioned Taint to go, either. The best scenes so far have introduced characters I didn't even know existed, never mind are (apparently) going to be key. I think there's a whole separate plot going on in the story that I'm still almost completely unaware of. But what can one do but keep writing to find out, eh? ;) If it doesn't turn out to be Taint (either; it's certainly not Amulet I), I'll just rename it to something else when I'm done.

Meanwhile, Amulet II is still on track. There's been various stalls and full stops here and there. The fact that the plot is almost entirely political intrigue, and I suck at political intrigue, makes for quite a few pauses to figure out what the heck I'm doing. Overall though, I should be able to crank out the remaining 9k words to pass 50k with it by the end of the month. The story won't be done by then, but that's another issue...

And for the past few days while trying to figure out setting for Amulet II, I've been assaulted by serious plot bunnies for the remaining three novels in the series. They all want to be worked on Right Now. Let's see if I can hold them off for another couple weeks ... then I'll figure out where I am and which one(s) I attempt for Nano next year.

And speaking of next year... my average daily wordcount this year hovers around 2500. Last year it was 2300. 100k was definitely too ambitious. So next year I'm thinking I ought to aim for writing a total of 80k words toward a single novel. Which one that will be is still up in the air. There's Triangle, Fall of Myan, and Birthright. The first two are related to each other, as the start and endpoints of my most epic plotline in the whole series. Birthright is either a standalone novel, or a sequel to Temple (last year's nano), depending on your point of view.

My other thought is to see if I can work extra throughout next year and save up a bunch of comp time so I can take all of next November off. That might up the wordcount better and allow me to try for 100k again. ;)

All of that is Big Picture stuff that I need to ignore for a little while longer, though. It's "fine brushstrokes" time, not Big Picture time. I'll figure it out in December.

Nanowrimo: Halfway

Wordcounts at the moment are:
25,462 on Amulet II
11,295 on Amulet I (which is mostly material for Taint at this point)
36,757 total words

Amulet II is right on schedule, both in terms of how many words it's supposed to have by now, and in terms of the outline. I knew I was going to run out of outline at around halfway, when the main antagonist of the largest plot gets introduced. That's exactly what has happened. I have a bunch of vague notes after that point, but nothing solid enough that I can say "these scenes are going to be required, in this order." Instead I'm leaving myself to flounder.

However, the plan was that, by the time I finished setting stuff up in the first 25k words, the characters themselves will have enough material to work with that they will figure out how to finish the rest of the story FOR me. That's sort of how it's looking like it'll still work, though I haven't actually started yet. Last night I wrote in some additional setup material, and the next thing I need to write is where it starts getting nebulous as hell.

Four characters are going to meet and talk about the things going on. I know who they are, what their motivations are, and why they are talking in terms of what the various people are hoping to do with the conversation. I have no clue what will actually happen, how it will play out, and what it will make them do after that scene except in very vague, general terms. We'll see how that goes I guess. This is kind of scary but I'm looking forward to it. ;)

Amulet I, meanwhile, is tanked out. It's not ready to be written yet, and I've noticed that Taint really does need to be written first. At least, the half that's relevant to Amulet I. So that's what I'm doing. I haven't officially changed over the title but I probably will at some point. I can't really call it Taint either, though, because Taint includes a lot of other stuff that isn't relevant to Amulet I - and in fact there are a few scenes in Amulet II that probably belong in Taint. There's also a whole other big chunk that doesn't belong in either Amulet I or II, and so I don't think I'm going to be writing that part of it this November. Unless I run out of words by the time I'm done writing up the pieces of Taint, of course, and still need more.

So at the moment, the scene is focused on my MC for Taint as he discovers what Tainting is all about. He's not really very happy to be dead. I'm thinking that the next thing that needs to go in is one of the sire's minions stopping in for some conversation, partially explaining more of why Edward did this to him. He's too mad at Edward right now for Edward to explain it.

I have no idea if this is going to reach 50k by the end of November. It might not. Amulet II stands a really good chance, though, so I'll be happy with one "win" even if I don't get both.

Incidentally, I've noticed that a vast majority of my sentences have regressed into massive run-ons of infinite comma-separated clauses. I used to write like that all the time. Apparently I'm going back to that under the stress of high-speed writing. ;)

I was enjoying the flash version of the profile when it was a "see also" thing. Not so much now that it's the default. But the latest breaking news says we'll be able to turn that back off again soon.

Nanowrimo: Beginning of Week Two

Well, I have a total of 17,297 words. 14,032 on Amulet II, and 3265 on Amulet I.

Amulet I is definitely not ready to be written yet, based on the amount of pointless blathering I do in it. I'm pretty sure that Chapter 1 is not really the beginning of the book, and although the main events planned for Chapter 2 do indeed come after Chapter 1, a lot of the setup material in the first half of it needs to be somewhere earlier. Also, at the moment it's completely stalled out because I need to stop and invent a magic system. Talk about a total lack of proper preparation back in October...

Amulet II is going a lot better. It's more or less following along to my outline, except that the secondary subplot seems to be a lot more expanded up than I had expected it to be. Also, there's a number of scenes revolving around one of the minor characters that probably belong in a different novel (Taint). Other than that, though, it's got its share of fits and starts, but otherwise I'm pretty pleased with my overall progress. I seem to be writing it in the order that the final book will be, which is completely different from how the structure played out for Temple last year. With Temple, I could write it in just about any order I wanted. With Amulet II I really can't.

Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying the Flash version of the author profile pages. It's a bit annoying that only the first 8 friends on the list will show up on the Flash page (and since it's in the order of signup to the site, it's the 8 people who signed up earliest). I've also noticed that you can only have 15 friends displayed on the old version of the page. You can add more, but only the first 15 will appear (in the order they were added to your list).

I'm managing to work around that a little bit by having two profiles with slightly different friend lists, though. The two combined give me everyone I want to see. ;)

And being able to see everyone, a big woot! to Poetmage, Ellsea, and Emiko! :) Sheba and Veronnika need to enter their wordcounts *poke poke poke*! ;)

I've been hanging out a lot in the SFFMuse IRC chatroom. There's 4 or 5 people in there most evenings, all working on our stories and sharing snippets. More of the people here ought to drop by. :) Or maybe we ought to make a Hobgoblin chatroom. Where's Jeanene been these days?

Nanowrimo: mid-day 3

Well, I have 5997 total words thus far. 621 of those are mind-bogglingly bad, and they're all on Amulet I. The other 5376 words are decent enough. Not great, most of them. The first chapter was good enough to stick in my excerpt but I can't say the same for the second and third chapters ...

By the end of Day 3, if I still want to be on target, I need to have 7500 words. This means I'm technically behind by around 1500 words. I have no clue where I'm going to find the time to do it, as I've already skipped out on work early two days in a row now, and if I keep doing that someone is bound to notice ...

Also I'm a bit stumped for what to write as Chapter 4 in Amulet II. Back to Amulet I for the next thing I write! ... and see if I can at all salvage anything after the opener to the scene that I'm working on. *head, desk*

I would've done that tonight, except that I spent a huge chunk of time stalled out due to a software crash. (!) About a thousand words into a GREAT roll, I'm typing along, when suddenly in midsentence - POOF! All gone! I was so pissed that I couldn't write a thing for two hours afterward. And I couldn't go on until after I had reconstructed it from memory, and put it reasonably back together in a way that's not even close to how good it was originally. (*sob*) It took me twice as long to rewrite it as it did to write it the first time, and got fewer words out of it the second time because I was just too tired to wax as poetic about things again. Now I obsessively hit the save button after every paragraph. :p

Grrrr. Arrrrghhh. Software should not be allowed to crash! Ever!

Nanowrimo 2005: Day 1

Well, so far I have 1902 words according to the official wordcount verifier, all of it in the first chapter of Amulet II. It took me 5 hours to do that. I need to have at least 2500 by the time midnight comes around - at which point I have to start all over again. And I have to do such things as sleep, work, and grocery shop tomorrow, so I'm not sure how I'm going to come up with another 600 words.

This does not bode well for my attempt at 100k. Must ... write ... faster ...

I'm thinking maybe the other 600 words should go toward Amulet I or Taint, whichever I find myself writing as my second novel. I'm doing Amulet II on Jer's Novel Writer - which is a really nifty bit of software for Macs. It's in beta and I ought to download the latest version at some point. I really like it so far. However, I won't always want to write at my computer - so maybe the second novel will be written during all the times when I'm not. The alphasmart is all set up to go too, after all.

Guess we'll see if I can scrape together enough time to eke out 600 words during the regular workday. :)

Hurtling toward the starting gate

Actually my title was stolen off of someone's thread title in one of the Nano forums. But it seems to be pretty accurate. ;) One more week to go.

Amulet II is still sitting at the same place of ready-to-go as before. I know how I'm going to start, and I know how it's going to go for the first third or so. Hopefully I'll figure out how to keep going while I'm writing the first part.

