30 / 90 days to go | 60 / 90 days gone
35,973 / 90,000 words done | 24,027 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 8470
Blogs: 20,176
Caught up on all roleplay again (*gasp... wheeze...*). My favorite GM was around to pester me to get my sorry arse in gear, so I did. Took me all night, but I did. Managed to reduce the "words behind" category slightly in the process.
[members-only cut]
Major new development for the July novel dare story (which I've decided just earlier today is going to be my July novel dare story (which I hadn't actually planned to join until today either)): Aniqa is going to be Craig's original target, he's going to catch up with her while she's in the process of failing abysmally at convincing Aaron that vampires are nice, which would've been getting her in trouble with Hernando anyway even if Craig hadn't been around. I like it that way because that's what happened in the game, and I can just write forward from that; it makes perfect logical sense for the story to flow forward that way. I'll be changing the names of Aniqa and Hernando, of course, as those aren't my characters. Basically I just need to retain the basic idea of them and their plot functions.
I'll be ditching a large number of side plots from the game, though. First, Mariah has explicitly said that she doesn't want me to write about her character or the werewolf pack, so I'm just going to omit the werewolves entirely. Then, in the game there's room for a lot more vampires than my story; I'm just going to leave it as Rumen and Hernando, with Aniqa as one of Hernando's underlings. In the game there was a third vampire that was muscling in on Hernando's territory, but that's not really terribly relevant to what I have in mind, and it's not my story anyhow, so out it goes. Also, I'll probably skip the whole Damisa thing. She was fun for developing some of Rumen's entourage, but not terribly relevant either. I'm not even sure how I'm going to work in his cat collection as it is, or whether I ought to, fun as they were.
I have an opening scene in mind too. Craig arriving, finding Aniqa, getting ready to kill her off, and Hernando stepping in. They have a chat that ends with Rumen introduced at the end.
I need to rename the characters that aren't mine, real soon like.
But it's past dawn, I'm not actually sleepy, but tomorrow is going to drag badly, I can tell already...
Oh, and I got nothing housework-related done today either. Must... start... uncluttering...
2006/06/30
2006/06/29
SFR: hanging in there
31 / 90 days to go | 59 / 90 days gone
34,870 / 90,000 words done | 24,130 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 19,730
Well, I'm not slipping behind because of the massive blog entry I wrote a couple days ago. I'm not pulling ahead either.
Most of two bathrooms are now clean. So are the kitchen counters and the sink. Still to do: stovetop; insides of microwave, toaster oven, and fridge; bathtub; paper clutter in the living room and dining room; vacuuming living room*, dining room, and bedroom; washing all the blankets and sheets (requires a laundromat); buying a living room lamp**; dusting.
*I can't vacuum after I get home from work, because I get home so late that it's past bedtime for everyone around me. So that'll have to be over the weekend - which is fine, since I need to clear the clutter first anyhow.
**I've been sitting here mostly in the dark for several months, after my halogen floor lamp died. The bulb burned out, I replaced it, it still won't turn on even though the bulb looks okay. I was annoyed with it anyway because it has a built-in failsafe feature that causes it to turn off if the bulb gets too hot. Well, since I like extremely bright light, I was putting bulbs in that all the warnings say are of too high a wattage ... and I couldn't use the bright setting because of the feature. So even with high-watt bulbs, I was still in dim light. :(
Also, on the writing front: I'm now over a week late in updating my own game, and writing a reply to another game (that might be one post or many, I don't know yet). I have three other characters to post in two other games.
After my visitors next week, the first thing I want to tackle is Dragonfly. If I can get that into shape before the end of July, I can still submit it. After that, my original plan was to dive back into Amulet II but ... I have a whole other story that's been niggling at me. With What is it to be Human? dormant, I miss my characters, and they demand to be written. So I might do that one instead. The plotline continues to unfold in my head whether I want it to or not - and I want it to. Aside from Craig and Rumen, Aaron is going to get roped into it too. As the assigned task. Poor Aaron. ;)
"The story...must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person."
--Maxwell Anderson
That's the theme for the new story. Rumen is that person.
As for tonight, I didn't do squat. I sat here and powerchatted. And now I'm going to bed.
34,870 / 90,000 words done | 24,130 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 19,730
Well, I'm not slipping behind because of the massive blog entry I wrote a couple days ago. I'm not pulling ahead either.
Most of two bathrooms are now clean. So are the kitchen counters and the sink. Still to do: stovetop; insides of microwave, toaster oven, and fridge; bathtub; paper clutter in the living room and dining room; vacuuming living room*, dining room, and bedroom; washing all the blankets and sheets (requires a laundromat); buying a living room lamp**; dusting.
*I can't vacuum after I get home from work, because I get home so late that it's past bedtime for everyone around me. So that'll have to be over the weekend - which is fine, since I need to clear the clutter first anyhow.
**I've been sitting here mostly in the dark for several months, after my halogen floor lamp died. The bulb burned out, I replaced it, it still won't turn on even though the bulb looks okay. I was annoyed with it anyway because it has a built-in failsafe feature that causes it to turn off if the bulb gets too hot. Well, since I like extremely bright light, I was putting bulbs in that all the warnings say are of too high a wattage ... and I couldn't use the bright setting because of the feature. So even with high-watt bulbs, I was still in dim light. :(
Also, on the writing front: I'm now over a week late in updating my own game, and writing a reply to another game (that might be one post or many, I don't know yet). I have three other characters to post in two other games.
After my visitors next week, the first thing I want to tackle is Dragonfly. If I can get that into shape before the end of July, I can still submit it. After that, my original plan was to dive back into Amulet II but ... I have a whole other story that's been niggling at me. With What is it to be Human? dormant, I miss my characters, and they demand to be written. So I might do that one instead. The plotline continues to unfold in my head whether I want it to or not - and I want it to. Aside from Craig and Rumen, Aaron is going to get roped into it too. As the assigned task. Poor Aaron. ;)
"The story...must be a conflict, and specifically, a conflict between the forces of good and evil within a single person."
--Maxwell Anderson
That's the theme for the new story. Rumen is that person.
As for tonight, I didn't do squat. I sat here and powerchatted. And now I'm going to bed.
2006/06/27
Musings
Dragonfly. Elephants. Memories.
"Hello. Are you still chasing the memories in shadows? Some stay young, some grow old. Come alive. There are thoughts unclear you can never hide."
Shinedown's I Dare You is turning out to be the story of my life for the past five years.
What are my elephants? What memories lurk in the shade of those trees? I never saw any. And I am not sure that I know. Perhaps at some point they will come out into the light. They probably are already, and I just haven't spotted them yet as the elephants that they are.
I think this is the point where fiction departs from me. I can think of ways to tell a story about the old man with the dragonfly and the wall, and a life and memories that I can create for him. It won't be a true story anymore, but it would be more meaningful to other people and have more impact as a story.
In the meantime, I've been ruminating on what I want to do with my What is it to be Human? story. (That's not the title of my story; that's the game title. I don't know what my title is yet.) My basic premise is that Craig will come into the city pursuing a different target. Said target turns out to be someone important to the master of the city, who isn't so keen on letting Craig take them out. And so Craig gets to work out a deal with the master, wherein he has to perform some sort of complex task that only a vampire hunter can do well - and if he does a good enough job, the master will reward him with the target. Rumen, as the master's second, is assigned to work with Craig. And so as they work together, Craig and Rumen get to know each other. Eventually when they're friends, the truth comes out of their shared past. Mayhem ensues. I don't know how they will react when the story gets to that point; it kind of depends on what happens before, which I won't know until I write it.
And as I'm thinking this over, I'm noticing that this bears a striking resemblance to Taint. Same general setup. Thomas - who hates vampires even though he is one - finds himself trespassing in King Stranahan's city, and is forced to become Jacob's stepchilde. Jacob and Thomas get to know each other and eventually become friends. Of course, in Taint, they stay friends... and also there's nothing sinister about Jacob at all.
I've also noticed that the two of them aren't exactly cooperating when I attempt to write the first few scenes of this. They're in-character, with the right motivations and actions and all ... but it makes me feel like I'm writing the wrong story. (Actually, come to think of it, Thomas isn't too terribly cooperative with very much of what I've written with him as the focus...).
Other differences ... Rumen is the tragic duality figure in the first story, while that's Thomas in Fortress Launne.
Either way. Somewhere I'd read that we tend to write the same things over and over until we succeed in saying what we need to say. I wonder what I'm trying to say.
"Hello. Are you still chasing the memories in shadows? Some stay young, some grow old. Come alive. There are thoughts unclear you can never hide."
Shinedown's I Dare You is turning out to be the story of my life for the past five years.
What are my elephants? What memories lurk in the shade of those trees? I never saw any. And I am not sure that I know. Perhaps at some point they will come out into the light. They probably are already, and I just haven't spotted them yet as the elephants that they are.
