Labor Day Novel: The fun continues!

If anyone is signed up at SFFMuse, I now have the first 9 chapters of Stranger on a Bus in its own separate novel forum. Drop by, read, enjoy. :) (Try to forget everything I've ever said about the plot in these blogs...).

I'm also signed up to analog's Short Story challenge (details in Robert's last blog entry). Not so I can write tons of short stories - I don't think that's the right thing for me to be doing right now. However, I do tend to write better when there's other people writing with me. So, that's the plan. Write something when other people are writing. It worked out pretty well over Labor Day when it was me and Robert working on our novels. Others will work on their short stories, while I work on various projects I've got ongoing.

The first one, of course, is to finish up Stranger on a Bus. ;) Three more chapters to go. It's my plan for tomorrow. If I write at the same speed as last weekend, this should be no problem.

After that ... I've been ignoring Taint since last June. July hit me pretty hard, first with the science paper that ultimately got rejected, and then with the two back-to-back work cruises. By the time July ended, I was also getting my Dark Ages game started up.

The Dark Ages game focused me in ways that I really needed for a very long time. I stopped GMing my last game over a year ago - in August of 2004. Since then I kept thinking I ought to start something, but never had time. I still didn't have time when I started the Dark Ages game, but it kind of fell in my lap when I signed up to help GM a different game. That game fell apart when the primary GM vanished without a trace, leaving several of us co-GMs with viable games on our hands. We launched them separately, and now there's 3 of them running (including mine) that originally started there.

It's been very helpful for writing - looking at how to make open plots that are tailored to the characters, without knowing who the characters are going to be. Working up setting on the fly. All the sorts of things that go into organic writing, which I just don't do all that well when I'm actually writing. My GMing approach is very organic, however. It's kind of odd that it works out that way. If I can GM a game organically, and I can play characters well in other games, why can't I do both at the same time and write novels?

The other thing is, I'm rampantly borrowing setting elements and plot premises out of my Fortress Launne series for the game. This is helping me work out a bunch of things for one of the novels that I'm going to attempt to write in November for Nanowrimo. Amulet I has the same key characters as the Dark Ages game (though not other ones that I've also tossed into the mix who are technically from other parts of the timeline...).

Then there's Amulet II which is the other novel I'm considering writing in November. It has nothing to do with Amulet I other than the fact that it's the same amulet as the point of contention. Completely different parts of the timeline, different casts, etc.

Mmm. Where was I? I went off on a tangent again.

Anyway, so I'd been ignoring Taint since June. Now there's this short story challenge going on. I'm figuring to see if I can get some more work done on this novel - write five key chapters in the next six weeks. (The first week being reserved for the bus novel).

Taint is very different, structure-wise, from the other novels in the Fortress Launne series. It's the only one that doesn't have a huge complex plot. Instead, it's about the lives of two characters, so it has to be exceptionally character-driven. At the moment I'm not sure if it should be an actual novel, or a collection of short stories. If it turns out to be more of a short story collection, though, this challenge would be a good way to go about writing some of them. ;)

Mmmmm. It feels like I originally wanted to say more about that, but I think that covers it.

*wanders off in an absentminded daze*