Thank the gods for past blog posts!
Christmas break has started, and instead of doing what I was originally planning to do - finish up the tail end of Edward - I was suddenly struck with an overwhelming urge to do something involving my What is it to be Human? characters. Back in summer 2006, I'd gotten just over 700 words into an intro to a story based on the plotline of that game, when suddenly the game came out of dormancy and my story became moot.
Well. Now the game is dormant again, and has been since last May. There's no sign that the GM is ever planning to come back. All of the original players are now gone too. I think this time it really is dead.
Of course, with a year and a half having passed since I even thought about my little tale, I'd completely forgotten everything I'd been planning to do with it. So I sort of floundered around today, trying to remember - until it occurred to me to check back on my past blog posts here. And voila! Suddenly it's a good thing I rambled on and on about it for weeks. :)
In a nutshell then:
1. Craig was hired by the owners of the zoo Jessica demolished, to have her destroyed.
2. Craig gets captured by Rumen, who takes him to Hernando.
3. Hernando is already displeased with Jessica, who has been doing a terrible job of convincing Aaron that vampires aren't all that bad.
4. They make a deal where Hernando will let Craig have Jessica, IF Craig can first convince Aaron that not all vampires are bad, and to let Hernando talk to him.
5. Hernando assigns Rumen to assist Craig. In theory, since they're working closely together on something, they will have plenty of opportunity to discover their shared ancient history.
I've done the first one, and now I'm at the beginning of #2.
There's now also another dimension to the story - the plot bunny that drew me back into this in the first place. A scene set a couple hundred years back, when Rumen was just getting done raging about the loss of his human servant, and moving on into a fugue state. He meets a mortal woman and her child, she's dying, and somehow she foists care of the child onto him. Through taking care of the child while taking the child back to its own people, we (hopefully) get to learn just what he'd been up to just prior to the point of meeting them. Which sets up the other end of where Craig came from.
2007/12/26
2007/12/23
Finished a 10th book!
I finished reading Starcraft: Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg tonight. Basically it's a novelization of the Zerg missions from the game, plus some of the Protoss missions.
Overall I'd say it could've been better. There were inconsistencies, plus one major typo ("whole" instead of "hole"), that could've been fixed if it had gone through another revision pass or two. Things like the MC, Jim Raynor, deciding at length all the reasons why not to tell his men something, and then a few chapters later they have a conversation that sounds like he'd already told them and it went without any issues. That happened at least a couple times. Then there were a couple places where the author went into lengthy exposition that could've just been cut out entirely - the kinds of things I might write into a rough draft to explain a character motivation as a note to myself for later. Some of the characters were wildly inconsistent too. And finally, I'm not sure the MC he picked was really the best viewpoint character for the story. Mostly he went around watching other characters doing things to each other, while being fairly useless himself. Also, the plausibility for how exactly he was set up was kind of weak - he wanders off alone in the mountains spying on the other characters while he has 51 underlings doing nothing important, for example. He was also unrealistically quick to accept situations that should've pissed him off for a lot longer.
Also, Kerrigan (the main villain) was kind of 2D and cliche. Down to the maniacal laughter, tantrums, and dramatic speeches about doom and gloom.
Of course, it probably didn't help that the storyline was fairly constrained by what other people had already written into the game. There were events that had to happen in it, in the same way that it happened in the game. In a lot of ways, the first half of the book probably wouldn't catch the interest of anyone who wasn't already familiar with the story, because it's really too weak to stand alone.
However, there were also a lot of really good parts, especially in the back half. The Protoss really came to life. I really enjoyed reading the parts after Raynor, Tassadar, and Zeratul all came together against Kerrigan. There were some really great character interaction scenes there.
The story doesn't really have a solid conclusion to it, though again that was by necessity due to staying canon to the storyline. Lots of loose ends stayed loose. No clue what happened to Kerrigan at the end, if you don't already know the story in advance. I guess the uninitiated would just have to wait for the next novelization to get published.
Meanwhile, I think I've figured out why I don't read as much as I used to. Physically speaking, it actually takes a lot out of me. There doesn't seem to be a reading position in existence where I don't eventually become completely stiff and sore - and if I do my preferred method of wanting to read an entire book in one sitting, that means I rotate positions until eventually my entire body is stiff and sore. I recovered from that a lot faster when I was a spry young'n ... but not so much anymore, alas.
Overall I'd say it could've been better. There were inconsistencies, plus one major typo ("whole" instead of "hole"), that could've been fixed if it had gone through another revision pass or two. Things like the MC, Jim Raynor, deciding at length all the reasons why not to tell his men something, and then a few chapters later they have a conversation that sounds like he'd already told them and it went without any issues. That happened at least a couple times. Then there were a couple places where the author went into lengthy exposition that could've just been cut out entirely - the kinds of things I might write into a rough draft to explain a character motivation as a note to myself for later. Some of the characters were wildly inconsistent too. And finally, I'm not sure the MC he picked was really the best viewpoint character for the story. Mostly he went around watching other characters doing things to each other, while being fairly useless himself. Also, the plausibility for how exactly he was set up was kind of weak - he wanders off alone in the mountains spying on the other characters while he has 51 underlings doing nothing important, for example. He was also unrealistically quick to accept situations that should've pissed him off for a lot longer.
Also, Kerrigan (the main villain) was kind of 2D and cliche. Down to the maniacal laughter, tantrums, and dramatic speeches about doom and gloom.
Of course, it probably didn't help that the storyline was fairly constrained by what other people had already written into the game. There were events that had to happen in it, in the same way that it happened in the game. In a lot of ways, the first half of the book probably wouldn't catch the interest of anyone who wasn't already familiar with the story, because it's really too weak to stand alone.
However, there were also a lot of really good parts, especially in the back half. The Protoss really came to life. I really enjoyed reading the parts after Raynor, Tassadar, and Zeratul all came together against Kerrigan. There were some really great character interaction scenes there.
The story doesn't really have a solid conclusion to it, though again that was by necessity due to staying canon to the storyline. Lots of loose ends stayed loose. No clue what happened to Kerrigan at the end, if you don't already know the story in advance. I guess the uninitiated would just have to wait for the next novelization to get published.
Meanwhile, I think I've figured out why I don't read as much as I used to. Physically speaking, it actually takes a lot out of me. There doesn't seem to be a reading position in existence where I don't eventually become completely stiff and sore - and if I do my preferred method of wanting to read an entire book in one sitting, that means I rotate positions until eventually my entire body is stiff and sore. I recovered from that a lot faster when I was a spry young'n ... but not so much anymore, alas.
2007/12/21
Roleplaying
I barely even look at RPoL anymore. Four and a half years of mostly great times have gone by, but at this point my slow creeping burnout has finally gotten far enough advanced that it's time to think about cutting loose completely.
At the moment I'm:
a) Running a game with 12 characters in it and three more trying to get in.
b) Playing 5 characters in four games (one of them active, the others moving in fits and starts), plus another 4 in mostly-dead games.
c) Helping run a few scenes in one of the mostly-dead games.
I can't work up the motivation to do anything in my own game, barely manage to come up with player posts in other games, and have basically no interest in replacing dead games with new ones. Also, even when I do have inspiration, I mostly want to use it in other writing pursuits (fiction, blogging, occasionally wikipedia) or maybe even reading. Trying to get my mind into roleplay mode is just getting too hard. Even when my favorite roleplay buddy is around and excited, it doesn't drag me into it the way it used to.
And yet, when I go into my game to write the official hiatus post, I just end up sitting there staring at the threads I need to update instead.
I guess I fail at declaring my failure.
At the moment I'm:
a) Running a game with 12 characters in it and three more trying to get in.
b) Playing 5 characters in four games (one of them active, the others moving in fits and starts), plus another 4 in mostly-dead games.
c) Helping run a few scenes in one of the mostly-dead games.
I can't work up the motivation to do anything in my own game, barely manage to come up with player posts in other games, and have basically no interest in replacing dead games with new ones. Also, even when I do have inspiration, I mostly want to use it in other writing pursuits (fiction, blogging, occasionally wikipedia) or maybe even reading. Trying to get my mind into roleplay mode is just getting too hard. Even when my favorite roleplay buddy is around and excited, it doesn't drag me into it the way it used to.
And yet, when I go into my game to write the official hiatus post, I just end up sitting there staring at the threads I need to update instead.
I guess I fail at declaring my failure.
2007/12/18
More progress on Edward
Huh. 54,185 words.
Again I sat down and felt an urge to write something, even though I didn't really know what to write. So I just started. A scene came to mind, and I wrote it down. A figure moved in it, so I wrote down what he was doing. And now he's doing the ritual, all the important people in it are there... I'm not sure how exactly it's all going to go, but it doesn't seem to matter, because they're doing it on their own and I'm just watching.
Hmm. And now I'm done, and I have 873 more words. They got the shadows out of Edward and into James.
There's something not quite right about the shadows taking over James. There's nothing wrong with any of the rest that I just wrote. Just the part where the shadows are actually going in, something's not quite right there. James is objecting too much, like it's not supposed to happen that way. My subconscious is saying that we're going back to rumination time to figure out what happens next. So I guess that's what I'm doing.
Again I sat down and felt an urge to write something, even though I didn't really know what to write. So I just started. A scene came to mind, and I wrote it down. A figure moved in it, so I wrote down what he was doing. And now he's doing the ritual, all the important people in it are there... I'm not sure how exactly it's all going to go, but it doesn't seem to matter, because they're doing it on their own and I'm just watching.
Hmm. And now I'm done, and I have 873 more words. They got the shadows out of Edward and into James.
There's something not quite right about the shadows taking over James. There's nothing wrong with any of the rest that I just wrote. Just the part where the shadows are actually going in, something's not quite right there. James is objecting too much, like it's not supposed to happen that way. My subconscious is saying that we're going back to rumination time to figure out what happens next. So I guess that's what I'm doing.
2007/12/16
2007 Book Challenge Final Tally
1. Agent to the Stars - John Scalzi (sci fi)
2. Out of Thin Air - Peter Ward (science nonfic)
3. Memory of Running - Ron McLarty (mainstream fic)
4. The Paths of the Dead - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 1)
5. The Lord of Castle Black - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 2)
6. Sethra Lavode - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 3)
7. Core Performance - Mark Verstegen (nonfic exercise book)
8. Hellspark - Janet Kagan (sci fi)
9. Brokedown Palace - Steven Brust (fantasy)
I was aiming for 12 and ended up with 9. Next year I think I'll aim for 10. :)
I was also aiming to write up book reviews as I went along, but that went by the wayside after the third one, unfortunately. Right around the time I was finishing up Brust's trilogy was when I first got sucked into Wikipedia. So all my writing efforts went there instead. By the time I started wandering back in the direction of reviewing books, I'd moved on to read other things and never managed to make it back. Then I didn't want to review the things I was currently reading without first reviewing the stuff I'd already read, and therein went a gridlock that led to not writing any of them.
Apparently I did write a few mini-reviews in the forum thread, though. For Hellspark I wrote:
"I finally forced myself past the opening paragraphs of Hellspark. It turns out that this book is not very well written at all, and now that I've had some practice at the basic technicalities of writing, I'm a lot more conscious of what specifically is wrong and sometimes even how to fix it. I keep stopping to look at passages and thinking of ways I would've written it instead. However, I liked Kagan's other two books and I'm pretty sure there's a good story buried in the crappy writing, so I'm planning to read the whole thing."
I did read the whole thing. The plot was entertaining in a good but not spectacular way. I liked all of the characters but none of them really fired up my imagination. Probably the biggest flaw was when the story shifted suddenly near the end with the arrival of the main character's mother. Suddenly all the relationship dynamics went funny there. It still all wrapped up well enough, but it was definitely bumpy getting past that shift.
The setting was Kagan's strongest point by far, and the book would be right up the alley of people who like exploring really cool faraway places. As I recall her other book, Mirabile, the setting of that was the strongest point as well though the six connected stories were a lot stronger than Hellspark's one big story. Kagan is definitely better at writing short stories than longer works.
Then the last book I managed to read was Steve Brust's Brokedown Palace. I bought it because it's in the same Dragaera setting as the Jhereg series and Khaavren series, but it's a standalone story about four brother princes and the palace they live in, which is crumbling with old age. It reads like an allegory, and like all of his other work I've read, very easy to slip into and get started - which is an important point with me these days when getting myself started on a new book is a lot harder than it was in my youth. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
I might manage to read one more book before the end of the month. I've started on Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg, which is a Starcraft novel. Should be a fairly easy read. Guess we'll see.
Earlier tonight I put in an order for five more books: Old Man's War by John Scalzi, Dzur by Steve Brust, Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and 1491 by Charles C. Mann. Since they're shipping to my work address, where they're much less likely to get stolen than if they came to my apartment, I won't actually receive any of them until work reopens in January. That should give me a good start for next year's book challenge. :)
2. Out of Thin Air - Peter Ward (science nonfic)
3. Memory of Running - Ron McLarty (mainstream fic)
4. The Paths of the Dead - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 1)
5. The Lord of Castle Black - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 2)
6. Sethra Lavode - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 3)
7. Core Performance - Mark Verstegen (nonfic exercise book)
8. Hellspark - Janet Kagan (sci fi)
9. Brokedown Palace - Steven Brust (fantasy)
I was aiming for 12 and ended up with 9. Next year I think I'll aim for 10. :)
I was also aiming to write up book reviews as I went along, but that went by the wayside after the third one, unfortunately. Right around the time I was finishing up Brust's trilogy was when I first got sucked into Wikipedia. So all my writing efforts went there instead. By the time I started wandering back in the direction of reviewing books, I'd moved on to read other things and never managed to make it back. Then I didn't want to review the things I was currently reading without first reviewing the stuff I'd already read, and therein went a gridlock that led to not writing any of them.
Apparently I did write a few mini-reviews in the forum thread, though. For Hellspark I wrote:
"I finally forced myself past the opening paragraphs of Hellspark. It turns out that this book is not very well written at all, and now that I've had some practice at the basic technicalities of writing, I'm a lot more conscious of what specifically is wrong and sometimes even how to fix it. I keep stopping to look at passages and thinking of ways I would've written it instead. However, I liked Kagan's other two books and I'm pretty sure there's a good story buried in the crappy writing, so I'm planning to read the whole thing."
I did read the whole thing. The plot was entertaining in a good but not spectacular way. I liked all of the characters but none of them really fired up my imagination. Probably the biggest flaw was when the story shifted suddenly near the end with the arrival of the main character's mother. Suddenly all the relationship dynamics went funny there. It still all wrapped up well enough, but it was definitely bumpy getting past that shift.
The setting was Kagan's strongest point by far, and the book would be right up the alley of people who like exploring really cool faraway places. As I recall her other book, Mirabile, the setting of that was the strongest point as well though the six connected stories were a lot stronger than Hellspark's one big story. Kagan is definitely better at writing short stories than longer works.
Then the last book I managed to read was Steve Brust's Brokedown Palace. I bought it because it's in the same Dragaera setting as the Jhereg series and Khaavren series, but it's a standalone story about four brother princes and the palace they live in, which is crumbling with old age. It reads like an allegory, and like all of his other work I've read, very easy to slip into and get started - which is an important point with me these days when getting myself started on a new book is a lot harder than it was in my youth. I enjoyed it quite a lot.
I might manage to read one more book before the end of the month. I've started on Queen of Blades by Aaron Rosenberg, which is a Starcraft novel. Should be a fairly easy read. Guess we'll see.
Earlier tonight I put in an order for five more books: Old Man's War by John Scalzi, Dzur by Steve Brust, Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and 1491 by Charles C. Mann. Since they're shipping to my work address, where they're much less likely to get stolen than if they came to my apartment, I won't actually receive any of them until work reopens in January. That should give me a good start for next year's book challenge. :)
2007/12/14
Writing plans for the rest of this month
Well, it looks like I've basically reached a longterm stall point on Edward at 53k words. My current plan is to see if I can get back into it when Christmas Break starts.
I won't be seeing family this year. They can't afford to come down here, and I'm not keen on driving back up there again since I was just there in October. Where I work, we get 12 total holiday days per year - and 7 of them are all in a row for Christmas. Also, I don't actually celebrate Christmas. All of that means that, including weekends, I have eleven days of (nearly) uninterrupted time coming up (I'll probably still be working at the takeout). It could be a mini-pseudo-Nanowrimo!