I think this is the point where fiction departs from me. I can think of ways to tell a story about the old man with the dragonfly and the wall, and a life and memories that I can create for him. It won't be a true story anymore, but it would be more meaningful to other people and have more impact as a story.
In the meantime, I've been ruminating on what I want to do with my What is it to be Human? story. (That's not the title of my story; that's the game title. I don't know what my title is yet.) My basic premise is that Craig will come into the city pursuing a different target. Said target turns out to be someone important to the master of the city, who isn't so keen on letting Craig take them out. And so Craig gets to work out a deal with the master, wherein he has to perform some sort of complex task that only a vampire hunter can do well - and if he does a good enough job, the master will reward him with the target. Rumen, as the master's second, is assigned to work with Craig. And so as they work together, Craig and Rumen get to know each other. Eventually when they're friends, the truth comes out of their shared past. Mayhem ensues. I don't know how they will react when the story gets to that point; it kind of depends on what happens before, which I won't know until I write it.
And as I'm thinking this over, I'm noticing that this bears a striking resemblance to Taint. Same general setup. Thomas - who hates vampires even though he is one - finds himself trespassing in King Stranahan's city, and is forced to become Jacob's stepchilde. Jacob and Thomas get to know each other and eventually become friends. Of course, in Taint, they stay friends... and also there's nothing sinister about Jacob at all.
I've also noticed that the two of them aren't exactly cooperating when I attempt to write the first few scenes of this. They're in-character, with the right motivations and actions and all ... but it makes me feel like I'm writing the wrong story. (Actually, come to think of it, Thomas isn't too terribly cooperative with very much of what I've written with him as the focus...).
Other differences ... Rumen is the tragic duality figure in the first story, while that's Thomas in Fortress Launne.
Either way. Somewhere I'd read that we tend to write the same things over and over until we succeed in saying what we need to say. I wonder what I'm trying to say.
Comprehensive Update
33 / 90 days to go | 57 / 90 days gone
32,798 / 90,000 words done | 24,202 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 17,658
Hmmm. Time just keeps slipping on by. Nearly two months into SFR, I'm 24k words behind, and I'm not likely to make a comeback anytime soon. Maybe after my friend's visit, which is creeping up on me a lot faster than I'd like. She's going to be here next week! :o
On the bright side, I cleaned most of two bathrooms. :) Both toilets are done now, at least as done as they can get. (Anyone have any clue how to get rid of ring-around-the-toilet?) I cleaned the worst of the three sinks, and I'd cleaned the tub and other two sinks in recent history so they shouldn't be too bad to do again. Now I'm eyeing the kitchen. I'm thinking baby steps there, too. Maybe if I just do one section of counter at a time and hope that I'm on enough of a roll by the end to do the fridge... The hard part is just moving stuff out of the way so I can get underneath things. The stovetop isn't too bad at the moment (I clean that off a lot more often than elsewhere).
Then there's vacuuming everywhere else, tossing a ton of paper-type things (mostly junk mail), hiding the rest in my pantry or something ... maybe some dusting. Also laundry; I need to wash all the comforters, which means lugging them down to a laundromat with a big enough washer and dryer, spending lots of quarters.
My friend isn't going to be here that long, and we're going to be out sightseeing for a lot of it, so hopefully she won't have time to notice anything I miss.
Yeah, okay, so I'm a total slob. At least nobody has to look at it most of the time besides me.
[members-only cut]
After the visit, though, it should be clear sailing through the rest of July. I have so many writing projects going on it's starting to get confusing. So ... a list:
1. Dragonfly. In light of ellsea's excellent critique, I now have a lot more of a clue what I need to do with it.
The whole thing was based on a couple of dreams, which is why it looks like a bunch of weakly connected fragments. But I know what it means to me. It's about my friend (the one that's visiting soon, actually), and how she pulled me out of the abyss I was in when we met. I was sitting around waiting to die, and she showed me life. Then last year (when I had the dream), our paths had already diverged though neither of us were quite ready to admit it yet; she had her own life to lead, her own errands to keep, and she couldn't forever stay. And so I had to let her go, and go on without her. But I didn't die. I guess it's more like an ascension than a death (if anyone here follows Stargate). I guess in some ways, she brought me to the wall but I had to cross it by myself.
I still don't know what the elephants mean, though. That whole thing was kind of nebulous. The way I wrote it, that was the way it happened in the dream. I looked over the wall and knew there were elephants, and there were signs of their habitation, but we didn't actually see any of them.
Hmmm. It's a lot like other animals in my dreams. The kind that lurk. Crocodiles hanging from trees by their tails, for example; that was in a dream several years ago. They were menacing with very sharp teeth, and I was afraid to pass them, even though that was the way I needed to go. Perhaps it's time to look up elephants in ye olde dream dictionary and see what they're supposed to mean...
(ten minutes later)
Elephants: strength, power, long memory; sometimes the ability to forgive and forget.
Domestic animals: a part of your animal nature that has been domesticated or tamed, i.e. integrated into your personality.
Hmmmmm. Think I'm going to need to sleep on that one. There's what that part of the dream means to me personally, and then there's working in the dream dictionary version into Dragonfly (if what it means to me personally turns out to be incompatible).
Either way, I ought to reread this whole book. It's Interpreting Your Dreams by W. Lindsay Jacob, M.D. It's a paperback I picked up decades ago, I have no clue where, but somehow everything it says seems to be spot-on for me. I've looked through other dream-related books before, but didn't like any of them as much as this one.
2. Stranger on a Bus. I started editting Chapter 1, and I basically know what rough spots need revising in it. The hard part is done; that was the first four paragraphs which got completely rewritten into three paragraphs that somehow managed to have more total words. As most people have commented, my first draft is remarkably clean overall, so most of it should just be light editting. I'm hoping once I get back into this, it'll go fairly quickly, and then I can get back to figuring out how to end Chapter 10.
3. Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout. I haven't written anything new for this one recently. Still one more lengthy setup post, and then I want to dump out a whole bunch of accumulated thoughts from the past couple months. Strangely, I didn't have anything noteworthy thoughts last weekend. Maybe my brain is pausing for me to catch up.
4. Fortress Launne. That's kind of a gigantic chunk that's all related. I have lots of ruminations going on all the time, thinking about my characters and plotting their dooms and such. ;) Most of it is just scattered stray thoughts that I don't write down.
4a. Temple. The opening scene needs a lot of work. Something C_Wolfe said in Writing Jam is kicking some gears into motion, though. Maybe if I ditched the first full paragraph entirely, or somehow found somewhere farther down to move it, and put the intro to Chance up top...
4b. Amulet II. I still need to finish the second half of this one. But it'll take a lot of immersion to get back into it, as the plot was a gargantuan tangled mass.
4c. Birthright. The more of these I write, the more clear and straightforward I seem to get. Birthright is going to be so simple compared to the first two. It'll follow a girl as she discovers everything along with the readers. Hopefully I won't need to sneak in infodumps much at all. And when I think about eventual marketing, Birthright would probably be the first one that ought to go out.
4d. Everything Else. I think about the original seed of the whole venture, Aliacorba Thomas Cougar. I listen to I Dare You by Shinedown, over and over, and he's speaking to me through them. "Even in madness I know you still believe. Paint me on canvas so I become what you could never be." And I do still believe. No matter how much doubt keeps sneaking up on me. And I will write him down so he becomes greater than me.
5. What is it to be Human? Rumen hasn't abandoned me. I see glimmers of him in my posts for other characters that are cut from the same archetype.
In his past, Rumen lost his first human servant to a vampire hunter - and for revenge he killed that hunter and the hunter's entire family line. When I made Craig Turner, a Hunter: the Reckoning character, for a different game, I used that plot thread; Craig was the only survivor of that line. I have some ideas baking about having him turn up in the same city and confronting Rumen. It might make for an interesting story of undetermined length.
The game itself is still dead. The GM doesn't seem to think so, but there's only three of us even looking anymore - me, him, and one other who is so swamped with Real Life that she barely has time to run her own game. I loved that game, but I'm thinking it's time to move on.
6. Roleplay. As usual, I'm being way too slow about updating my game. I have lots of scattered ruminative thoughts about that one, too. Mainly involving the mage backstory, which is going to get tangled up with some of what the wolves are currently doing. And some of which I need to pin down before I write the next round of posts. Like with every other writing task lately, though, it's going slowly. My players aren't being too terribly fast either, though, and the vampire side of things seems to have died entirely.
I'm mostly keeping up in my other games. Two of the Dante games are moving along pretty fast, and there's a third where I need to post. (Dante being my favorite GM on rpol; I've mentioned him a number of times in these blogs before. Dante is his GMing name, not his real name.)
