SFR start of Day 7

SFR 2006:
84 / 90 days to go | 06 / 90 days gone
3688 / 90,000 words done

general roleplay: 1699
Temple: 1989

Well, that's what it was for Day 6. If anyone's keeping track, I wrote very few words in the past couple of days.

Roleplay is deader than a doornail. It couldn't be more dead than it has been. Nobody is posting anywhere, not even in my game which almost always has something going on that requires me to do something. It was so dead that I actually considered joining a new game (albeit briefly). Luckily I came to my senses and have more or less decided not to do that after all.

The reason it was such an attractive proposition, though, was because my high-writing-quality Anitaverse game has been lying dormant for weeks. It's not my turn to post for any of my characters; one set of them is basically dead due to the disappearance of a player last December, and the other set is crawling along at a snails' pace while waiting for two people to finish their scenes. Said people are obviously quite consumed with Real Life and unable to find the time to roleplay. I don't mind that and I'm not upset with them for it; Real Life should always be more important than games, after all. I just sometimes wish that things were back to where they were before. But they'll never be that way again.

Anyway, so I miss my characters from that game. And lately they've been tugging at the back of my mind to write them up into a novel of their own. It wouldn't be part of the Fortress Launne series or any other world that I've ever created. It would be sparked off by Anita Blake, the same way that Fortress Launne was sparked off by the World of Darkness - however, it would quickly go its separate way from the established published setting that belongs to someone else, same as Fortress Launne did.

To my mind, I'd rather call it a derivative work of the game, and not of the Anitaverse. I've never been that fond of the Anita Blake series itself. I read a number of the books for the purposes of being able to play the game properly, not because I really wanted to read the books. The concise way of putting it is that Anita Blake is railroaded all to hell by her author, and aside from the very first book, isn't allowed to be herself. When I do that to my characters, they eventually stop speaking to me, and then die. And because I've been put into a position before of having to watch my characters die at the hands of someone else's railroad, I feel for Anita Blake and hate what her author does to her. It's almost enough for me to get into writing fanfic so I can rewrite the books "the way they're supposed to be" ...

... but not quite. Lucky for me I have my own stories to nurture without trying to trample into other people's universes as well. I don't have quite that much time on my hands.

There are a number of other things I detest about the series (such as pacing, impact-killing lengthy tangents with no point to the plot, that are then followed up with bullet-point-list endings to the main plotline(s), areas of poor editting, etc.), but after thinking about it long enough, I think the railroading is one of the main things.

So my stories about my characters in the Anitaverse game would be more appropriately called a derivative work of the game, which has an entirely different flavor to it from the books, and which I enjoy much more. At some point I need to ask permission of the other players to let me write stories that are going to be heavily drawn from the existing game plotlines, and probably make use of their characters to some extent.

So getting back to my original point of this ramble ... the game I got interested in this afternoon is another Anitaverse game, and furthermore they're looking for people to play lycans. My vampire character has as one of his subplots that he's looking to form a triumvirate. Well, my necromancer character would be the obvious human part of that triumvirate, but I don't have a lycan yet. Therefore, I need to create one. And what better place to do it than in an Anitaverse game that's moving, that's looking for lycans?

However, coming back to my senses, if my gameload were to come back to life like it's scheduled to do on Monday, I'm already going to be swamped. Second, I looked over what parts of the game I could see and noticed that I don't really actually want to play in it. There's typos all over the place, and the GM is 18 years old at most. (Not that there's anything wrong with young roleplayers, aside from the fact that they're technically violating the RPoL ToU if they're running an adult game as a minor. It's just that the themes I'd be interested in pursuing are unlikely to be run well by an 18 year old.)

Meanwhile, to make this blog entry even longer ... (but hey! I get to count blog entries in my SFR wordcount at the end!) ...

So I'm stalled out with Temple right now. I think it's because I really do need to figure out where I'm going before I start. So I spent some time doodling more notes, trying to make diagrams of my individual plot threads so I could see how they all fit together.

Well, I've managed to notice a couple things.
1. I'm using the same name for two different characters, and they really need to not be named the same thing.
2. Two of my favorite characters are superfluous to the story of Temple, but their presence is required because of who they are in the rest of the series.

That latter problem is the more serious one by far. I can't just cut them out, as I'm planning to do with Rebecca, (most of) Josephine, and (most of) Kim. But at the moment they're just kind of dangling without any real plot points to them.

One of them is Jacob. He has to be there because a) he's one of the king's advisors, b) he's one of Thomas' closest friends, and c) he cares deeply about Janis. But at the moment he does nothing that someone else isn't already doing.

Iorli is quite a bit more problematic. While Jacob could certain become just a secondary sidekick character to Thomas and still work, mostly, Iorli really can't. He has to be in it because he swore an oath to protect Janis because she's the cougar clan totem (this has important backstory relevance to stuff that went on during Amulet I). There are really two options he could go for that make sense: a) guard Janis when she's finally found (but Thomas is already doing that), or b) go off to avenge her by attacking the one who kidnapped and tortured her (but the wolf and bear spirits are already doing that for different reasons). In short, he doesn't do anything that someone else isn't already doing. But he also can't just tag along with someone else because this stuff hits him quite personally in ways that are distinctly different from the way it's all hitting other people.

So I need to give him something to do. Something completely different from what other people are doing. Find a crucial clue that nobody else finds, and act on it in some way that only he can act, in a way that also affects everything else.

As if my story isn't already a nightmare tangled mass of plotlines going every which way. However, until I figure it out, I suspect I'm just going to stay stalled out. At least I've finally managed to pinpoint the problem. One step at a time, I guess.

I'm kind of hoping I don't have to write all of Amulet I before I can continue with Temple. That would stall me out for years, since Amulet I is an enormous mess right now.

In general, I have figured out that I have three main plotlines, and 5-7 subplots. At least I'm making some progress somewhere. My story gets a little clearer every time I have to go into a frenzy of note-writing from another different direction. Sooner or later I'll figure out how to tell it to readers. ;)