48,176 total freewrite words.
2,767 total words from before the freewrite marathon.
50,943 total words for the February Novel Dare.
:) :) :)
Okay, it's dawn now and I need to go to bed.
2005/02/28
2005/02/26
ding!
That's it folks, the writing's done, the 37,315-word freewrite challenge is OVAH!
Well, let's see how I did. 35,474 words in the past 24 hours. I got way too complacent this afternoon, got myself sucked into too many interesting IM conversations, and didn't write. So I fell about 2k words short of the goal.
But still, 35k freewrite words in 24 hours is still way more than I've ever done before. So it's still a fairly impressive feat in its own right. ;) Plus it puts me a lot closer to doing the 50k words I dared to do for the February Novel Dare. A bit of freewriting on Sunday and Monday, and I should be able to get in the rest of it really easily.
I also informally clocked myself a few times. I seem to hit 80 wpm as a good, comfy writing speed. Near the end there when I was trying to crank it all out as fast as possible, it gusted up briefly to 92 wpm. But at that speed there's a lot of typos, and my hands cramp really fast.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the results. The ultimate point was to get me off my duff and do some writing. And it did. Furthermore, it caused Robert to challenge me to write with him in the 3-Day Novel dare over Labor Day, and I think I'm going to do it. At least, I'll put in the prep work for a novel to write, and decide at the last minute whether I want to cough up the $50 to do it officially. Plus I did learn a few things about myself and my writing processes. So all in all, it was a successful challenge. :)
Well, let's see how I did. 35,474 words in the past 24 hours. I got way too complacent this afternoon, got myself sucked into too many interesting IM conversations, and didn't write. So I fell about 2k words short of the goal.
But still, 35k freewrite words in 24 hours is still way more than I've ever done before. So it's still a fairly impressive feat in its own right. ;) Plus it puts me a lot closer to doing the 50k words I dared to do for the February Novel Dare. A bit of freewriting on Sunday and Monday, and I should be able to get in the rest of it really easily.
I also informally clocked myself a few times. I seem to hit 80 wpm as a good, comfy writing speed. Near the end there when I was trying to crank it all out as fast as possible, it gusted up briefly to 92 wpm. But at that speed there's a lot of typos, and my hands cramp really fast.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the results. The ultimate point was to get me off my duff and do some writing. And it did. Furthermore, it caused Robert to challenge me to write with him in the 3-Day Novel dare over Labor Day, and I think I'm going to do it. At least, I'll put in the prep work for a novel to write, and decide at the last minute whether I want to cough up the $50 to do it officially. Plus I did learn a few things about myself and my writing processes. So all in all, it was a successful challenge. :)
halfway through the freewrite :)
20,255 words at 5:30pm. I slept from 6am until about 1:30pm, when I was rudely awakened by the phone ringing and then had to drag myself to Sam's Club, because the person that I go with and leech off the card of (she gets it free too from her parents' business), who has not had time to go in months and therefore I'm out of everything, finally decided she wanted to go Right Now. The third time she called, which was just before 1:30, she was calling to tell me that she was driving there already and if I wanted to go I better hurry up. :p
So by the time all of that was said and done, it was 4pm. So I got a very late start on today. I have written about 5k words in the past 2 hours, which is not really that good if I still want to get done in time for a party I want to go to at 9:30pm. I might have to arrive very late ...
Oh well. Onwards. Upwards. :)
So by the time all of that was said and done, it was 4pm. So I got a very late start on today. I have written about 5k words in the past 2 hours, which is not really that good if I still want to get done in time for a party I want to go to at 9:30pm. I might have to arrive very late ...
Oh well. Onwards. Upwards. :)
quarter of the way through the freewrite :)
I started at midnight. At 4am I had 10,312 words. That's over a quarter of the way to the goal already. :)
It turns out that yes, I *can* rant at great length about my life, if I have an excuse to do it. Most of the time I keep quiet, but in this freewrite I'm just letting it all hang out. It's kind of interesting what kinds of things are popping up in all the myriad digressions. The whole thing is just one big gigantic digression. I'll start a paragraph saying one thing, and by the time I get to the end I'm talking about something entirely different. Then eventually I run out of steam on a particular tangent, and have to scroll up to figure out what I was trying to say originally, and then I'm merrily on my way down a different tangent. ;)
Anyway, not bad for 4 hours - at least 1.5 hours of which was breaks. 37,315 should be a piece of cake if I keep this up, and I'll even be able to afford sleeping. ;)
It turns out that yes, I *can* rant at great length about my life, if I have an excuse to do it. Most of the time I keep quiet, but in this freewrite I'm just letting it all hang out. It's kind of interesting what kinds of things are popping up in all the myriad digressions. The whole thing is just one big gigantic digression. I'll start a paragraph saying one thing, and by the time I get to the end I'm talking about something entirely different. Then eventually I run out of steam on a particular tangent, and have to scroll up to figure out what I was trying to say originally, and then I'm merrily on my way down a different tangent. ;)
Anyway, not bad for 4 hours - at least 1.5 hours of which was breaks. 37,315 should be a piece of cake if I keep this up, and I'll even be able to afford sleeping. ;)
2005/02/23
freewriting
Well, I've been challenged by a friend to crank out 37,315 words in a single 24-hour period. She even said that she'd read them if I actually managed to do it. ;)
Unfortunately, I don't have anything as worthwhile to say as Robert with that many words, so it'll have to be a freewrite. There's one more weekend left in February. Let's see if I can manage to hit my 50k goal this month after all. :)
In other news, last night for roleplay, I wrote a cute little scene about two guys at a picnic having a really dumb argument about girls. I left them coming to blows by the end of my post. It'll be interesting where that goes when the girl they're arguing about arrives at the picnic (which should be the next post - different player). ;)
Unfortunately, I don't have anything as worthwhile to say as Robert with that many words, so it'll have to be a freewrite. There's one more weekend left in February. Let's see if I can manage to hit my 50k goal this month after all. :)
In other news, last night for roleplay, I wrote a cute little scene about two guys at a picnic having a really dumb argument about girls. I left them coming to blows by the end of my post. It'll be interesting where that goes when the girl they're arguing about arrives at the picnic (which should be the next post - different player). ;)
2005/02/22
Yacketing
I just wanted to say that I really enjoy reading people's rants. The more sleep-deprived and longwinded it gets, the more fun it seems to be to read. ;)
Sheba really ought to be writing Dave Barry like columns. :p "Muslim Jew" ... *still laughing at that one*
Anyhow. That's all I wanted to say. ;)
Sheba really ought to be writing Dave Barry like columns. :p "Muslim Jew" ... *still laughing at that one*
Anyhow. That's all I wanted to say. ;)
2005/02/16
Our lives are interesting .. to us
The current random quote says:
"Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down." --W. B. Kinsella
And yet we spend a lot of time posting about our lives, and reading about each other's lives, here in these blogs.