32,798 / 90,000 words done | 24,202 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 17,658
Hmmm. Time just keeps slipping on by. Nearly two months into SFR, I'm 24k words behind, and I'm not likely to make a comeback anytime soon. Maybe after my friend's visit, which is creeping up on me a lot faster than I'd like. She's going to be here next week! :o
On the bright side, I cleaned most of two bathrooms. :) Both toilets are done now, at least as done as they can get. (Anyone have any clue how to get rid of ring-around-the-toilet?) I cleaned the worst of the three sinks, and I'd cleaned the tub and other two sinks in recent history so they shouldn't be too bad to do again. Now I'm eyeing the kitchen. I'm thinking baby steps there, too. Maybe if I just do one section of counter at a time and hope that I'm on enough of a roll by the end to do the fridge... The hard part is just moving stuff out of the way so I can get underneath things. The stovetop isn't too bad at the moment (I clean that off a lot more often than elsewhere).
Then there's vacuuming everywhere else, tossing a ton of paper-type things (mostly junk mail), hiding the rest in my pantry or something ... maybe some dusting. Also laundry; I need to wash all the comforters, which means lugging them down to a laundromat with a big enough washer and dryer, spending lots of quarters.
My friend isn't going to be here that long, and we're going to be out sightseeing for a lot of it, so hopefully she won't have time to notice anything I miss.
Yeah, okay, so I'm a total slob. At least nobody has to look at it most of the time besides me.
[members-only cut]
After the visit, though, it should be clear sailing through the rest of July. I have so many writing projects going on it's starting to get confusing. So ... a list:
1. Dragonfly. In light of ellsea's excellent critique, I now have a lot more of a clue what I need to do with it.
The whole thing was based on a couple of dreams, which is why it looks like a bunch of weakly connected fragments. But I know what it means to me. It's about my friend (the one that's visiting soon, actually), and how she pulled me out of the abyss I was in when we met. I was sitting around waiting to die, and she showed me life. Then last year (when I had the dream), our paths had already diverged though neither of us were quite ready to admit it yet; she had her own life to lead, her own errands to keep, and she couldn't forever stay. And so I had to let her go, and go on without her. But I didn't die. I guess it's more like an ascension than a death (if anyone here follows Stargate). I guess in some ways, she brought me to the wall but I had to cross it by myself.
I still don't know what the elephants mean, though. That whole thing was kind of nebulous. The way I wrote it, that was the way it happened in the dream. I looked over the wall and knew there were elephants, and there were signs of their habitation, but we didn't actually see any of them.
Hmmm. It's a lot like other animals in my dreams. The kind that lurk. Crocodiles hanging from trees by their tails, for example; that was in a dream several years ago. They were menacing with very sharp teeth, and I was afraid to pass them, even though that was the way I needed to go. Perhaps it's time to look up elephants in ye olde dream dictionary and see what they're supposed to mean...
(ten minutes later)
Elephants: strength, power, long memory; sometimes the ability to forgive and forget.
Domestic animals: a part of your animal nature that has been domesticated or tamed, i.e. integrated into your personality.
Hmmmmm. Think I'm going to need to sleep on that one. There's what that part of the dream means to me personally, and then there's working in the dream dictionary version into Dragonfly (if what it means to me personally turns out to be incompatible).
Either way, I ought to reread this whole book. It's Interpreting Your Dreams by W. Lindsay Jacob, M.D. It's a paperback I picked up decades ago, I have no clue where, but somehow everything it says seems to be spot-on for me. I've looked through other dream-related books before, but didn't like any of them as much as this one.
2. Stranger on a Bus. I started editting Chapter 1, and I basically know what rough spots need revising in it. The hard part is done; that was the first four paragraphs which got completely rewritten into three paragraphs that somehow managed to have more total words. As most people have commented, my first draft is remarkably clean overall, so most of it should just be light editting. I'm hoping once I get back into this, it'll go fairly quickly, and then I can get back to figuring out how to end Chapter 10.
3. Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout. I haven't written anything new for this one recently. Still one more lengthy setup post, and then I want to dump out a whole bunch of accumulated thoughts from the past couple months. Strangely, I didn't have anything noteworthy thoughts last weekend. Maybe my brain is pausing for me to catch up.
4. Fortress Launne. That's kind of a gigantic chunk that's all related. I have lots of ruminations going on all the time, thinking about my characters and plotting their dooms and such. ;) Most of it is just scattered stray thoughts that I don't write down.
4a. Temple. The opening scene needs a lot of work. Something C_Wolfe said in Writing Jam is kicking some gears into motion, though. Maybe if I ditched the first full paragraph entirely, or somehow found somewhere farther down to move it, and put the intro to Chance up top...
4b. Amulet II. I still need to finish the second half of this one. But it'll take a lot of immersion to get back into it, as the plot was a gargantuan tangled mass.
4c. Birthright. The more of these I write, the more clear and straightforward I seem to get. Birthright is going to be so simple compared to the first two. It'll follow a girl as she discovers everything along with the readers. Hopefully I won't need to sneak in infodumps much at all. And when I think about eventual marketing, Birthright would probably be the first one that ought to go out.
4d. Everything Else. I think about the original seed of the whole venture, Aliacorba Thomas Cougar. I listen to I Dare You by Shinedown, over and over, and he's speaking to me through them. "Even in madness I know you still believe. Paint me on canvas so I become what you could never be." And I do still believe. No matter how much doubt keeps sneaking up on me. And I will write him down so he becomes greater than me.
5. What is it to be Human? Rumen hasn't abandoned me. I see glimmers of him in my posts for other characters that are cut from the same archetype.
In his past, Rumen lost his first human servant to a vampire hunter - and for revenge he killed that hunter and the hunter's entire family line. When I made Craig Turner, a Hunter: the Reckoning character, for a different game, I used that plot thread; Craig was the only survivor of that line. I have some ideas baking about having him turn up in the same city and confronting Rumen. It might make for an interesting story of undetermined length.
The game itself is still dead. The GM doesn't seem to think so, but there's only three of us even looking anymore - me, him, and one other who is so swamped with Real Life that she barely has time to run her own game. I loved that game, but I'm thinking it's time to move on.
6. Roleplay. As usual, I'm being way too slow about updating my game. I have lots of scattered ruminative thoughts about that one, too. Mainly involving the mage backstory, which is going to get tangled up with some of what the wolves are currently doing. And some of which I need to pin down before I write the next round of posts. Like with every other writing task lately, though, it's going slowly. My players aren't being too terribly fast either, though, and the vampire side of things seems to have died entirely.
I'm mostly keeping up in my other games. Two of the Dante games are moving along pretty fast, and there's a third where I need to post. (Dante being my favorite GM on rpol; I've mentioned him a number of times in these blogs before. Dante is his GMing name, not his real name.)
2006/06/24
SFR 54 Days
36 / 90 days to go | 54 / 90 days gone
31,916 / 90,000 words done | 22,084 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7579
Blogs: 17,010
I did some heavy revisions of the first four paragraphs for the bus story. Basically I rewrote them into three big paragraphs, using the first draft version as fodder. That should be the hardest part of the whole editting pass - I hope. Everything else will be light line edits, and will hopefully get me higher wordcounts faster.
Which I desperately need, considering that I'm now over 22k words behind. :(
Unfortunately, I won't have as much time to work on writing as I'd like. At some point I'm going to need to devote a few days to a thorough housecleaning - and it has to be sooner than later, before my visitors arrive. If I can just get myself to do it all at once, I'd probably get it done faster overall.
I finally got caught up on Writing Jam yesterday too, so that's another thing off the list of things that niggle at the back of my mind.
Other than that, I have nothing to report.
31,916 / 90,000 words done | 22,084 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7579
Blogs: 17,010
I did some heavy revisions of the first four paragraphs for the bus story. Basically I rewrote them into three big paragraphs, using the first draft version as fodder. That should be the hardest part of the whole editting pass - I hope. Everything else will be light line edits, and will hopefully get me higher wordcounts faster.
Which I desperately need, considering that I'm now over 22k words behind. :(
Unfortunately, I won't have as much time to work on writing as I'd like. At some point I'm going to need to devote a few days to a thorough housecleaning - and it has to be sooner than later, before my visitors arrive. If I can just get myself to do it all at once, I'd probably get it done faster overall.
I finally got caught up on Writing Jam yesterday too, so that's another thing off the list of things that niggle at the back of my mind.
Other than that, I have nothing to report.
2006/06/21
Writing via the Distraction Method
39 / 90 days to go | 51 / 90 days gone
30,611 / 90,000 words done | 20,389 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7018
Blogs: 16,567
Still no new progress on Stranger on a Bus. Instead of working on it, and as a method of procrastinating working on it, I keep wandering off to work on other writing instead.