Amulet I ... I'm a bit lost there. My original outline was written from the point of view of someone who isn't actually all that involved in most of the events, and doesn't even get to find out most of the specifics of what happened. Unfortunately, at this point I only know how to do it from his point of view. But that's not Amulet I. That's Taint - a whole separate novel which retells the same events in Amulet I and II from other perspectives, plus throws in a lot of other stuff that's irrelevant to those particular plotlines. So what am I really going to write as the second novel? Amulet I or Taint?

I do know that, if these things are going to be published, Amulet I needs to be out before Taint. That doesn't mean they need to be written in the order of publishing though. In fact, at this rate, I'm probably going to write all six Fortress Launne books before I even think about editting, never mind publishing.

Meanwhile, while browsing the Nano forums and reading other people's plot ideas ... I've been struck by musings for a whole other novel that has nothing to do with Fortress Launne or any other universe currently in existence (at least in my own head). It could be set in the same universe of Fortress Launne ... but it's not part of the same series, not exactly. More like an alternate universe version. Also, it would be a horror novel. Thinking about the basic premise scares the crap out of me. Basically, what if there really is a Hell, and everyone goes there no matter what one does in life? In Fortress Launne terms, that would be: what if there is no Great Mother, Great Cycle, or any of that? When you die you end up in this dark, frightening place often seen in nightmares for the rest of eternity. And that's it. The end.

To elaborate on it farther, suppose that a hole got ripped into the Great Cycle, and now all of reality is broken, and all souls are falling through into such a Hell. This has "epic-level chaos mage plotline" written all over it.

To go another step into things ... back when life on Earth began, there was no oxygen. Oxygen was a toxic waste product. As life lived, they kept making more and more of it, until it filled up the atmosphere and they basically killed themselves. What if ... something like that is going on in the Fortress Launne universe? What if one of the side effects of the Great Cycle is that it's destroying itself?

To have some sort of silver lining to it all, life on Earth ended up with all sorts of critters that learned how to use oxygen. And thus we have the diversities we see today.

So my beginnings of an idea is to have someone inadvertently find this out - perhaps through a near-death experience. Someone who was hitherto a very strong believer in the Great Mother, such as a matriarch of one of the spirit clans or (very specifically from Fortress Launne) the Speaker of the Native Folk, Janis. Her faith would be shaken irrevocably and I have no idea what she would actually do in response. I don't even know if there's anything one COULD do. It wouldn't be much of a horror novel if the thing could be stopped. So would it just be an extremely bleak, depressing ending? (Why do I keep writing stories with bleak, depressing endings?)

And why am I thinking about all this, working it out in great detail, with a week to go before Nano when I already have two other novels in the pipeline? *head, desk*

All I know is that it's been a long time since something really reached out and grabbed me and made me feel any kind of emotion as strongly as this idea is doing. I'm quite familiar with unending psychic-based fright, and I would be using that as my flavor for the Hell. It would be a real Hell, as I've seen and envisioned it. And it's nothing I want to delve into while I'm living alone doing most of my writing late at night. Before I can seriously consider writing it, I would need to find someone that can comfortably hang around in the same house/apartment while I'm writing, and who won't ask questions if I randomly tackle them and try to hide under them from time to time ...

Anyway. So I'm a bit lost on Amulet I. I know who the two MCs are, but I've never really played either of them before, so I don't really know them well. They are based off of people I know in "real' life' but somehow these aren't grabbing me as personalities I want to fictionalize. Also I haven't a clue how to even start - where in the timeframe the story begins, with who, or any of that. Hmmm... (begin random musings) ... maybe during the umbral quest... Yeah. During the umbral quest with Iorli. Maybe just before he gets to Hidden Glory's hut. Perfect.

(Isn't it odd how, the moment I try to explain a problem to someone else, even virtual people, suddenly I figure out what my answer is?)

In other news, my roleplay buddy finally did return. :) Sort of. He still seems to be kind of busy with Real Life, and doesn't have as much of a presence on rpol as he used to. It turned out that his month-long absence was because he was hospitalized. So I'm glad he's still alive and reasonably okay.

My Dark Ages game is still crawling along. 2.5 active wolves, and I'm at a point of stalling the moot until at least 2 more wolves magically appear. Maybe in November some people will show up and want to play wolves instead of vampires. I can always hope, right?

Meanwhile, I don't even have a plotline for the vampires. I have 4 of them in play, and there might be up to 9 of them eventually depending on how chargen goes for the other 5 people actively working on characters. My cap is 10 active PCs per critter. My current plot idea is to go with the "when in doubt, send in a couple guys with guns." In my case these are going to be a scouting party of 5 Inquisitors who are paving the way for their leader to arrive. They're going to attempt to commandeer the tavern that all the PCs are sitting around in. Let's see whether that'll get them off their butts and go out and do something beside sit there ...

Ahh, chaos. I'm still having a pretty good time, all in all. ;)

I also figured out at least part of my brain cobwebs problem. It might be a deficiency of obscure micronutrients. On Monday night I took half a multivitamin, followed that with something caffeinated, and suddenly my brain fuzz cleared and the inspiration was flowing like it hasn't in months. I wrote a lot of great posts. :D With November coming up with its total lack of proper diet, I'm going to have to make sure I take half a multivitamin every night ... (I can't do whole ones. Too big.) And I've got plenty of caffeinated sodas in with my massive ramen stash now. I think I'm set there. ;) I made a vat of beef barley soup, too, which should last through the rest of October and at least part of Nano Week 1. I'll have to make another vat of something this weekend for the freezer.

Nano prepping

I'm 32 today. Happy birthday to me. :)

I now have a 2000 word outline for Amulet II. I'm pretty sure I know how the first 20k words or so will go, too. All of it will be through the eyes of Antoine - as he is informed about the quest they're going to embark on, as he pursues the hidden treasure that he and Adien wants - up until the point that they run afoul of Mindy.

After that point, I'm not quite sure where I'm going. At the moment I'm thinking the POV will switch to Mindy for her side of the story, and then devolve into a series of council meetings, wherein I'll be able to introduce the other subplot about the caern. But I don't want to lose focus on the main plot by getting too sidetracked into the caern side of things, either. It might turn out to be a balancing act of interspersing caern-related subplot scenes with amulet quest scenes. And I still don't know what exactly Nathaniel is going to be doing, except that his involvement is kind of key...

I haven't really looked at Amulet I again yet. Probably this weekend I'll dig up my notes and figure out a detailed outline for it.

As for Nano writing in general ... 20 weekdays, 10 weekend days if you include Thanksgiving. I'm thinking I should aim for 5k words on each weekend day. That would give me 50k words. Then I'd need to do another 50k on the weekdays, so, 2500 words per day. This is a higher bar than what I set for myself last year. Last year I aimed for 2500 words per day every day and didn't make it most of the time. My overall average was 2300 - but it was plenty sufficient to get me to a win at the standard 50k words. This year, though, 2500 is my minimum. Maybe I should aim for 3k instead so I have some room for falling short. At least weekends are realistic, if the bus story gives me a good indication. 5k per day when I've got nothing else to do should be within easy reach, and hopefully I'll go over that.

So, 500 words per hour was my cruising speed during the bus story. For 2500 per day ... means I need to write for 5 hours a day. Hmm... okay, I'm screwed. :) Guess it's going to be a whole month of takeout, lots of advanced cooking of big vats of things, and I really do need to get this place cleaned up before the month ends. Maybe next year I'll work extra hard and save up vacation and comp time so I can just take the entire month off from work ...

In other writing news, my game suffered the loss of a werewolf player at the beginning of the week. :( Now I'm down to two active ones. The vampire side of things seems to be going better - three characters in play with up to four more in the works. All I have to do is get up the motivation to post for them once a day. And for that matter post for my other games, too. I've been neglecting the heavy-writing one lately. It's my turn for all three characters now.

And I still need to finish that bus story. Just have to get the cobwebs in my brain to clear up long enough.

Random Rant about Writing and Roleplay

Well, I'm signed on at the Nanowrimo boards - both as Kayara and reregistered as Nerwen. I've got two novels in mind for this November. Both are from the Fortress Launne series - Amulet I and Amulet II. Whether I'll actually write them both or not remains to be seen. If I do, I might either write them one after the other (which makes more sense, doesn't it?) or try to do both at once - one scene each per night. Depending on which one I'm in the mood for at the time, perhaps.

Of course, all of this requires me to actually have some sort of clue as to what I'm going to be writing. :p Last year I did Flattening of the Temple on no notice. I didn't even hear about it until Nov. 6, signed up just before I went to bed, lay there wondering what the heck I should write about, brainstormed a bunch, decided to do Fortress Launne, and picked a plotline out of it to write up. Then I started writing it the next day. I had the characters pegged out and the plot pretty much set. But I had to make up the setting as I went along. Then work out all the plot details as I went along. It was a wild ride and I had a great time of it, and the sense of accomplishment at the end, when I passed the 50k mark, was like nothing else I'd ever felt before.

