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.