I've been putting a lot of setup work into the Chinese Takeout blog lately. The layout is done, and now I'm writing backstory posts to explain what the blog is for. There's one more big one of those left. I might think of more, but once the third post is up, I should be good to go for plunging into random miscellany. I'm still kind of waffling over whether I want to put all of it in public. On the one hand, if I wanted to turn it into a published memoir, it would be better to keep it all under wraps. On the other hand, I kind of think it might turn out to be a better project if I had the kind of daily give-and-take of people reading, commenting, and asking questions. I guess it all depends on what I'm trying to accomplish here, and I'm not real clear on that yet myself.
All my roleplay is up to date again except for one game, which I'm procrastinating. I have to finish blowing up the warehouse in the game with the Sabbat pack. The PC has run out the door now, so it's just a matter of writing something horrific as the people still trapped inside die screaming. Hmm. That probably explains why I haven't done it yet. It takes the right kind of mood, I think.
Meanwhile, I have a friend visiting from out of town in early July. This means I need to get my place cleaned up. So now I have something else to distract me from writing - but it's necessary anyway even without visitors. I just hope I can get it presentable in the next two weeks. Must toss all the accumulated junk mail, hide the rest of the unfiled paperwork, clean both bathrooms, clean the kitchen, vacuum, and wash all the sheets and blankets. If I'm extremely productive and lucky, I'll manage to clear the living room clutter, too. I've got stuff stacked everywhere.
This doesn't sound like much - maybe a day's work if I had a full day and put my mind to it. But I never have a full day anymore, and even back when I did, I was busy waffling about writing at the same time. Hmm. I don't know what I can do to entertain them either, actually. They won't be here long, but they'll still need to eat a few times at least. Maybe Chinese takeout? :)
30,611 / 90,000 words done | 20,389 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7018
Blogs: 16,567
Still no new progress on Stranger on a Bus. Instead of working on it, and as a method of procrastinating working on it, I keep wandering off to work on other writing instead.
I've been putting a lot of setup work into the Chinese Takeout blog lately. The layout is done, and now I'm writing backstory posts to explain what the blog is for. There's one more big one of those left. I might think of more, but once the third post is up, I should be good to go for plunging into random miscellany. I'm still kind of waffling over whether I want to put all of it in public. On the one hand, if I wanted to turn it into a published memoir, it would be better to keep it all under wraps. On the other hand, I kind of think it might turn out to be a better project if I had the kind of daily give-and-take of people reading, commenting, and asking questions. I guess it all depends on what I'm trying to accomplish here, and I'm not real clear on that yet myself.
All my roleplay is up to date again except for one game, which I'm procrastinating. I have to finish blowing up the warehouse in the game with the Sabbat pack. The PC has run out the door now, so it's just a matter of writing something horrific as the people still trapped inside die screaming. Hmm. That probably explains why I haven't done it yet. It takes the right kind of mood, I think.
Meanwhile, I have a friend visiting from out of town in early July. This means I need to get my place cleaned up. So now I have something else to distract me from writing - but it's necessary anyway even without visitors. I just hope I can get it presentable in the next two weeks. Must toss all the accumulated junk mail, hide the rest of the unfiled paperwork, clean both bathrooms, clean the kitchen, vacuum, and wash all the sheets and blankets. If I'm extremely productive and lucky, I'll manage to clear the living room clutter, too. I've got stuff stacked everywhere.
This doesn't sound like much - maybe a day's work if I had a full day and put my mind to it. But I never have a full day anymore, and even back when I did, I was busy waffling about writing at the same time. Hmm. I don't know what I can do to entertain them either, actually. They won't be here long, but they'll still need to eat a few times at least. Maybe Chinese takeout? :)
2006/06/19
Lack of following my own plans continues ...
41 / 90 days to go | 49 / 90 days gone
28,418 / 90,000 words done | 20,582 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6259
Blogs: 15,133
My weekend plans were to do a bunch of household chores, and a bunch of editting for the bus story. Well, household chores are basically a lost cause at this point. I got some laundry done (good thing because I was running out of underwear). I did almost no writing at all.
[members-only cut]
What happened instead? A bunch of friends from RPoL managed to convince me to get a Livejournal. Finally, after months of talking about their friends-only posts that I can't see without being a member there. And it turns out that there's all sorts of shiny buttons involved in setting up an LJ blog.
Several hours later, when I was tired of tinkering with the color scheme, I ended up with this. :D
Meanwhile, unbekownst to them, I started a different blog there. A topic blog. I decided that Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout needed to be one. Every weekend I end up with more stuff I want to say - but it's day-to-day things, mostly, about whatever happened while I was there. I have a lot of anecdotes about ways I've managed to screw up, like the time I hit a wrong button on the credit card machine, which caused all business at the front counter to come to a halt (with like ten people in line) while Linda figured out how to fix it. Or the two new-hire cooks who didn't understand the concept of "why don't we let the English-speaking people speak to the customers and pass out food, while the cooks stay in the back and cook the food to be passed out, so that they aren't standing there waiting for it and therefore needing to be talked to."
There's a lot of stuff like that going on all the time, and there was nowhere really to go into it at great length before. I'll probably write lots of lengthy entries at first as I catch up the blog for the first couple months of those. Then it'll move into a weekly format, for just whatever happened during that weekend.
(Incidentally, I'd prefer that Galen not tell everyone about this blog, as it will include a lot of information about me that I'd rather some of them not know. Of course, for that matter, there's a lot of info in this blog that also qualifies... erm. Keep up the good work of keeping quiet. :D )
Anyway, so I really need to get started editting Stranger on a Bus. I don't know why I keep putting it off. It's like I have to psych myself up for it. And each chapter is good for around 2k words toward my SFR wordcount, which is sinking farther and farther behind... :( Must... begin... editting...
28,418 / 90,000 words done | 20,582 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6259
Blogs: 15,133
My weekend plans were to do a bunch of household chores, and a bunch of editting for the bus story. Well, household chores are basically a lost cause at this point. I got some laundry done (good thing because I was running out of underwear). I did almost no writing at all.
[members-only cut]
What happened instead? A bunch of friends from RPoL managed to convince me to get a Livejournal. Finally, after months of talking about their friends-only posts that I can't see without being a member there. And it turns out that there's all sorts of shiny buttons involved in setting up an LJ blog.
Several hours later, when I was tired of tinkering with the color scheme, I ended up with this. :D
Meanwhile, unbekownst to them, I started a different blog there. A topic blog. I decided that Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout needed to be one. Every weekend I end up with more stuff I want to say - but it's day-to-day things, mostly, about whatever happened while I was there. I have a lot of anecdotes about ways I've managed to screw up, like the time I hit a wrong button on the credit card machine, which caused all business at the front counter to come to a halt (with like ten people in line) while Linda figured out how to fix it. Or the two new-hire cooks who didn't understand the concept of "why don't we let the English-speaking people speak to the customers and pass out food, while the cooks stay in the back and cook the food to be passed out, so that they aren't standing there waiting for it and therefore needing to be talked to."
There's a lot of stuff like that going on all the time, and there was nowhere really to go into it at great length before. I'll probably write lots of lengthy entries at first as I catch up the blog for the first couple months of those. Then it'll move into a weekly format, for just whatever happened during that weekend.
(Incidentally, I'd prefer that Galen not tell everyone about this blog, as it will include a lot of information about me that I'd rather some of them not know. Of course, for that matter, there's a lot of info in this blog that also qualifies... erm. Keep up the good work of keeping quiet. :D )
Anyway, so I really need to get started editting Stranger on a Bus. I don't know why I keep putting it off. It's like I have to psych myself up for it. And each chapter is good for around 2k words toward my SFR wordcount, which is sinking farther and farther behind... :( Must... begin... editting...
2006/06/16
SFR Over the Hill
44 / 90 days to go | 46 / 90 days gone
27,156 / 90,000 words done | 18,844 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6114
Blogs: 14,016
I spoke too soon about the death of roleplay. Today all the wolves woke up with a vengeance, and I spent my afternoon hanging two of them from the tops of trees. They were learning to fly, but had some bad dice rolls...
Now if the vampires have a similar awakening, things would start moving forward again quite rapidly. I must admit to liking the wolves quite a bit more though. Every time I write for them, I remember why I'm running the game.
One of these days I'll get around to starting up the mage storyline too, though I might wait until August. By then I'm hoping my current players will stop having quite so many offline difficulties. Coincidentally this would also be after the end of SFR.
At this point it's just over half over, and I'm around 19k words behind. I do feel more focused than I have in a week, though. And I have a plan in mind for what to do in the next couple weeks - line edit the first 9 chapters of the bus story. One chapter per night shouldn't be too bad. I'll have to keep up with roleplay at the same time, so I'm not going to declare that this will be done in 9 days. I'll try for end-of-June, taking days off if there's a lot of roleplay to do. If I get done with the first nine chapters sooner than June 30, I'll go into a bonus round of finishing off chapter 10 - and then an extra bonus round of finishing the novella.
