SFR winding down...

02 / 90 days to go | 89 / 90 days gone
50,229 / 90,000 words done | 38,771 words behind

Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count) +1012
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
What is it to be Human: 726
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 12,903
Blogs: 27,223
RPoL: 1038

Yeah. I've basically given up. And I don't think I'm going to sign up for any more non-Nanowrimo writing marathons. All they tend to do is make everything stressful instead of fun. I haven't eliminated Labor Day Novel from consideration this year, but at this point I'm not real sure how well that's going to go, considering I do have to work three hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, right during the middle of the day, which will probably kill my flow. But we'll see...

The game What is it to be Human? took off like a rocket after I nudged three people into joining. The GM suddenly started taking an interest in the game again, and has been doing a lot of admin housecleaning - removing obviously-gone players, changing the way we do things threadwise, etc. He's around to post quite a lot more now than he has been for months. He hasn't paid this much attention to the game since he first started it back in 2003.

And in the process, I'm pretty stoked again too. There's a couple posts I need to write for one of my characters, and I'm a tad stuck, but I'm still having a good time reading everyone else's activities and recognizing all the plot bits everywhere. Being able to actually talk about the game to other people helps a lot too (the aforementioned three people).

On the downside, however, it means that my own plans for a fanfic has screeched to a halt. I can't write an alternate storyline while the "real" storyline is still in progress. I detest contradictions from canon, and it's the main reason why my Star Trek paperback collection is 90% TOS. I didn't want to buy any of the novels from the other series while those series were actually still on TV. The same applies to fanfic in general, and is why I don't read it.

So now I'm planning to write down a much-reduced version of the hunter story, turn it into a single standalone scene of not more than 20 paragraphs, and use that to explain 5 hours of Rumen's evening where he's got nothing else going on. After I do that, I can get on to the important part - just before dawn where there's a whole lot of stuff going on to other people in the game, that he's going to know about and want to react to.

What all this means, of course, is that I'm throwing myself wholeheartedly back into roleplay. I need to take a break from writing for a while. I need to get back to writing just to write, the way I breath - and not look at it as some sort of monumentally important task. I write quite well when I don't think about it at all, as my roleplay posts demonstrate to me quite clearly.

I'll still blog, of course. The takeout blog gets entries whenever I can think of anything to talk about, though most of the time all I need is a starting point, and I end up finding an entire iceberg under the tip.

Dragonfly isn't ready to be finished yet. I don't know what the entire story is, and there's a part of my subconscious that tells me it's still baking. There are pieces that I don't have yet. So I'm going to ease back and take my time, and try for having it finished by next summer.

Fortress Launne continues to recede from my mind, though there are vague twinges here and there all the time. Maybe it means that I'll get a nice tsunami at some point, but it's not here yet.

At the same time, I recently read a "how to become a writer" article on John Scalzi's Whatever blog, and in it he suggests getting a copy of Writer's Market. Poking on Amazon a bit, I note that they put out a new edition every year, and the next edition will be available in early August. I'm planning to pick up a copy, just to see what's in it, and whether there's anything non-fiction I can do with it.

Meanwhile, roleplay is going well. My game is still moving along, though still slowly. I'm in the process of kicking out a problem player - one that was cheating a few months back, and whom has since then been remarkably aggravating about just how much he can possibly get away with doing. Having him in the game isn't fun, and I want to have fun in my game, so out he's going. I'm looking around for someone to replace him - not necessarily his specific character, who is well positioned to die horribly at the moment - but someone who can take up getting entangled in the same subplots. I've managed to interest the GM of What is it to be Human? so far; he's working on a character as we speak.

And I'd like to get the mage stuff kicked off during August. That's primetime for player recruitment. I just need to finish working out the character sheets a bit more, and then start advertising in a number of key games.

Guess I'll hold off on any final thoughts about how I did with SFR until the beginning of August. I'll still be writing a lot of roleplaying posts until then.