Meanwhile, now I'm stalled out...

No words of any kind since my last SFR update. :(

Even roleplay has been totally dead. I'm in three games with the same missing guy. I'm in another game that's missing the GM. Then my fifth game is not only missing the GM, it's also missing everyone else I'm in any scene with (including Robert). The top game on my waiting list of things to join? It's run by one of the missing people of the aforementioned fifth game. The next game on that list? Was a game in the works by the missing GM of the fifth game. :p So what am I doing? Twiddling my thumbs.

Also attempting to join what looks like might be a good Hunter: the Reckoning game, which will have a whole bunch of completely different people in it, none of which are any of the people mentioned above. I need my fix, dangit!

As for all other writing... heh, umm... *twitch* I'm going with the "deep rumination!" excuse and sticking to it. :D

Actually I sort of didn't really know where to go with Taint. After the scene I'm working on (they're getting acquainted in a carriage on the way to MC2's house), some time skipping needs to start occurring.

I'm thinking to do an alternating scheme with the timeline. There's a whole bunch of stuff that happened 80 years ago to MC1, when he was practically a whole different person. I can tell that story every other chapter, while telling the present-day story the other half of the time. I'm hoping this will give me enough variety in what I'm writing that it doesn't feel like I'm getting bogged down doing the *same* thing all the time.

At this point I'm not even sure if this is really going to be a single coherent novel. But I'll figure that out later. ;) If nothing else, I can turn it into a series of shorts/novellas in a single volume, that works as a companion to my other novels in the series. (Obviously this would mean it will not be the first one I attempt to sell...).

On the bright side, the 80-years-ago story is outlined in great detail. 6 single-spaced pages worth, in expository form. And it's even already written up from the point of view of MC1. (Because I originally wrote it up as MC1's backstory as a roleplay character.) All I have to do is alter the details to fit my updated setting, and I should be good to go with plenty of material for a good long time to come. (This same plot is going to be Amulet I as well. Except Amulet I is not from the point of view of MC1. MC1 was little more than a pawn in the grand scheme of things...).

As for Temple, that's sort of been rotated out of the way a bit. There's a very emotionally-heavy scene I still need to write, and unfortunately I haven't quite gotten around to summoning up the energy for it. Plus, when I do write it, it will probably have to come out in nearly-finished form. This could pose a problem if details get changed around afterwards, so maybe I should wait on that until after I start doing the heavy-duty second-draft rearranging.

I spent all yesterday reading a very long thread with Jim D. Macdonald talking about what he does to write. I got to about page 17 or so. One of the things they referenced was: http://www.critters.org/turkeycity.html (of which a slightly different version seems to be at http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html ). I read through that list and noticed that in Temple, I make roughly half of the mistakes they list. *head, desk* (but it'll still work! honest! ...) So that kind of deflated all the wind out of my sails all yesterday. Heh. I played Diablo 2 for five hours instead. :p

The main question I left with was: if you're not allowed to do infodumps of any kind, then how DO you tell the reader anything?

Anyhow, that's what I've been up to lately.