I've also passed chapter 5 to my friend who was born in Russia. Hopefully he'll be able to fix my details with the Russian bandits. He turns out to be a writer as well, so we might end up trading crits. I looked over the first draft of a prologue he wrote and gave him a few broad-stroke suggestions about it; he did thank me, though I'm not sure he was exactly thrilled with everything I said.
Once July starts, I'm submitting Dragonfly, then getting started on Amulet II. It needs a thorough reread and lots of plothole filling before I can write the ending. (Sort of the same boat as Stranger on a Bus, except three times the size.)
One of my cousins announced today that one of her short stories got published in an online literary fiction magazine. Yay her. :) I browsed around on their website and noticed that not only does Dragonfly resemble the stories on there (in the sense of being scene snapshots and internal reflections without much actual plot), Dragonfly looks better. ;) That one isn't a paying market, but I'll keep it in mind if no one else wants to buy it. My hopes are up at the moment, though.
And finally, I told my mother about the Chinese takeout job today. She said I should do something that involves learning something new, making some money, and also having fun.
I said, "I am. I'm learning all sorts of things that I didn't learn the first time. Even though it was right in front of me."
I think she understood. But that's why I ought to write the memoir. So I can explain to my mother why I'm there. At this stage it's not something I can put into words yet, though. It's still early in the game for that. Maybe next year.
27,156 / 90,000 words done | 18,844 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6114
Blogs: 14,016
I spoke too soon about the death of roleplay. Today all the wolves woke up with a vengeance, and I spent my afternoon hanging two of them from the tops of trees. They were learning to fly, but had some bad dice rolls...
Now if the vampires have a similar awakening, things would start moving forward again quite rapidly. I must admit to liking the wolves quite a bit more though. Every time I write for them, I remember why I'm running the game.
One of these days I'll get around to starting up the mage storyline too, though I might wait until August. By then I'm hoping my current players will stop having quite so many offline difficulties. Coincidentally this would also be after the end of SFR.
At this point it's just over half over, and I'm around 19k words behind. I do feel more focused than I have in a week, though. And I have a plan in mind for what to do in the next couple weeks - line edit the first 9 chapters of the bus story. One chapter per night shouldn't be too bad. I'll have to keep up with roleplay at the same time, so I'm not going to declare that this will be done in 9 days. I'll try for end-of-June, taking days off if there's a lot of roleplay to do. If I get done with the first nine chapters sooner than June 30, I'll go into a bonus round of finishing off chapter 10 - and then an extra bonus round of finishing the novella.
I've also passed chapter 5 to my friend who was born in Russia. Hopefully he'll be able to fix my details with the Russian bandits. He turns out to be a writer as well, so we might end up trading crits. I looked over the first draft of a prologue he wrote and gave him a few broad-stroke suggestions about it; he did thank me, though I'm not sure he was exactly thrilled with everything I said.
Once July starts, I'm submitting Dragonfly, then getting started on Amulet II. It needs a thorough reread and lots of plothole filling before I can write the ending. (Sort of the same boat as Stranger on a Bus, except three times the size.)
One of my cousins announced today that one of her short stories got published in an online literary fiction magazine. Yay her. :) I browsed around on their website and noticed that not only does Dragonfly resemble the stories on there (in the sense of being scene snapshots and internal reflections without much actual plot), Dragonfly looks better. ;) That one isn't a paying market, but I'll keep it in mind if no one else wants to buy it. My hopes are up at the moment, though.
And finally, I told my mother about the Chinese takeout job today. She said I should do something that involves learning something new, making some money, and also having fun.
I said, "I am. I'm learning all sorts of things that I didn't learn the first time. Even though it was right in front of me."
I think she understood. But that's why I ought to write the memoir. So I can explain to my mother why I'm there. At this stage it's not something I can put into words yet, though. It's still early in the game for that. Maybe next year.
2006/06/14
SFR nearly halfway point
46 / 90 days to go | 44 / 90 days gone
25,373 / 90,000 words done | 18,627 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 13,237
My Internet connection at home is a bit kablooey at the moment. Everything is loading at a glacial pace. (So much for their ads proclaiming "6 megs of speed." Hah! I'm looking at speeds more along the lines of 60-600 bytes.) I couldn't get the profile thing at SFFMuse to let me update it there. Here's hoping this will actually post here.
So what's on my writing plate at the moment?
Dragonfly started out at 898 after the first round of tweakage, then went up to 925 briefly, and finally settled in at 916. I'll look at again in another week or two to see if I still like it the way it is now. Then it's off to the submissions with it as soon as July comes around. I'm waiting for July because that way I can submit it to Glimmer Train under two different categories at once. (It's allowed.) Might as well see if they like it enough to buy it, even if it isn't good enough to win the annual competition. Both ways pay relatively well. I won't hear back from them until October, though. Of course, that'll give me a lot of time to look at other literary fiction places to submit if they don't like it there.
Next, Stranger on a Bus is up for some line editting, starting from the beginning. I'm reading over the critiques that Spiff gave it back last September, when I first posted it at SFFMuse. I have a hardcopy of it floating around here somewhere and will probably draw red ink all over it for the first pass, then type it all back in by hand. Hopefully I'll manage to do a chapter per night until I'm done with the first nine chapters. Meanwhile I'll post up what I have of 10 (for backup purposes if nothing else), in case anyone is still following along and wants the latest and greatest. (assuming my Internet cooperates. *sigh*)
Also, Amulet II is up for a reread, outlining, and hopefully finishing. I left off at 55k words back in November. At that point I discovered that the end of my outline was not the end of the story after all, but was somewhere around the middle. So I still have to write the other half. But before I can do that, I need to rewrite the outline. It's a story with two major plotlines and four(ish) minor ones, which means it's fairly complex; at the time I stopped in November, it was getting rather unwieldy. There were lots of holes developing, and I'll need to fill them before I can move forward.
Temple is still on the backburner as well, but at the moment I cringe too much when I look at the opening material. At some point I do need to get back to writing up the second full draft, though.
Then there's Birthright coming up for next Nano. I have lots of backstory material in mind for the main plotline, though none of it is fleshed out enough yet. I need to outline the second plotline as well, since at this point it consists of a one-paragraph blurb. So far it's looking like this will be even more straightforward of a plot than Amulet II was. The main protagonist will be discovering all the info at the same time as the readers. The secondary protagonist, of the other plotline, will be in a similar situation, I think. The scary part is that I have no real idea of how it ends. I know what I'd like to see happen at the end, but have no clue how it's going to get there.
Taint/Amulet I is just going to stay a pile of scattered scenes for now. Maybe I'll write more of them as my secondary project for Nano, the way I did last November when I was stalled out on Amulet II.
As for roleplay, it's deader than a doornail. I have exactly one active player in my game, but he can't move because there's four other people who aren't around much. There are two posts I need to make as a player but haven't worked up the energy for it yet. There's one dead game that's scheduled to be removed from my list next week (I give most games one month to come back to life before I remove them). All the other games are basically dead as well, though there are occasional signs that they might revive.
That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment. Now it's time to hit the "post" button to see if this will actually post...
...
(it wouldn't go until 12 hours after I wrote it. Grrrr.)
25,373 / 90,000 words done | 18,627 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 13,237
My Internet connection at home is a bit kablooey at the moment. Everything is loading at a glacial pace. (So much for their ads proclaiming "6 megs of speed." Hah! I'm looking at speeds more along the lines of 60-600 bytes.) I couldn't get the profile thing at SFFMuse to let me update it there. Here's hoping this will actually post here.
So what's on my writing plate at the moment?
Dragonfly started out at 898 after the first round of tweakage, then went up to 925 briefly, and finally settled in at 916. I'll look at again in another week or two to see if I still like it the way it is now. Then it's off to the submissions with it as soon as July comes around. I'm waiting for July because that way I can submit it to Glimmer Train under two different categories at once. (It's allowed.) Might as well see if they like it enough to buy it, even if it isn't good enough to win the annual competition. Both ways pay relatively well. I won't hear back from them until October, though. Of course, that'll give me a lot of time to look at other literary fiction places to submit if they don't like it there.
Next, Stranger on a Bus is up for some line editting, starting from the beginning. I'm reading over the critiques that Spiff gave it back last September, when I first posted it at SFFMuse. I have a hardcopy of it floating around here somewhere and will probably draw red ink all over it for the first pass, then type it all back in by hand. Hopefully I'll manage to do a chapter per night until I'm done with the first nine chapters. Meanwhile I'll post up what I have of 10 (for backup purposes if nothing else), in case anyone is still following along and wants the latest and greatest. (assuming my Internet cooperates. *sigh*)
Also, Amulet II is up for a reread, outlining, and hopefully finishing. I left off at 55k words back in November. At that point I discovered that the end of my outline was not the end of the story after all, but was somewhere around the middle. So I still have to write the other half. But before I can do that, I need to rewrite the outline. It's a story with two major plotlines and four(ish) minor ones, which means it's fairly complex; at the time I stopped in November, it was getting rather unwieldy. There were lots of holes developing, and I'll need to fill them before I can move forward.
