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.

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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.)