What makes us do this? It's true that maybe the individual details are relatively mundane. We worry about jobs, school, kids, our health. We get annoyed by our families. A lot of things go on in our daily lives that aren't that different from what goes on in the lives of everyone else, except that we all write and angst about wordcounts. But we read (and write) the blogs because we care what happens to each other.
How exactly did that happen though? How do you start caring about a character and what happens to him/her? It seems like a chicken and egg kind of thing, in a lot of ways. You don't care about the details of their lives unless you care about them to begin with. But how do you care about them to begin with if all you have is the details of their lives?
(a lengthy pause to ponder)
So obviously that can't be all there is. The other part is that we also respond to each other's blogs. I care about the people who care about me.
Also, I care about the people whom I can either relate to well because they're going through stuff that I might've gone through before or am going through at the moment.
Or there's some kind of intriguing quirk about them that sparks my imagination. That spark doesn't have to be big. Nobody has to come out with a grand revelation that they're really a dragon from another planet.
Hmmmmm.
"Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down." --W. B. Kinsella
And yet we spend a lot of time posting about our lives, and reading about each other's lives, here in these blogs.
What makes us do this? It's true that maybe the individual details are relatively mundane. We worry about jobs, school, kids, our health. We get annoyed by our families. A lot of things go on in our daily lives that aren't that different from what goes on in the lives of everyone else, except that we all write and angst about wordcounts. But we read (and write) the blogs because we care what happens to each other.
How exactly did that happen though? How do you start caring about a character and what happens to him/her? It seems like a chicken and egg kind of thing, in a lot of ways. You don't care about the details of their lives unless you care about them to begin with. But how do you care about them to begin with if all you have is the details of their lives?
(a lengthy pause to ponder)
So obviously that can't be all there is. The other part is that we also respond to each other's blogs. I care about the people who care about me.
Also, I care about the people whom I can either relate to well because they're going through stuff that I might've gone through before or am going through at the moment.
Or there's some kind of intriguing quirk about them that sparks my imagination. That spark doesn't have to be big. Nobody has to come out with a grand revelation that they're really a dragon from another planet.
Hmmmmm.
2005/02/15
Throwing my lot into the bandwagon ...
I don't know whether everyone involved in the Novel Dare is using the Challenge Participants page, but I do watch the wordcounts on it to see how everyone else is doing. For the people who are right on target: Yay! :) Go You(s)! (or actually, here in the Deep South of the U.S., that would be "Go Y'all!").
Unfortunately, I'm not in that group. I don't think I ever was. I don't feel bad about it, really. I guess deep down I already knew that the time wasn't right for me to crank out another 50k this month. It would do no good to beat myself up with guilt about something that's not going to happen anyway.
Instead, I've been sort of in a longterm ruminating, reflecting type of mode. Gathering myself together before the next Big Thing that I do end up doing. Whatever that might be. Even while nothing much changes about my life in an external sense, a lot has happened for me, inside, in the past several months (and years). Revelations, ephiphanies, the completing of life's puzzles. There's a lot to think about.
A friend of mine has a paradigm that I like. Life is about completing puzzles. You spend your time acquiring the puzzle pieces, and putting them together. Then the first puzzles you complete become the puzzle pieces for the next level of puzzle. As I'm currently seeing it, you have level 0 puzzles up until you hit puberty, and then you start working on level 1 puzzles as a teenager. I'm 31. Last summer I completed a level 2 puzzle. Amidst a tumultous event that nearly lost me my grasp on reality, a little voice in the back of my mind told me, very simply, that I had passed. (Passed what? I didn't know at the time, as I pretty much felt like I'd failed miserably. I'm only starting to know now.)
Sometimes you can fail to acquire a level 0 puzzle piece until you're working on a level 2 or level 3 puzzle. You might have a small hole that goes all the way up, and the other pieces don't quite fit together exactly right. Then, when you finally find that missing piece and fill it, things can very suddenly fall into place in a grand moment of "Ohhh!" That's what happened to me when I found a piece like that in December. I guess one might say that I'm still reeling.
But it's a good sort of reeling. I have a firm grasp on who I am. I'm thrilled beyond belief to finally know what I am. It's not something that will do anything but get me severely ostracized if I talk about it too much in public or too casually. But there are so many beautiful silver linings to being a nadle that I have no words to describe it all.
A nadle is the Navajo word for the third gender. The ones who are neither fully male, nor fully female. The hermaphrodites, the intersexed, and the gender dysphoric. I have a male brain inside of a female body. I wouldn't call myself a transsexual because I don't actually want to become male. So, "nadle" is a very good word. And that's what I am.
It's interesting how that worked out. How things all fall into place. The game that I most enjoy roleplaying in has as one of its central theme, what does it mean to be human? A personal theme for me, that seems to make its way into a great many of my serious characters, is the difference between who and what. Who am I? What am I? Those questions are completely different, but you can't answer one without the other. Those are the questions that I most want to answer. I imagine my writing (all art that I do) will reflect them in great detail whenever I finally do get seriously started.