Temple is still on the backburner as well, but at the moment I cringe too much when I look at the opening material. At some point I do need to get back to writing up the second full draft, though.
Then there's Birthright coming up for next Nano. I have lots of backstory material in mind for the main plotline, though none of it is fleshed out enough yet. I need to outline the second plotline as well, since at this point it consists of a one-paragraph blurb. So far it's looking like this will be even more straightforward of a plot than Amulet II was. The main protagonist will be discovering all the info at the same time as the readers. The secondary protagonist, of the other plotline, will be in a similar situation, I think. The scary part is that I have no real idea of how it ends. I know what I'd like to see happen at the end, but have no clue how it's going to get there.
Taint/Amulet I is just going to stay a pile of scattered scenes for now. Maybe I'll write more of them as my secondary project for Nano, the way I did last November when I was stalled out on Amulet II.
As for roleplay, it's deader than a doornail. I have exactly one active player in my game, but he can't move because there's four other people who aren't around much. There are two posts I need to make as a player but haven't worked up the energy for it yet. There's one dead game that's scheduled to be removed from my list next week (I give most games one month to come back to life before I remove them). All the other games are basically dead as well, though there are occasional signs that they might revive.
That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment. Now it's time to hit the "post" button to see if this will actually post...
...
(it wouldn't go until 12 hours after I wrote it. Grrrr.)
2006/06/13
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I spent last night tweaking up Dragonfly (again). I won't inflict it on the rest of you here (again), as this is a place for speculative fiction, not literary fiction, and the piece is still the epitomy of passivity and navel gazing. ;) It says what it needs to say to me, though.
Final wordcount is 917 words. Somewhere I read that if I'm turning my commas into periods in the morning, then turning them back into commas in the afternoon, it means it's ready to go. I'm at that state of tweakage now. I might show it to a few people who appreciate literary fiction if I can find any before July.
It's always odd to me how that works out. I don't like to read what I tend to write. Fortress Launne is best classified as fantasy, and there's very little fantasy that I enjoy reading. I don't particularly care about other people's renditions of classical music but greatly enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm just a narcissist, in love with my own creations to the exclusion of everyone else's. But then again, I also greatly enjoy listening to all sorts of music that I haven't a clue how to create, and the things I enjoy reading are the types of things I wouldn't ever think to write. In the latter case, in recent times anyway, that would be nonfiction science-related articles in things like Discover Magazine, Smithsonian, Science News, etc. I'm a scientist, and I have no inspiration to write any of the articles in the magazines I most enjoy reading. Meanwhile my reaction to most fiction magazines (the types of places I'm likely to attempt to submit stuff in the future) leaves me "ehh" for actually reading.
Anyway, back to Dragonfly. I went and looked up the Emily Dickinson poem that apparently had a much greater influence on the piece than I thought. I'd read it back in high school or somesuch and forgot all but the very first line. In fact, up until I reread it just now, I could've sworn it was an abstract 4-line poem - and not something with 4 stanzas and concrete imagery. And here I thought I didn't much care for Emily Dickinson. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Stranger on a Bus is still stalled out. I've been a bit depressed in the past few days, and this makes it hard to work on things that are high-speed action-adventure. However, I have a friend originally from Russia who gets quite passionate about all things Russian, and I'm planning to inflict him with Chapter 5 (when a band of rogue Russians try to hijack the bus) for his thoughts on cultural accuracy. The names I use for the hijackers are definitely wrong, so hopefully he'll feel inclined to rename everyone involved for me. That should hopefully give me the kick in the pants I need to start line-editting things from the beginning, too, which I need to do before I finish Chapter 10. The last bit of Chapter 10 needs to draw rather heavily from everything that went on in the first nine chapters, and the details are a bit fuzzy since the last time I looked at them back in September.
And finally, yesterday I wrote a blog entry elsewhere about hurricanes. Alberto is hitting Florida right now, on its way up through Savannah GA (where I am) and I felt inclined to wax poetic about my past experiences with hurricanes. After I was done, I noticed that I'd managed to put it into the approximate format for creative nonfiction. I'd spend quite a bit of time looking that up, while pondering the possibilities of a Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout which is kind of tabled at the moment. Apparently stuff sank in that I can use elsewhere, though.
[members-only cut]
I'm putting the full text of the other blog entry here in case anyone is curious. It could use some tweakage but the overall form is right. Thinking about my process while writing it, I kind of wish I'd saved some intermediate stages for my own personal amusement - from the "blurt out a bunch of disjointed thoughts onto the screen" stage to where it is now. I call these things "first drafts" but in retrospect it isn't really, because there's already been a ton of editting gone into it before it sees the light of day. On the other hand, the "blurt it all out" stage could be classified under "prewrite" mode too. Overall, it's not really a process with discrete stages, as everything sort of grades into each other.
Anyway, here it is:
Final wordcount is 917 words. Somewhere I read that if I'm turning my commas into periods in the morning, then turning them back into commas in the afternoon, it means it's ready to go. I'm at that state of tweakage now. I might show it to a few people who appreciate literary fiction if I can find any before July.
It's always odd to me how that works out. I don't like to read what I tend to write. Fortress Launne is best classified as fantasy, and there's very little fantasy that I enjoy reading. I don't particularly care about other people's renditions of classical music but greatly enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm just a narcissist, in love with my own creations to the exclusion of everyone else's. But then again, I also greatly enjoy listening to all sorts of music that I haven't a clue how to create, and the things I enjoy reading are the types of things I wouldn't ever think to write. In the latter case, in recent times anyway, that would be nonfiction science-related articles in things like Discover Magazine, Smithsonian, Science News, etc. I'm a scientist, and I have no inspiration to write any of the articles in the magazines I most enjoy reading. Meanwhile my reaction to most fiction magazines (the types of places I'm likely to attempt to submit stuff in the future) leaves me "ehh" for actually reading.
Anyway, back to Dragonfly. I went and looked up the Emily Dickinson poem that apparently had a much greater influence on the piece than I thought. I'd read it back in high school or somesuch and forgot all but the very first line. In fact, up until I reread it just now, I could've sworn it was an abstract 4-line poem - and not something with 4 stanzas and concrete imagery. And here I thought I didn't much care for Emily Dickinson. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Stranger on a Bus is still stalled out. I've been a bit depressed in the past few days, and this makes it hard to work on things that are high-speed action-adventure. However, I have a friend originally from Russia who gets quite passionate about all things Russian, and I'm planning to inflict him with Chapter 5 (when a band of rogue Russians try to hijack the bus) for his thoughts on cultural accuracy. The names I use for the hijackers are definitely wrong, so hopefully he'll feel inclined to rename everyone involved for me. That should hopefully give me the kick in the pants I need to start line-editting things from the beginning, too, which I need to do before I finish Chapter 10. The last bit of Chapter 10 needs to draw rather heavily from everything that went on in the first nine chapters, and the details are a bit fuzzy since the last time I looked at them back in September.
And finally, yesterday I wrote a blog entry elsewhere about hurricanes. Alberto is hitting Florida right now, on its way up through Savannah GA (where I am) and I felt inclined to wax poetic about my past experiences with hurricanes. After I was done, I noticed that I'd managed to put it into the approximate format for creative nonfiction. I'd spend quite a bit of time looking that up, while pondering the possibilities of a Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout which is kind of tabled at the moment. Apparently stuff sank in that I can use elsewhere, though.
[members-only cut]
I'm putting the full text of the other blog entry here in case anyone is curious. It could use some tweakage but the overall form is right. Thinking about my process while writing it, I kind of wish I'd saved some intermediate stages for my own personal amusement - from the "blurt out a bunch of disjointed thoughts onto the screen" stage to where it is now. I call these things "first drafts" but in retrospect it isn't really, because there's already been a ton of editting gone into it before it sees the light of day. On the other hand, the "blurt it all out" stage could be classified under "prewrite" mode too. Overall, it's not really a process with discrete stages, as everything sort of grades into each other.
Anyway, here it is:
Later tonight, Alberto will hit Florida. First tropical storm of the 2006 hurricane season. Possibly a weak category 1 by the time it makes landfall. Nobody is out trying to catch the big waves this time. They're being sensible and stocking up on supplies, or evacuating. The pall of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma last year, and the quadruple-whammy on Florida in 2004, still hangs over everyone.