That's a lot to live up to. Can I pull it off again? I don't know. It was hard the first time. But not too hard. I was ready to do it, and I did. If I did it once, I should be able to do it again, right?

The two plotlines I have in mind this time are no better thought out than Temple was last year before I started. In some ways they are a lot more vague. I know who the key players are, but not the details of exactly who did what when. In the case of Amulet II, I'm not even entirely sure what half of the key players did exactly - only that they did something to influence the way things turned out. I made all that up as I went along last year, though, so in theory I should be able to do it again this year.

It still feels insurmountable though. Panic is starting to rise. But in some ways that's a good thing, because it beats out the flat calm that I've felt for all of the other writing challenges I've attempted this year - most of them falling short of the goal. I wasn't worried because it didn't feel like it meant anything if I didn't make it. So I guess I didn't try as hard as I could've. I'd rather be at least a little bit worried about this - just a little.

Then again, last year I wasn't all that worried either. I knew I was going to write more than I ever had in my life, and I passed the largest number of words I'd ever written for one thing by the end of the first weekend. I was already achieving things and doing myself proud. Why did I continue and push on for the full 50k? Hmm... to prove that I could, I guess. But I've done that now. What am I proving this year? I guess that I can do it twice.

Two accounts now. Two novels. I guess we'll see.

In other news ... roleplaying is plodding along. I don't even do half as much as I used to, and yet I'm too tired to even do what little is on my plate now. I guess the allure of it all is starting to loosen its grip on me. I was kind of burnt out on it last year around this time too, actually, wondering what I wanted to be doing instead.

My game is still going fairly well. I have plenty of players and there's at least one new applicant every week. Not all of them make it into the game, though. About half seem to drop out during chargen. But I went into the venture knowing full well not to count on any of them as participants until they were fully added to the game with full backstories and stats.

The setting I'm using is basically the same as Fortress Launne, except adapted of course for northern England in the Dark Ages. I realized earlier this week that my city map is only going to work out if I turn it upside down. North in Fortress Launne is now south in Norchester. East is now west. Viewed in that way, which is going to confuse the heck out of me come November, Norchester now makes a lot more sense in my mind for where everything is. (Almost. Actually the caerns are still in the wrong places from their equivalent points in Fortress Launne, but it's doable otherwise.)

The main NPCs I have are also people from Fortress Launne, and the plot premises I have in mind are several from there as well. Half of them are actually events that occur during the timeframe of Amulet I. There's a few elements thrown in from the timeframe of Amulet II. That's where things start to diverge, though. The rest of the plot premises are drawn from character backstories - and I'm hoping that my players will really cause things to take off in some weird directions. Should be a lot of fun once things get off the ground. It's going slow even for a play-by-post because I'm aiming for quality in the participants. Hopefully we aren't so slow that we start to lose good people who want it to be a faster game...

I'm also signed on to help run a modern-day World of Darkness game. So far I'm supposed to be running a combat scene for a PC Gangrel, with a lot of input from the head ST. I need to write a post, because it's already been two days, and it's nearly 6 am and I dont' think it's going to happen tonight because I needed to ramble in here a lot more than I needed to post fiction.

I guess that's the highlights. My favorite GM is still missing. It's been a month since he last posted anywhere. I resorted to pestering him by phone, and left a message on his voicemail, but he didnt' respond. I hope his life isn't going too wonky on him. I hope he comes back eventually, even if it would mean I'm even more swamped with roleplay than I already am.

Adventures in Pasta

... so I read Ellsea's pasta recipe with the cream and the parmesan and the fettucine, and I thought ... "Hmm, that one looks so easy even I could figure it out in one try!" I'd been wanting to figure out how to make a good alfredo sauce, and the white sauce version just doesn't taste all that good to me. Or maybe I just suck at white sauces. Somehow it tends to come out tasting like flour - but that might just be because I'm impatient and don't let it cook long enough. Hmm.

Anyway, so I bought a pint of "heavy whipping cream" (we don't have anything called "double cream" here) and some fresh fettucine (they only had garlic and basil at the time). Brought it home, looked at the recipe again.

A pint turns out to be less than 250 ml... okay, so use all of it. A standard stick of butter is 113 g - half the stick! The fettucine was over 300 g, but I figured might as well use all of that. Parmesan? The label on my block of Digiorno says that serving size is "1 tablespoon (5 grams)" ... 20 tablespoons? Guess I'll be standing there doing a lot of grating! I opted to shred on the coarsest possible so it wouldn't take all night. Next time I'll buy some of the pre-shredded version of Digiorno (which, by the way, is really good parmesan, even if it is from the U.S. and not Italy).

The cheese didn't melt all the way. The pasta smelled kind of strange while it was boiling, since it was the kind with garlic and basil in it, and not just regular pasta. It managed to cook all right, and tastes all right, even though it clumped up while it was cooking. I had to mix the sauce into it pretty fast before the cheese solidified out of it again. I didn't put in any spinach but I might next time. I did add in some nutmeg and white pepper, though, since those are often called for in alfredo recipes.

Overall? Mmmmm..... :). It's very rich, and I don't think I can eat too much of it at once, but I like it. :) And ellsea is right - it's a no-brainer and very fast, even with all the parmesan grating.

In other news, I've decided to join the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. :D Have you been touched by His noodly appendage? If not, go there and see. :) Then worship Him by eating ellsea's pasta thing.

bus story, roleplaying, moves, new computer! :)

I'm psyching myself up for writing the last 3 chapters of the bus story. Tomorrow shall be the official day for it. :)

I might end up combining chapters 10 and 11, or moving events around between 10, 11, and 12. The rockfall chapter (the next one), it occurred to me last night that it would make sense if I took the standard formula for most of the previous chapters, only twist it around to be completely backwards. ;) That is, Alan will save the day - but he will be doing it right at the very beginning of the chapter, and then he will get into a heap of trouble for doing it. The goal of the whole journey will be in jeopardy and he might have to start over completely from scratch if Nature wins. It will then be up to Ned (the bus driver) to rescue him, save all their efforts, and keep things moving along to the goal.

The chapter after that will then be the phone call from the Pope, which is the whole payoff for the entire story (for Alan). After that point, I really don't see why Alan would hang around, so this might actually make more sense to occur in Eugene. (In which case, the rockfall chapter will also be the Clarkston, Idaho chapter.)

I've got an awesome set of pics of the area around the Greyhound station in Eugene, courtesy of a friend over at SFFMuse who lives in Oregon and went there with his digital camera. 479 shots plus an annotated map with comments. I spent all last night engrossed in pics of parking lots. :) Not sure whether I'll manage to work in all of the details I now have, but it was neat to see a step-by-step street tour of the area. Thanks Spiff! :D

Other random thoughts ... Alan's mysterious book will probably get left with Ned. What will it actually say to him? My best thought at the moment is that it will be an account of the bus trip from Alan's point of view, so that Ned knows what really happened. (Even though the readers never will. ;) ) (The way more obvious choice was to have the book be equivalent to a 'bible' - but ... I don't really wanna go there. :p And it wouldn't be very fitting anyhow.)

And somewhere in there I need more character development for Ned, too. Stuff about his own family that he's about to visit in Eugene, that sort of thing. He's really not that complex ... he's a bus driver who enjoys driving. A bit on the dense side when it comes to not recognizing what Alan is (but that might be on purpose on his part too).

Roleplaying is still pretty dead. My favorite roleplay buddy has been missing for two weeks now. :( My own game has kind of come to a halt because we're waiting on him for two out of three threads. If he doesn't post by the end of the weekend, I'll resort to calling him. I do have his number, because we traded numbers to arrange that dinner meeting in Macon. I just don't really want to bother him if he's got major Real Life issues...

In other news ... I'm moving into my new office on Monday. My boss has been moving into his all last week, while they were renovating the space I'm going into. There's a bit of work I need to get done over the weekend before the move, and I'll probably wander over there later today.

Much more importantly, I have my new computer! :) It's a G5 iMac with a 20 inch screen. All the components for my new setup arrived last week, and I got it all set up yesterday. I now have a wireless network, wireless keyboard and mouse, and way more disk space than I know what to do with (the old comp has 5 gigs total space, with less than 200 megs left available). And the ability to burn things to CDs and DVDs! (The old comp has a CD-ROM.) And an iPod Nano! Finally I can get sucked into the whole downloading craze for music and videos. :) And I have expensive APC UPS's so now I never have to worry about power surges again.

Next month's credit card bill is going to be horrendous. Oh well. ;)

And then two or three months down the road when I'm back in the black again, I'll get the printer/copier/scanner that I've got my eye on. Then it'll be off to looking at digital cameras. :)

Life is looking pretty good overall. Anyway, I better get going and get stuff done.

Two soups and a rant (not in that order)

I got a lot of stuff done this weekend. :D

Unfortunately, none of it was writing. :(

At least I'm out of that slump from last week. I stopped feeling the urge to constantly play D2 and managed to write some roleplay posts on Thursday and Friday. I partially updated my game today. Got one more post to go in there, though at the moment I have no clue what to write.

