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. ;)