Hopefully that'll give me the time to break through the stallpoint on Edward and finish the damn story. I'm still where I was when last I posted - just before the big ritual. But for some reason I don't feel like I'm ready to write it yet - like there are still pieces missing, probably an entire subplot involving Charles and Felna, which I've only barely roughed in thus far. So I have about a week to ruminate on it and figure out what I'm doing next.
In other news, most of my non-work/non-sleep time lately has been more focused on my blog. It sucks up a lot more time than it really probably should, especially taking into account that I seem to have gotten sucked into a whole network of daily blogs, and I read and comment on other people's even moreso than I spend trying to think of stuff to say on my own.
My game is still creeping along. I've only managed to update it once this month - after not updating it at all in November, and not much in October. I haven't been able to get my mind into roleplay mode for quite some time, and deep down I think I might never get back fully into it again. Not anytime soon, anyhow. I've been moving on to doing all sorts of other things and would really like to focus more on writing again.
Of course, I think that every year at this time, then end up majorly blocked on writing, and then get seriously into roleplaying from January to March ... so who knows. Maybe it's just part of the yearly cycle. ;)
I won't be seeing family this year. They can't afford to come down here, and I'm not keen on driving back up there again since I was just there in October. Where I work, we get 12 total holiday days per year - and 7 of them are all in a row for Christmas. Also, I don't actually celebrate Christmas. All of that means that, including weekends, I have eleven days of (nearly) uninterrupted time coming up (I'll probably still be working at the takeout). It could be a mini-pseudo-Nanowrimo!
Hopefully that'll give me the time to break through the stallpoint on Edward and finish the damn story. I'm still where I was when last I posted - just before the big ritual. But for some reason I don't feel like I'm ready to write it yet - like there are still pieces missing, probably an entire subplot involving Charles and Felna, which I've only barely roughed in thus far. So I have about a week to ruminate on it and figure out what I'm doing next.
In other news, most of my non-work/non-sleep time lately has been more focused on my blog. It sucks up a lot more time than it really probably should, especially taking into account that I seem to have gotten sucked into a whole network of daily blogs, and I read and comment on other people's even moreso than I spend trying to think of stuff to say on my own.
My game is still creeping along. I've only managed to update it once this month - after not updating it at all in November, and not much in October. I haven't been able to get my mind into roleplay mode for quite some time, and deep down I think I might never get back fully into it again. Not anytime soon, anyhow. I've been moving on to doing all sorts of other things and would really like to focus more on writing again.
Of course, I think that every year at this time, then end up majorly blocked on writing, and then get seriously into roleplaying from January to March ... so who knows. Maybe it's just part of the yearly cycle. ;)
2007/12/03
Continuing on toward the end of the story
Well, it's not Nanowrimo anymore, but I'm still working on the story. I'm basically just one big scene from the end, though it may turn into several more scenes of aftermath. They're now at the point of the big climactic ritual that I've been building toward since they set foot in Aunlania.
And I'm now at 53,312 words. Tonight I finished the scene I'd started last Thursday; basically I got distracted by a bout of temporary insanity completely unrelated to writing fiction, but I think I'm getting past that now. So the rest of that scene netted me 1200 words. Then I went back and changed the ending of another scene, adding another 300 or so, making it around 1500 new words for the evening.
Overall, even though my wordcount hasn't been as high as the past couple years, it was a good Nanowrimo. I have a story that is almost all "right" - and the stuff that needs fixing is relatively minor. This is much different from my previous two attempts. The very first version only barely got past 20k words, and that was already stretching things. It just felt wrong the entire time I was doing it. The second version got to nearly 54k words, and more of it felt right than wrong, which is how I got that far - but eventually the total weight of major things wrong dragged it to a stop.
Which means that I basically followed the same process as I do for writing supershort stories in the form of roleplay posts. I write a first draft, then rearrange it into a second draft, then tweak the second draft to death. Then I dump the whole thing and write a third draft from a completely different starting point than the first two, using material from the second draft as content fodder. This can take anywhere from four hours to a week.
Apparently when it's a novel, it's the same process, but it takes three years. I'm discarding a total of 74,296 past words, though I'll probably go back and cannibalize chunks of the second draft later on when I flesh out some of the character bits that aren't directly relevant to the main plotline. There were some really nice scenes that I'm hoping to use somehow.
This year the story is still dragging me along. I didn't think I was going to get back to it, but then I sat down and my brain demanded that I start writing. So I did, and I'm glad I did. :)
And I'm now at 53,312 words. Tonight I finished the scene I'd started last Thursday; basically I got distracted by a bout of temporary insanity completely unrelated to writing fiction, but I think I'm getting past that now. So the rest of that scene netted me 1200 words. Then I went back and changed the ending of another scene, adding another 300 or so, making it around 1500 new words for the evening.
Overall, even though my wordcount hasn't been as high as the past couple years, it was a good Nanowrimo. I have a story that is almost all "right" - and the stuff that needs fixing is relatively minor. This is much different from my previous two attempts. The very first version only barely got past 20k words, and that was already stretching things. It just felt wrong the entire time I was doing it. The second version got to nearly 54k words, and more of it felt right than wrong, which is how I got that far - but eventually the total weight of major things wrong dragged it to a stop.
Which means that I basically followed the same process as I do for writing supershort stories in the form of roleplay posts. I write a first draft, then rearrange it into a second draft, then tweak the second draft to death. Then I dump the whole thing and write a third draft from a completely different starting point than the first two, using material from the second draft as content fodder. This can take anywhere from four hours to a week.
Apparently when it's a novel, it's the same process, but it takes three years. I'm discarding a total of 74,296 past words, though I'll probably go back and cannibalize chunks of the second draft later on when I flesh out some of the character bits that aren't directly relevant to the main plotline. There were some really nice scenes that I'm hoping to use somehow.
This year the story is still dragging me along. I didn't think I was going to get back to it, but then I sat down and my brain demanded that I start writing. So I did, and I'm glad I did. :)
2007/11/28
Passed 50K
Today I passed 50k. Twice.
The first time was the standard sort of passing, where I input everything I had into the validator and voila! purple bar!
Then I went back and deleted my pile of discard words. In every WIP, I keep a "Volume 0" where I dump all the stuff I wrote, decided I disliked, and replaced with complete rewrites. I ended up with around 1500 discarded words for Edward. So I deleted and validated again to see how many words I had to replace to make it past 50k. It turned out to only be around 700 or so, so I did that and passed it again.
Now I'm at 51,750 words (including the discards). The story isn't done yet, though it might be somewhat close, so I'm going to press on with the remaining time and see how far I can get by Friday night. I'm not so much moving forward as I am backfilling some scenes that were missing. There's at least one more of those to do - an important conversation between Charles and James. After that I should be all set for the climax ritual that changes everything and everyone.
In a broader sense, this story seems to be a three-parter. The first 20k were focused on Edward. This second 30-35k seems to be focused mainly on Charles. After that there ought to be another (at least) 10k that focuses on James. Whether I'll actually write the part about James anytime soon is still debatable, as I've got basically nothing at all in mind for what happens to him after he goes back to Lagarnica. I might not be able to until after I finish the Emerald Sword story, because that's what will set up how Lucien Duchene (their father) got to be the way he is by the beginning of Edward.
And of course the other fork is what happens to Edward and Charles, which hopefully will explain where Fortress Launne came from. At least, that's what the story was supposed to be for originally. I hope it still ends up that way. We'll see. ;)
The first time was the standard sort of passing, where I input everything I had into the validator and voila! purple bar!
Then I went back and deleted my pile of discard words. In every WIP, I keep a "Volume 0" where I dump all the stuff I wrote, decided I disliked, and replaced with complete rewrites. I ended up with around 1500 discarded words for Edward. So I deleted and validated again to see how many words I had to replace to make it past 50k. It turned out to only be around 700 or so, so I did that and passed it again.
Now I'm at 51,750 words (including the discards). The story isn't done yet, though it might be somewhat close, so I'm going to press on with the remaining time and see how far I can get by Friday night. I'm not so much moving forward as I am backfilling some scenes that were missing. There's at least one more of those to do - an important conversation between Charles and James. After that I should be all set for the climax ritual that changes everything and everyone.
In a broader sense, this story seems to be a three-parter. The first 20k were focused on Edward. This second 30-35k seems to be focused mainly on Charles. After that there ought to be another (at least) 10k that focuses on James. Whether I'll actually write the part about James anytime soon is still debatable, as I've got basically nothing at all in mind for what happens to him after he goes back to Lagarnica. I might not be able to until after I finish the Emerald Sword story, because that's what will set up how Lucien Duchene (their father) got to be the way he is by the beginning of Edward.
And of course the other fork is what happens to Edward and Charles, which hopefully will explain where Fortress Launne came from. At least, that's what the story was supposed to be for originally. I hope it still ends up that way. We'll see. ;)
2007/11/26
End of Day 26: Almost to 50k
At the moment I have 48,415 words. That means I have maybe one longish chapter left, or possibly two smallish ones, before I hit 50k.
I still have no idea what I'm doing. And I'm nowhere near done.
Let's see... what has happened since last I left off...
Well, first, to say that Charles took the child under his wing would be an understatement. Charles and the kid latched onto each other almost instantly and now they're inseparable, and it has brought a lot of new, unexpected joy to his life. Now he must ponder a fork in his life path - to continue tending to Edward and staying devoted to his family, or to foster a whole new life with his adopted son.
On the other hand, Edward is dead. Not long after he adopted the kid, they figured that out. Charles took it very hard. I think that was the first time I ever wrote something that made me cry.
So now they have to figure out how to end things for Edward and set him free from eternal pain. Meanwhile, the war on the plain has started, with the natives taking it before the Aunlanian army arrives, as seen through the eyes of Moraina, who has packed up and gone to Branitel.
At the moment, I sort of feel like I'm missing some vitally important pieces to the puzzle before I can move forward with what happens to Edward next - and since I don't know what the pieces are, I'm going around in big, pointless circles. It's funny how I know basically where I'm going, but not in enough detail to ever have any clue what to write. And even with being stalled out between every single chapter, I still seem to somehow manage to be stumbling in the right direction. But overall I feel pretty good about my story. Everything feels like I'm getting it right for a change (or at the very least not wrong).
I still have no idea what I'm doing. And I'm nowhere near done.
Let's see... what has happened since last I left off...
Well, first, to say that Charles took the child under his wing would be an understatement. Charles and the kid latched onto each other almost instantly and now they're inseparable, and it has brought a lot of new, unexpected joy to his life. Now he must ponder a fork in his life path - to continue tending to Edward and staying devoted to his family, or to foster a whole new life with his adopted son.
On the other hand, Edward is dead. Not long after he adopted the kid, they figured that out. Charles took it very hard. I think that was the first time I ever wrote something that made me cry.
So now they have to figure out how to end things for Edward and set him free from eternal pain. Meanwhile, the war on the plain has started, with the natives taking it before the Aunlanian army arrives, as seen through the eyes of Moraina, who has packed up and gone to Branitel.
At the moment, I sort of feel like I'm missing some vitally important pieces to the puzzle before I can move forward with what happens to Edward next - and since I don't know what the pieces are, I'm going around in big, pointless circles. It's funny how I know basically where I'm going, but not in enough detail to ever have any clue what to write. And even with being stalled out between every single chapter, I still seem to somehow manage to be stumbling in the right direction. But overall I feel pretty good about my story. Everything feels like I'm getting it right for a change (or at the very least not wrong).
2007/11/23
Back to the circles!
Well, I've managed to pass 40k, and I've noticed that not only don't I have a Bad Guy in this part of the story, I pretty much suck at making bad guys in general. Anytime I think I've made a plausible bad guy, he turns into a good guy. Edward was originally supposed to be the bad guy in this thing after all. I think I must be doomed to write stories where everyone always gets along. Either that or I need to make them more 2D from now on.
Maybe not all stories need bad guys though. Some of my favorite ones didn't really have one - just lots of people all working toward a common goal, and overcoming obstacles along the way. Of course, the two examples off the top of my head (IDIC Epidemic, Hellspark) are also both examples of bad writing, so that probably tells me something too.
There also keeps popping up weird bits of scenes that point toward a completely different story than what I think I'm writing. Something about a prophecy, with a tree that is really a door to the lands of the fae. I think some of the Emerald Sword themes are trying to bleed over or something.
Anyhow. At the moment, they're all in one of the native folk villages, called Glavni. The natives didn't know quite what to make of Edward and didn't take very good care of him, so now Charles and James are trying to put him back together again.
I guess the next thing to do is introduce the kid that Charles is supposedly going to take under his wing. We'll see if that actually happens...
Maybe not all stories need bad guys though. Some of my favorite ones didn't really have one - just lots of people all working toward a common goal, and overcoming obstacles along the way. Of course, the two examples off the top of my head (IDIC Epidemic, Hellspark) are also both examples of bad writing, so that probably tells me something too.
There also keeps popping up weird bits of scenes that point toward a completely different story than what I think I'm writing. Something about a prophecy, with a tree that is really a door to the lands of the fae. I think some of the Emerald Sword themes are trying to bleed over or something.
Anyhow. At the moment, they're all in one of the native folk villages, called Glavni. The natives didn't know quite what to make of Edward and didn't take very good care of him, so now Charles and James are trying to put him back together again.
I guess the next thing to do is introduce the kid that Charles is supposedly going to take under his wing. We'll see if that actually happens...
2007/11/18
Clawed My Way Past 30K
Well, now I'm exactly on target for a standard Nanowrimo. I have 30,005 words, and the target for Day 18 is 30,006.
The problem boils down to: I know where I want to go, but I don't know how to get there.
The ending is supposed to be: Aliacorba transfers half of Edward to James and the other half to himself, in exchange for Charles teaching their spirit shaman how to be a spirit shaman.
The problem: how on earth do they even meet each other, and once they do, why on earth would they actually tell each other their respective problems?
Thus: come up with a way for them to discover each other's problems without any telling needed. Also, the natives either need to go visiting at the fort without getting killed, or the Duchene brothers need to somehow go visit the forest without getting killed.
My present idea: Have the natives capture Edward alive ... for some reason ... yet to be determined. Maybe they were curious because they'd never seen a wolf before (there aren't any in Aunlanian). Once they have him, they can observe for themselves what Edward's problems are. Then, eventually when Charles tracks him down, Charles can hopefully be in some kind of useful position to observe the natives' conundrum.
So, more prison time for Edward. Poor guy. He spent most of the first half being a prisoner too.
The problem boils down to: I know where I want to go, but I don't know how to get there.
The ending is supposed to be: Aliacorba transfers half of Edward to James and the other half to himself, in exchange for Charles teaching their spirit shaman how to be a spirit shaman.
The problem: how on earth do they even meet each other, and once they do, why on earth would they actually tell each other their respective problems?
Thus: come up with a way for them to discover each other's problems without any telling needed. Also, the natives either need to go visiting at the fort without getting killed, or the Duchene brothers need to somehow go visit the forest without getting killed.
My present idea: Have the natives capture Edward alive ... for some reason ... yet to be determined. Maybe they were curious because they'd never seen a wolf before (there aren't any in Aunlanian). Once they have him, they can observe for themselves what Edward's problems are. Then, eventually when Charles tracks him down, Charles can hopefully be in some kind of useful position to observe the natives' conundrum.
So, more prison time for Edward. Poor guy. He spent most of the first half being a prisoner too.
2007/11/15
So Very Blocked :(
Well, that whole "let's stumble around being disjointed" thing isn't working out so well. I can think of lots of events to write about. But I don't want to do any of them because none of them seem to have any point. There has to be a reason for the events before I write them.
So where they are now is in Aunlania. They ran there to escape from their father. I've decided to alter the setup slightly and say it's several decades later. The last chapter in Lagarnica will be too, in the second draft. They managed to hide for a while, but their father finally caught up and nearly killed Charles, hence they decided it was time for a whole new continent.
In Aunlania there are native folk hiding in the mountainous swamps (yes, I realize that's geographically unlikely), and they've fiercely defended their remaining lands from outlanders that are still, occasionally, trying to take it away from them. Ideally the native folk would like to take back all of Aunlania, but realistically they're just trying to survive. The problem with their lack of spirit shamans is part of that.