In other news, the one roleplaying game finally got deleted last night in a periodic admin sweep through inactive games. The game that I poured my heart and soul into for a good 5 months. Where ten players and the GM wrote 70-100 posts per day, every day, for over two of those months. Most of those within the same 3 hours of each day. The plot was that good, the pace was frenetic, and we were obsessed - we all showed every single night. The whole run lasted about 11 months, though it was really not going very well in the last 5. The GM was psychotic. Whenever there was the slightest, perfectly solvable problem, she threatened to leave the game. We (mostly I) were then obligated to beg her to stay and keep running it. Things would then continue with the problems unsolved and ignored and buried.

Problems don't go away if you ignore and bury them. They just fester and grow, until one day they explode and destroy everything.

In October, 3 months into things, the GM expanded the game to twice its size - and the whole thing lost focus. After the holiday season, half the players didn't come back. And it was not the same half that got signed in during the expansion. Things kind of limped along until May before we had our final OOC blowout and the GM left for good. I refused to grovel for her to stay again, and so she never came back. The game didn't end - it just stopped. We were so close to the conclusion, too. If I could've kept my opinions to myself for another month, we would've gotten there.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That game, along with my Stargate game, were part of an era. And last night I saw its end. I never really got the closure that I would've wanted, but it's okay now. I'm okay now. I think I understand how it happened and I have no regrets.

Intermission time.

Tomato Soup with Nothing Green In It

Two family-sized cans of Campbell's tomato soup
Three cans water
half a head of cabbage
three carrots
about 3 cups worth of diced red potatoes
2 cups corn (I use frozen)
rice
hot dogs, sliced

Heat up the soup with water. (Don't let it come to too fast of a boil.) Rice, then carrots, then potatoes, then corn, then cabbage, then hotdogs. Use all of those or whichever you happen to feel like at the time. Makes about a gallon.

***

... caveats. It makes about a gallon assuming you don't let it boil over and make a mess all over the stove. Doh. :( Apparently tomato soup expands a lot when heated. A lot more than broth. It's been so long since I've made this one that I kind of forgot the details of how it goes.

Also, for some reason this soup tends to throw me into anaphylactic shock. I guess there must be a lot more sugar in it than how it tastes. That's why I add so many veggies to it - to try and counter that effect. And I try not to eat just this soup with nothing else accompanying it.

I made it earlier today, as one might guess - including the spillover. For some reason I've had a craving for it for the past week. I still have some of my spinach soup left from two weeks ago, and a whole lot of field greens salad that I was dumb enough to buy at Sam's Club even though I knew I wouldn't be able to eat it fast enough before it rotted. I guess that was just too much greenery. ;) Although I did end up putting some celery in. I keep that in the same container as my carrots, and it's so old that it's molding. So I figured I'd better use what was salvageable while I still could.

And speaking of the spinach soup...

Spinach Soup

One big bag of fresh spinach (yeah, you could buy a bunch and wash it yourself but I'm lazy, I buy the salad bags :p)(do not use frozen or canned! those are disgusting.)

One gallon pork broth (Penzey's sells it as a paste) or veggie broth if pork broth is unavailable

A bundle of bean thread (looks like translucent noodles, found in the Asian section of the grocery store)

Firm or extra-firm tofu (I buy Nasoya extra-firm)

Sliced (fresh) mushrooms

Saute the mushrooms and tofu in some corn oil. When it looks all sauteed, add the broth and bring to a boil. Stir. Put in the bean thread. Stir some more. When it boils again, add the spinach. As soon as it's all added and stirred in, turn off the heat.

***

This is one of those soups that doesn't really take much sitting time. It's ready to eat right away. I add some black pepper and sesame oil to it. It's based on something my mother made when I was a kid, and is probably the primary reason why I've never understood why people hate spinach so much. (That, along with another very basic stir-fried spinach dish where you basically just 'steam' it in the oil with some garlic.) I've always loved spinach.

Anyway, so where was I?

So I had a productive weekend overall. Did a whole lot of household chores - big run of groceries, laundry, dishes, soup-making, etc. But by the time I was doing everything else on my list, the weekend was over. :(

I was hoping to write the last three chapters of the bus story, but if I want to do it all in one shot, then I need an entire uninterrupted day. I didn't have that this weekend. Maybe next weekend? *sighs*

nothing in particular

I've been in one heckuva slump lately. Pretty much since Labor Day. I can't get myself to do anything creative whatsoever, and I'm even neglecting my own game. Instead I just spend all night every night playing Diablo 2. *sigh*

I wrote a paragraph toward the bus story last night. Wrote one reasonably good post for one of my games last weekend. Other than that ... bleh.

Next weekend I might be volunteering to drive some donated supplies down to Alabama. At least, I thought I was on the driving list last Friday. But the latest mass email about it didn't have me listed as going. So I'm not sure what's up with that. If I'm not going after all, though, I suppose I'll have plenty of time to try finishing up the bus story.

I did order my new computer (finally!). A G5 iMac, 20 inch screen. :) It should arrive some time next week.

My favorite GM has been missing since last weekend. Not sure what's up with that, either. He just started a new job and everything was supposed to be great - more money, less travel, more roleplay time. But he's sort of vanished... I hope he's all right. He does have family in Florida, and there's a possibility that Katrina fallout is hitting him in some form or another.

In a few weeks I'm going to be changing offices yet again. They're going to start renovations on the new room next week. I need to measure stuff and figure out how exactly I want my part of the room to be arranged. I kind of don't even really care. I'm not picky. :p Just give me a desk, another table and a file cabinet, and a work area that's free of toxic fumes, and I'm happy.

I used to have the absolutely most perfect office back when I first started working there. A corner office with big windows and a nice view of trees and the river, and full control of the thermostat, all to myself. It was my boss's lab space but he had several other lab spaces and didn't spend much time in there. I could do whatever I wanted, play my music as loud as I want, eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted without stinking anyone else out, and all at a comfy temperature.

Then that first boss ran out of grant funds to pay me, so I switched to another lab. At first I was allowed to stay put where I was, which was just grand, until former boss and I got into a bit of a disagreement. Then he booted me. :p We made up later on, but by then the motions were going and it was too late.

Now I'm in an office that's part of a suite with 4 others. It has one small window with a view of a gutted building that got stalled out mid-renovation. There's a psycho across the hall from me. She wants it to be frigid because the AC vents are weird in her office and don't carry the cold air into it as efficiently as it carries it into mine. And she prefers dead silence and hates my food. Last year there were several days where she threw temper tantrums at me through my locked office door, where she wanted to make sure I was informed that she thought I was a horrible terrible person. :p Luckily this year she hasn't been quite as pissy.

This new office is going to be located in the main building of the campus, and I'll be sharing it with someone. My boss will be right next door, and my former boss across the hall. Basically I'm going to be surrounded by old farts who prefer dead silence, and they all have a heckuva lot more clout than me. :p There might not be room for my fridge and microwave. We have a tiny window, and my part of the room is nowhere near it. I haven't a clue where the thermostat is located and doubt I'd be allowed to fiddle with it even if I did know.

On the bright side, I do still get to set my own hours. It almost has to be that way now, considering I need my boss's computer to do half of my work, and can't realistically do it while he's present. So I tend to show up in the afternoon and work until late evening. Also we have no dress code. I can wear whatever I want and it's usually sweats. I suppose I can always just keep clinging to that.

Labor Day Novel: The fun continues!

If anyone is signed up at SFFMuse, I now have the first 9 chapters of Stranger on a Bus in its own separate novel forum. Drop by, read, enjoy. :) (Try to forget everything I've ever said about the plot in these blogs...).

I'm also signed up to analog's Short Story challenge (details in Robert's last blog entry). Not so I can write tons of short stories - I don't think that's the right thing for me to be doing right now. However, I do tend to write better when there's other people writing with me. So, that's the plan. Write something when other people are writing. It worked out pretty well over Labor Day when it was me and Robert working on our novels. Others will work on their short stories, while I work on various projects I've got ongoing.

The first one, of course, is to finish up Stranger on a Bus. ;) Three more chapters to go. It's my plan for tomorrow. If I write at the same speed as last weekend, this should be no problem.

After that ... I've been ignoring Taint since last June. July hit me pretty hard, first with the science paper that ultimately got rejected, and then with the two back-to-back work cruises. By the time July ended, I was also getting my Dark Ages game started up.

The Dark Ages game focused me in ways that I really needed for a very long time. I stopped GMing my last game over a year ago - in August of 2004. Since then I kept thinking I ought to start something, but never had time. I still didn't have time when I started the Dark Ages game, but it kind of fell in my lap when I signed up to help GM a different game. That game fell apart when the primary GM vanished without a trace, leaving several of us co-GMs with viable games on our hands. We launched them separately, and now there's 3 of them running (including mine) that originally started there.