But I'm not really ready yet.
My goals for the rest of this month are fairly modest. Write whatever I can, whenever I have something to write about. Try to finish off those last few scenes from Temple. Polish up Dragonfly and see about submitting it somewhere, as Robert suggested to me elsewhere. I've never submitted anything before; it might be a good way for me to find out, a little, what all of that is about. Maybe work on some of the things from my Tying Up Loose Ends entry.
And continue to think. Continue to live.
Unfortunately, I'm not in that group. I don't think I ever was. I don't feel bad about it, really. I guess deep down I already knew that the time wasn't right for me to crank out another 50k this month. It would do no good to beat myself up with guilt about something that's not going to happen anyway.
Instead, I've been sort of in a longterm ruminating, reflecting type of mode. Gathering myself together before the next Big Thing that I do end up doing. Whatever that might be. Even while nothing much changes about my life in an external sense, a lot has happened for me, inside, in the past several months (and years). Revelations, ephiphanies, the completing of life's puzzles. There's a lot to think about.
A friend of mine has a paradigm that I like. Life is about completing puzzles. You spend your time acquiring the puzzle pieces, and putting them together. Then the first puzzles you complete become the puzzle pieces for the next level of puzzle. As I'm currently seeing it, you have level 0 puzzles up until you hit puberty, and then you start working on level 1 puzzles as a teenager. I'm 31. Last summer I completed a level 2 puzzle. Amidst a tumultous event that nearly lost me my grasp on reality, a little voice in the back of my mind told me, very simply, that I had passed. (Passed what? I didn't know at the time, as I pretty much felt like I'd failed miserably. I'm only starting to know now.)
Sometimes you can fail to acquire a level 0 puzzle piece until you're working on a level 2 or level 3 puzzle. You might have a small hole that goes all the way up, and the other pieces don't quite fit together exactly right. Then, when you finally find that missing piece and fill it, things can very suddenly fall into place in a grand moment of "Ohhh!" That's what happened to me when I found a piece like that in December. I guess one might say that I'm still reeling.
But it's a good sort of reeling. I have a firm grasp on who I am. I'm thrilled beyond belief to finally know what I am. It's not something that will do anything but get me severely ostracized if I talk about it too much in public or too casually. But there are so many beautiful silver linings to being a nadle that I have no words to describe it all.
A nadle is the Navajo word for the third gender. The ones who are neither fully male, nor fully female. The hermaphrodites, the intersexed, and the gender dysphoric. I have a male brain inside of a female body. I wouldn't call myself a transsexual because I don't actually want to become male. So, "nadle" is a very good word. And that's what I am.
It's interesting how that worked out. How things all fall into place. The game that I most enjoy roleplaying in has as one of its central theme, what does it mean to be human? A personal theme for me, that seems to make its way into a great many of my serious characters, is the difference between who and what. Who am I? What am I? Those questions are completely different, but you can't answer one without the other. Those are the questions that I most want to answer. I imagine my writing (all art that I do) will reflect them in great detail whenever I finally do get seriously started.
But I'm not really ready yet.
My goals for the rest of this month are fairly modest. Write whatever I can, whenever I have something to write about. Try to finish off those last few scenes from Temple. Polish up Dragonfly and see about submitting it somewhere, as Robert suggested to me elsewhere. I've never submitted anything before; it might be a good way for me to find out, a little, what all of that is about. Maybe work on some of the things from my Tying Up Loose Ends entry.
And continue to think. Continue to live.
2005/02/09
Dragonfly
Well, I wrote .. something ... :D.
I had extremely surreal, complex dreams this morning. The last one before I woke up was about a giant dragonfly that was big enough for me to cling to its back while it flew me places. Later on, in the way dreams tend to segue smoothly into new scenes without any reason whatsoever, I was a 60 year old man dying of heart failure. The dragonfly was more of a sympathetic spirit in that part of the dream than an actual creature. By the time I woke up, I was convinced I was dying. (And that I was a 60 year old man with a wife and all sorts of family that I don't actually have.) It took me walking all the way into the bathroom before I remembered otherwise ...
Anyway, so that dream kind of nibbled at the back of my mind all day long. Finally I figured I needed to write it down. So I did.
It turned into a bizarre, surreal abstract piece of 846 words. That I actually kind of like. It was really cool, despite the lack of plot and characters. ;) I seem to be pretty good at writing strong endings, as this one has a very strong ending. I'm not entirely sure the rest of it leads up to the ending quite so well, but since it's a freewrite, that doesn't really bother me. I wrote it for me, and I felt the oomph behind the ending, and therefore it's good enough.
So, Novel Dare day 9, 2767 words. ;)
I had extremely surreal, complex dreams this morning. The last one before I woke up was about a giant dragonfly that was big enough for me to cling to its back while it flew me places. Later on, in the way dreams tend to segue smoothly into new scenes without any reason whatsoever, I was a 60 year old man dying of heart failure. The dragonfly was more of a sympathetic spirit in that part of the dream than an actual creature. By the time I woke up, I was convinced I was dying. (And that I was a 60 year old man with a wife and all sorts of family that I don't actually have.) It took me walking all the way into the bathroom before I remembered otherwise ...
Anyway, so that dream kind of nibbled at the back of my mind all day long. Finally I figured I needed to write it down. So I did.
It turned into a bizarre, surreal abstract piece of 846 words. That I actually kind of like. It was really cool, despite the lack of plot and characters. ;) I seem to be pretty good at writing strong endings, as this one has a very strong ending. I'm not entirely sure the rest of it leads up to the ending quite so well, but since it's a freewrite, that doesn't really bother me. I wrote it for me, and I felt the oomph behind the ending, and therefore it's good enough.