So now we have the Duchene brothers coming in, claiming an abandoned fort as their new house, and all they really want to do is survive too. Plus build a nice quiet rural life. As far as I can tell. Part of my problem is that they don't seem to have any workable goals; this wasn't a problem in Part I because although Edward himself had no specific goals, a bunch of other people did, and they were using him as a pawn for their own ends. But now? I don't have a bunch of little-known third parties to do those roles of jerking them around.
There are also outlanders (calling themselves "Aunlanians") who would like to colonize the remaining native folk lands. Every once in a while they probably send missionaries into the forests, and those missionaries are generally never heard from again. There might also be a few traders that are allowed to go in and out - Arrun (who showed up out of nowhere in Attempt #1) is probably one of those.
Then there might be Arthur Glorian, who is actually their eldest brother. He and their father had a falling out when Charles was too young to remember, before either Edward or James were born. Arthur might be somewhere in the area too, doing what, I'm not sure. If he's anywhere he's likely to be in with the native folk.
All of which boils down to: I have no opening conflict. I've got lots of parties, but no plot. Events I could conceivably write for no reason: have the native folk capture Edward while he's running around as a wolf, have the native folk capture Charles while he's in the woods gathering herbs for his spells, have an arrogant missionary go by on his way into the forest to never be seen again.
Maybe I should flesh out the Aunlanians more.
Guess I'll just go write the missionary scene just so I have some words tonight.
So where they are now is in Aunlania. They ran there to escape from their father. I've decided to alter the setup slightly and say it's several decades later. The last chapter in Lagarnica will be too, in the second draft. They managed to hide for a while, but their father finally caught up and nearly killed Charles, hence they decided it was time for a whole new continent.
In Aunlania there are native folk hiding in the mountainous swamps (yes, I realize that's geographically unlikely), and they've fiercely defended their remaining lands from outlanders that are still, occasionally, trying to take it away from them. Ideally the native folk would like to take back all of Aunlania, but realistically they're just trying to survive. The problem with their lack of spirit shamans is part of that.
So now we have the Duchene brothers coming in, claiming an abandoned fort as their new house, and all they really want to do is survive too. Plus build a nice quiet rural life. As far as I can tell. Part of my problem is that they don't seem to have any workable goals; this wasn't a problem in Part I because although Edward himself had no specific goals, a bunch of other people did, and they were using him as a pawn for their own ends. But now? I don't have a bunch of little-known third parties to do those roles of jerking them around.
There are also outlanders (calling themselves "Aunlanians") who would like to colonize the remaining native folk lands. Every once in a while they probably send missionaries into the forests, and those missionaries are generally never heard from again. There might also be a few traders that are allowed to go in and out - Arrun (who showed up out of nowhere in Attempt #1) is probably one of those.
Then there might be Arthur Glorian, who is actually their eldest brother. He and their father had a falling out when Charles was too young to remember, before either Edward or James were born. Arthur might be somewhere in the area too, doing what, I'm not sure. If he's anywhere he's likely to be in with the native folk.
All of which boils down to: I have no opening conflict. I've got lots of parties, but no plot. Events I could conceivably write for no reason: have the native folk capture Edward while he's running around as a wolf, have the native folk capture Charles while he's in the woods gathering herbs for his spells, have an arrogant missionary go by on his way into the forest to never be seen again.
Maybe I should flesh out the Aunlanians more.
Guess I'll just go write the missionary scene just so I have some words tonight.
2007/11/14
Nearly Halfway
It's mid-14th, and I'm just over a hundred words from 25k. (The site tells me I'm only 43 words away, but I'm using my JNW count of 24,883).
Developments since my last post:
1. I've figured out how I'm going to resolve the main plotlines at the end. Aliacorba needs somewhere to put the shadows he separates from Edward, and Lucien still needs an heir and isn't going away until he gets one. Suddenly I realized why younger brother James exists.
2. The "Edward backstory" part of the story is done! It's about 20k words, all told (in first draft form). Now I'm back to the beginning of Amulet I for the third time.
At the moment I haven't found the opener to that part yet. I've written a couple different scenes, and have a third scene from before, but none of them seem very opener-like. On the other hand, writing them has given me some plot premises to pursue. First, a hurricane went by which presumably did some damage elsewhere than on-screen, plus it means I can put in floods now. Second, the native folk are now aware of the existence of friendly settlers (when before they assumed all such settlers are hostile). Third, the former dungeons of the abandoned fort are haunted.
Also, Iorli made an appearance as a cat spirit. No clue yet whether that will go anywhere - if not, I'll just take him back out again later.
I guess I'll continue to wander around disjointedly until a story magically appears.
Developments since my last post:
1. I've figured out how I'm going to resolve the main plotlines at the end. Aliacorba needs somewhere to put the shadows he separates from Edward, and Lucien still needs an heir and isn't going away until he gets one. Suddenly I realized why younger brother James exists.
2. The "Edward backstory" part of the story is done! It's about 20k words, all told (in first draft form). Now I'm back to the beginning of Amulet I for the third time.
At the moment I haven't found the opener to that part yet. I've written a couple different scenes, and have a third scene from before, but none of them seem very opener-like. On the other hand, writing them has given me some plot premises to pursue. First, a hurricane went by which presumably did some damage elsewhere than on-screen, plus it means I can put in floods now. Second, the native folk are now aware of the existence of friendly settlers (when before they assumed all such settlers are hostile). Third, the former dungeons of the abandoned fort are haunted.
Also, Iorli made an appearance as a cat spirit. No clue yet whether that will go anywhere - if not, I'll just take him back out again later.
I guess I'll continue to wander around disjointedly until a story magically appears.
2007/11/11
Beginning of Day 11
The Nanowrimo site has its validation thingy up now, and it gives me almost a hundred more words than Jer's Novel Writer. For consistency I'm going to stick with the JNW counts, which means I have 20,715 words.
The highlight of tonight's writing was discovering the tragedy of Charles. He is very loyal to both Edward and their father, and even in last year's attempt this came through in the way he still hoped they would someday reconcile. Unfortunately, reconciliation is basically impossible, and he was forced to choose. He chose Edward but it killed him to do it.
More of the details are working themselves out as I go along; for example, Edward didn't escape from his father so much as get smuggled out by Charles. In some ways it's actually writing itself. This has never happened to me before. I think I like it. :)
[members-only cut]
Chapter 11 - This was the battle where Mario Romero was captured.
Chapter 12 - Edward takes Mario back to his father. Much to his great surprise, his father accepts him back into the family with no argument at all. It's because he's devised a ritual...
Chapter 13 - the ritual in question is performed. It's very painful and last a long time.
Chapter 14 - Edward convalesces from the ritual. They discover it didn't work. Father wants to do it again.
Chapter 15 - second attempt at the ritual. Charles decides he's had enough, he can't stand to see Edward destroyed by inches like this, and he chooses to hide Edward away from their father, thereby disowning himself. About 90% of the chapter was dialogue, where Charles wrestles with himself before reaching that decision.
Chapter 16 - And now it's a month or two later, they've moved to a peasant's cabin, and Edward is waking up for effectively the first time since the second ritual.
That's where I stopped. We'll see what happens next. ;)
The highlight of tonight's writing was discovering the tragedy of Charles. He is very loyal to both Edward and their father, and even in last year's attempt this came through in the way he still hoped they would someday reconcile. Unfortunately, reconciliation is basically impossible, and he was forced to choose. He chose Edward but it killed him to do it.
More of the details are working themselves out as I go along; for example, Edward didn't escape from his father so much as get smuggled out by Charles. In some ways it's actually writing itself. This has never happened to me before. I think I like it. :)
[members-only cut]
Chapter 11 - This was the battle where Mario Romero was captured.
Chapter 12 - Edward takes Mario back to his father. Much to his great surprise, his father accepts him back into the family with no argument at all. It's because he's devised a ritual...
Chapter 13 - the ritual in question is performed. It's very painful and last a long time.
Chapter 14 - Edward convalesces from the ritual. They discover it didn't work. Father wants to do it again.
Chapter 15 - second attempt at the ritual. Charles decides he's had enough, he can't stand to see Edward destroyed by inches like this, and he chooses to hide Edward away from their father, thereby disowning himself. About 90% of the chapter was dialogue, where Charles wrestles with himself before reaching that decision.
Chapter 16 - And now it's a month or two later, they've moved to a peasant's cabin, and Edward is waking up for effectively the first time since the second ritual.
That's where I stopped. We'll see what happens next. ;)
2007/11/09
Beginning of Day 9
I ended Day 8 with 15,998. Now I'm at 17,349. Everything is flowing smoothly along.
Right after I finished writing the previous blog post, the epiphany finally hit me. Edward is the same story as Amulet I. It's just that both of the previous times, I was telling it from the wrong starting point, because I didn't know who the story was really about. Or well, I had it partly right ... I thought it was about Aliacorba when it was about Edward, but Edward essentially becomes Aliacorba by the end of the story. And since the story is about Edward, it should start where Edward's story starts, which is back several hundred years when he first stepped off the path of being a standard shallow, arrogant noble.
It all makes a lot more sense now. The timeframe of Aliacorba is actually the middle of the story and not the beginning. Also, a surprisingly large number of the scenes that failed in Attempts #1 and #2 are, in fact, successful scenes in the first half that I wasn't aware of before. They were just in the wrong places with the wrong cast.
So this year has been going very well. I'm having a lot of fun. And most importantly, everything finally feels like it's right. :)
Right after I finished writing the previous blog post, the epiphany finally hit me. Edward is the same story as Amulet I. It's just that both of the previous times, I was telling it from the wrong starting point, because I didn't know who the story was really about. Or well, I had it partly right ... I thought it was about Aliacorba when it was about Edward, but Edward essentially becomes Aliacorba by the end of the story. And since the story is about Edward, it should start where Edward's story starts, which is back several hundred years when he first stepped off the path of being a standard shallow, arrogant noble.
It all makes a lot more sense now. The timeframe of Aliacorba is actually the middle of the story and not the beginning. Also, a surprisingly large number of the scenes that failed in Attempts #1 and #2 are, in fact, successful scenes in the first half that I wasn't aware of before. They were just in the wrong places with the wrong cast.
So this year has been going very well. I'm having a lot of fun. And most importantly, everything finally feels like it's right. :)
2007/11/08
Beginning of Day 8
So where last we left off, I had 12,863 words. I'm now at 13,368, and I did finish Chapter 10. My new short-term goal is to reach 20k by the end of Friday night's writing session. Then the weekend probably won't be terribly productive, because I'll have work and a local nano meet to distract me. Then we'll see how next week goes. I'm still considering a shot at 100k, same as I try every year, but that'll depend on how close I am to 50k by the 15th.
I might just put it all in one novel this time instead of splitting attention on two of them. That depends on whether I get stalled out on Edward anymore. So far it's going really well, and I have short-term plotting ideas in mind for at least a few more chapters, which will hopefully spawn more ideas by the time I reach the end of the current batch.
Things I'm doing differently this year: didn't start with any plans (though several months of back-of-the-mind rumination, plus running my semi-related game, certainly helped). Not letting anyone read any of it as I go along. Only one MC. Not sure which of those are what I'm doing right for a change. If I do manage to do Edward as a complete story of over 50k, and there's still time left, I might use the rest of the month to work on Emerald Sword. That story is actually related, oddly enough (albeit very much tangentially). It's its own complete story but has at least one character in common.
[members-only cut]
So. To continue the synopsis from before:
Chapter 7 - one week later, Edward is used to nightly feeding, but unfortunately hadn't figured out how not to kill his victims. Rumors of his disowning have reached the townspeople he's freeloading off of, and also there's news of a murderer on the loose. He did manage to collect the clothes he ordered from the tailor, though he had to talk his way out of going to jail.
Charles found him and they had a lovely chat before he left again, never to return. Charles told Edward he needed to find his new path and to do that he needed to go into the woods.
Chapter 8 - first day in the woods. He gets attacked by a pack of wolves, but his Inner Predator flares up, he discovers he can turn into a wolf himself, and he defeats them.
Chapter 9 - three months later, he's comfortably settled into being the leader of the wolf pack he'd defeated on the first day. It's winter now, he's discovering snow, and he encounters another Wilds Tainted named Gremlof. The two of them have a lovely chat discussing politics, and in the end Edward follows Gremlof to a Wilds moot.
Chapter 10 - the moot. They make plans to capture Edward's sire's boss and turn him in to Edward's father so that Edward's father will stop trying to kill them all on account of what happened to Edward.
And that's where we are now. The next thing I write will be the action-adventure segment of storming Mario Romero's HQ. Then the tentative plan is to send Edward in to deliver the guy to his father. Whereupon his father will capture Edward, because he's been spending his three months trying to work out a ritual to reverse Edward's tainting and turn him into an Abyssal after all.
Then we get a whole bunch of extended torture, because the ritual doesn't work as well as it was supposed to. Edward manages to escape eventually, in terrible shape. And now he has to hide from his father to avoid an unpleasant demise.
Which, aside from any sideplots that need resolving, basically brings us to the beginning of Amulet I proper. At that point, Edward is slowly dying unless he can somehow reverse the botched ritual. Meanwhile, the indigenous natives of Aunlania are in dire need of someone to teach their lone spirit shaman how to do an important ritual that none of them know. As you might guess, they're going to be doing a bit of a trade. But we'll see if I even get to that point of the proceedings...
I might just put it all in one novel this time instead of splitting attention on two of them. That depends on whether I get stalled out on Edward anymore. So far it's going really well, and I have short-term plotting ideas in mind for at least a few more chapters, which will hopefully spawn more ideas by the time I reach the end of the current batch.
Things I'm doing differently this year: didn't start with any plans (though several months of back-of-the-mind rumination, plus running my semi-related game, certainly helped). Not letting anyone read any of it as I go along. Only one MC. Not sure which of those are what I'm doing right for a change. If I do manage to do Edward as a complete story of over 50k, and there's still time left, I might use the rest of the month to work on Emerald Sword. That story is actually related, oddly enough (albeit very much tangentially). It's its own complete story but has at least one character in common.
[members-only cut]
So. To continue the synopsis from before:
Chapter 7 - one week later, Edward is used to nightly feeding, but unfortunately hadn't figured out how not to kill his victims. Rumors of his disowning have reached the townspeople he's freeloading off of, and also there's news of a murderer on the loose. He did manage to collect the clothes he ordered from the tailor, though he had to talk his way out of going to jail.
Charles found him and they had a lovely chat before he left again, never to return. Charles told Edward he needed to find his new path and to do that he needed to go into the woods.
Chapter 8 - first day in the woods. He gets attacked by a pack of wolves, but his Inner Predator flares up, he discovers he can turn into a wolf himself, and he defeats them.
Chapter 9 - three months later, he's comfortably settled into being the leader of the wolf pack he'd defeated on the first day. It's winter now, he's discovering snow, and he encounters another Wilds Tainted named Gremlof. The two of them have a lovely chat discussing politics, and in the end Edward follows Gremlof to a Wilds moot.
Chapter 10 - the moot. They make plans to capture Edward's sire's boss and turn him in to Edward's father so that Edward's father will stop trying to kill them all on account of what happened to Edward.
And that's where we are now. The next thing I write will be the action-adventure segment of storming Mario Romero's HQ. Then the tentative plan is to send Edward in to deliver the guy to his father. Whereupon his father will capture Edward, because he's been spending his three months trying to work out a ritual to reverse Edward's tainting and turn him into an Abyssal after all.
Then we get a whole bunch of extended torture, because the ritual doesn't work as well as it was supposed to. Edward manages to escape eventually, in terrible shape. And now he has to hide from his father to avoid an unpleasant demise.
Which, aside from any sideplots that need resolving, basically brings us to the beginning of Amulet I proper. At that point, Edward is slowly dying unless he can somehow reverse the botched ritual. Meanwhile, the indigenous natives of Aunlania are in dire need of someone to teach their lone spirit shaman how to do an important ritual that none of them know. As you might guess, they're going to be doing a bit of a trade. But we'll see if I even get to that point of the proceedings...
2007/11/07
Wahooey!
12,863 words and at the beginning of Chapter 10 now. That's 47 more words than Robert's current wordcount. I get to have more words than him!
