Regrouping ad infinitum

Well. This sure has been a very scattered year for me so far. I don't think I have yet managed to carry out any of the plans that I keep making in these blog entries, and instead keep ending up doing the exact opposite.

Let's take roleplaying for example. At the beginning of the year I was thinking, gee, I really need to cut back. A quick look back at past blog entries shows that on Jan. 25 I had 9 characters in 6 games plus co-GMing a 7th. A quick count of my present games shows that I'm about to have 12 characters in 7 games plus co-GMing an 8th. And there are three other games in line on my personal wait-list of things to join. *head, desk* People need to stop starting games and inviting me to join their invite-only games! They should know I can't say no! *wails*

Ironically, at about this time last year, I was at my all-time high of 14 characters in 8 games, one of which I was the GM. All of them active and moving fast. GMing, by the way, takes up about ten times more time than playing does. Talk about way overcommitted! So I guess I really am not doing so good at all with the cutting down, but at least it isn't quite that bad yet. ;)

Then one of my best roleplay friends made a wisecrack about inviting me to co-GM his new game (for which I'm working up 2 of those aforementioned 12 characters), and although I was quite flattered at the thought, the other half of me was ready to run away screaming. ;) Because if he ever seriously asked me that, I would have to cut two or three games and start pissing people off.

Or I could always quit my job and roleplay around the clock. But that wouldn't be very wise in the long run ...

Meanwhile, all other writing has kind of fallen by the wayside. I decided a while back to try doing 50k freewrites once a month, just to get all of my thoughts down on paper in a single huge chunk. I ruminate on things, and then I have to express them somewhere. I used to just rant at my best friend about life, the universe, and everything - but lately she's had stuff going on in her own life to think about and is too preoccupied to listen to me rant anymore. So these freewrites would make for a good alternate. It's also slightly more organized of a record of my thoughts at any given point in time that I might want to look back over in a decade or two. All of my rants before are still recorded, they're just scattered over IM logs that are located in 4 or 5 different places, and surrounded by lots of other conversations.

And of course the second attempt at the 50k in a single snapshot chunk ... kind of didn't occur in a single snapshot chunk. It was more like 3 separate chunks, and it occurred over the course of almost 2 weeks (and hence, not a snapshot). :p I just finished it at the beginning of this week. This definitely wasn't the way it was supposed to work. I will have to try harder to reserve a weekend to do them from now on, so I can just sit there and type for an entire day and get it all down at once, not in bits and pieces stretched over more than 3 days of realtime. It's not a snapshot if it takes 2 weeks to write it.

Other minor things on my original list that I still haven't finished ... The other scientific paper, for which I'm the sole author, is still sitting there not moving. :p The one that my former-boss did is now out the door for review at least, but that sure wasn't because of anything I did.

I still haven't finished the Starcraft missions. Still have to beat the very last one, as well as go back and redo the one I failed before.

Unpacking has stalled slightly. I did get the sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks into the new bookcase and have some idea of what to do with the rest of the books. Now I just have to go do it. This will require me to clear the accumulated mounds of crap off my other three shelves, move one shelf to a different room, and move the vast majority of my books down a flight of stairs. Then I have to figure out where to put the stuff I clear off the shelves. This will require me to start filing all my paperwork that I've let accumulate over the last 5 years without doing anything (the current round of which is all tossed onto one of the shelves of one of the bookcases, in a mound)(the previous rounds are all in a laundry basket). I have file cabinets. I just haven't put much of anything into them in a very long time. The financial statements in them now are probably all for accounts I don't even have anymore and there's no reason to keep them. This requires me to go out and buy a paper shredder because I sure as heck am not going to sit there and tear up that much obsolete paper by hand. Maybe someday soon, before the year is up, I'll be back up to my original super-organized anal-retentive paper-filing ways.

And boy do I need to throw stuff away! Non-working electronics, etc. I also have several duplicate books, some of which won't sell anywhere because they're older editions of textbooks and nobody wants those. :p I was thinking to find a homeless shelter to donate them to, because lord knows nobody else is going to want them. With Robert's recent blogged remark about his friend who used to collect broken TVs and fix them for people ... maybe my broken TV could go there too? (Wait ... was that in here or DevArt? I can't remember where he wrote that.) I also have huge stacks of old magazines. I don't know yet whether I'd want to keep them. These are mostly Discover, Smithsonian, Science News, the now-out-of-business Earth Magazine, and other scientific type things. I also have some other miscellaneous things that I didn't read the first time, so those can definitely go somewhere else.