It's been very helpful for writing - looking at how to make open plots that are tailored to the characters, without knowing who the characters are going to be. Working up setting on the fly. All the sorts of things that go into organic writing, which I just don't do all that well when I'm actually writing. My GMing approach is very organic, however. It's kind of odd that it works out that way. If I can GM a game organically, and I can play characters well in other games, why can't I do both at the same time and write novels?

The other thing is, I'm rampantly borrowing setting elements and plot premises out of my Fortress Launne series for the game. This is helping me work out a bunch of things for one of the novels that I'm going to attempt to write in November for Nanowrimo. Amulet I has the same key characters as the Dark Ages game (though not other ones that I've also tossed into the mix who are technically from other parts of the timeline...).

Then there's Amulet II which is the other novel I'm considering writing in November. It has nothing to do with Amulet I other than the fact that it's the same amulet as the point of contention. Completely different parts of the timeline, different casts, etc.

Mmm. Where was I? I went off on a tangent again.

Anyway, so I'd been ignoring Taint since June. Now there's this short story challenge going on. I'm figuring to see if I can get some more work done on this novel - write five key chapters in the next six weeks. (The first week being reserved for the bus novel).

Taint is very different, structure-wise, from the other novels in the Fortress Launne series. It's the only one that doesn't have a huge complex plot. Instead, it's about the lives of two characters, so it has to be exceptionally character-driven. At the moment I'm not sure if it should be an actual novel, or a collection of short stories. If it turns out to be more of a short story collection, though, this challenge would be a good way to go about writing some of them. ;)

Mmmmm. It feels like I originally wanted to say more about that, but I think that covers it.

*wanders off in an absentminded daze*

Labor Day Novel: End

17,942 total words.

The first 9 chapters came out to be 17,638 words. Then I wrote four extremely bad paragraphs to try and launch into chapter 10, but they were not only extremely bad, they also didn't lead anywhere. I'm out of steam, I think. Might as well stop until I can do something only semi-bad instead, and with content that actually makes sense. ;)

So ... to catch up from my last blog, I ended up combining chapters 8 and 9 (now chapter 8), and it was told as an on-the-road scene. Then chapter 10 became chapter 9, and it was told at a diner in Driftwood (instead of being an on-the-road scene). The lost hiker chapter is one of the least action-packed chapters; the only other one with no action was chapter 6, which was basically an infodump chapter. (But it was a good infodump - by the time I spelled it all out, hopefully the readers would've actually wanted to know all that).

That leaves 3 more chapters to go before the story is done.

Chapter 10: The rock fall scene. It's Friday morning (story started on a Tuesday night), and the bus is now driving its way through the Bitterroot Mountains. Nature is going to take God by surprise by trying to smash the bus with a giant boulder. Alan has no choice but to catch it in mid-air, without any prep time to make it look natural to casual observers. The aftermath of the event is probably going to be long and drawn out.

Chapter 11: A diner in Clarkston, Idaho in late afternoon. The Pope calls. This is where the root password is finally given out. This is the chapter where everything in the preceding chapters has to get tied together. I wrote up a lot of weird stuff at random, whatever came to mind at the time of writing. Before I can write this phone conversation, I have to reread everything I wrote before and see if I can make them related to each other in some cool way.

Chapter 12: Eugene, Oregon. God tells all (to Ned) and goes back to Heaven. ;) Most of the relevant bits from the actual song will play out in this chapter. The lyrics like "If you had one question what would you ask" etc.

So... when am I going to write this? I'm debating whether to do a chapter per night until it's finished, or if I should wait until next weekend and do them all at once. All at once might work out better, just to get myself completely immersed again. Also gives me more time to recharge from this weekend, mull over what I've written already, and reread the first 9 chapters before plunging in again. Plus the work week tends to be full of daily life distractions.

Robert is reading it now. He seems to be liking it. ;) If anyone else wants to see it, it's up at my dead rpol game (in a non-public thread). Send me a PM and I'll give out details for how to access it.

Labor Day Novel: since I'm still awake and thinking about it ...

"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." -- Somerset Maugham

I'm liking that quote right now. My writing is abyssal, but boy am I having fun devising incidents...

At least, that's what happened in Chapter 7. A cow jumped over a green cheese moon, some cactus tried to eat the bus driver, and he also fought off a stampede of jackalopes and a swarm of woozles while defending an 80-foot brontosaurus. Which actually isn't purple, by the way - I remembered wrong. The dinosaur is green in real life. The main goal of the chapter was a weasel hunt. They were hunting for a mauve weasel in Wall. Get it? The weasel and Wall? Har har har ... it's a Nano in-joke, sorry I'm easily amused right now.

I'm at 14,143 words now. Haven't started chapter 8 yet. Haven't figured out what it's even going to be yet, though I am leaning toward a scene where they're safely sitting in a bus stop, discussing the aftermath of everything that happened at Wall Drug. I sort of left a lot of things hanging at the end of chapter 7.

Over on SFFMuse, Alcar suggested that I have a scene where the bus breaks down. Not just run out of gas, but die completely. And so does everything else electronic on the bus - radio, cell phones, etc. For no apparent reason. This is a slightly more intriguing idea than what I originally had in mind (as my chapter 6 of the previous posted outline), which was just for the bus to run out of gas somewhere.

I thought about that one and it would actually work out well as the followup crisis to the Wall Drug adventures. Maybe Chapter 8 can be another short scene (chapter 6 was too). Then Chapter 9 can be the bus breakdown chapter. Then I can resume my original outline as planned.

So here's the revised outline:

Chapter 6 - sitting in Choctaw, IA, followed by a conversation during the next leg of the bus trip wherein nothing bad happens to them. Alan (God) finally gets around to telling Ned (bus driver) exactly what he's up to and why, but he's thinly metaphorical about it, and it goes over Ned's head. Ned still doesn't have a clue. Any readers should be able to pick up on it pretty easily, though. ;) This chapter was relatively short compared to my other ones. Most of them have been running around 1800-2000 words or so, while this one was more like 1200ish, I think.

Chapter 7 - Wall Drug. See highlights listed above. This chapter ran longer than average, which made up for the shortfall of Chapter 6 and also the slight shortfalls of all the other chapters (if 2k was the goal).

Chapter 8 - sitting in a bus station talking about Wall Drug. Probably Driftwood, Montana. At the end of Chapter 7, I had Ned wake up in the cafeteria with no clue how he got there or where Alan is, and he was about to be late for bus departure. The last thing he did was run toward the bus station. So I need to wrap up a few loose ends from Chapter 7, and it would best be done if they're sitting somewhere safe so they can talk. This'll probably be fairly short as well.

Chapter 9 - the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason, and so does everyone's cell phones and radioes. How exactly to get out of that one? I haven't a clue right at the moment. God will think of something I'm sure. ;)

Chapter 10 - a lost hiker in the mountains of Montana. The bus hears about it over the radio. God hears about it because the hiker is praying. God saves the hiker. I'm not sure what the point of this scene is anymore. It probably should've been earlier, but I wanted it to be somewhere with mountains, and there aren't any elsewhere. I'll have to see if I can come up with something useful to reveal about any of the characters. Maybe focus more on Ned again. He hasn't had much backstory development since the first two chapters.

Chapter 11 - on the road between Montana and Idaho. Nature makes a last-ditched effort to stop God. By trying to smash the bus with a giant falling boulder. God really shows his true colors here, because Alan catches it with telekinesis.

Chapter 12 - a diner in Clarkston, Idaho. Alan receives a phone call. It's the Pope. He's trying to reach God to confess a sin. Alan uses all the scattered bits of knowledge he's acquired during the rest of the book to come up with a task for the Pope to do to absolve himself. The pope also inadvertently tells Alan the root password during this conversation, which was Alan's quest in the novel.

Does anyone have any good ideas for what kinds of sins a Pope might commit?

Chapter 13 - Eugene, Oregon. Another real city. I'm using it because of the name. This is where Alan finally tells Ned everything that happened, and then he gets to ascend in a puff of white light. The end. ;)

So... if I wanted to actually finish this off tomorrow, I have 6 chapters to write. Will I make it? Guess we'll see. Right now it's 4am though and I need to get some sleep.

Labor Day Novel: End of Day Two

13,083 words. I'm halfway through Chapter 7 and slowing down at an alarming rate. This chapter has definitely been more surreal than the previous ones, and I've let myself stay free to write in whatever I want no matter how silly, and yet ... I think I'm just really sick of this story now. I'm very tempted to just slip off to play Diablo 2 for a few hours instead of working on this thing.

It looks like my best fiction-writing speed is 500 words per hour, too.

On the bright side, I've definitely written way more (fiction) words in such a short timespan than I've ever done before.

One more day to go. Not sure if I'm going to get the whole thing finished tomorrow. There's at least 5 more chapters after this one. Heh. Ironic that I spent all of yesterday wishing I was already at these later chapters, and now that I'm almost there I don't want to do them anymore. *sigh*

Oh well. I'm going to try and at least finish Chapter 7 before quitting for the night.