So, Novel Dare day 9, 2767 words. ;)
2005/02/05
I figured stuff out :)
The exact details of Tainting. I figured it out. :) *bounces around with glee* 921 words of worldbuilding today, after a lengthy brainstorming session while lying in bed doing nothing this morning. Now I can put some serious thought into planning for Amulet I.
Which, actually ... it may well be better to have two separate novels after all. One for the actual amulet incident itself, and one about Thomas and Jacob. The more I recall about the first amulet incident, the more I recall how elaborate and complex it all actually was. (I still haven't read my notes about it from when I first wrote it down. I might discover still more details that I'm failing to recall right at the moment.)
Ironically, the amulet incident was the very first story that I came up with in the whole thing. It's based on a fight between two online friends over a Diablo II amulet. Unfortunately, the two people who had the fight no longer talk to each other; one of them now hates the other, and the other feels bad but can't think of what to do to fix things. I don't think it's fixable. The two people have such completely divergent views of how life works and how socializing works, that there was just no way to get them to see things from the other's perspective. (I tried, very hard, at the time.) They simply lack the proper frames of reference to grok each other.
Anyway, so my story pretty much takes that core argument and turns it upside down and sideways with some new details of who wanted to do what to whom and why. And then bashes it into place in the WoD (and soon the Fortress Launne setting). The personalities of the two people having the argument are going to be pretty similar to the actual people who did it in real life. It's not necessary for that to be the case, but it saves me some work of coming up with personalities from scratch.
I can write Amulet I from the perspectives of the people doing the arguing (Iorli and Edward), and Thomas - although he's in it - doesn't really need to have that big of a role. He was just a pawn for the whole thing, up until it ended when he killed Edward. I'm not sure whether he even needs POV. Because ... I can just take Thomas's perspective on the whole incident and stick it into a second novel with Jacob as flashbacks, as I'd thought before. So I might end up telling parts of the story twice, but it should still be different enough that it will still work out well. What Thomas got out of it was definitely nothing like what Edward and Iorli were seeing.
Anyway, all of that aside, the whole process of Tainting is a fairly crucial bit of setting material for both Jacob's and Thomas's stories. I couldn't proceed until I had it worked out. And so today I did. :) It's sort of a weird hodgepodge of VtM embracing and vampirehood, the way energy works amongst Anitaverse vampires, and bits and pieces of my personal existentialist views of the way reality operates.
Hmm. Actually that makes for a good working title, too. "Taint." Since that's basically what it's going to be about. Them angsting over their Tainting experiences. ;)
In other news, I wrote 1001 words in the past 24 hours toward Temple. :) No, it's not that grand a feat by the wordcount perspective - but I did finish off a scene that had been hanging since November (I stopped in the middle because at that point I had no clue what to write next), and started another one. So, some progress is going on with the novel too. The main downside right now is that I seem to be incapable of playing the characters that are prominently featured in the remaining scenes. Hopefully I'll manage to pick back up on them before the month is up.
So now my new goals for the rest of February: Finish off the last few scenes of Temple in first-draft quantity-over-quality fashion. Start seriously planning out either Amulet I or Taint. Maybe I can write up one or both for SSFMuse's Summer Fun Run, which is a two-month challenge over the summer.
Which, actually ... it may well be better to have two separate novels after all. One for the actual amulet incident itself, and one about Thomas and Jacob. The more I recall about the first amulet incident, the more I recall how elaborate and complex it all actually was. (I still haven't read my notes about it from when I first wrote it down. I might discover still more details that I'm failing to recall right at the moment.)
Ironically, the amulet incident was the very first story that I came up with in the whole thing. It's based on a fight between two online friends over a Diablo II amulet. Unfortunately, the two people who had the fight no longer talk to each other; one of them now hates the other, and the other feels bad but can't think of what to do to fix things. I don't think it's fixable. The two people have such completely divergent views of how life works and how socializing works, that there was just no way to get them to see things from the other's perspective. (I tried, very hard, at the time.) They simply lack the proper frames of reference to grok each other.
Anyway, so my story pretty much takes that core argument and turns it upside down and sideways with some new details of who wanted to do what to whom and why. And then bashes it into place in the WoD (and soon the Fortress Launne setting). The personalities of the two people having the argument are going to be pretty similar to the actual people who did it in real life. It's not necessary for that to be the case, but it saves me some work of coming up with personalities from scratch.
I can write Amulet I from the perspectives of the people doing the arguing (Iorli and Edward), and Thomas - although he's in it - doesn't really need to have that big of a role. He was just a pawn for the whole thing, up until it ended when he killed Edward. I'm not sure whether he even needs POV. Because ... I can just take Thomas's perspective on the whole incident and stick it into a second novel with Jacob as flashbacks, as I'd thought before. So I might end up telling parts of the story twice, but it should still be different enough that it will still work out well. What Thomas got out of it was definitely nothing like what Edward and Iorli were seeing.
Anyway, all of that aside, the whole process of Tainting is a fairly crucial bit of setting material for both Jacob's and Thomas's stories. I couldn't proceed until I had it worked out. And so today I did. :) It's sort of a weird hodgepodge of VtM embracing and vampirehood, the way energy works amongst Anitaverse vampires, and bits and pieces of my personal existentialist views of the way reality operates.
Hmm. Actually that makes for a good working title, too. "Taint." Since that's basically what it's going to be about. Them angsting over their Tainting experiences. ;)
In other news, I wrote 1001 words in the past 24 hours toward Temple. :) No, it's not that grand a feat by the wordcount perspective - but I did finish off a scene that had been hanging since November (I stopped in the middle because at that point I had no clue what to write next), and started another one. So, some progress is going on with the novel too. The main downside right now is that I seem to be incapable of playing the characters that are prominently featured in the remaining scenes. Hopefully I'll manage to pick back up on them before the month is up.
So now my new goals for the rest of February: Finish off the last few scenes of Temple in first-draft quantity-over-quality fashion. Start seriously planning out either Amulet I or Taint. Maybe I can write up one or both for SSFMuse's Summer Fun Run, which is a two-month challenge over the summer.