[party smileys]
On the other hand, it's because he had stopped writing for two days to finish up some commission artwork (which incidentally turned out very well). Tomorrow morning when he starts up again, he'll run me over almost instantly. So my triumph will be brief. ;) Even so, this has been a very good writing day with almost 4k new words at the stroke of midnight (wordcount at that point was 12,164) - and I'm not done yet. Going to see about finishing Chapter 10 before I call it a night.
[typing smiley]
[party smileys]
On the other hand, it's because he had stopped writing for two days to finish up some commission artwork (which incidentally turned out very well). Tomorrow morning when he starts up again, he'll run me over almost instantly. So my triumph will be brief. ;) Even so, this has been a very good writing day with almost 4k new words at the stroke of midnight (wordcount at that point was 12,164) - and I'm not done yet. Going to see about finishing Chapter 10 before I call it a night.
[typing smiley]
2007/11/06
Starting Day 6
Day 6 is almost half over at 10am, and I hadn't really intended for my nap to last 8 hours... but here I am.
At the end of Day 5, I had 8359 words. Basically I passed the minimum needed for a standard nano (8335) and stopped. Mid-scene. Because the scene I was writing was turning into total dreck anyway and the only reason I was still writing it was to get the wordcount in.
On the other hand, if I ignore the last little bit, I have a fairly good scene overall. I got myself going again by fast forwarding a week, to the next part where anything interesting happens. The rest of the town has noticed that Edward is penniless and now they're demanding payment on all his accumulated bills. Also, they've noticed that he has some of the personal possessions of a number of murder victims from the past week (because he hasn't figured out how not to kill who he eats yet).
At some point coming up, his brother Charles is going to come along and bail him out. Not sure yet exactly how that will go yet, but the general idea is to drag him back home, whereupon Lord Duchene will do mean things to him, thereby setting up the way he is by the time he reaches the timeframe of Amulet I.
That's the current plan, anyhow.
I also wrote a short scene for Amulet I proper while blocked on the stuff Edward was doing. Since chances are fairly high that all of the Edward stuff thus far is going to end up as flashback material for Amulet I anyway, I figured that was fair to call it part of the same story. On the other hand, apparently I'm not discarding all of last year's material - so now we run into the rule against working on stuff already in progress.
Maybe I better get started on Birthright at some point...
At the end of Day 5, I had 8359 words. Basically I passed the minimum needed for a standard nano (8335) and stopped. Mid-scene. Because the scene I was writing was turning into total dreck anyway and the only reason I was still writing it was to get the wordcount in.
On the other hand, if I ignore the last little bit, I have a fairly good scene overall. I got myself going again by fast forwarding a week, to the next part where anything interesting happens. The rest of the town has noticed that Edward is penniless and now they're demanding payment on all his accumulated bills. Also, they've noticed that he has some of the personal possessions of a number of murder victims from the past week (because he hasn't figured out how not to kill who he eats yet).
At some point coming up, his brother Charles is going to come along and bail him out. Not sure yet exactly how that will go yet, but the general idea is to drag him back home, whereupon Lord Duchene will do mean things to him, thereby setting up the way he is by the time he reaches the timeframe of Amulet I.
That's the current plan, anyhow.
I also wrote a short scene for Amulet I proper while blocked on the stuff Edward was doing. Since chances are fairly high that all of the Edward stuff thus far is going to end up as flashback material for Amulet I anyway, I figured that was fair to call it part of the same story. On the other hand, apparently I'm not discarding all of last year's material - so now we run into the rule against working on stuff already in progress.
Maybe I better get started on Birthright at some point...
2007/11/05
Beginning of Day 5
The weekend didn't turn out to be as productive as I'd've preferred. I had 5500 at the end of Day 4 and 6454 words at the moment, middle of Chapter 6. I'm kind of clueless on what to write next.
I mugged him, he ate them, and then the street beggar he met back in Chapter One made an appearance to give him a few pointers on street living. Now he's sitting in an alley.
Meanwhile his brother Charles is planning to look for him, against their father's wishes, but as I don't intend for Charles to actually find him for a while, that's not really an option to write next. The next Charles appearance will be right before Edward is found.
I mugged him, he ate them, and then the street beggar he met back in Chapter One made an appearance to give him a few pointers on street living. Now he's sitting in an alley.
Meanwhile his brother Charles is planning to look for him, against their father's wishes, but as I don't intend for Charles to actually find him for a while, that's not really an option to write next. The next Charles appearance will be right before Edward is found.
2007/11/03
End of Day 3
I've passed 5k. :) 5014 words at the moment, somewhere in Chapter 5 now.
Where last I left off with the synopsizing, Edward was about to confront his father. Well, they did that, and now he's disowned. He spent the rest of Chapter 4 sitting around just outside the estate's front gates, sulking, not really having any clue what to do next, until I threatened him with some more rain. Then he got up and went back to the city.
In Chapter 5 he got a room at an inn, and now he's in a tailor shop trying to get some new clothes. Thus far he's not changed clothes yet, and what he's wearing currently is starting to get dirty and torn. Fortunately for him, thus far the townspeople aren't aware that he's been disowned, so they're letting him do what he wants without demanding immediate payment.
I'm getting kind of bored having him wandering aimlessly around town, though, so I'll have to think of something to do to him next.
Where last I left off with the synopsizing, Edward was about to confront his father. Well, they did that, and now he's disowned. He spent the rest of Chapter 4 sitting around just outside the estate's front gates, sulking, not really having any clue what to do next, until I threatened him with some more rain. Then he got up and went back to the city.
In Chapter 5 he got a room at an inn, and now he's in a tailor shop trying to get some new clothes. Thus far he's not changed clothes yet, and what he's wearing currently is starting to get dirty and torn. Fortunately for him, thus far the townspeople aren't aware that he's been disowned, so they're letting him do what he wants without demanding immediate payment.
I'm getting kind of bored having him wandering aimlessly around town, though, so I'll have to think of something to do to him next.
2007/11/02
Mid-Day Two
3576 words at the moment.
Chapter Three was: Edward woke up in an outdoor cage by himself, discovered a few of the things about being undead, escaped (or so he thinks), and went home.
Chapter Four started with a short scene with two of his brothers wondering where he is, as he's been missing for six days. Then it switched over to Edward arriving at the house, with his father standing on the steps, and they're about to have a confrontation. I left off just before it started, as I'm not actually sure who is going to say/do what...
If I try to stick to my wordcount plan, I need to be at 6k by midnight. Since I'm also going to work today, and Stargate: Atlantis is this evening, we'll have to see how well that works...
Chapter Three was: Edward woke up in an outdoor cage by himself, discovered a few of the things about being undead, escaped (or so he thinks), and went home.
Chapter Four started with a short scene with two of his brothers wondering where he is, as he's been missing for six days. Then it switched over to Edward arriving at the house, with his father standing on the steps, and they're about to have a confrontation. I left off just before it started, as I'm not actually sure who is going to say/do what...
If I try to stick to my wordcount plan, I need to be at 6k by midnight. Since I'm also going to work today, and Stargate: Atlantis is this evening, we'll have to see how well that works...
End of Day One
2636 words in three chapters. Edward has escaped from his captors (or at least, that's what he thinks) and is now walking from one side of the city to the other. I'm not sure what chapter 4 will be - it feels like this is a good time to switch to a different character. This will probably be brother Charles, back at the ranch (err, their family estate), fretting about the fact that Edward has disappeared.
If I want to keep up with my goal of 3k per day, I'm already 400 words behind. Guess I better get started.
If I want to keep up with my goal of 3k per day, I'm already 400 words behind. Guess I better get started.
2007/11/01
First half of Day 1
1859 words so far.
Turns out I'm running with the idea that it's Edward Duchene's backstory. In Chapter One he got mugged in a dark alley, and in Chapter Two he's in the process of being killed. In Chapter Three he'll be waking up undead. :) There's all sorts of hints of intrigue going on in the background (the whys and wherefores around why he's being tainted and by whom). There are also a lot of similarities in the scenes with Amulet I take one; I'm taking the same basic setups and switching it to different characters with different motives. It seems to be working out better.
Looks like I'm doing pretty good so far, for not having a clue what I'm doing. :)
Turns out I'm running with the idea that it's Edward Duchene's backstory. In Chapter One he got mugged in a dark alley, and in Chapter Two he's in the process of being killed. In Chapter Three he'll be waking up undead. :) There's all sorts of hints of intrigue going on in the background (the whys and wherefores around why he's being tainted and by whom). There are also a lot of similarities in the scenes with Amulet I take one; I'm taking the same basic setups and switching it to different characters with different motives. It seems to be working out better.
Looks like I'm doing pretty good so far, for not having a clue what I'm doing. :)
2007/10/31
AIIYIIEEE!!!!! O.O
Less than an hour and a half away from the starting gate, and I don't really have any clue what I'm doing.
Uh. Thus far, a possible Main Character has presented himself to me as a young, arrogant nobleman who is going to get mugged in a dark alley. I think this is a mortal Edward Duchene, in the process of becoming Tainted. Which is not a story I had ever planned to write but, who knows, maybe it'll be interesting to see where it goes. If it turns out to be a dead end, I'll just start over with something else. By that point maybe I'll actually think of something else. :)
My October has been unspeakably busy. Until an hour and a half ago I was still in coding mindset, writing up complicated PHP scripts while going back and forth changing things in a corequisite matlab7 script and a postgresql database. Changing from coding-mindset to fiction-writing-mindset is never an easy feat, but I've been puttering around at home now for a while (read: going around in circles like a headless chicken), drinking in some caffeinated soda (Sunkist), and hoping for the best.
Uh. Thus far, a possible Main Character has presented himself to me as a young, arrogant nobleman who is going to get mugged in a dark alley. I think this is a mortal Edward Duchene, in the process of becoming Tainted. Which is not a story I had ever planned to write but, who knows, maybe it'll be interesting to see where it goes. If it turns out to be a dead end, I'll just start over with something else. By that point maybe I'll actually think of something else. :)
My October has been unspeakably busy. Until an hour and a half ago I was still in coding mindset, writing up complicated PHP scripts while going back and forth changing things in a corequisite matlab7 script and a postgresql database. Changing from coding-mindset to fiction-writing-mindset is never an easy feat, but I've been puttering around at home now for a while (read: going around in circles like a headless chicken), drinking in some caffeinated soda (Sunkist), and hoping for the best.
2007/10/04
Well, I'm signed up
I have no idea what I'm doing this year. But I've settled into the new 2007 Nanowrimo digs. I've decided to use the tree picture from here as my avatar. I'm signed in as Nerwen again too, but don't know how many novels I'll attempt this year.
Possible ideas:
a) yet another attempt on Amulet I - third time's the charm, maybe?
b) Birthright
c) come up with something entirely different, like the story behind Nerwen and Kayara
d) slack off and do nothing but dares the whole time
Decisions, decisions. I'll figure it out after I survive October. Got the annual Open House at work in a week and a half to help prepare for, a high school reunion newsletter to put together, then attending of said reunion which will include a long-distance road trip. Things will be quite frantic for a little while...
Possible ideas:
a) yet another attempt on Amulet I - third time's the charm, maybe?
b) Birthright
c) come up with something entirely different, like the story behind Nerwen and Kayara
d) slack off and do nothing but dares the whole time
Decisions, decisions. I'll figure it out after I survive October. Got the annual Open House at work in a week and a half to help prepare for, a high school reunion newsletter to put together, then attending of said reunion which will include a long-distance road trip. Things will be quite frantic for a little while...
2007/09/04
Emerald Sword - happy endings
It was indeed a magical weekend, as Robert said at the end of his last post. Everything seemed to come together for all involved. While I didn't end up with a very high word count - 6144 was my final total - it's been a long time since I've written anything without being highly stressed. I tend to get blocked very easily because of the Every Single Word Is Important And Must Be Perfect syndrome, especially with Fortress Launne, where my well-established characters get mad at me if I write them wrong, which makes me second-guess everything I write and eventually leaves me afraid to write down anything.
But this time it was more like "come on in, the water's warm and you know the strokes because you've done this before." I think it helped that I didn't have anything beyond the flimsiest of plot premises and character archetypes. I did have an ironclad plot outline - the song lyrics - which provided the structure I needed to start building and enough setting elements that I didn't have to spend hours wordbuilding while attempting to write the story. But it wasn't so detailed as to be a cage. Which is what Fortress Launne has become, in a lot of ways. There are things that I can't allow to happen in the plot, and things the characters can't be allowed to do, because it would affect stuff that happens in other parts of the timeline. My notes got too detailed and restrictive.
I think it also helped to have Robert writing along with me again, like with Stranger on a Bus two years ago. I discovered through online roleplay that I do best when I have an external muse. For Emerald Sword, I think we were each other's muses.
The caffeine helped too. I drank one caffeinated soda per day, which really loosened things up in my brain. Caffeine isn't generally good for me, as I tend to crash pretty hard the following day, but if I'm careful with it in small doses it's helpful.
My story isn't finished. It's not even a third of the way through. But I basically know how I'll proceed, in the broadest sense. Over the weekend I wrote the opener, which was basically the setup for the quest in four chapters, and the first half of Chapter 5, which put him at the beginning of his journey, searching for the first quest item in a desert. The middle portion looks like it'll be about twice as long as the opener, so I'm figuring on 8 chapters between journey start and the Emerald Sword in his hands. Then there will be either 4 or 8 chapters describing what happens to him while trying to take the sword back to the Black Lord - that part is still sort of fuzzy and distant, because I don't know what all will happen during the journey, what he'll discover and (most importantly) whether the Black Lord is lying about his motives for wanting the sword, which I have a sneaking suspicion he might be. Because so far I still don't know why the sword was hidden in the first place. And then, if I manage to be symmetrical, there will be 4 chapters to wrap everything up at the end.
And then when everything was over, I managed to write a lot of roleplay posts. Taking the time off to do some serious writing apparently helped freshen me from the roleplay burnout I've been having.
But this time it was more like "come on in, the water's warm and you know the strokes because you've done this before." I think it helped that I didn't have anything beyond the flimsiest of plot premises and character archetypes. I did have an ironclad plot outline - the song lyrics - which provided the structure I needed to start building and enough setting elements that I didn't have to spend hours wordbuilding while attempting to write the story. But it wasn't so detailed as to be a cage. Which is what Fortress Launne has become, in a lot of ways. There are things that I can't allow to happen in the plot, and things the characters can't be allowed to do, because it would affect stuff that happens in other parts of the timeline. My notes got too detailed and restrictive.
I think it also helped to have Robert writing along with me again, like with Stranger on a Bus two years ago. I discovered through online roleplay that I do best when I have an external muse. For Emerald Sword, I think we were each other's muses.
The caffeine helped too. I drank one caffeinated soda per day, which really loosened things up in my brain. Caffeine isn't generally good for me, as I tend to crash pretty hard the following day, but if I'm careful with it in small doses it's helpful.
My story isn't finished. It's not even a third of the way through. But I basically know how I'll proceed, in the broadest sense. Over the weekend I wrote the opener, which was basically the setup for the quest in four chapters, and the first half of Chapter 5, which put him at the beginning of his journey, searching for the first quest item in a desert. The middle portion looks like it'll be about twice as long as the opener, so I'm figuring on 8 chapters between journey start and the Emerald Sword in his hands. Then there will be either 4 or 8 chapters describing what happens to him while trying to take the sword back to the Black Lord - that part is still sort of fuzzy and distant, because I don't know what all will happen during the journey, what he'll discover and (most importantly) whether the Black Lord is lying about his motives for wanting the sword, which I have a sneaking suspicion he might be. Because so far I still don't know why the sword was hidden in the first place. And then, if I manage to be symmetrical, there will be 4 chapters to wrap everything up at the end.
And then when everything was over, I managed to write a lot of roleplay posts. Taking the time off to do some serious writing apparently helped freshen me from the roleplay burnout I've been having.
2007/09/02
Emerald Sword
Labor Day Novel is going on this weekend. Over at SFFMuse, we've turned it into a writing challenge with a twist: write something using the song Emerald Sword by Rhapsody of Fire as inspiration. It can be any length - there are a few people who only have time to write Ficlets. There's a members-only forum on the SFFMuse board for people to post their results.