My personal experiences with hurricanes have been remarkably uneventful by comparison. I was in Wilmington, NC during the time period when every single Atlantic hurricane seemed intent on making landfall in Wilmington, NC; I missed out on Bertha and Fran of 1996, but was there for Bonnie in 1998, and Dennis and Floyd in 1999. (My best friend at the time saw all five of those, plus he was in Charleston for Hugo in 1988. He figured he was cursed.) In all of those cases, I lived on relatively high ground (as high as one can hope for in a place that's totally flat). There was lots of wind and rain, but no thunder or lightning. And the power was out. Which meant hours upon hours of sitting around in the dark with nothing to do. We saw the eye of Bonnie as it passed right over my apartment complex, on such a slow trek that we were in it for an hour. That was about as exciting as things ever got.
Hurricanes are rather boring. It's the aftermath that sucks. That's when all the flooding problems start, with all the overflowing rivers. The full impact of a hurricane tends not to be immediately evident, because it isn't so much the downed street signs and power lines as it is when all that extra water starts coming back downstream to get back to the ocean.
Wilmington is in the part of the southeast coast that juts outward, making it a prime target for hurricanes going by. Savannah, GA is in the part of the coast that indents inward, which makes the odds of something hitting here much less. So far since I've lived here, there have been some near-misses, but nothing to cause much alarm.
The projected path of Alberto has it hitting Savannah from behind by Wednesday morning - going over a bunch of land, so it will hopefully just be severe thunderstorms by the time it gets here.
As for the rest of 2006, the hurricane specialists predict another highly active year, though it will be extremely difficult to top last year, which broke an enormous number of records.
Guess we'll see what happens.
2006/06/11
10 days into Month 2
50 / 90 days to go | 40 / 90 days gone
22,954 / 90,000 words done | 17,046 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 11,734
The bus story is starting to languish again. I'm stalled out on the rest of the highway chase scene. My mind, meanwhile, seems to have decided to move on to something else. What that would be, though, I'm not really sure. I sort of feel vaguely like working on something that's different from what's on my plate now, but I don't know what.
I did a bit of freewriting last night and will probably continue with that for a while, see if anything interesting jars loose. This year freewrites don't count for SFR though.
There is one topic that has been tugging at me for a while though. I'm not sure how to define it, except by looking at the types of songs that do the tugging. In particular:
Audioslave's "Show Me How to Live"
Diablo's "The Preacher"
System of a Down's "Chop Suey"
Evanescence's "Tourniquet"
Metallica's "The God that Failed"
This has been going on for years. The Metallica song is my theme song for my Anitaverse vampire, Rumen. The Evanescence song is (very, very strangely) the theme song for my Anitaverse necromancer, Aaron (and I have no idea why that is).
So I know I'll be writing something that's rooted in Catholicism and its practices in some way. Something that is about falls and redemptions. And it's been in deep rumination for a very long time.
On a lighter note, I get occasional glimmers of inspiration toward the opening scene for Taint. I've figured out that what I need to do is focus on Aliacorba's POV, starting from when he was a perfectly normal mortal going about his normal daily life. Hopefully I can pin it down into a scene of some sort at some point.
22,954 / 90,000 words done | 17,046 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 11,734
The bus story is starting to languish again. I'm stalled out on the rest of the highway chase scene. My mind, meanwhile, seems to have decided to move on to something else. What that would be, though, I'm not really sure. I sort of feel vaguely like working on something that's different from what's on my plate now, but I don't know what.
I did a bit of freewriting last night and will probably continue with that for a while, see if anything interesting jars loose. This year freewrites don't count for SFR though.
There is one topic that has been tugging at me for a while though. I'm not sure how to define it, except by looking at the types of songs that do the tugging. In particular:
Audioslave's "Show Me How to Live"
Diablo's "The Preacher"
System of a Down's "Chop Suey"
Evanescence's "Tourniquet"
Metallica's "The God that Failed"
This has been going on for years. The Metallica song is my theme song for my Anitaverse vampire, Rumen. The Evanescence song is (very, very strangely) the theme song for my Anitaverse necromancer, Aaron (and I have no idea why that is).
So I know I'll be writing something that's rooted in Catholicism and its practices in some way. Something that is about falls and redemptions. And it's been in deep rumination for a very long time.
On a lighter note, I get occasional glimmers of inspiration toward the opening scene for Taint. I've figured out that what I need to do is focus on Aliacorba's POV, starting from when he was a perfectly normal mortal going about his normal daily life. Hopefully I can pin it down into a scene of some sort at some point.
2006/06/09
Chugging along in fits and starts
51 / 90 days to go | 39 / 90 days gone
22,304 / 90,000 words done | 16,696 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 11,275
After my brief burst of productivity, I went back to being wordless. Mainly I was reading again - voraciously. I'm rereading through Learn Writing with Uncle Jim now that it's back up and available for reading at Absolute Write. The whole thread is chock full of highly useful writing tips, especially the first 20 pages or so. The last time I went over it, it eventually degenerated into more noise than signal, but the thread as a whole is still going strong, and I suspect it went back to signal after the point where I stopped. I'm on page 8 at the moment.
Absolute Write came back up and when I checked over it, nobody was saying anything whatsoever due to impending lawsuits. So I still don't know exactly how it ended - whether they got back everything completely intact, the way we got back RPoL, or the stuff that's back is just what they've managed to cobble together out of Google caches. I suspect the latter, but there's so much material from pre-yank that it's hard to tell (without having been a regular there before, at least). They did an amazing job of reassembling the forums.
I also found another fun writing community to try out - Orson Scott Card's writers workshop. It's slightly larger than Hobgoblin, has a crowd of regulars in their 30s, and might become useful when I get around to asking for Random Stranger Critiques. I like their format - first 13 lines of a WIP posted to the forum, free for people to crit as an effective opener, or as a sampler for people to ask for the whole story to crit. I like the idea of not having to commit to any minimum amount of work in a regular workshop-style arrangement, but just to participate when I can.
And last but not least, I joined Writing Jam, which is a private workshop here on Hobgoblin. It's not a regular workshop-style crit circle, which I like, and is having a good start (just launched a week or two ago). I'm enjoying it so far. (Details in here :D ).
So basically, while getting myself acquainted with all of those, I didn't write anything for two days. Tonight I wrote a couple roleplay posts that are a week late (the same two posts I mentioned two blog entries ago), and now I'm back to having nothing roleplay-related to do. Turns out that my favorite GM has had the flu, hence his inactivity. Nobody else is showing much signs of life either - crosscountry moves, relationship quandaries, schoolwork, and Internet connections gone kablooey, have taken out just about everyone else. I'm not complaining. It's more time for me to ruminate about writing, and occasionally do some actual writing.
22,304 / 90,000 words done | 16,696 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 11,275
After my brief burst of productivity, I went back to being wordless. Mainly I was reading again - voraciously. I'm rereading through Learn Writing with Uncle Jim now that it's back up and available for reading at Absolute Write. The whole thread is chock full of highly useful writing tips, especially the first 20 pages or so. The last time I went over it, it eventually degenerated into more noise than signal, but the thread as a whole is still going strong, and I suspect it went back to signal after the point where I stopped. I'm on page 8 at the moment.
Absolute Write came back up and when I checked over it, nobody was saying anything whatsoever due to impending lawsuits. So I still don't know exactly how it ended - whether they got back everything completely intact, the way we got back RPoL, or the stuff that's back is just what they've managed to cobble together out of Google caches. I suspect the latter, but there's so much material from pre-yank that it's hard to tell (without having been a regular there before, at least). They did an amazing job of reassembling the forums.
I also found another fun writing community to try out - Orson Scott Card's writers workshop. It's slightly larger than Hobgoblin, has a crowd of regulars in their 30s, and might become useful when I get around to asking for Random Stranger Critiques. I like their format - first 13 lines of a WIP posted to the forum, free for people to crit as an effective opener, or as a sampler for people to ask for the whole story to crit. I like the idea of not having to commit to any minimum amount of work in a regular workshop-style arrangement, but just to participate when I can.
And last but not least, I joined Writing Jam, which is a private workshop here on Hobgoblin. It's not a regular workshop-style crit circle, which I like, and is having a good start (just launched a week or two ago). I'm enjoying it so far. (Details in here :D ).
So basically, while getting myself acquainted with all of those, I didn't write anything for two days. Tonight I wrote a couple roleplay posts that are a week late (the same two posts I mentioned two blog entries ago), and now I'm back to having nothing roleplay-related to do. Turns out that my favorite GM has had the flu, hence his inactivity. Nobody else is showing much signs of life either - crosscountry moves, relationship quandaries, schoolwork, and Internet connections gone kablooey, have taken out just about everyone else. I'm not complaining. It's more time for me to ruminate about writing, and occasionally do some actual writing.
2006/06/06
Bus story moving forward at a good clip
54 / 90 days to go | 36 / 90 days gone
21,673 / 90,000 words done | 14,327 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,970
My brain is starting to settle back into the rhythm of actual writing again. It feels good. The bus story is probably the easiest for me to get into, in terms of its lack of high-falutin' language, and the fact that I pretty much know what I want to do. Once Ned got away from the news reporter, things started moving forward quite fast.