2005/02/04
Fortress Launne
Well, I spent my evening looking over my city's timeline. After a lot of thinking and tinkering, I think the series is going to have six novels.
1. Temple - this is what I'm working on now. Basically, Felicia (the head of the temple) makes a whole bunch of tragic mistakes in a row and causes a war. ;) I'm working on making her series of errors more plausible by adding an accomplice that has her own underhanded goals to confuse the mix. This accomplice, Ashley, is who the majority of my remaining scenes-to-be-written are going to focus on. I'm planning to dive back into it this weekend.
2. Amulet I - in which Jacob and Thomas meet, become friends, and share their life stories with each other. Also will cover stuff revolving around Janis when she's in her 20s, including when she first met Thomas. The first amulet incident is not meaty enough to be a novel by itself, so it would work better as a lengthy series of flashbacks for Thomas.
3. Amulet II - in which Antoine and Adrien are ousted from the city by Mindy. (It's way more complex than that, but that sums it up pretty well...). This will also need to introduce Arthur Glorian, Sally Anne, and possibly Sarabelle. I might also toss in the subplot about the caern, but it's not related. It just happens to occur at the same time as the main events.
4. Triangle - in which Nathaniel first establishes the foundations of the giant, city-wide ward to bind the demon. Nathaniel, Henry, and Antoine have a huge fight about what should go where in the founding of the city.
5. Dragon and Phoenix - Jalai grows into her birthright. Lots of other people try to take it away from her. This one is the closest to a 'sequel' to Temple, though it isn't really.
6. The Fall of Myan - an army of zombies wreaks havoc. ;)
7. There would've been one about the Return of Thomas to Fortress Launne, but unfortunately at the end of Temple, Janis talks him out of leaving in the first place. :p So, I'm going to have to rethink this one. (My characters decided not to play out what I wanted them to... doesn't affect Temple all that much, but it does affect all the books set after it.)
others:
Mudawi Three
Nathaniel and the Demon
These two would be set way in the distant past, and not in Fortress Launne.
My overall plan at this point is to finish writing the first-draft scenes for Temple, possibly get the second draft cranked out after that, and then work out the details for a different book in time for next November (Nanowrimo). My thoughts at this point are to do either Amulet I or Amulet II next.
The trouble is that I don't think I can write these books one at a time all the way to finish, because they're all from the same setting and share the same timeline, and stuff is interconnected between them. I might have to do all 6 of them together. What can I say, clearly I'm only going to be rich and famous as a writer post-humously. ;)
1. Temple - this is what I'm working on now. Basically, Felicia (the head of the temple) makes a whole bunch of tragic mistakes in a row and causes a war. ;) I'm working on making her series of errors more plausible by adding an accomplice that has her own underhanded goals to confuse the mix. This accomplice, Ashley, is who the majority of my remaining scenes-to-be-written are going to focus on. I'm planning to dive back into it this weekend.
2. Amulet I - in which Jacob and Thomas meet, become friends, and share their life stories with each other. Also will cover stuff revolving around Janis when she's in her 20s, including when she first met Thomas. The first amulet incident is not meaty enough to be a novel by itself, so it would work better as a lengthy series of flashbacks for Thomas.
3. Amulet II - in which Antoine and Adrien are ousted from the city by Mindy. (It's way more complex than that, but that sums it up pretty well...). This will also need to introduce Arthur Glorian, Sally Anne, and possibly Sarabelle. I might also toss in the subplot about the caern, but it's not related. It just happens to occur at the same time as the main events.
4. Triangle - in which Nathaniel first establishes the foundations of the giant, city-wide ward to bind the demon. Nathaniel, Henry, and Antoine have a huge fight about what should go where in the founding of the city.
5. Dragon and Phoenix - Jalai grows into her birthright. Lots of other people try to take it away from her. This one is the closest to a 'sequel' to Temple, though it isn't really.
6. The Fall of Myan - an army of zombies wreaks havoc. ;)
7. There would've been one about the Return of Thomas to Fortress Launne, but unfortunately at the end of Temple, Janis talks him out of leaving in the first place. :p So, I'm going to have to rethink this one. (My characters decided not to play out what I wanted them to... doesn't affect Temple all that much, but it does affect all the books set after it.)
others:
Mudawi Three
Nathaniel and the Demon
These two would be set way in the distant past, and not in Fortress Launne.
My overall plan at this point is to finish writing the first-draft scenes for Temple, possibly get the second draft cranked out after that, and then work out the details for a different book in time for next November (Nanowrimo). My thoughts at this point are to do either Amulet I or Amulet II next.
The trouble is that I don't think I can write these books one at a time all the way to finish, because they're all from the same setting and share the same timeline, and stuff is interconnected between them. I might have to do all 6 of them together. What can I say, clearly I'm only going to be rich and famous as a writer post-humously. ;)
2005/02/03
Irony
As of Day 3:
Novel Dare - 83 words. (of which 11 were written yesterday.)
Yesterday's Blog entry - 2029 words. :p
Hmm. I'm definitely barking up the wrong tree, what say. ;) Reading back over yesterday's tome, though, I'm thinking I ought to use up blog space more often to describe my Lauderburough stuff. I work through things by talking about it with an audience in mind. So even if none of it will net any actual finished products anytime soon, at least I'll be worldbuilding and keeping up my own interest. Then when I do finally write the novels, they'll be that much better organized and constructed. :D
Novel Dare - 83 words. (of which 11 were written yesterday.)
Yesterday's Blog entry - 2029 words. :p
Hmm. I'm definitely barking up the wrong tree, what say. ;) Reading back over yesterday's tome, though, I'm thinking I ought to use up blog space more often to describe my Lauderburough stuff. I work through things by talking about it with an audience in mind. So even if none of it will net any actual finished products anytime soon, at least I'll be worldbuilding and keeping up my own interest. Then when I do finally write the novels, they'll be that much better organized and constructed. :D
Once more unto the breach ...