Basically what happened was I introduced the song to Robert, telling him that I thought the chorus might inspire him. Indeed it did, and next thing you know he's decided to use it for Labor Day Novel. Then, next thing I know I've decided to do the same thing - after having listened to the song for almost a year, I had a few ideas of my own. Then, next thing we knew, we'd roped alcar into it too, and it just went on from there. :)
Unfortunately, because we didn't decide all this until Friday night, which was just a few hours before the event started, I didn't have time to clear my weekend. I've only got 4k words so far, though my Monday is completely free, so hopefully I'll get a lot written then. It won't be a repeat of my 2005 Labor Day Novel experience, though (bus novel for 18k words).
On the bright side, my story is unfolding really well. Everything is nice and flowy, which amazes me because I started with no notes, no characters, no plot, and only the barest idea of a setting. Normally this doesn't happen; normally when I have no clue what I'm doing I just sit there staring at a blank page. This time it's not been like that. I think it's because I've been using the song lyrics as my outline.
So... yeah, I know it's a bit late to be telling everyone here about it now, but come on over and write a short story or something. :)
edit: fixed all the links. sorry 'bout that...
Basically what happened was I introduced the song to Robert, telling him that I thought the chorus might inspire him. Indeed it did, and next thing you know he's decided to use it for Labor Day Novel. Then, next thing I know I've decided to do the same thing - after having listened to the song for almost a year, I had a few ideas of my own. Then, next thing we knew, we'd roped alcar into it too, and it just went on from there. :)
Unfortunately, because we didn't decide all this until Friday night, which was just a few hours before the event started, I didn't have time to clear my weekend. I've only got 4k words so far, though my Monday is completely free, so hopefully I'll get a lot written then. It won't be a repeat of my 2005 Labor Day Novel experience, though (bus novel for 18k words).
On the bright side, my story is unfolding really well. Everything is nice and flowy, which amazes me because I started with no notes, no characters, no plot, and only the barest idea of a setting. Normally this doesn't happen; normally when I have no clue what I'm doing I just sit there staring at a blank page. This time it's not been like that. I think it's because I've been using the song lyrics as my outline.
So... yeah, I know it's a bit late to be telling everyone here about it now, but come on over and write a short story or something. :)
edit: fixed all the links. sorry 'bout that...
2007/08/07
Still alive now, too
Well, I basically spent SFR time working on a Wikipedia article about the place where I work. This included online research, offline research via books from the library, interrogating three people who work there, making photos, and politicking to have a couple small maps added in (which aren't there currently because that part isn't done yet). Then there was all the writing, revising, more writing, more revising, reorganizing, and still more revising. At this point it's looking pretty good. There are three other small blurbs of info I want to add in later on, but probably not for a couple weeks while I take a break from it all.
Aside from that, I have a newish daily blog. Now that it's been up and running for nearly two months, I think I can safely say that keeping up with daily short blog entries isn't as out of my reach as I'd originally figured. I try to include a wide variety of topics for a very general audience. Some days I can't come up with anything worth saying, but people seem to like the inane things too, so it isn't too totally pointless. Come visit. :)
I've started reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne but haven't gotten too far into it yet.
Next on my list of Wikipedia articles to reconstruct is RPoL's. Coincidentally enough, I just got warning today that some of the site's "favorite" idiots are plotting to mangle it for their own purposes. The politicking never ends, I guess. What it means for me is that I better get cracking. (No rest for the weary either.)
As for roleplaying, it's still exactly the same as the last time I posted here about it. I've slowed down to once-a-week posts for everywhere. It isn't that I post everywhere once a week, it's that I post in a few places every day or so, and these rotate along with stuff I'm doing on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Everything advances slowly together.
As for fiction writing... looks like I'm slowly ruminating toward yet another attempt at Amulet I for Nanowrimo 2007. That'll be my third attempt. I guess each iteration does get me closer to the story I'm actually trying to tell.
Aside from that, I have a newish daily blog. Now that it's been up and running for nearly two months, I think I can safely say that keeping up with daily short blog entries isn't as out of my reach as I'd originally figured. I try to include a wide variety of topics for a very general audience. Some days I can't come up with anything worth saying, but people seem to like the inane things too, so it isn't too totally pointless. Come visit. :)
I've started reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne but haven't gotten too far into it yet.
Next on my list of Wikipedia articles to reconstruct is RPoL's. Coincidentally enough, I just got warning today that some of the site's "favorite" idiots are plotting to mangle it for their own purposes. The politicking never ends, I guess. What it means for me is that I better get cracking. (No rest for the weary either.)
As for roleplaying, it's still exactly the same as the last time I posted here about it. I've slowed down to once-a-week posts for everywhere. It isn't that I post everywhere once a week, it's that I post in a few places every day or so, and these rotate along with stuff I'm doing on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Everything advances slowly together.
As for fiction writing... looks like I'm slowly ruminating toward yet another attempt at Amulet I for Nanowrimo 2007. That'll be my third attempt. I guess each iteration does get me closer to the story I'm actually trying to tell.
2007/06/20
still alive
I'm still here. I pass through at least once a day, even though it's been a while since I've felt up to saying anything.
Basically it's a lack of time. I'm incapable of just dashing off something short. Instead I must ramble on at great length about anything and everything - and the longer this gets put off the longer the ramble must be. I don't technically have time for a lengthy ramble now, either, but I'm procrastinating doing something else, so here I am. ;)
(I've also noticed a distinct lapse back into starting every single sentence with "I" ... guess I really am that egotistical. :( Must ... figure out ... how to stop that...)
Things going on:
I'm still reading stuff for the Book Challenge, but because I've fallen behind on writing up reviews like I told myself I would, it's gotten to the point where catching up would be a monumental effort.
I've become addicted to Wikipedia. Mostly I sort songs into categories, but have put some serious work into a couple of articles. The one on John Two-Hawks is almost entirely mine. At the moment I'm working on a fairly big article on the place where I work, and there's another big article I want to do about RPoL after that. It's an entirely different kind of writing than fiction - lots of research and stating of facts.
Roleplaying is still its usual huge timesink. Things I'm doing:
a) Running my Dark Ages game with 10-11 active characters.
b) Helping run a modern-day game, with two threads assigned to me at the moment, and also playing a character in it.
c) Playing six other characters in five other active games.
d) Running a Roundrobin game. It supposedly has two active stories in progress, but so far the majority of participants grossly overestimate the amount of time they actually have to commit to the venture, so it's basically dead.
e) Involved in one other dead game with three characters (the one set in the Anitaverse).
f) Moderating a forum (which mostly means I must read every single post, whether I'm interested or not; this can be a problem if it's extra busy at the same time as me). Also I recently got promoted to channel op for the chat channel, though that doesn't really take up any more time than I was already spending there.
Officially I'm signed up for Summer Fun Run 2007 at SFFMuse, but it isn't really working out very well. Basically I'm too busy to count fiction words. I sort of rotate between tasks on a weekly basis, because my roleplaying speed certainly hasn't gotten any faster. It doesn't help that I keep running off after shiny objects. Lately I've been looking into wiki software in general, at a number of different wiki farms, to find something useable for my extended family to post stuff about our daily lives. So far I like Wikidot.com best. I've also started a new personal blog in the hopes of getting into the practice of dashing off short posts on a daily basis.
As for Fortress Launne? Erm... *shifty eyes* I think about it a lot, actually. Nearly every day. But I'm not writing anything down.
One thing I did discover while looking at wiki stuff and talking to people about things I could do with them, is Scrivener. It's corkboard based writing software for Macs, supposedly similar to Rough Draft for the PC. It's just gotten out of the beta phase. Just in time for Jer's Novel Writer to also come out of beta. Jer's is the one I'd been using for a year and a half now, and I really like it when I'm doing the actual writing of the prose. However, Scrivener's looks much more up my alley when it comes to organizing my notes beforehand. They have completely different philosophies behind how novels get created, each based on how their programmers write. I don't really want to move away from Jer's since I'm rather loyal to Jerry, having spent quite a bit of time helping beta test and just watching its progress. But it may ultimately end up not fitting what I need.
I've also decided that I'm not a writer. At least, not in the way everyone else is. It's not a calling that I must do or else. Instead, my calling is to be an editor. This has become abundantly clear to me by getting sucked into Wikipedia. I've watched alcar (a "real" writer) in the SFFMuse chat, and how he'll just spontaneously write something whenever any kind of idea whatsoever strikes him. We'll be discussing something off-the-wall, and then he'll go quiet for about twenty minutes, and then he'll announce that he's just written a short story or poem, and link us to where he put it on the SFFMuse forum. It's like he breathes writing.
Meanwhile, I breathe editting. I'll sit there and compulsively fix things in Wikipedia articles that I see are wrong. It's a little like finding a loose piece of yarn in a sweater. I have to pull on it to make it go away. So I do that, and pretty soon the first string leads me to more strings that are also loose, and then I'm unravelling the entire sweater so I can put it back together again properly. I've sat around grinding through mindless tedious edits for hours on end, way past my bedtime, because I can't get myself to stop until it's all done.
As for Zette's class, I've sort of dropped out of it entirely. It wasn't even a lack of time as the assignments got more complex - they weren't really that much more of a stretch than what I do for roleplaying posts. However, I just couldn't connect to my story. Every time I tried to do the assignment for the Zette class project, thoughts of Fortress Launne (and Amulet I in particular) would get in the way, and then I would go into a mental tailspin of thinking about neither one. Eventually I gave up.
I guess that's basically been my writing life for the past four months or so. Lots of writing is going on, but almost nothing is happening on the noveling front, alas.
Basically it's a lack of time. I'm incapable of just dashing off something short. Instead I must ramble on at great length about anything and everything - and the longer this gets put off the longer the ramble must be. I don't technically have time for a lengthy ramble now, either, but I'm procrastinating doing something else, so here I am. ;)
(I've also noticed a distinct lapse back into starting every single sentence with "I" ... guess I really am that egotistical. :( Must ... figure out ... how to stop that...)
Things going on:
I'm still reading stuff for the Book Challenge, but because I've fallen behind on writing up reviews like I told myself I would, it's gotten to the point where catching up would be a monumental effort.
I've become addicted to Wikipedia. Mostly I sort songs into categories, but have put some serious work into a couple of articles. The one on John Two-Hawks is almost entirely mine. At the moment I'm working on a fairly big article on the place where I work, and there's another big article I want to do about RPoL after that. It's an entirely different kind of writing than fiction - lots of research and stating of facts.
Roleplaying is still its usual huge timesink. Things I'm doing:
a) Running my Dark Ages game with 10-11 active characters.
b) Helping run a modern-day game, with two threads assigned to me at the moment, and also playing a character in it.
c) Playing six other characters in five other active games.
d) Running a Roundrobin game. It supposedly has two active stories in progress, but so far the majority of participants grossly overestimate the amount of time they actually have to commit to the venture, so it's basically dead.
e) Involved in one other dead game with three characters (the one set in the Anitaverse).
f) Moderating a forum (which mostly means I must read every single post, whether I'm interested or not; this can be a problem if it's extra busy at the same time as me). Also I recently got promoted to channel op for the chat channel, though that doesn't really take up any more time than I was already spending there.
Officially I'm signed up for Summer Fun Run 2007 at SFFMuse, but it isn't really working out very well. Basically I'm too busy to count fiction words. I sort of rotate between tasks on a weekly basis, because my roleplaying speed certainly hasn't gotten any faster. It doesn't help that I keep running off after shiny objects. Lately I've been looking into wiki software in general, at a number of different wiki farms, to find something useable for my extended family to post stuff about our daily lives. So far I like Wikidot.com best. I've also started a new personal blog in the hopes of getting into the practice of dashing off short posts on a daily basis.
As for Fortress Launne? Erm... *shifty eyes* I think about it a lot, actually. Nearly every day. But I'm not writing anything down.
One thing I did discover while looking at wiki stuff and talking to people about things I could do with them, is Scrivener. It's corkboard based writing software for Macs, supposedly similar to Rough Draft for the PC. It's just gotten out of the beta phase. Just in time for Jer's Novel Writer to also come out of beta. Jer's is the one I'd been using for a year and a half now, and I really like it when I'm doing the actual writing of the prose. However, Scrivener's looks much more up my alley when it comes to organizing my notes beforehand. They have completely different philosophies behind how novels get created, each based on how their programmers write. I don't really want to move away from Jer's since I'm rather loyal to Jerry, having spent quite a bit of time helping beta test and just watching its progress. But it may ultimately end up not fitting what I need.
I've also decided that I'm not a writer. At least, not in the way everyone else is. It's not a calling that I must do or else. Instead, my calling is to be an editor. This has become abundantly clear to me by getting sucked into Wikipedia. I've watched alcar (a "real" writer) in the SFFMuse chat, and how he'll just spontaneously write something whenever any kind of idea whatsoever strikes him. We'll be discussing something off-the-wall, and then he'll go quiet for about twenty minutes, and then he'll announce that he's just written a short story or poem, and link us to where he put it on the SFFMuse forum. It's like he breathes writing.
Meanwhile, I breathe editting. I'll sit there and compulsively fix things in Wikipedia articles that I see are wrong. It's a little like finding a loose piece of yarn in a sweater. I have to pull on it to make it go away. So I do that, and pretty soon the first string leads me to more strings that are also loose, and then I'm unravelling the entire sweater so I can put it back together again properly. I've sat around grinding through mindless tedious edits for hours on end, way past my bedtime, because I can't get myself to stop until it's all done.
As for Zette's class, I've sort of dropped out of it entirely. It wasn't even a lack of time as the assignments got more complex - they weren't really that much more of a stretch than what I do for roleplaying posts. However, I just couldn't connect to my story. Every time I tried to do the assignment for the Zette class project, thoughts of Fortress Launne (and Amulet I in particular) would get in the way, and then I would go into a mental tailspin of thinking about neither one. Eventually I gave up.
I guess that's basically been my writing life for the past four months or so. Lots of writing is going on, but almost nothing is happening on the noveling front, alas.
2007/02/15
Week 5 of Zette's Class as applied to Fortress Launne
So, it's actually nearing the end of Week 6, but I've been busy doing roleplay-related things for the past week and a half, and now I'm a bit behind in the class. Week 5 turns out to be a lot more time- and thought-intensive than the previous four weeks. Also, when I read the eight questions we're supposed to answer about our setting, I immediately start thinking about Fortress Launne instead of my 2YN story. This is good, because I desperately need to make sense of my Fortress Launne setting. It's a bit of a mess right now. I'm looking forward to the worldbuilding sections of the class for that reason.
On the other hand, it stalls me out for the 2YN story because I can't answer the questions until after I've already answered them for Fortress Launne. I therefore need to do this time- and thought-intensive assignment twice. Hence I haven't done anything yet.
In roleplaying news, my game is the only one that's moving. I got slammed with applicants last week, but things have quieted down this week. All the games I play are dead.
I've also started a game on RPoL for alcar's roundrobin story idea. The basic premise is:
Come one, come all. ;) I've got one story already started, plus a couple tandem stories to pass the time while people are taking turns writing. If more people sign up I can coordinate another one.
[members-only cut]
Anyway, so here's my attempt to answer the Week 5 questions for Fortress Launne...
1. Culture as personality - What basic overall influence has gone into creating your setting? How is this influence reflected in the setting, in both physical appearance and general atmosphere?
For Amulet I, there are two distinct cultures. The native folk are hardened survivors living in swamplands after having been driven nearly to extinction. They're a very resourceful people and have a culture that was originally matriarchal but now reflects equality among everyone. There are no officially designated gender roles; each person has their own set of talents and skills that can help the community, and what gender they are is not as important. There are female warriors and male babysitters. All of the tribal leaders are still female, however.
The other culture is sort of a medieval European culture, male dominated with highly-defined ideas of gender roles, roles by birth (nobility vs. servants/peasants), etc. Everyone has a place, and stepping out of bounds of their places is severely disapproved. Needless to say, the native folk find this way of doing things a bit distressing.
2. Scars - Signs of previous troubles in the setting. What are the scars on your setting, and what caused them? How do your people react to them?
The native folk are highly suspicious of anyone outside of their lands. Non-natives are called "outlanders." It doesn't help that previous overtures of peace have turned into betrayal and bloodshed. They tend to overreact at any sign that they're about to be betrayed again.
The biggest physical scar would be the fort in the valley. This was where the first outlanders set up to extirpate the native folk. The fort has been flattened twice before in the past several decades, then rebuilt in the same place. By the end of Amulet I it'll probably be flattened again.