Labor Day Novel: Halfway on Time

Well, it's past noon on Sunday. 36 hours are gone and 36 hours are left. I have 8025 words and I've just started Chapter 5. I should be at the fun parts of this novel by the end of the day.

What have I got so far:

Chapter 1 - Paynetown, PA. Alan does an amazing physical feat while saving a little girl from being run over by a train.

Chapter 2 - Somerville, OH. Alan gives his leftover salad to a homeless bum, who then gets a phone call and her life gets turned around very suddenly.

Chapter 3 - Indianapolis, IN. A baby elephant breaks loose of a mall display and runs amuck until Alan creatively stops her using a piece of string, a block of swiss cheese, and 6 mounds of dirt.

I used a real city because I've actually been to the Greyhound station here. It's at Union Station. Granted I've only ever been there once for the station, though numerous times for the mall as a kid, but I decided to use it anyway.

Chapter 4 - en route to Ellington, IL. Freak traffic accident caused by a deer jumping in front of a sedan driven by a little old lady, who then collides with a semi, which jacknifes across the highway. Alan doesn't actually do anything for this one, but he does hand out lunch to everyone at the scene. There's a wisecrack about turning water into wine, but I've forgotten exactly how it goes with the bread and fish stories, so couldn't work those in. (Anyone want to explain it to me?)

Chapter 5 - the bus is going to get hijacked while en route to Choctaw, IA. Alan is going to save the day by summoning tornadoes.

Chapter 6 - the bus is going to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, probably in South Dakota. This is because the terrorists of Chapter 5 somehow managed to damage the fuel tank.

Chapter 7 - Wall Drug. :) They have an 80 foot purple dinosaur. Somehow that's going to be involved. This is going to be a very surreal chapter no matter how it turns out.

That's what's on my immediate radar for this afternoon. I'll continue outlining out the rest of it after I'm done with chapter 7.

Labor Day Novel: End of Day One

Final tally for Saturday: 5755 words in 3 chapters. Three fun events at three really big bus stations so far. :)

Hmm. I'm thinking the next station ought to be one of those small dinky ones. That should mix things up a little...

I guess I need to catch up the 4000 words I fell behind today, too. That means 12k words per day for the two remaining days. We'll see if I make it. Hopefully this will go a lot faster once I get to the good parts in the second half of the story. And there shouldn't be any more interruptions either. Nothing but me, my novel, and lots of Chinese takeout.

Labor Day Novel: midway through Chapter 3

So far it's looking like I have chapters of 2k words apiece. I'm about halfway through chapter 3, trying to figure out what kind of excitement I can come up with involving a baby elephant in a mall, that still manages to be relevant to the rest of the story. I just need something to liven things up in this mall. ;)

So, 5005 words. I thought I'd post an update since I finally managed to pass 5k. I was aiming for 10k words per day, but that doesn't look like it'll happen today given there's only 2 hours left.

At least the Sam's trip is over with now. And I also bought enough Chinese takeout to last two days. No more interruptions until Tuesday. It's just writing, sleeping, and eating takeout.

On the bright side, I do believe that 5005 is the most words of fiction I've ever written in one day. :D

Labor Day Novel: Mush, mush!

Actually that pretty much describes how I feel about Chapter 2, too. It's awful. So bad that I'm a bit blocked at the moment for how exactly to keep going with the scene I'm trying to write.

Chapter 1 didn't turn out that bad at all - but that was probably because I kept editting things as I went along. It took me 4 hours to write slightly under 2k words, so I guess my cruising speed is 500 words an hour. I'm in trouble if I can't speed up. 500 words an hour means 20 hours a day, which is bad.

3343 total words so far. Unfortunately I'm about to get interrupted because my coworker with the Sam's Club card, who has a knack for only being available to take me to Sam's Club during the most inconvenient possible days ... wants to go this afternoon. *sigh* I should decline, but I need to pick up a few things and have needed to go for over a month.

Labor Day Novel: At the Starting Gate

Technically I'm half an hour into the writing time already, but I had some delays with getting things set up. Namely, the cable to my new USB drive finally arrived today - after the ebay seller forgot to include it in the box with the drive. So I've been spending my evening getting data files backed up for the first time in who knows how long... and this took a lot longer than I thought it would.

Also I needed to transfer a file off my Alphasmart to clear off space for the novel. Since I only have two USB ports, and the other one is taken by my mouse, I couldn't do it at the same time as the file copying.

I'll just pretend I'm in Robert's time zone instead. ;)

I should probably also have printed out my outline instead of having to scroll through looking at my notes on a screen. Doh. Also, I had wanted to look up the city names that I'd made up for each bus stop with the hopes that all of them really are fictional. They have to be fictional because I don't want to inadvertently use a real city with a real Greyhound station and describe the place as being nothing like what it really looks like. I guess these sorts of details will get taken care of after the fact now, since this thing isn't going to get submitted anywhere immediately after I write it.

Hmmm. How do I feel so far? A lot calmer than I thought I would. I was nearly panic-stricken when I signed up to Nano last November, on the 6th, with no clue what I was going to write about. But I managed to pull it off then so theoretically I can pull it off now too, right? Just as long as this doens't lull me to complacency. That would suck.

Guess I better get started. I'm aiming to do one chapter before going to bed tonight. The opening scene, when the bus pulls up to the first stop in Pennsylvania, and the main character (the bus driver) introduces everything ...

GRARGH!!!

The paper was rejected.

*head, desk*

That science paper I editted back at the beginning of July. The one I ripped apart at the seams and put back together in a completely different order, and then wrote that brilliant summary of what it was all about. Bleh.

I knew I shouldn't've gotten lazy with those tables. I haven't read through all of the reviewer comments yet, but the part I saw said that we hadn't clearly explained how we made our calculations. And yes, that's probably true. Is it my fault for letting it slip by without comment?

At this point I don't actually know. I really needed a lot more time with that thing to get it up to my best perfectionist standards. As the deadline loomed I had to lower them. I thought it was acceptable by the time I was done - but I guess it was not.

Maybe I should've calmly ignored my former-boss's constant comments about the journal's philosophy, back when it had that other Editor-in-Chief - who is dead and gone now and replaced by someone with a much different view. Former-boss said that the previous guy could see the core importance of a paper, and didn't fret so much about the "trivial" details. Therefore, I should edit the paper with that same approach - make sure our key points were clear. That's what I did.

But that past guy isn't there anymore. Maybe we shouldn't try to cling so hard to philosophies of the past. Maybe we should've paid more attention to the philosophy of the current gal.

*sigh* This is what happens when I don't speak up when I know I'm right. Former-boss is not an easy guy to want to argue with. He's the type that's larger than life, a well-respected member of the scientific community with a very distinguished career in his field. His very presence commands respect - and I respect him a great deal. He's a great guy, deeply cares about the Institute we work for and the directions it's going, cares about the students that come through here, and gets very impassioned about his own work. Ask him a simple question and he'll stand there and arm-wave about it with great enthusiasm for an hour or more. He's the kind of scientist that never truly retires because the research is his life and he will be doing it until the day he dies.

And he's also supposed to know how to publish papers by now. :p

I know he's going to be royally outraged, too. It's probably a good thing that he's in Germany right now, and will have had about a week to digest the news before he gets back here to try and talk to me about it.

They better not have complained about the English this time around. :p I'm still afraid to look. Maybe tomorrow.

More Roleplaying Rambles

Well, now I have three werewolves in play and potentially four vampires being created. One potential player withdrew, and then one of the others decided he wanted to play both a werewolf and a vampire. Such are the ways of the fluctuating pool of applicants.

For the werewolves, I'm trying to get all three of them hooked up into the same scene wherein they get to rescue Brightspot, the matriarch of the fallen caern. This will just be out in the woods somewhere. The idea is that they will take her back to their own caern, and then Brightspot will tell them all the foul deeds that have befallen her caern, and then the PCs will form a pack to go retake Brightspot's caern from the Wyrm.

That's the general outline so far. This will probably take at least a few months to fully play out. By that point, hopefully there will be enough werewolf PCs in the game that the entire pack can be them without any of my NPCs helping out.

I have nothing outlined beyond that point. The pack will have its overall mission, and hopefully they will figure out for themselves how exactly they want to go about it. For me, that will be when the fun really begins. ;) The fun part is the challenge of coming up with stuff on the spot, as I need it, and trying to keep it all consistent with whatever I made up before that point. The complexities tend to mushroom at an alarming rate, and it'll start snowballing forward for quite a wild ride.

I'm looking forward to getting the vampire side of things started too. Three of the players are excellent, and the fourth, although a bit annoying, is one that I know is good once he's actually playing. I don't think he means to be a stats munchkin. He just isn't used to creating characters as actual individual people, and I suspect he's becoming quite well enlightened on an entirely different style of roleplaying than he usually does.

In some ways I wish I had offered twice as many freebie points. The backstories I get deserve to have more points associated with them. The amount of screening I've been doing already ensures that those incapable of playing such high-powered characters will probably not make it all the way through chargen. So maybe I should've just allowed that to begin with.