After a lot of rumination, I've decided that the best use of my Novel Dare time is to continue working on my Nano novel. There is still a lot of stuff left that I need to write the first time. Most of it is in the latter half of the novel (at least by the revised order of scenes, more on that in a moment). I had originally planned to do my second draft rewrite in the order that the book would be read - but almost immediately got stuck and then stalled out. There's a couple of opening scenes that I just don't know how to make go yet. And because up until now I've been refusing to skip ahead, I've been stalled since the end of December. So for Novel Dare, I'm going to dump that whole concept and just go back to writing it in whatever order I feel like until all the scenes are done.
So a quick rundown of the story behind my story. ;)
Two and a half years ago I was invited to join an online roleplaying game through IMs. I made a character for it. His name is Thomas. It was a Vampire: The Masquerade (VtM) game, and he's a Gangrel. It turned out that the GM was very interested in character development, and she would keep asking me all sorts of intriguing questions into Thomas's past, his personality quirks and where they came from, etc., which sparked me to keep writing up backstory until I had around 7 single-spaced pages. Longest backstory for a roleplay character I'd ever written, up to that point. (Actually I think it *still* stands as the longest one.)
A few months of playing with her later, I was inspired to create the city where he had come from before he moved into the GM's city, for the purpose of eventually running a game set in it. Basically I threw together every roleplay character I've ever played into the same city, and then figured out what exactly they would do and how they all niched out. There were about 10 of them initially. Then I added in some supporting characters based on ones that other people had played with mine. From that point, it became necessary to fill in all of the standard powerhouse slots (prince, primogen, etc.), and so I had to make a few new characters on top of that. Those weren't entirely from scratch either, since my city (Lauderburough) is based on a real-life city (Fort Lauderdale) and I rampantly borrowed local historical figures. Also, everyone that was mentioned in Thomas's backstory had to be in there. All of that got me up to about 30 key characters with major roles in the development of the city.
Well, in the midst of figuring out what all of these people do in the city, they started to get into each others' ways. Voila, conflicts. Several major plotlines were born.
Fast forward through that process for a few months, and soon I had a fairly detailed timeline of the city from its founding until present times. The timeline noted when each of my key characters arrived, why they first came, and when they left (if they left) and why that was. The backbone behind it all was, of course, the history of my original roleplay character. The initial plot premises in the timeline were all focused on Thomas. But then most of the other 30 characters started to take on lives of their own as well. It was all very organic, how it just kept growing and developing and expanding.
At that point, I was a really crappy writer. Really, truly awful. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to use that lovely outline of characters and plots, and write a series of novels out of it. I wanted to, and I tried a few times, but quickly gave up due to the fact that I didn't know how to write, at all.
Of course I wasn't exactly trying that hard at the time either, seeing as how it was IM games, where short and fast was the way to go. But that first game with the GM (who eventually became my best friend) was a solo game, and as we played, our writing gradually got more and more elaborate.
Then I found rpol.net. It's a play-by-post site. I dabbled there, decided I liked it, and it was a good match for the way we were roleplaying anyway. We weren't writing IM-style posts anymore. She would take up to 20 minutes at a time to write several paragraphs worth of stuff, when we had agreed to a max of 6 minutes when we'd first started. I was responding in kind, though I did still try to keep it short and sweet. My writing skills were improving. I got myself heavily involved in several games on rpol.
Fast forward about 8 months. Last year I joined a game where writing quality was very much emphasized. The minimum post length seemed to be about 4 paragraphs. My maximum post length back then was about 4 paragraphs. :p I was panicking about my ability to keep up the same kind of length and quality as the other players. But I took the plunge and stuck with the game.
Boy am I glad I did. That game has become one of the most rewarding writing and roleplaying experiences I've ever been involved with. :) And my writing skill grew in leaps and bounds. I found that not only could I reach the high bar, I could indeed go over it.
Fast forward almost another year, to last November. My best friend (the same former GM who initially ran the game where Thomas was made) passed me a link to Nanowrimo. It was 4am on November 6, I read it, decided to try, signed up, went to bed, lay there panicking about what the heck I was going to write ... and I remembered Lauderburough.
The Flattening of a Temple (title thought up on the spot, while I was filling out my profile on the Nano site), is one of the fairly meaty complex plots from the Lauderburough timeline. I started writing it the following afternoon. 22 days and 50,163 words later, I had won. :) It worked out almost perfectly too. It was right around 48k words that I reached the point of having written every important scene I could think of, and I desperately needed to stop writing and start organizing it into a coherent outline, so I could see what holes I still needed to fill.
In December I printed everything out, putting page breaks between scenes. I acquired some index cards from work, and jotted down a single scene per card. Then I laid those out all over the floor, first in chronological order of events, and then I kept rearranging them for several days until I had worked out a plausible progression that the story ought to be told to a reader for maximum smoothness and sense. It's still not perfect, because as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the story just isn't linear that way. It's got layers that need to be collapsed down into a single line of words, and there isn't really a good way to do it. At least not that I've figured out so far.
The other issue is that Lauderburough is very definitely set in the World of Darkness - which is an established, published, very well known roleplaying game setting (and the one that I spend most of my time playing in). I had to drastically alter the novel's setting in order to get it away from already-published material. It was both terrifying and amazingly freeing. With Fortress Launne set on a fictional planet, and not in south Florida, suddenly I could do all sorts of things I'd always wanted to include but couldn't because I had been constrained by what's there in real life. I put in some mountains, raised the altitude so I could have underground tunnels, moved the locations of the swamps and changed their natures, and did a bunch of other things. On the downside, there's a lot of details that I desperately need to work out and still manage to keep plausible. My vampires are no longer vampires, but are a type of creature called Tainted. They are loosely based on VtM clans, though I eliminated a lot of the fluff that I'd never especially liked. My werecreatures became creatures called the Blessed, and are sort of a combination of WtA changing breeds and CtD changelings. There's also "chaos mages" which are very loosely based on MtA mages. There's not too much about those guys in Temple, as they don't have a prominent role in those particular events. One of Thomas's best friends is a mage though, so at some point I'll have to get more into detail about them. Then I threw in several elements of my own existentialist views on reality for good measure.
