SFR: still not doing so great

22 / 90 days to go | 68 / 90 days gone
39,256 / 90,000 words done | 28,744 words behind

Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 9453
Blogs: 22,476

Well... my paladin is now 20 and in the Arcane Sanctuary in Act II. :p

I've been spending the last few days recuperating from having houseguests. Oddly enough, I never did get as sore all over as I expected, from doing 9 straight hours of cleaning on Monday. Also I've noticed that I have more upper arm muscles than I used to. Maybe that's related...

I've been doing a lot more brainstorming than actual writing. Mostly for Taint and Amulet I. Basically, Amulet I is unworkable as-is. I spent yesterday's worktime doing a lot of hard thinking on the backstory, and who the main characters are, how they're related to each other and why, and what went on in the immediate vicinity of the abandoned fort just before they showed up (which was a few years before the actual story). I think I know who Edward Duchene is now. I didn't before - he was the guy that turned out stillborn. Well, I know who he is because of how Iorli views him, and from there I can extrapolate who he is to himself. They're nothing like how I originally imagined them, nor the people they're based on.

And reading back over my game, the scenes where Lord Duchene appears, it turns out that he does have a distinct personality after all. I didn't get him right all the time, but enough that it shows through as I'm seeing him now.

Which doesn't make the plot work out any better, really. There's just too many key differences between what happened in real life between my two friends who argued over the Diablo 2 amulet, and how I adapted it in a quick, shoddy fashion when I needed to come up with a roleplay character's backstory in a hurry. It worked well enough at the time, for its original purpose, but not so well now that I'm trying to turn it into a full-fledged novel-lengthed story.

As for Taint. That one is a lot more difficult. Basically, the protagonist comes to an unfortunate end, which doesn't make for a very happy story. When one roots for the protagonist to 'win' and he ends up losing everything by the end of the story, well, somehow I don't think that's going to fly well with the average reader... and yet it's necessary for everything that happens later in the series. It's what happened to him. But whenever I try to write about it, the character fights me too, so I know it isn't right, but I don't know how to make it right.

But I'll keep bashing my head against it until it turns into something workable. I think it will happen eventually.

Meanwhile I've taken Robert's approach to Diablo 2 lately. My paladin is named Craig Turner, who would also have been a paladin if he'd been in the D2 world. I play slower, and I ruminate while I play. It does turn out to be useful in small doses, and not played to excess like I did before. USEast is back up, but I'm kind of hooked on my USWest paladin now and might not go back there anytime soon.

Eventually I'll rotate through my various WIPs back to Dragonfly. It needs to get done, and has an actual deadline if I still want to submit it. Hopefully this weekend I'll get around to looking at it again.

Oh. My houseguests are coming back. They've discovered that they're not going to manage to drive from Pittsburgh to Orlando in a single day after all, and so they're staying over tomorrow night. Somehow I'm not particularly surprised.