He has now stolen the armoured car that Alan is imprisoned in, and they're going down the highway trying to evade the cops. I just finished some complex passing maneuvers, and the next thing will be a long stretch of deserted road. I'm planning to hit him with miniature versions of everything he ran into in the past nine chapters, as an increasingly desperate attempt by Nature to stop them from getting to the bus station.
Once they get past all that, I probably should end the chapter and start a new one. Chapter 10 is already going to be five times longer than the previous nine chapters.
So that would mean Chapter 11 is the scene in the bus station where Alan gets the phone call he needs. Not sure how long this will be yet. Depends on whether there will be any complications resulting from the car chase. It could be as short as Chapter 6, which was only around 1k words.
Then Chapter 12 will wrap it all up.
Hmm. Every time I say that while I'm running a game scene, it means that plot complexities will mushroom things out into the stratosphere and it'll take ten times longer for anything to even start looking like a conclusion... if that happens with this story, I might end up with a novel after all. ;)
At the moment, the total on Bus is 22,234 words. Guess we'll see.
21,673 / 90,000 words done | 14,327 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,970
My brain is starting to settle back into the rhythm of actual writing again. It feels good. The bus story is probably the easiest for me to get into, in terms of its lack of high-falutin' language, and the fact that I pretty much know what I want to do. Once Ned got away from the news reporter, things started moving forward quite fast.
He has now stolen the armoured car that Alan is imprisoned in, and they're going down the highway trying to evade the cops. I just finished some complex passing maneuvers, and the next thing will be a long stretch of deserted road. I'm planning to hit him with miniature versions of everything he ran into in the past nine chapters, as an increasingly desperate attempt by Nature to stop them from getting to the bus station.
Once they get past all that, I probably should end the chapter and start a new one. Chapter 10 is already going to be five times longer than the previous nine chapters.
So that would mean Chapter 11 is the scene in the bus station where Alan gets the phone call he needs. Not sure how long this will be yet. Depends on whether there will be any complications resulting from the car chase. It could be as short as Chapter 6, which was only around 1k words.
Then Chapter 12 will wrap it all up.
Hmm. Every time I say that while I'm running a game scene, it means that plot complexities will mushroom things out into the stratosphere and it'll take ten times longer for anything to even start looking like a conclusion... if that happens with this story, I might end up with a novel after all. ;)
At the moment, the total on Bus is 22,234 words. Guess we'll see.
2006/06/05
SFR Month 2 Day 5
SFR 2006:
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281
Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.
I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.
I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).
Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.
Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).
I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.
Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281
Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.
I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.
I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).
Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.
Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).
I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.
Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...
2006/06/01
SFR Month 2 Day 1
SFR 2006:
59 / 90 days to go | 31 / 90 days gone
17,540 / 90,000 words done | 14,358 words behind
Dragonfly: 898
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4169
Blogs: 9660
Month Two is starting out with a nice bang. :) I spent my evening editting Dragonfly. That was a short piece I did two Februaries ago (2005), based on an extremely strong and realistic dream. I'd entertained the thought of polishing it up to submit somewhere at the time, but then kind of let it drop until now.
Why now? I found somewhere to submit it. Stumbled across it in an early Miss Snark, actually. (thanks again to ellsea! :) ) The publication is Glimmer Train, and it's two women with a quarterly that like literary fiction. I don't know what else to call Dragonfly other than literary fiction. Based on their website, it looks like a pretty good magazine. And if Miss Snark endorsed it, it can't be that bad, right?
First prize for their "very short fiction" contest is $1200 and publication. Second and third are $500 and $300. Obviously I'd like to win first, so if people have some time to read and critique 898 words, I'd very much appreciate it. :) I ran it past one (non-writer) person already and he said it was good, so I have hope... I posted it as a reply to my original post in the member's only workshop forum.
Meanwhile, I am still considering doing something for the Asian American Writers Workshop contest. I sent an email asking whether they really mean what their announcement says - "no theme! no page limit! only requirement is to be Asian!" - ...and sadly, the answer was no. :( The sponsors of the contest are both really big on stuff that's about the Asian American experience, so of course the contest winner would have to be something about that. That pretty much eliminates the bus story, which is about a black bus driver and God posing as a white guy, on a cross-country trip, that has no Asian/Asian American subplots or characters in it.
I don't know. I don't really define myself by my ethnicity. Yes, I'm of Asian descent, but so what? It's not that noteworthy to me. I still spent a few hours trying to brainstorm up some possible short stories I could write about it, and ... well, I got nothing. My response to the whole question of "What's it like to be Asian American?" is basically "uhhh.... " [*shrugging smileys*]
My brother suggested I write some kind of inspirational feel-good story about something out of my childhood, but that sounds boringly formulaic. I didn't have that interesting of a childhood. :p At least nothing that could be turned into a story with an actual plot.
As for the Chinese Takeout thing, that did take up a lot of my brainstorm time, but honestly I don't see that as being anything fictional. It's going to be a memoir-like thing if I do it. There's no plot, therefore it's not that kind of story. If I do it, the obvious places to try submitting would be New Yorker first, then Hyphen (which doesn't pay, sadly). Maybe I'll run across some other magazines for that.
Obviously I've fallen way out of the groove for Fortress Launne. Those are still on the back burner of things to do, notably Temple and Amulet II. Temple might not be the first thing I try to submit somewhere; its structure is possibly still too complex for me to do properly right now, and after reading some of the sample first-pages that Miss Snark shot down, and noticing that my first chapter of Temple resembles the rejects more than the non-suckies ... erm, yeah. I'll just crawl back into my hole now.
Amulet II at least has a straightforward chronological-order structure. I might get around to looking at that again pretty soon.
59 / 90 days to go | 31 / 90 days gone
17,540 / 90,000 words done | 14,358 words behind
Dragonfly: 898
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4169
Blogs: 9660
Month Two is starting out with a nice bang. :) I spent my evening editting Dragonfly. That was a short piece I did two Februaries ago (2005), based on an extremely strong and realistic dream. I'd entertained the thought of polishing it up to submit somewhere at the time, but then kind of let it drop until now.
Why now? I found somewhere to submit it. Stumbled across it in an early Miss Snark, actually. (thanks again to ellsea! :) ) The publication is Glimmer Train, and it's two women with a quarterly that like literary fiction. I don't know what else to call Dragonfly other than literary fiction. Based on their website, it looks like a pretty good magazine. And if Miss Snark endorsed it, it can't be that bad, right?
First prize for their "very short fiction" contest is $1200 and publication. Second and third are $500 and $300. Obviously I'd like to win first, so if people have some time to read and critique 898 words, I'd very much appreciate it. :) I ran it past one (non-writer) person already and he said it was good, so I have hope... I posted it as a reply to my original post in the member's only workshop forum.
Meanwhile, I am still considering doing something for the Asian American Writers Workshop contest. I sent an email asking whether they really mean what their announcement says - "no theme! no page limit! only requirement is to be Asian!" - ...and sadly, the answer was no. :( The sponsors of the contest are both really big on stuff that's about the Asian American experience, so of course the contest winner would have to be something about that. That pretty much eliminates the bus story, which is about a black bus driver and God posing as a white guy, on a cross-country trip, that has no Asian/Asian American subplots or characters in it.
I don't know. I don't really define myself by my ethnicity. Yes, I'm of Asian descent, but so what? It's not that noteworthy to me. I still spent a few hours trying to brainstorm up some possible short stories I could write about it, and ... well, I got nothing. My response to the whole question of "What's it like to be Asian American?" is basically "uhhh.... " [*shrugging smileys*]
My brother suggested I write some kind of inspirational feel-good story about something out of my childhood, but that sounds boringly formulaic. I didn't have that interesting of a childhood. :p At least nothing that could be turned into a story with an actual plot.
As for the Chinese Takeout thing, that did take up a lot of my brainstorm time, but honestly I don't see that as being anything fictional. It's going to be a memoir-like thing if I do it. There's no plot, therefore it's not that kind of story. If I do it, the obvious places to try submitting would be New Yorker first, then Hyphen (which doesn't pay, sadly). Maybe I'll run across some other magazines for that.
Obviously I've fallen way out of the groove for Fortress Launne. Those are still on the back burner of things to do, notably Temple and Amulet II. Temple might not be the first thing I try to submit somewhere; its structure is possibly still too complex for me to do properly right now, and after reading some of the sample first-pages that Miss Snark shot down, and noticing that my first chapter of Temple resembles the rejects more than the non-suckies ... erm, yeah. I'll just crawl back into my hole now.
Amulet II at least has a straightforward chronological-order structure. I might get around to looking at that again pretty soon.
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