So what do I have? Lots and lots of shameless borrowing and plagiarizing to make this city. ;) Very few original, from scratch ideas in any of this. Basically Thomas was the seed for all the rest, and then I drew heavily from published roleplay setting, real-life local history of south Florida, and plot premises based on plots of past games I've been in. It still somehow seems to work out and has become my own creation.
The biggest stumbling block now is Tainting. How exactly does someone become Tainted? I don't know that yet. Hence I can't write what I had originally planned for Novel Dare, which was the story of how Thomas met his stepsire Jacob and how they became friends. The whole Tainting thing is kind of crucial to their story, and until I figure out a good, plausible alternative to Embracing (for VtM vamps), it's going to have to wait.
The other fairly complex plot that I've got is called "Amulet II" until I figure out something better to call it. (There is an "Amulet I" as well which occurred 80 years before II, and revolves around the exact same amulet which had become lost and buried for 80 years and then dug up again ...) This one is more complicated than Temple and is probably good for at least 80k first-draft words, especially if I put the Thomas/Jacob story in as a major subplot to it. The timeframe of the latter encompasses the same part of the timeline as the second Amulet incident. Unfortunately, it's not as well worked-out for what exactly who was doing what to whom and when, so I'm not ready to write it yet. I'm thinking I should work out a good, solid outline in time for next November and do it for my next Nano.
So as I sat here tonight thinking about the Novel Dare, kicking around ideas for what to write for 50k words, I've decided the best thing to do is go back to Temple and finish at least the first draft, maybe do some more work on the second draft. The index cards I laid out back in December are still all over the floor. I went over it and picked out 5 of them for scenes that still need to be finished or written. That should give me at least 10k words. A good start. By that point maybe I'll be back in the groove of massive writing, and can come up with what to write for the next 40k after that. Maybe more of Temple, maybe something else. We'll see. :)
Okay so that wasn't a very quick rundown. Heheh .. well .. what I lack in frequency of blog posts, I make up for by length. ;)
So a quick rundown of the story behind my story. ;)
Two and a half years ago I was invited to join an online roleplaying game through IMs. I made a character for it. His name is Thomas. It was a Vampire: The Masquerade (VtM) game, and he's a Gangrel. It turned out that the GM was very interested in character development, and she would keep asking me all sorts of intriguing questions into Thomas's past, his personality quirks and where they came from, etc., which sparked me to keep writing up backstory until I had around 7 single-spaced pages. Longest backstory for a roleplay character I'd ever written, up to that point. (Actually I think it *still* stands as the longest one.)
A few months of playing with her later, I was inspired to create the city where he had come from before he moved into the GM's city, for the purpose of eventually running a game set in it. Basically I threw together every roleplay character I've ever played into the same city, and then figured out what exactly they would do and how they all niched out. There were about 10 of them initially. Then I added in some supporting characters based on ones that other people had played with mine. From that point, it became necessary to fill in all of the standard powerhouse slots (prince, primogen, etc.), and so I had to make a few new characters on top of that. Those weren't entirely from scratch either, since my city (Lauderburough) is based on a real-life city (Fort Lauderdale) and I rampantly borrowed local historical figures. Also, everyone that was mentioned in Thomas's backstory had to be in there. All of that got me up to about 30 key characters with major roles in the development of the city.
Well, in the midst of figuring out what all of these people do in the city, they started to get into each others' ways. Voila, conflicts. Several major plotlines were born.
Fast forward through that process for a few months, and soon I had a fairly detailed timeline of the city from its founding until present times. The timeline noted when each of my key characters arrived, why they first came, and when they left (if they left) and why that was. The backbone behind it all was, of course, the history of my original roleplay character. The initial plot premises in the timeline were all focused on Thomas. But then most of the other 30 characters started to take on lives of their own as well. It was all very organic, how it just kept growing and developing and expanding.
At that point, I was a really crappy writer. Really, truly awful. There was no way in hell I was going to be able to use that lovely outline of characters and plots, and write a series of novels out of it. I wanted to, and I tried a few times, but quickly gave up due to the fact that I didn't know how to write, at all.
Of course I wasn't exactly trying that hard at the time either, seeing as how it was IM games, where short and fast was the way to go. But that first game with the GM (who eventually became my best friend) was a solo game, and as we played, our writing gradually got more and more elaborate.
Then I found rpol.net. It's a play-by-post site. I dabbled there, decided I liked it, and it was a good match for the way we were roleplaying anyway. We weren't writing IM-style posts anymore. She would take up to 20 minutes at a time to write several paragraphs worth of stuff, when we had agreed to a max of 6 minutes when we'd first started. I was responding in kind, though I did still try to keep it short and sweet. My writing skills were improving. I got myself heavily involved in several games on rpol.
Fast forward about 8 months. Last year I joined a game where writing quality was very much emphasized. The minimum post length seemed to be about 4 paragraphs. My maximum post length back then was about 4 paragraphs. :p I was panicking about my ability to keep up the same kind of length and quality as the other players. But I took the plunge and stuck with the game.
Boy am I glad I did. That game has become one of the most rewarding writing and roleplaying experiences I've ever been involved with. :) And my writing skill grew in leaps and bounds. I found that not only could I reach the high bar, I could indeed go over it.
Fast forward almost another year, to last November. My best friend (the same former GM who initially ran the game where Thomas was made) passed me a link to Nanowrimo. It was 4am on November 6, I read it, decided to try, signed up, went to bed, lay there panicking about what the heck I was going to write ... and I remembered Lauderburough.