It's kind of interesting also that all four of the characters are shaping up to be the bookworm type, who are more for digging up cool knowledge out of musty old tomes than killing things. I should probably make up a large, attractive library for them to stumble around in. ;) This is an interesting change of pace from the majority of werewolf applicants, who almost all wanted to play the warriors. For them, the plot is therefore going to include a lot more hack-n-slash.

I'd missed GMing without even really knowing it. There was a lot of Stargate running that I enjoyed immensely while it was going on - all of them related to writing the story and watching it unfold. (None of it related to the Stupid Player Tricks going on in the background.) Now I get to do it again, and this time I know that every single player in the game is good. All in all, I couldn't ask for a better starting group. This is going to be fun. :)

And now for an interlude ... My lentil chili recipe.

1 lb ground beef
1 large green pepper, diced
1 large can of diced tomatoes (or you can blanch, de-skin, and dice a couple fresh ones, but I find that much more of a hassle than just getting a can)
1 medium onion, diced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup lentils, washed in cold water
1 can beef broth
1 can water
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
cayenne pepper
black pepper

In a gallon pot, crumble and brown the ground beef. Drain off excess fat (if you're anti-fat).

Dump the green pepper and onion into the pot and pan fry until they stop being crisp. Put the ground beef back in and add garlic. Stir. Dump in the tomatoes, beef broth, and water. Stir some more. Add lentils. Stir. Put in all the spices.

Let simmer for 40 minutes or until lentils are cooked. Add more water if it gets too thick.

:)

The chili powder I'm currently using is something local to Arizona. My boss brought some back for me the last time he went there. (He has a lot of business trips). Your mileage may vary depending on what brand you use, but I've had reasonably good results with Tones (the kind they sell at Sam's Club), and I suspect anything you order off of http://penzeys.com will be great.

I guess you can't technically call it "chili" the way I do it, but it tastes good and i like it. ;) I use lentils because I don't like most beans. Also, lentils don't require you to soak them overnight first. And to me it tastes quite good that way.

(For other dried beans: need to soak them overnight to get them softened up and ready to cook. Don't use the water you soaked them in because that's where the compounds go that give you gas.)

I usually eat the chili topped with extra-sharp cheddar, and served over white rice. I've also used my chili over baked potatoes with sour cream.

***

Two more weeks to Labor Day. I'm getting ready for it by not doing anything other than roleplaying. Trying to save up the inspirational energy for the one big run. Running my game is helping create it, too, so it works out well. ;)

In terms of food, at the moment I have a lot. I have half a pot of the chili mentioned above and about a third of a lasagna, both of which I made last weekend. That should keep me eating well through next week. I also have a small pot of clam chowder penne - which is where I take a can of Campbell's chunky clam chowder and turn it into a pasta sauce by adding some spices and other veggies.

I have enough ingredients to make other things too - a lot of it the type that's reasonably quick to do, like frozen burgers and sandwich components. (broiled Bubba burger + toasted Lenders plain bagel + cheddar + ketchup = really good.) And a wide assortment of junk food, mostly in the form of ramen noodles, that I will probably be eating during the actual weekend itself. That and Chinese takeout. But I figure if I eat large portions of healthy things in these next two weeks, it should work out well.

In some ways it's kind of interesting how my approach to roleplaying (GMing in particular) is a lot more organic than my approach to writing. At some point I ought to sit down and make some organized comparisons between the two. But not right now. Right now I've just had an ice cream sandwich and I feel a nap coming on ...

Heh

I saw that Robert had been afoot and left a bunch of encouraging posts to people. Then I thought, "darn. I didn't get one." Then I thought, "... maybe it's because you haven't posted anything, you dork." :p

(Does anyone else have arguments in the second person in their head? Or am I just strange that way?)

Anyway, so I thought maybe I should write something. Anything. :)

Unfortunately there's not much to report on the writing front. I haven't done a darn thing in relation to any novels. I've fiddled with my outline for the Labor Day novel a bit, but that's about it. Since Robert isn't going to officially enter, I'm not going to bother either. I'll still attempt to write it though. Still holding steady with the Stranger on a Bus idea.

My werewolf game has stalled out for the moment. One of my players (who is also my favorite GM) has vanished, and I don't want to continue until he gets a chance to post something. My other player doesn't seem to mind too much. Theoretically I'll have up to 5 more players, two of which are currently working on character generation (chargen), and three more of which claim to be interested and/or working on something but I have yet to see anything. Three of those are vampires, and two are werewolves.

I've been tinkering with the various plotlines in my mind for other creatures besides werewolves. There's still nothing obvious popping out as a main plot for the vampires, but I suspect I will have something by the time the first guy actually finishes something. Why?

Because he's currently being a major headache. :p He's not happy with the already-generous allotment of stat points and keeps trying to find loopholes into getting more of them. If I don't say no directly, he takes it as a yes. The published books say that there's a max of 7 flaw points, and at the moment he's managed to worm his way up to 15 so that he can buy stuff that he wasn't able to get because I refused to give him more stat points for writing a lengthy backstory.

Mind you, I did mention the possibility of more points for a good quality backstory. However, length and quality are not the same thing. His backstory, although quite lengthy, gave me almost nothing to work with, and in fact attempts to take the game focus and scope way, way way out of what I would enjoy running.

So I said no to that. Now he's trying to get creative with flaw points. Very creative. :p If I actually let him keep all of them, I would be able to come up with enough plots just to screw him on his flaws, and I won't need any external plots at all.

And to think I actually enjoyed running this guy in my freeform Stargate game. *sigh* I know he writes well, and once we start it should (hopefully) be all right, but good lord.

Aside from that, I'm kind of hoping that the other two promised vampires will be more enjoyable to work with. The two potential players are the GMs of another game in which I've signed on to help moderate. So far I haven't started helping with theirs yet. I'm slowly getting up to speed by reading through past threads (it's a very old game, been going almost 2 years now, with nearly 4800 posts). They also strongly recommended that I make a character to play in it as well, so I'm also working on that. I sent them a backstory this morning and haven't heard a response yet.

Meanwhile there's a third werewolf that's almost completed. Then he had visiting family arrive, so he won't be ready to start for at least another week. I'm hoping that by that point, the other two will have reached a point where it would make sense to introduce him.

Timing is an art form in an online game. Players are always popping in and out due to offline crises, or insufficient advanced planning for such things as school starting up. (I'm hoping I don't have any student-aged players; typically they join lots of games early in the semester before any homework sets in, and then suddenly realize that they need to quit everything.) So it's a bit of an art form trying to get the in-game timelines to line up right, so that characters can meet up for appropriate scenes without stalling out the entire game.

In the Stargate game, we pretty much just ignored time entirely. If two parties ran into each other, it didn't matter how much time elapsed for each of the separate groups. They still met up just fine as if they'd had the same amount of time. Also, we played through almost an entire out-of-game year without ever changing days or having anyone go to sleep. After a while people just kind of assumed that "a few days" had occurred between the beginning of the plotline and whenever they were at the time of posting. Even though there were no actual breaks anywhere, ever.

Then Robert mentioned wanting to play a werecat, which would require some slightly different plotlines than what would work for either the werewolves or the vampires. Fortunately, I have a couple that would actually work pretty well as solo plotlines. Now it's just a matter of seeing whether he can get ahold of the right books so he can make a character... unfortunately they're out of print, so once the stocks are gone, they're gone.

There's potential room down the road, too, for some of the other were-creatures - wererats, werespiders, and wereravens in particular. But that's something that would get set up after the vampires do. I need for the city to make sense as a consistent setting first, and that won't happen until after I have a few more vampire backstories to fiddle with. ;)

I really do like the story that's developing. It's very heavily based on the plots of Amulet I - one of the Fortress Launne novels I'm hoping to write in November. Both of the two key characters are going to be in the game - Edward Duchene (as the vampire prince) and Iorli (a werecat). Iorli wasn't originally going to get any screentime, just be a background element, but if I do end up running Robert, he's going to be featured pretty prominently.

Then the rest are additional events and characters that would've reasonably occurred in the same time period, even though they probably wouldn't fit as part of the same novel. (In particular there's a couple of powerful mages.) So the game is helping me think and plan what to do with all of that for the Nano.

There's a bunch of maintenance type things I'm kind of procrastinating as well. Namely, I need to convert it from a Werewolf game to a World of Darkness game that includes more than just werewolves. This would involve setting up more chargen info threads and figuring out how exactly I want to organize everything. I also need to revise my game ad to reflect the changing focus. But right now I'm too annoyed to look at any of it because I have to figure out how to rein in the problem vampire. *sigh*

Other things I'm doing ... playing lots of Diablo 2. The ladder season just reset last week, so everything is once more from scratch. I'm playing low level characters wearing crummy equipment again, and this time I don't have huge throngs of friends ready to donate handmedowns. I used to be a shameless items whore. I accepted anything from anyone, because I was too lazy to do the work to find my own. :p Now I'm the only one left playing so I have to find everything myself.