3. Status - Is your setting the location of rich and powerful people, a quiet village with everyone working together, or an impoverished town where everyone is scrambling to survive?
It's a frontierland to the European-style culture. The fort and surrounding farms is a small population that is always on guard for hostility from the native folk. The outlanders would really like to colonize the rest of the native folk lands.
The native folk live in primitive-looking villages of round wooden huts on stilts, adapted to constant flooding. They mostly get their food from fishing and hunting/gathering, and a tiny bit of gardening.
4. Population - What is the general population of the setting for your story? Consider this not just as a number function, but also a relative function as well. One hundred people on a small ship can be far more trouble to maintain than 1,000 people in a small village.
The fort population is small, somewhere in the low hundreds. However, they are not far from a larger population center to the south. The city of Myan is just across a wide river.
The native folk, meanwhile, are the last of their kind. There are less than a thousand of them in the Amulet I part of the timeline. There are more of them somewhere "off to the west" because most of them were captured and relocated to wastelands several decades ago, but they aren't in contact with each other.
Population is one of the things that keeps changing on me; I'd originally figured that there are only 300 or so native folk, but it keeps getting bumped upward because I'm not sure they can have as much power as I need them to have with only 300.
5. Weaknesses - What are the weaknesses within your setting and how did they come about? Are the people aware of the weaknesses, blind to them, or worried about them?
Based on the way Zette describes it, she's asking about signs of decay. I'm not sure there's been enough time for permanence to either setting at the time of Amulet I for anything to have decayed. There are certainly signs of past battles, especially at the fort, but those were total destruction events. Later on, when Fortress Launne is an actual city, there will be more of these. 80 years later, the native folk are dwindling by slow atrophy of their ways rather than outright battle.
6. Relationships - What are the relationships within and outside the setting which help to define it?
Hmmm. These questions are starting to get a bit repetitive.
Between settings, I've already covered in Question 1-2.
Within each setting... the native folk are mainly cooperative with each other, as their survival is still threatened from outside forces. There are a series of small villages of 30-50 people each, set up that way to make it easier to find resources and stay hidden, and they communicate closely with one another. The setting as a whole hasn't been in place for more than a couple generations since the last major attempt at annihilation from the outlanders.
The fort population is fairly cooperative as well. Their survival is threatened by native hostilities, and they rely on a centralized government system to guard everyone. It has really only been an organized town for about a decade.
7. Weather - What is the general weather pattern for your setting? What extremes might affect your story?
Well, basically it's southern Florida except with mountains. A subtropical setting, lots of swamplands. There are occasional hurricanes. On a daily basis it's fairly sunny most of the time with scattered rainshowers that last less than an hour each.
8. Emotions - What is the emotional impact the background has on your setting and scene?
Mutual distrust between the two settings. A reasonable sense of trust and cooperation within each setting. Also, the native folk work in harmony with nature, while the outlanders would like to tame it.
Hmmm. In retrospect, this wasn't as hard as I was thinking. Apparently I do have the bare basics pinned down fairly well. It's the details that keep tripping me up.
On the other hand, it stalls me out for the 2YN story because I can't answer the questions until after I've already answered them for Fortress Launne. I therefore need to do this time- and thought-intensive assignment twice. Hence I haven't done anything yet.
In roleplaying news, my game is the only one that's moving. I got slammed with applicants last week, but things have quieted down this week. All the games I play are dead.
I've also started a game on RPoL for alcar's roundrobin story idea. The basic premise is:
Writer A writes Chapter 1, aiming for somewhere around 500-1000 words. Writer A passes their last 10 lines (up to 200 words) to Writer B.
Writer B writes Chapter 2 based on what Writer A passed along, and passes the last 10 lines of Chapter 2 to Writer C ...
This goes on until each participant has written three chapters. When the last writer has finished the last chapter, the entire story is assembled and read for the first time. Hilarity ensues. :)
Come one, come all. ;) I've got one story already started, plus a couple tandem stories to pass the time while people are taking turns writing. If more people sign up I can coordinate another one.
[members-only cut]
Anyway, so here's my attempt to answer the Week 5 questions for Fortress Launne...
1. Culture as personality - What basic overall influence has gone into creating your setting? How is this influence reflected in the setting, in both physical appearance and general atmosphere?
For Amulet I, there are two distinct cultures. The native folk are hardened survivors living in swamplands after having been driven nearly to extinction. They're a very resourceful people and have a culture that was originally matriarchal but now reflects equality among everyone. There are no officially designated gender roles; each person has their own set of talents and skills that can help the community, and what gender they are is not as important. There are female warriors and male babysitters. All of the tribal leaders are still female, however.
The other culture is sort of a medieval European culture, male dominated with highly-defined ideas of gender roles, roles by birth (nobility vs. servants/peasants), etc. Everyone has a place, and stepping out of bounds of their places is severely disapproved. Needless to say, the native folk find this way of doing things a bit distressing.
2. Scars - Signs of previous troubles in the setting. What are the scars on your setting, and what caused them? How do your people react to them?
The native folk are highly suspicious of anyone outside of their lands. Non-natives are called "outlanders." It doesn't help that previous overtures of peace have turned into betrayal and bloodshed. They tend to overreact at any sign that they're about to be betrayed again.
The biggest physical scar would be the fort in the valley. This was where the first outlanders set up to extirpate the native folk. The fort has been flattened twice before in the past several decades, then rebuilt in the same place. By the end of Amulet I it'll probably be flattened again.
3. Status - Is your setting the location of rich and powerful people, a quiet village with everyone working together, or an impoverished town where everyone is scrambling to survive?
It's a frontierland to the European-style culture. The fort and surrounding farms is a small population that is always on guard for hostility from the native folk. The outlanders would really like to colonize the rest of the native folk lands.
The native folk live in primitive-looking villages of round wooden huts on stilts, adapted to constant flooding. They mostly get their food from fishing and hunting/gathering, and a tiny bit of gardening.
4. Population - What is the general population of the setting for your story? Consider this not just as a number function, but also a relative function as well. One hundred people on a small ship can be far more trouble to maintain than 1,000 people in a small village.
The fort population is small, somewhere in the low hundreds. However, they are not far from a larger population center to the south. The city of Myan is just across a wide river.
The native folk, meanwhile, are the last of their kind. There are less than a thousand of them in the Amulet I part of the timeline. There are more of them somewhere "off to the west" because most of them were captured and relocated to wastelands several decades ago, but they aren't in contact with each other.
Population is one of the things that keeps changing on me; I'd originally figured that there are only 300 or so native folk, but it keeps getting bumped upward because I'm not sure they can have as much power as I need them to have with only 300.
5. Weaknesses - What are the weaknesses within your setting and how did they come about? Are the people aware of the weaknesses, blind to them, or worried about them?
Based on the way Zette describes it, she's asking about signs of decay. I'm not sure there's been enough time for permanence to either setting at the time of Amulet I for anything to have decayed. There are certainly signs of past battles, especially at the fort, but those were total destruction events. Later on, when Fortress Launne is an actual city, there will be more of these. 80 years later, the native folk are dwindling by slow atrophy of their ways rather than outright battle.
6. Relationships - What are the relationships within and outside the setting which help to define it?
Hmmm. These questions are starting to get a bit repetitive.
Between settings, I've already covered in Question 1-2.
Within each setting... the native folk are mainly cooperative with each other, as their survival is still threatened from outside forces. There are a series of small villages of 30-50 people each, set up that way to make it easier to find resources and stay hidden, and they communicate closely with one another. The setting as a whole hasn't been in place for more than a couple generations since the last major attempt at annihilation from the outlanders.
The fort population is fairly cooperative as well. Their survival is threatened by native hostilities, and they rely on a centralized government system to guard everyone. It has really only been an organized town for about a decade.
7. Weather - What is the general weather pattern for your setting? What extremes might affect your story?
Well, basically it's southern Florida except with mountains. A subtropical setting, lots of swamplands. There are occasional hurricanes. On a daily basis it's fairly sunny most of the time with scattered rainshowers that last less than an hour each.
8. Emotions - What is the emotional impact the background has on your setting and scene?
Mutual distrust between the two settings. A reasonable sense of trust and cooperation within each setting. Also, the native folk work in harmony with nature, while the outlanders would like to tame it.
Hmmm. In retrospect, this wasn't as hard as I was thinking. Apparently I do have the bare basics pinned down fairly well. It's the details that keep tripping me up.
2007 Book Challenge 3: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty
The Memory of Running is a mainstream novel about a middle-age man who takes a cross-country bike ride after he tragically loses his entire family. Basically he just starts riding. It's a little like when Forrest Gump started his three years of running, after Jenny left him, and this story has a lot of similarities to that part of the movie.
He starts out in Rhode Island as a fat, drunken loser with a rundown bike, no money, no ID, and only the clothes on his back. By the time he gets to California a few months later, he's on a completely different bike, has completely different clothes, and still no money or ID. But he has lost several dozen pounds and become fit, stopped drinking, and gotten into much healthier eating habits. In between he nearly drowns, helps take care of a dying man, gets beaten up, rescues a ten year old from a blizzard, gets shot at, gets threatened to be shot at, hitches a ride with a trucker, joins and leaves a biking rally, and hears the life stories of lots of interesting people.
More importantly, he spends a lot of time thinking about his past. The book jumps around from the present (him doing something interesting on the bike ride) to various points of his past. It's very jumbled. Much like the inside of someone's mind, I suppose. Most of it is focused on his childhood, living with his older sister who had schizophrenia and how the family dealt with that. Much of the rest was about his time in the army during Vietnam.
At first when I started reading it, it didn't look like much. I started reading it for the same reasons I read people's blogs. In a lot of ways, the book is like a really long blog. However, it held my interest really well, and I wanted to keep going, so it must've been doing something right.
The most interesting thing that struck me about it early on was how the book breaks a whole lot of the "don't" rules of writing. For example, the opening sentence has his family arriving at a cabin retreat, but then the rest of the page (and most of the next) is a gigantic infodump about all the past times they've been at this particular cabin. However, it works anyway, because the infodump is just as interesting as the story - moreso, in fact, as we eventually find out that nothing exciting happened in the "real" story (he and his parents arrive at the cabin and relax; the end).
Also, I noticed that the story violates just about everything Zette says about first-person POV in the Week 6 material. The MC comes across as being rather dim; he sees stuff happening around him and doesn't ever actually link events to each other. We as the readers seeing the view through his eyes, though, can readily infer what really happened, even if the MC himself has no clue.
It makes me wonder about how other people think. I philosophize constantly about everything. I make links every which way. Just last night, for example, it occurred to me that learning the basics of IDL programming is strikingly similar to learning the basics of organic chemistry, and I had to stop reading the IDL book to ponder that at length before I could continue. So I find it intriguing to see a glimpse into living a life where thinking isn't a terribly high priority, like it isn't for the MC.
The MC doesn't really have any thoughts about anything, either. (Well, aside from the fact that the whole book was a thought.) He reacts passively to stuff that happens to him and will let just about anyone lead him around. Someone says "do this" and he says "okay" and does it. It's how he wound up attending the deathbed of a total stranger. It wasn't until I was about 3/4th of the way through before he showed any signs of intelligence or willpower, and even then it was just a brief flicker. At the same time, though, he couldn't've been that dumb if he successfully rode a bike from coast to coast.
Another thing is that I don't normally care for travel quest stories. Especially the standard fantasy version. I find them really boring, and just want the protagonists to get to where they're going already so they can do the far more interesting (to me) things that they went there to do. For Memory of Running though, the journey is a lot more than just "stuff happens between point A and point B." The MC does have an actual reason to get to California - it's where his sister's remains are, and he's gone to retrieve them, - but the journey is the important part. The endpoint was just setup; not meant to be a major plot point, and not all that interesting in and of itself. One could certainly sum up the whole book by saying "Smithy Ide rode a bike from Rhode Island to California to make arrangements with the funeral home holding his sister's remains." But that's not what the story was about. And it spoils nothing to say that he got there and took care of the paperwork successfully.
Anyway. Just some random assorted musings in no particular order. I liked the book. It's a good, easy read.
He starts out in Rhode Island as a fat, drunken loser with a rundown bike, no money, no ID, and only the clothes on his back. By the time he gets to California a few months later, he's on a completely different bike, has completely different clothes, and still no money or ID. But he has lost several dozen pounds and become fit, stopped drinking, and gotten into much healthier eating habits. In between he nearly drowns, helps take care of a dying man, gets beaten up, rescues a ten year old from a blizzard, gets shot at, gets threatened to be shot at, hitches a ride with a trucker, joins and leaves a biking rally, and hears the life stories of lots of interesting people.
More importantly, he spends a lot of time thinking about his past. The book jumps around from the present (him doing something interesting on the bike ride) to various points of his past. It's very jumbled. Much like the inside of someone's mind, I suppose. Most of it is focused on his childhood, living with his older sister who had schizophrenia and how the family dealt with that. Much of the rest was about his time in the army during Vietnam.
At first when I started reading it, it didn't look like much. I started reading it for the same reasons I read people's blogs. In a lot of ways, the book is like a really long blog. However, it held my interest really well, and I wanted to keep going, so it must've been doing something right.
The most interesting thing that struck me about it early on was how the book breaks a whole lot of the "don't" rules of writing. For example, the opening sentence has his family arriving at a cabin retreat, but then the rest of the page (and most of the next) is a gigantic infodump about all the past times they've been at this particular cabin. However, it works anyway, because the infodump is just as interesting as the story - moreso, in fact, as we eventually find out that nothing exciting happened in the "real" story (he and his parents arrive at the cabin and relax; the end).
Also, I noticed that the story violates just about everything Zette says about first-person POV in the Week 6 material. The MC comes across as being rather dim; he sees stuff happening around him and doesn't ever actually link events to each other. We as the readers seeing the view through his eyes, though, can readily infer what really happened, even if the MC himself has no clue.
It makes me wonder about how other people think. I philosophize constantly about everything. I make links every which way. Just last night, for example, it occurred to me that learning the basics of IDL programming is strikingly similar to learning the basics of organic chemistry, and I had to stop reading the IDL book to ponder that at length before I could continue. So I find it intriguing to see a glimpse into living a life where thinking isn't a terribly high priority, like it isn't for the MC.
The MC doesn't really have any thoughts about anything, either. (Well, aside from the fact that the whole book was a thought.) He reacts passively to stuff that happens to him and will let just about anyone lead him around. Someone says "do this" and he says "okay" and does it. It's how he wound up attending the deathbed of a total stranger. It wasn't until I was about 3/4th of the way through before he showed any signs of intelligence or willpower, and even then it was just a brief flicker. At the same time, though, he couldn't've been that dumb if he successfully rode a bike from coast to coast.
Another thing is that I don't normally care for travel quest stories. Especially the standard fantasy version. I find them really boring, and just want the protagonists to get to where they're going already so they can do the far more interesting (to me) things that they went there to do. For Memory of Running though, the journey is a lot more than just "stuff happens between point A and point B." The MC does have an actual reason to get to California - it's where his sister's remains are, and he's gone to retrieve them, - but the journey is the important part. The endpoint was just setup; not meant to be a major plot point, and not all that interesting in and of itself. One could certainly sum up the whole book by saying "Smithy Ide rode a bike from Rhode Island to California to make arrangements with the funeral home holding his sister's remains." But that's not what the story was about. And it spoils nothing to say that he got there and took care of the paperwork successfully.
Anyway. Just some random assorted musings in no particular order. I liked the book. It's a good, easy read.
2007/01/31
Zette's class, Roundrobin Storytime
Well, the first month turns out to be pretty easy. We're apparently easing our way into things slowly, and a lot of people are impatient as they wait for the next assignment to go up. The first three weeks could probably have been combined into a single week, but at the same time I suspect the padded time gave people a chance to get comfy with the forum setup and get acquainted with each other. And also to drop out if it turns out that they weren't serious when they signed up. Seeing as how there's 160 people signed up at the moment, a high dropout rate would probably be good for the rest of us. A large number of people haven't even done the first assignment yet, so I guess we have plenty of no-shows right off the bat.
So far Zette herself hasn't gotten involved in discussing the assignments. She posts them and leaves us to fend for ourselves. I assume that at some point she'll actually look at what her students are doing... otherwise it might've been better to stick with a format where all the assignments are posted at once where everyone can see, that way it is with Uncle Jim's forum thread.