The Flattening of a Temple (title thought up on the spot, while I was filling out my profile on the Nano site), is one of the fairly meaty complex plots from the Lauderburough timeline. I started writing it the following afternoon. 22 days and 50,163 words later, I had won. :) It worked out almost perfectly too. It was right around 48k words that I reached the point of having written every important scene I could think of, and I desperately needed to stop writing and start organizing it into a coherent outline, so I could see what holes I still needed to fill.
In December I printed everything out, putting page breaks between scenes. I acquired some index cards from work, and jotted down a single scene per card. Then I laid those out all over the floor, first in chronological order of events, and then I kept rearranging them for several days until I had worked out a plausible progression that the story ought to be told to a reader for maximum smoothness and sense. It's still not perfect, because as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the story just isn't linear that way. It's got layers that need to be collapsed down into a single line of words, and there isn't really a good way to do it. At least not that I've figured out so far.
The other issue is that Lauderburough is very definitely set in the World of Darkness - which is an established, published, very well known roleplaying game setting (and the one that I spend most of my time playing in). I had to drastically alter the novel's setting in order to get it away from already-published material. It was both terrifying and amazingly freeing. With Fortress Launne set on a fictional planet, and not in south Florida, suddenly I could do all sorts of things I'd always wanted to include but couldn't because I had been constrained by what's there in real life. I put in some mountains, raised the altitude so I could have underground tunnels, moved the locations of the swamps and changed their natures, and did a bunch of other things. On the downside, there's a lot of details that I desperately need to work out and still manage to keep plausible. My vampires are no longer vampires, but are a type of creature called Tainted. They are loosely based on VtM clans, though I eliminated a lot of the fluff that I'd never especially liked. My werecreatures became creatures called the Blessed, and are sort of a combination of WtA changing breeds and CtD changelings. There's also "chaos mages" which are very loosely based on MtA mages. There's not too much about those guys in Temple, as they don't have a prominent role in those particular events. One of Thomas's best friends is a mage though, so at some point I'll have to get more into detail about them. Then I threw in several elements of my own existentialist views on reality for good measure.
So what do I have? Lots and lots of shameless borrowing and plagiarizing to make this city. ;) Very few original, from scratch ideas in any of this. Basically Thomas was the seed for all the rest, and then I drew heavily from published roleplay setting, real-life local history of south Florida, and plot premises based on plots of past games I've been in. It still somehow seems to work out and has become my own creation.
The biggest stumbling block now is Tainting. How exactly does someone become Tainted? I don't know that yet. Hence I can't write what I had originally planned for Novel Dare, which was the story of how Thomas met his stepsire Jacob and how they became friends. The whole Tainting thing is kind of crucial to their story, and until I figure out a good, plausible alternative to Embracing (for VtM vamps), it's going to have to wait.
The other fairly complex plot that I've got is called "Amulet II" until I figure out something better to call it. (There is an "Amulet I" as well which occurred 80 years before II, and revolves around the exact same amulet which had become lost and buried for 80 years and then dug up again ...) This one is more complicated than Temple and is probably good for at least 80k first-draft words, especially if I put the Thomas/Jacob story in as a major subplot to it. The timeframe of the latter encompasses the same part of the timeline as the second Amulet incident. Unfortunately, it's not as well worked-out for what exactly who was doing what to whom and when, so I'm not ready to write it yet. I'm thinking I should work out a good, solid outline in time for next November and do it for my next Nano.
So as I sat here tonight thinking about the Novel Dare, kicking around ideas for what to write for 50k words, I've decided the best thing to do is go back to Temple and finish at least the first draft, maybe do some more work on the second draft. The index cards I laid out back in December are still all over the floor. I went over it and picked out 5 of them for scenes that still need to be finished or written. That should give me at least 10k words. A good start. By that point maybe I'll be back in the groove of massive writing, and can come up with what to write for the next 40k after that. Maybe more of Temple, maybe something else. We'll see. :)
Okay so that wasn't a very quick rundown. Heheh .. well .. what I lack in frequency of blog posts, I make up for by length. ;)
2005/02/02
*cracks knuckles*
Mid-day two. Word count so far is a whopping 72. :p Clearly it was a bad idea to attempt to write without any clue what to write about.
I do have several novel ideas, but I am not really at a point of being ready to do any of them. Not like with the plot I picked for Nano. For that one, I didn't have every last detail figured out but I had enough to do most of it. Or I could do one of the non-novel ideas, such as 50 random 1k-word scenes, or just freewrite.
I'm at work at the moment, so I can't really work on anything writing-related for several hours. My plan is to come back later and vent at great length about how I can't do anything. Oddly, this seems to be the way I get myself started on doing a lot of things where I'm sketchy about my abilities. If I rant and rave about how I can't do it, and list many reasons (excuses) for why not, I often end up doing exactly what I say I can't do, and do it well. Must be like an internal challenge to myself. My subconscious responds to the "I can't!" whines with an "oh yeah? BS! You just watch me!" ;)
So that's the plan. More on that later, especially if it works.
I do have several novel ideas, but I am not really at a point of being ready to do any of them. Not like with the plot I picked for Nano. For that one, I didn't have every last detail figured out but I had enough to do most of it. Or I could do one of the non-novel ideas, such as 50 random 1k-word scenes, or just freewrite.
I'm at work at the moment, so I can't really work on anything writing-related for several hours. My plan is to come back later and vent at great length about how I can't do anything. Oddly, this seems to be the way I get myself started on doing a lot of things where I'm sketchy about my abilities. If I rant and rave about how I can't do it, and list many reasons (excuses) for why not, I often end up doing exactly what I say I can't do, and do it well. Must be like an internal challenge to myself. My subconscious responds to the "I can't!" whines with an "oh yeah? BS! You just watch me!" ;)
So that's the plan. More on that later, especially if it works.
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