They also upgraded the software - and the latest version keeps causing my computer to crash. :p Hopefully they'll releaes another patch soon to fix that.

And finally, a friend passed along an interesting website - http://www.psipog.net. It's a fairly large, well-established community of psychics (except they call themselves "psionics"), with the purpose of helping each other learn how to do paranormal things. I read through the "newbies" section, and the intro PDF, and I really like their approach and view. It exactly matches mine. The paranormal abilities are not my religious beliefs. They're separate, and I have always looked at them with a fairly scientific perspective. But I always lump them in with my religious beliefs because it's easier than trying to explain this to others and come across as a nutcase. Now there's a whole site that declares it with confidence. I feel rather vindicated. And I feel like I've come full circle on yet another fairly important aspect of my life.

This has certainly been a year for those. Everything coming together from my first 30 years of being alive. The last puzzle pieces falling into place.

I read through the intro PDF and noted that I can already do most of it. Have been doing those things for decades. In a couple categories, it's almost more of a curse than a blessing to have abilities that I've had to learn how to deal with and turn off when necessary. The difference is that, now, I can finally look at all of it, and look at other people doing the same things, and not get all bent out of shape about whether or not I'm 'special' and 'different' from others. I no longer need to be 'the only one and the very best' in that category. I am no longer a unique cog looking for the one task and place in the Grand Machine of Life where I am uniquely suited to fit, and I am no longer trying to compete. There isn't just one spot. There are many. And even in that many, even if I'm not the very best at a particular thing, I am still uniquely suited to be me.

12 to 6 months ago I was finally understanding what it meant to not be different, what it means to be human, and that it is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, to be the same as everyone else and to not be an oddity. 6 months ago to now, I was coming to terms with the fact that I am an oddity, different from others, and always had been - just as I had suspected all along. Just not in the ways that I was expecting.

Now? Full circles. In all sorts of different paths, all coming together within a single year.

It makes life feel grand again.

On roleplaying

So it's now a month later, and I'm finally making the beef barley soup I said I was going to make. It was a busy month. First the science paper, then the two cruises, then that new game I'm running.

The primary GM never did come back, so I finally moved the Dark Ages Werewolf plotline out of his game and into a new one. My players (all two of them :p) both wanted to continue, and I do have enough interest in the plot premise that I think I can do it. It's a fairly simple plot premise. Basically, a major caern has fallen to the Wyrm (the really evil bad guys), and the PCs are going to need to form a pack and win it back and restore it to its original pristine condition. Since the game is a play-by-post, though, this all by itself is enough material to keep the game going for at least a year - and that's not including how complex and interesting the character interactions will probably end up getting.

I'm planning to screen pretty heavily for good players, so there should hopefully be minimal morons in the game. The tome of submission guidelines alone should scare off the vast majority of people I don't want to play with. The ones who aren't scared off will be easy to spot because they won't have read the guidelines in the first place, and are therefore the bottom of the barrel. Hence, I'll end up with good players with good characters who interact with each other and develop intriguing and wonderful relationships.

That's the plan, anyway. This is going to take a while. Weeding the gems out of the muck requires a lot of patience. (Then when you're all done finding them and putting them into the game, they suddenly develop offline lives and stop playing. :p)

I'm also planning to take a serious left turn away from World of Darkness canon, now that the game is truly my own and I can do whatever I want with it. I've never much cared for a good chunk of the published material, though Werewolf bugs me a lot less than most. At this point I've decided that the manifestations of the Wyrm will resemble the Zerg from Starcraft. That should give me all sorts of bizarre creatures to describe for them to kill. :) Obviously, a good chunk of combat might end up being more freeformed than anything else, since there aren't exactly any published stats on zerglings.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in following along to the story, I'm planning to keep everything in public threads. It's here.

I love running play by posts. It means that I don't have to figure anything out until the last possible minute. ;) And even then, I have hours to think stuff up. I've never been a fast thinker and there's no way I could ever run something tabletop. I'm hoping I can run this game about like the last one I did (Stargate). It's a plot-directed game, in that the PCs have an actual end goal to work toward, but they can get there any way they want. Things that they do will have consequences in the setting and to each other. If the players are good, I'm mostly just sitting there as a referee, playing the bad guys based on the very simple motivations that they have (defend this desecrated caern :p). Any new setting detail that gets developed will be when a PC needs to ask a question about it, at which point I'll make stuff up on the spot. The trick is to keep it all consistent with whatever I've made up before that point, and the farther in the game goes, the more complex it'll get. Should be fun if it works. :)

It worked very well for Stargate for almost a year. Eventually that game ended, just before the conclusion, because the number of dorks reached my breaking point and I just couldn't take it anymore. There were also some other OOC issues with players who were formerly friends. Plus the fact that most of the best players had wandered off due to circumstances in Real Life. By the time I called it quits, I only had 4 players left, and they weren't positioned well to continue the plot. So I just ended up writing a bunch of fast-forward conclusions to get them to the end. Which they were pretty much there already anyway. If anyone is really bored and feels like reading the Stargate game, it's here [2009 Sep 26 - long gone now]. :p It's been deleted but not yet wiped from the rpol database. Despite all the OOC problems associated with the game, we wrote a lot of good stuff in there together.

I guess I should mention that Stargate worked best when there were around 10 active players going at any given time. I'm hoping I can build up the Werewolf game to be around that same size as well. I'm hoping that there's enough interest on rpol for a Dark Ages Werewolf game at all :p - I'm the only one, as far as I know, so they would at least all have to come to me.

Play by posts are nice in that you can have more players than you can in offline games. Offline, you have to deal with separate groups one at a time, while everyone else sits around waiting. Online, you can post for all of them at once. The dynamic is entirely different.

Slower, but no better or worse. You do have to have a lot of patience, as you don't often get a response to your post for quite a while. Sometimes your entire group is online at the same time, and then everyone can post pretty fast - which averages out around 10-20 minutes between each post. Most of the time, though, you have to wait a few hours or days.

I was in one game for a while, a Vampire, that had a meteoric life. The first two in-game days took us only three months to play - not because we were fast-forwarding through everything, but because we really were playing that fast. One GM, around 10 players, and at our peak we were doing 70-100 posts per day, every day, most of them between 10pm and 2am U.S. east coast time. For three months. And these were not one-liners, these were good quality posts. We were insane.

Needless to say we burnt out. That game sucked up most of my time outside of work, and *cough* some of my work hours as well. I was obsessed. The GM was obsessed. 5 months later it just wasn't going to work anymore. The GM had serious issues that came to a head, and I was the one taking the brunt of her venting because somehow we had become friends-like. It kind of died a slow, agonizing death for the following 5 months, until finally we just couldn't do it anymore. It never did come to an official end. The GM just stopped coming back. I still have the game on my sticky list, mainly because I haven't gotten around to archiving it yet, and at this point I still don't know whether I would want to finish playing out the plot. It's been over a year since it stopped. I know that several of the players still don't want to even think about that game again. But the ride, at least the first part, was fun while it lasted.

Hmmm. And here I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my roleplaying to indulge PoetMage's curiosity. :p Guess I can really work up a rant when I get going on something. Which parts did you most enjoy reading about? I can rant about that more than the other parts next time. ;)

In other news... August is looking like it'll be more quiet overall. I'm going to need all the time I can muster to work out Stranger on a Bus. Especially if I do cough up the $50 to enter it officially.

At the moment I have a very sparse plot outline for where it starts and where it ends. There's a bunch of possible scenes in the middle, and I have a list of locations that the bus will stop. I have no clue what exactly will happen at most of those stops, except that it will probably involve Alan (God in disguise) doing something incomprehensible. I've also decided that the bus driver, Ned, is going to drive the bus personally the whole way. He's going to inexplicably not need to sleep or rest, as well as inexplicably be scheduled by Greyhound to do all of that driving. He's not going to understand that at all, but that's okay, he doesn't need to.

I need to work out names for all the places, and maybe some of the minor characters. In my mind it sort of resembles a roleplaying game. I have two key characters (two PCs) with fairly straightforward motivations and abilities, the key obstacles to overcome and antagonists with motivations and abilities, some helper minor characters (friendly NPCs), a point A and a point B, and some vague setting info for the bus trip along the way. That's all you really need to start a roleplaying game. Not sure how well this'll work for a novel - especially a novel that's to be written in 3 days.

I think I can I think I can ...

I've read through the Survival Guide on the 3-Day Novel website too. There's actually a whole discussion thread buried in there, where you can get a play-by-play of a bunch of people doing it. Before, during, and after. I didn't read all of it, but got enough of a flavor that it looks like the crack version of Nano's cocaine. ;)

And now I'm enjoying my beef barley soup. It tastes pretty good already, straight after cooking it, and it'll be marvelous tomorrow. I always eat a bowl of my soup right after it's done, even knowing it isn't done done yet. Call it my personal soup-making tradition.