I was very pleasantly surprised a couple months ago when I suddenly started receiving Discover Magazine again. I had a subscription paid up to that for like .. decades. I originally subscribed back in the mid-90s, and then somehow through a number of weird snafu's with a magazine subscription service, plus the going-out-of-business of Earth, managed to accumulate a subscription expiration of .... heh, I didn't even know except that it was a decade from "now" (back then). Then I moved around *a lot*. I tried to keep up with the whole mail forwarding thing, but obviously things got lost along the way - including all of my magazine subscriptions.

Well, a couple months back, suddenly an issue was in my mailbox. Out of nowhere. With my correct address on it. I have no idea how they managed to track me down but I'm glad they did! I had assumed that my subscription must've run out by now, but according to the label it doesn't run out until August of this year. Heh. It's probably not worth the effort to get the several years' worth of back issues that haven't made it to me at this point. Hopefully the subsequent tenants of all the places I lived in have enjoyed my magazines in that time.

Anyway, that sure took me way off-topic. If anyone was curious what my freewrites look like ... they pretty much look like this post. ;)

So as I was saying, writing is kind of not happening outside of roleplay and the freewrites. I do have one idea for one of my novels. Taint. Unlike every other story out of the Fortress Launne series, that one is the only one that *isn't* set up like a mystery - a single complex big event that occurs in a very short timespan. Taint, in contrast, spans several decades of time, and is mostly focused on the lives and trials and tribulations of two main characters. It will also show the events of some of the other novels from a drastically different perspective, and although I intend to write it as a standalone, people who eventually read the entire series will hopefully get a kick out of all the little tie-ins with the other novels.

So my idea is that this might actually be better written up if I did it in roleplay format. One scene at a time, editted and polished up to perfection, written at maybe once per week. Each finished scene posted up as if it were a roleplay post. There is something about hitting the "submit" button on a roleplay post that says to me "this is done." It's like having a tiny "The End" - over and over. And I listen closely for the little subconscious *thud* in the back of my mind that tells me when the time has come to hit submit and call it "done." Once it's posted out where everyone can see it, it can't be changed. It's Done.

The reason I think this would work well for Taint is, so much of the novel is going to be delving into the complex personalities and characters of the MCs, and while there will be interesting plot things going on, those plot things are going to be the background foundation while the characters themselves will be the highlight. Exactly like the way it's working in that one roleplay game I'm in with Robert. My two characters in that game are very well characterized, and I've been slowly developing them over the course of a year and a half. There is no way I could possibly have done that with them in a one-month writing marathon. If I'm not "on" then I'm not on, and being forced to write will not cause the characters to be in-character and compelling in the right ways. I'm pretty sure there is no way I can peg my MCs in Taint in a marathon format. The roleplay format should work a lot better.

The whole "characters are wrong" thing is one of my biggest issues with Temple. The plot came out great, but many of my characters didn't. Or at least, they came out in interesting ways to my beta readers, but they weren't who I knew them to be. This wouldn't be an issue if my characters had been brand-spanking-new, developed as I wrote the novel - but they weren't. They were established in other places from before. I just couldn't play them right when I had to do it in marathon format. So the whole novel is kind of dissatisfying to me for that reason.

So, that's the idea. When to start? I have no idea. As soon as some of the latest roleplay swamping settles, maybe. If it ever does. Maybe something will go into longterm hiatus...

Man. This is *exactly* like one of my freewrites. Start off talking about one thing, wander off onto a tangent, run out of steam on the tangent, scroll up to figure out what I was trying to say at the beginning, start over, wander off again ... lather, rinse repeat. ;)

The other thing hanging over my head is the Labor Day novel. Somewhere along the way my interest in the original idea has waned. I still have a great opening scene in mind. But at this point I'm not sure the rest of what I've got down is going to work. I might have to scrap it completely and start over. And I only have *goes off to count* 20 more weekends to figure it out. Hrrmmm.

Anyhow. I really ought to go get some work done. Yeah, I also have a full-time job somewhere in all this. ;) I should probably go bs my way through looking like I've been productive lately...