As for me, I've taken to rambling on at length in response to the assignments. I figure nobody is actually reading them anyway, so I might as well indulge. I do the actual assignments themselves, explain in excruciating detail how I arrived at the answers I did, and also argue with anything in Zette's posted material that I disagree with. It does help me think. Much like blathering over here does, from time to time. ;)
The story itself is starting to form up pretty well as I attempt to do the assignments. It's looking like it'll be fairly straightforward for a change. Thankfully. ;) I really do need to do something that's not as convoluted as my other stuff.
In other news, I'm involved with one other writing project that's been very addictive so far. Group Story Project is basically a roundrobin story where each participants writes a chapter, then passes the last ten lines to the next person in line. Eventually when the story is finished, it gets assembled and read by everyone for the first time. So far we're on Round 1 with four people - I wrote Chapter 2 and passed 200 words to alcar, and now I'm breathlessly waiting for my turn to write chapter 6. And sitting around insanely curious what alcar did with my 200 words - what kinds of conclusions he came to about the plot, given the hopelessly incomplete info. ;) I'll be trying to stick with the plot ideas I came up with when it's my turn again, though by that point they might make no sense. All depends on what analog feeds me.
Eventually I'm thinking to make an RPoL game based on the concept. But it would probably be better to wait for an entire story to get finished first, in case any glitches come up.
Sadly, that's all the writing I've been doing lately. Roleplay is still crawling along as well, though every game is still dead including mine. With occasional spurts of activity here and there.
And now to keep things from getting hopelessly long and sucking up all the space on Blogs, I'll post my assignments to Zette's class behind a separator... Basically I want to save them here too as backup in case something happens to Forward Motion.
[cut would be here if Blogger did cuts - 28 Sep 2009]
(...and also because I suspect Galen would enjoy all the extra reading. ;) )
Week 1: State an idea in 50-100 words.
Short Version:
Two diplomats from warring nations try to make peace by drawing on a childhood bond.
Long Version:
Two young boys from different nations played together as children when their families met while stationed in a third nation. Fifty years later, their nations are at war with each other, and they meet again as emissaries for peace. Can they draw on their shared childhood to find common ground?
Week 2: What genre is it?
Possible genre definitions for my idea:
a) going by Agent Query - commercial fiction, military or political thriller (depending on which way I go with it)
b) going by http://www.cheapest-book.co.uk/book-retailers/about-genres.shtml - realistic fiction
c) going by http://dannyreviews.com/subjects.html - war fiction
I've noticed that not everywhere agrees on the definitions. What Zette says about "mainstream" and what Agent Query says about it are somewhat contradictory, for example.
My particular story could also easily fall under "science fiction" or "fantasy" depending on what kind of setting I decide to use. (Somehow, setting is always the last thing that gets pinned down when I'm writing a story. I always start with a plot, derive characters from it, and then figure out setting last.)
At the moment, I'm thinking to use something similar to Earth. But not necessarily with the same nations and cities that actually exist. Nor necessarily with the landmasses in all of the same places. But it would have the same kind of sky, seas, rocks and trees, plant and animal life, and humans as the people. It would have cities, contemporary technology levels, and no magic. Perhaps "alternate Earth" would be a good way to describe it.
Zette says that genre decision would likely depend on how the Earthlike place is related to 'real' Earth. I say that it doesn't matter. It matters to the story about as much as the name of the world mattered to the Black Company (Glen Cook) - that is, we never even get a name at all. Of course, The Black Company series is clearly fantasy because it has a lot of swords & sorcery elements in it, so it was never hard to classify for publishers.
Week 3: What's the theme?
It took me a while to figure this one out. Again, like with the first assignment, I found it easier to first start with the long-form version, and then derive a single-word version out of it.
Theme: Communication
Communication is the key to everything.
***
Okay, so what I have is a war between two nations. I also have two MCs who knew each other in childhood and haven't seen each other since their families went their separate ways. They recognize each other as adults due to things like personality quirks, characteristic gestures or identifying spoken phrases.
Why did the war start? Well, why do any wars start? The most obvious (and possibly easiest to resolve) would be: a misunderstanding of some sort. Could be a cultural difference. Could be the way one group views the other is detrimental to the second group, even though the first group thinks that they're doing "good" by subjugating/converting/annihilating them. Could be that the first group is actually trying to achieve something else entirely, and the second group started out as either a convenient means to that end or "collateral damage." Could be whatever the heck the U.S. is presently doing, mucking about in the Middle East - I'm still not entirely sure why we're there (though I've read some interesting rumors about a deadly combination of power-mongering and incompetence), only that as far as I can tell the U.S. is definitely the Bad Guy in that particular war.
Anyway. A misunderstanding of some collossal sort, that the two MCs have to sort out by building from their long-ago common ground.
I've long thought that human social interactions are fundamentally the same at every level. It all scales up and down the same, from two people to two nations.
Things that cause people to want to hurt each other:
1. A hurts B. Could be because B was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could be that A is a natural phenomenon (earthquake, hurricane, flood, etc.). Could be a misunderstanding about something. A might've hurt B on purpose or entirely by accident.
2. Three possible reactions:
a) B retaliates by hurting A.
b) B hurts C, because C reminds B of A in some way.
c) B hurts C, because C is the nearest convenient target.
3. 2.a) would be the most straightforward thing. A lengthy conflict begins between A and B. This is probably the form of plot my story will take.
The other two, B turns around and hurts C, causes C to react in some way in turn, which can cause a chain of hurting to begin.
To summarize the above a bit:
Pain springs from Nature, from ignorance and naivete', misunderstandings and retaliations. Pain begets pain down unending chains, until someone is strong enough to break free, sometimes (rarely) even turn it to joy.
Also, the possible reactions aren't mutually exclusive. It could be more than one, or a combination of things.
So I'm focusing on a misunderstanding as the main cause of this war. Misunderstandings are overcome by communication - telling each other truths until both sides understand why the war is happening. Realizing that there doesn't need to be a war at all.
Other possible themes:
1. pain and joy
2. experience and innocence
3. An end to world suffering, a moment of peace.
As for symbolism. For me, a lot of the symbolism will naturally emerge as I'm writing; I don't need to figure it out consciously beforehand. So this is the sort of thing I'll worry about when I'm doing final-polish on a story - making sure that symbols are referred to consistently and in appropriate places.
Week 4: What are the goals of the main characters? What are the conflicts they must resolve/overcome?
To recap, my story is about two childhood friends on opposite sides of a war, who are meeting again for the first time after 50 years.
So, goals. There are two sets of goals here. First, the nations who are at war with each other. Second, the actual MCs themselves.
So why is there a war?
A long time ago - maybe 50 years, maybe longer ago than that - there was another war. Several different nations sought to destroy each other, but none could prevail. Instead, over a decade, they wore each other down until finally the victor was the last one still standing in an utterly defeated land.
Just as this last nation (A) was about to declare victory, however, another nation swooped in, easily crushed A which had no reserves left to defend against it, and claimed victory for itself. That nation (C) had been standing on the sidelines the whole time, neutral, hiding from everyone and doing its best to pretend it didn't matter.
Nation A was much angered by this. A small, cowardly nation who hid during battle, only to steal the victory at the end. Secretly, as C built up its misbegotten empire now that no one could stop them, A plotted its revenge. Fiftyish years later they were ready. C had grown complacent during the time of peace. A caught C entirely unprepared in a surprise assault that wiped out the nation almost instantly. But then they kept going. They saw that Nation B had been actively trading with C and mistook B for just another colony - part of C that also deserved to be wiped out. They attacked.
B defended. B had no idea who A was or why they were attacking, having of course always been told the winner's story of the last great war. Some people of B wanted to take the offensive and go wipe out A, while others wanted to find out why A was attacking at all.
Goals
1. Nation A wants to annihilate Nation B because it thinks B is a part of C, and they hate C.
2. Nation B doesn't want to be wiped out, and some of them want to find out what A wants with them while others want to go wipe out A.
3. Character X is from nation A. He's a standard, straightforward military officer of some sort, leader of one army among many. He is a strong believer in the goals of his own nation, and wants to do his best to destroy nation B.
4. Character Y is from nation B. He's also military, but more of a spy/special ops sort of skillset than straightforward battle. He has been tasked with finding out why A is attacking them to help his nation decide what to do next.
Let me pause here to mention a few other working details. First, the above scenario is based on the outcome of a Starcraft game I watched a few years back, on Battlenet USEast. Nation A was named Tesseract, C was named omray. Omray stole Tess's win in a FFA game, at the last minute, and was quite pleased with himself and how clever he was. I must say I'm going to get a lot of cheap thrills whenever an opportunity comes up to describe nation C being soundly thwacked.
Second, I'm still thinking about the nations in terms of the actual real nations they're based on. Nation A is Nordic, Nation B is Japanese. So what we have here are Vikings vs. Samurai. :) I might push back the technology level a bit to accommodate this version of setting.
Moving on to the MCs then. I have an opening scenario in mind to get them together. First, X's army is ambushed and defeated in battle by one of B's armies. As the fighting comes to an end, Y's special task force sneaks around back and captures X. The idea is to acquire a high-ranking officer in A's military so they can interrogate.
However, before Y's task force can secure X and bring him back to B's strongholds, something bad happens and the task force is also wiped out. Maybe it was an unexpected, unfortunate spot of bad weather. This leaves X and Y with just each other, X nominally Y's prisoner (but not really; X's bluff is probably going to get called early on), and having to team up if they want to survive whatever Nature is now throwing at them.
Opening Conflicts
a) X and Y have to work out their differences enough to cooperate with each other. On their side of things, they recognize each other, which helps give them a common frame of reference to work from.
b) X and Y have to survive and overcome Mother Nature's obstacles and make it back to somewhere civilized.
c) Once they make it back to civilization, they have to convince their governments to end the fighting and begin working out their differences on an international scale. They have to find common frames of references to work from for their nations, not just themselves.
About Taking Control
I don't take control. My characters and I cooperate and compromise. That's the best way to really describe it.
Basically, I start each scene with a list of plot points I want to cover in it. Could be key bits of info that need to get passed from one character to another. Could be specific small events that need to happen. Could be particular characterization I want to see revealed.
I start the scene and give this list to the characters that are going to be in it. I then let them loose. They may do my list of points in any order they choose. They may do whatever else they'd like with the scene, so long as my list is covered by the end.
Occasionally I discover that I've cast the scene wrong. Then I have to pause it, take out the character that isn't cooperating, and replace with a different one. Then unpause and let things continue.
Reading over Zette's comments about "control," followed by her first example where she says "MC will attempt to kill his wife and her lover," I can't help thinking that it would never work that way for me. If my characters don't want to do what I want them to, they won't. I actually had a story stall out because I had a plotline like that - "MC will kill Bad Guy and then find that this has doomed him, and now he feels bad." Well, it turns out that that particular character would never do such a thing, and when it finally occurred to me to ask what would cause him to do such a thing, he told me that it would never occur to him to want to kill the Bad Guy under any circumstances; it just wasn't in him. That's why the story wouldn't go.
So I guess it was a matter of wrong casting. If I want to tell that particular story, I need to start over with a new set of characters that are more appropriate. Meanwhile, the first set of characters continue to thrive in an entirely different story that will hopefully have the same broad end goals, but will probably get there in a completely different way than I had in mind.
For this 2YN story, I haven't cast anyone yet. I've sketched out the roles that need to be filled, but not yet started coming up with characters to fill them. Maybe I won't. For something like this, where plot comes first and characters are derived from plot, perhaps it should be the roles that define the characters. Who they are beyond their roles is secondary.
Hmmm. Interesting lesson.
So far Zette herself hasn't gotten involved in discussing the assignments. She posts them and leaves us to fend for ourselves. I assume that at some point she'll actually look at what her students are doing... otherwise it might've been better to stick with a format where all the assignments are posted at once where everyone can see, that way it is with Uncle Jim's forum thread.
As for me, I've taken to rambling on at length in response to the assignments. I figure nobody is actually reading them anyway, so I might as well indulge. I do the actual assignments themselves, explain in excruciating detail how I arrived at the answers I did, and also argue with anything in Zette's posted material that I disagree with. It does help me think. Much like blathering over here does, from time to time. ;)
The story itself is starting to form up pretty well as I attempt to do the assignments. It's looking like it'll be fairly straightforward for a change. Thankfully. ;) I really do need to do something that's not as convoluted as my other stuff.
In other news, I'm involved with one other writing project that's been very addictive so far. Group Story Project is basically a roundrobin story where each participants writes a chapter, then passes the last ten lines to the next person in line. Eventually when the story is finished, it gets assembled and read by everyone for the first time. So far we're on Round 1 with four people - I wrote Chapter 2 and passed 200 words to alcar, and now I'm breathlessly waiting for my turn to write chapter 6. And sitting around insanely curious what alcar did with my 200 words - what kinds of conclusions he came to about the plot, given the hopelessly incomplete info. ;) I'll be trying to stick with the plot ideas I came up with when it's my turn again, though by that point they might make no sense. All depends on what analog feeds me.
Eventually I'm thinking to make an RPoL game based on the concept. But it would probably be better to wait for an entire story to get finished first, in case any glitches come up.
Sadly, that's all the writing I've been doing lately. Roleplay is still crawling along as well, though every game is still dead including mine. With occasional spurts of activity here and there.
And now to keep things from getting hopelessly long and sucking up all the space on Blogs, I'll post my assignments to Zette's class behind a separator... Basically I want to save them here too as backup in case something happens to Forward Motion.
[cut would be here if Blogger did cuts - 28 Sep 2009]
(...and also because I suspect Galen would enjoy all the extra reading. ;) )
Week 1: State an idea in 50-100 words.
Short Version:
Two diplomats from warring nations try to make peace by drawing on a childhood bond.
Long Version:
Two young boys from different nations played together as children when their families met while stationed in a third nation. Fifty years later, their nations are at war with each other, and they meet again as emissaries for peace. Can they draw on their shared childhood to find common ground?
Week 2: What genre is it?
Possible genre definitions for my idea:
a) going by Agent Query - commercial fiction, military or political thriller (depending on which way I go with it)
b) going by http://www.cheapest-book.co.uk/book-retailers/about-genres.shtml - realistic fiction
c) going by http://dannyreviews.com/subjects.html - war fiction
I've noticed that not everywhere agrees on the definitions. What Zette says about "mainstream" and what Agent Query says about it are somewhat contradictory, for example.
My particular story could also easily fall under "science fiction" or "fantasy" depending on what kind of setting I decide to use. (Somehow, setting is always the last thing that gets pinned down when I'm writing a story. I always start with a plot, derive characters from it, and then figure out setting last.)
At the moment, I'm thinking to use something similar to Earth. But not necessarily with the same nations and cities that actually exist. Nor necessarily with the landmasses in all of the same places. But it would have the same kind of sky, seas, rocks and trees, plant and animal life, and humans as the people. It would have cities, contemporary technology levels, and no magic. Perhaps "alternate Earth" would be a good way to describe it.
Zette says that genre decision would likely depend on how the Earthlike place is related to 'real' Earth. I say that it doesn't matter. It matters to the story about as much as the name of the world mattered to the Black Company (Glen Cook) - that is, we never even get a name at all. Of course, The Black Company series is clearly fantasy because it has a lot of swords & sorcery elements in it, so it was never hard to classify for publishers.
Week 3: What's the theme?
It took me a while to figure this one out. Again, like with the first assignment, I found it easier to first start with the long-form version, and then derive a single-word version out of it.
Theme: Communication
Communication is the key to everything.
***
Okay, so what I have is a war between two nations. I also have two MCs who knew each other in childhood and haven't seen each other since their families went their separate ways. They recognize each other as adults due to things like personality quirks, characteristic gestures or identifying spoken phrases.
Why did the war start? Well, why do any wars start? The most obvious (and possibly easiest to resolve) would be: a misunderstanding of some sort. Could be a cultural difference. Could be the way one group views the other is detrimental to the second group, even though the first group thinks that they're doing "good" by subjugating/converting/annihilating them. Could be that the first group is actually trying to achieve something else entirely, and the second group started out as either a convenient means to that end or "collateral damage." Could be whatever the heck the U.S. is presently doing, mucking about in the Middle East - I'm still not entirely sure why we're there (though I've read some interesting rumors about a deadly combination of power-mongering and incompetence), only that as far as I can tell the U.S. is definitely the Bad Guy in that particular war.
Anyway. A misunderstanding of some collossal sort, that the two MCs have to sort out by building from their long-ago common ground.
I've long thought that human social interactions are fundamentally the same at every level. It all scales up and down the same, from two people to two nations.
Things that cause people to want to hurt each other:
1. A hurts B. Could be because B was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could be that A is a natural phenomenon (earthquake, hurricane, flood, etc.). Could be a misunderstanding about something. A might've hurt B on purpose or entirely by accident.
2. Three possible reactions:
a) B retaliates by hurting A.
b) B hurts C, because C reminds B of A in some way.
c) B hurts C, because C is the nearest convenient target.
3. 2.a) would be the most straightforward thing. A lengthy conflict begins between A and B. This is probably the form of plot my story will take.
The other two, B turns around and hurts C, causes C to react in some way in turn, which can cause a chain of hurting to begin.
To summarize the above a bit:
Pain springs from Nature, from ignorance and naivete', misunderstandings and retaliations. Pain begets pain down unending chains, until someone is strong enough to break free, sometimes (rarely) even turn it to joy.
Also, the possible reactions aren't mutually exclusive. It could be more than one, or a combination of things.
So I'm focusing on a misunderstanding as the main cause of this war. Misunderstandings are overcome by communication - telling each other truths until both sides understand why the war is happening. Realizing that there doesn't need to be a war at all.
Other possible themes:
1. pain and joy
2. experience and innocence
3. An end to world suffering, a moment of peace.
As for symbolism. For me, a lot of the symbolism will naturally emerge as I'm writing; I don't need to figure it out consciously beforehand. So this is the sort of thing I'll worry about when I'm doing final-polish on a story - making sure that symbols are referred to consistently and in appropriate places.
Week 4: What are the goals of the main characters? What are the conflicts they must resolve/overcome?
To recap, my story is about two childhood friends on opposite sides of a war, who are meeting again for the first time after 50 years.
So, goals. There are two sets of goals here. First, the nations who are at war with each other. Second, the actual MCs themselves.
So why is there a war?
A long time ago - maybe 50 years, maybe longer ago than that - there was another war. Several different nations sought to destroy each other, but none could prevail. Instead, over a decade, they wore each other down until finally the victor was the last one still standing in an utterly defeated land.
Just as this last nation (A) was about to declare victory, however, another nation swooped in, easily crushed A which had no reserves left to defend against it, and claimed victory for itself. That nation (C) had been standing on the sidelines the whole time, neutral, hiding from everyone and doing its best to pretend it didn't matter.
Nation A was much angered by this. A small, cowardly nation who hid during battle, only to steal the victory at the end. Secretly, as C built up its misbegotten empire now that no one could stop them, A plotted its revenge. Fiftyish years later they were ready. C had grown complacent during the time of peace. A caught C entirely unprepared in a surprise assault that wiped out the nation almost instantly. But then they kept going. They saw that Nation B had been actively trading with C and mistook B for just another colony - part of C that also deserved to be wiped out. They attacked.
B defended. B had no idea who A was or why they were attacking, having of course always been told the winner's story of the last great war. Some people of B wanted to take the offensive and go wipe out A, while others wanted to find out why A was attacking at all.
Goals
1. Nation A wants to annihilate Nation B because it thinks B is a part of C, and they hate C.
2. Nation B doesn't want to be wiped out, and some of them want to find out what A wants with them while others want to go wipe out A.
3. Character X is from nation A. He's a standard, straightforward military officer of some sort, leader of one army among many. He is a strong believer in the goals of his own nation, and wants to do his best to destroy nation B.
4. Character Y is from nation B. He's also military, but more of a spy/special ops sort of skillset than straightforward battle. He has been tasked with finding out why A is attacking them to help his nation decide what to do next.
Let me pause here to mention a few other working details. First, the above scenario is based on the outcome of a Starcraft game I watched a few years back, on Battlenet USEast. Nation A was named Tesseract, C was named omray. Omray stole Tess's win in a FFA game, at the last minute, and was quite pleased with himself and how clever he was. I must say I'm going to get a lot of cheap thrills whenever an opportunity comes up to describe nation C being soundly thwacked.
Second, I'm still thinking about the nations in terms of the actual real nations they're based on. Nation A is Nordic, Nation B is Japanese. So what we have here are Vikings vs. Samurai. :) I might push back the technology level a bit to accommodate this version of setting.
Moving on to the MCs then. I have an opening scenario in mind to get them together. First, X's army is ambushed and defeated in battle by one of B's armies. As the fighting comes to an end, Y's special task force sneaks around back and captures X. The idea is to acquire a high-ranking officer in A's military so they can interrogate.
However, before Y's task force can secure X and bring him back to B's strongholds, something bad happens and the task force is also wiped out. Maybe it was an unexpected, unfortunate spot of bad weather. This leaves X and Y with just each other, X nominally Y's prisoner (but not really; X's bluff is probably going to get called early on), and having to team up if they want to survive whatever Nature is now throwing at them.
Opening Conflicts
a) X and Y have to work out their differences enough to cooperate with each other. On their side of things, they recognize each other, which helps give them a common frame of reference to work from.
b) X and Y have to survive and overcome Mother Nature's obstacles and make it back to somewhere civilized.
c) Once they make it back to civilization, they have to convince their governments to end the fighting and begin working out their differences on an international scale. They have to find common frames of references to work from for their nations, not just themselves.
About Taking Control
I don't take control. My characters and I cooperate and compromise. That's the best way to really describe it.
Basically, I start each scene with a list of plot points I want to cover in it. Could be key bits of info that need to get passed from one character to another. Could be specific small events that need to happen. Could be particular characterization I want to see revealed.
I start the scene and give this list to the characters that are going to be in it. I then let them loose. They may do my list of points in any order they choose. They may do whatever else they'd like with the scene, so long as my list is covered by the end.
Occasionally I discover that I've cast the scene wrong. Then I have to pause it, take out the character that isn't cooperating, and replace with a different one. Then unpause and let things continue.
Reading over Zette's comments about "control," followed by her first example where she says "MC will attempt to kill his wife and her lover," I can't help thinking that it would never work that way for me. If my characters don't want to do what I want them to, they won't. I actually had a story stall out because I had a plotline like that - "MC will kill Bad Guy and then find that this has doomed him, and now he feels bad." Well, it turns out that that particular character would never do such a thing, and when it finally occurred to me to ask what would cause him to do such a thing, he told me that it would never occur to him to want to kill the Bad Guy under any circumstances; it just wasn't in him. That's why the story wouldn't go.
So I guess it was a matter of wrong casting. If I want to tell that particular story, I need to start over with a new set of characters that are more appropriate. Meanwhile, the first set of characters continue to thrive in an entirely different story that will hopefully have the same broad end goals, but will probably get there in a completely different way than I had in mind.
For this 2YN story, I haven't cast anyone yet. I've sketched out the roles that need to be filled, but not yet started coming up with characters to fill them. Maybe I won't. For something like this, where plot comes first and characters are derived from plot, perhaps it should be the roles that define the characters. Who they are beyond their roles is secondary.
Hmmm. Interesting lesson.
2007/01/21
2007 Book Challenge 2: Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward
Out of Thin Air is a science nonfiction that explains a new theory on the underlying basis for how and why animal life on Earth had the history that it did. In a word: oxygen. The one thing all animals (and plants, and fungi, and protists and most bacteria) must do is breathe - and in particular they must figure out a way to take up enough oxygen to exist. Oxygen levels have fluctuated up and down through the ages, from as high as 35% to as low as 10% (it's 20% today). Times of high oxygen means high species diversity; times of low oxygen means high diversity in body plans.
The book was written by a university professor, and although it was apparently marketed for general public reading, it really requires at least a biology degree for full understanding. I can easily see a semester-long graduate-level seminar course that uses this book as an outline. One chapter at a time, along with all the primary literature that gets cited in support of all the things each chapter says. Lots of discussion on what the heck the author means. In fact, I suspect that the author uses this book for exactly that purpose.
As books go, this one could've used some more revising. The logic is unclear and even circular in some parts. There are also parts where the author starts out stating one thing, then goes off on a tangent and never gets back to supporting the original statement. And many many parts where he makes leaps, assuming that the reader knows things and can follow along if he omits stating a few in-between steps. Overall, it needs to be written from a completely different angle; as is, it looks like he's beating a tiresome drum over and over ("the answer was oxygen levels!"). It could be rewritten so that you don't start with a bunch of questions that lead to the same answer, but with the answer first followed by all the consequences thereof. It would still have the same content, but be a much smoother read.
Several factual things bothered me:
a) Early on he mentioned that birds are able to survive and thrive at much higher altitudes (thinner air, lower oxygen levels) than mammals. However, it isn't until the last hundred pages where he even mentions the setup of their lungs. That is, bird lungs have unidirectional airflow. Instead of a bag that inflates and deflates like ours, where oxygen-rich air goes in and then carbon-dioxide-laden air goes back out through the same paths, bird lungs have a system where air goes in one way and out a different way, and it's coupled to blood flow that moves in the opposite direction. It's a lot more efficient.
I spent a lot of the book wondering how he could've possibly overlooked such a basic fact, when he's writing something about oxygen and breathing. Fortunately for him, he eventually makes up for this lack by going into extreme detail on bird lungs for almost an entire chapter. Not only the details of how they're set up now (which I hadn't actually known fully), but lots of good nuggets of information from paleontology on when and from what it arose, and whether some of the dinosaurs had a setup like it (in the author's opinion: yes). But he needed to at least hint that such a section was upcoming.
b) There are whole sections in the book that strongly imply that lungs evolved from gills. No, they didn't. Lungs and gills are separate organs, and in some fish and amphibians you can even have both at the same time. Modern lungs (such as in us humans) are analogous to the modern swim bladder in bony fishes.
c) He also implies that reptiles evolved from amphibians. I'm fairly certain I read somewhere a while back that they both came from lobefinned fish, but did not evolve from each other. How controversial that was, I don't know - depends where I read it, and I can't remember.
d) Near the beginning he really should've talked more about how free oxygen first came to exist on Earth. The very first life on Earth was anaerobic. Oxygen is actually a toxin and was put out as a waste product. (It's still a toxin; we're just set up to make sure it doesn't do too much damage while we're harnessing it to do useful things). Eventually the first anaerobes polluted their atmosphere with it so much that there were no more rocks left to absorb it (by oxidizing).
Also, "descendant" is the correct spelling.
As for me and the Book Challenge. I actually started reading this back in December, so technically it's half a book I've read for 2007. I received it just before Christmas from a regular customer of the Chinese takeout where I work. He found out I have advanced degrees in biology, so he loaned me the book to read. He said he didn't understand it, and hoped I would be able to explain it to him. Having now read it in its entirety, I don't know if I can, unless I also want to teach him basic biology. It didn't bode well that one of the things he seemed amazed about was "wow, did you know humans came from fish?" This signals to me that we'd have to start with an uphill battle about evolution first...
The book was written by a university professor, and although it was apparently marketed for general public reading, it really requires at least a biology degree for full understanding. I can easily see a semester-long graduate-level seminar course that uses this book as an outline. One chapter at a time, along with all the primary literature that gets cited in support of all the things each chapter says. Lots of discussion on what the heck the author means. In fact, I suspect that the author uses this book for exactly that purpose.
As books go, this one could've used some more revising. The logic is unclear and even circular in some parts. There are also parts where the author starts out stating one thing, then goes off on a tangent and never gets back to supporting the original statement. And many many parts where he makes leaps, assuming that the reader knows things and can follow along if he omits stating a few in-between steps. Overall, it needs to be written from a completely different angle; as is, it looks like he's beating a tiresome drum over and over ("the answer was oxygen levels!"). It could be rewritten so that you don't start with a bunch of questions that lead to the same answer, but with the answer first followed by all the consequences thereof. It would still have the same content, but be a much smoother read.
Several factual things bothered me:
a) Early on he mentioned that birds are able to survive and thrive at much higher altitudes (thinner air, lower oxygen levels) than mammals. However, it isn't until the last hundred pages where he even mentions the setup of their lungs. That is, bird lungs have unidirectional airflow. Instead of a bag that inflates and deflates like ours, where oxygen-rich air goes in and then carbon-dioxide-laden air goes back out through the same paths, bird lungs have a system where air goes in one way and out a different way, and it's coupled to blood flow that moves in the opposite direction. It's a lot more efficient.
I spent a lot of the book wondering how he could've possibly overlooked such a basic fact, when he's writing something about oxygen and breathing. Fortunately for him, he eventually makes up for this lack by going into extreme detail on bird lungs for almost an entire chapter. Not only the details of how they're set up now (which I hadn't actually known fully), but lots of good nuggets of information from paleontology on when and from what it arose, and whether some of the dinosaurs had a setup like it (in the author's opinion: yes). But he needed to at least hint that such a section was upcoming.
b) There are whole sections in the book that strongly imply that lungs evolved from gills. No, they didn't. Lungs and gills are separate organs, and in some fish and amphibians you can even have both at the same time. Modern lungs (such as in us humans) are analogous to the modern swim bladder in bony fishes.
c) He also implies that reptiles evolved from amphibians. I'm fairly certain I read somewhere a while back that they both came from lobefinned fish, but did not evolve from each other. How controversial that was, I don't know - depends where I read it, and I can't remember.
d) Near the beginning he really should've talked more about how free oxygen first came to exist on Earth. The very first life on Earth was anaerobic. Oxygen is actually a toxin and was put out as a waste product. (It's still a toxin; we're just set up to make sure it doesn't do too much damage while we're harnessing it to do useful things). Eventually the first anaerobes polluted their atmosphere with it so much that there were no more rocks left to absorb it (by oxidizing).
Also, "descendant" is the correct spelling.
As for me and the Book Challenge. I actually started reading this back in December, so technically it's half a book I've read for 2007. I received it just before Christmas from a regular customer of the Chinese takeout where I work. He found out I have advanced degrees in biology, so he loaned me the book to read. He said he didn't understand it, and hoped I would be able to explain it to him. Having now read it in its entirety, I don't know if I can, unless I also want to teach him basic biology. It didn't bode well that one of the things he seemed amazed about was "wow, did you know humans came from fish?" This signals to me that we'd have to start with an uphill battle about evolution first...
2007 Book Challenge 1: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi
Agent to the Stars is available as a free online read in its entirety. It's a humorous science fiction story about a Hollywood agent who is assigned to figure out a way to introduce Earth to an alien race that looks like gelatinous blobs. The blobs in question are mild-mannered beings with great senses of humor.
It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.
I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.
I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.
By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.
Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.
The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.
Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.
My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)
It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.
I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.
I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.
By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.
Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.
The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.
Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.
My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)
2007/01/11
Beginning of the New Year: State of the Union (or at least my Writing Life)
Well, Zette's class is off to a rousing good start. So far, for the first week's assignment, we just needed to post up 50-100 words describing an idea. Here's mine:
Obviously I decided against the plot I mentioned in my last entry (though I might use it for something else later on). The above idea came to me last summer, while we had two visiting scientists on campus, one from Japan and one from Norway. They were both here for several months and they'd brought their families. They each had sons that spent a lot of time playing together.
I came up with the idea, didn't really know where to go with it from there, and filed it away. It occurred to me that Zette's class would be a perfect place to try to develop it, since I'm not doing anything much with it anyhow, and it's very different from everything else I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I wrote 992 words last night toward Amulet I. Since Nanowrimo ended I've managed to come up with around 4500 new words, mostly in fits and starts as the mood moves me. The good news is that the mood moves me rather more often than for either of my previous Nanowrimo novels. I've barely looked at Amulet II since Nanowrimo 2005 ended, and I'm holding off on any more fiddling with Temple (as well as Janis) until after Amulet I is done, and the setting ... umm, settles. Right now it's about as solid and stable as quicksand. Every time a character sneezes, it turns out I need to do more worldbuilding and change things around. (Note: no characters have ever actually sneezed in any of my efforts thus far. Hmm. Maybe someone should.)
As for Stranger on a Bus, it's still languishing on the backburner. I've decided that the next scene will involve a blizzard, however. So far I've managed to go ten chapters without any whiteout driving conditions; I need to "fix" that.
[members-only cut]
Then there's Dragonfly. I needed to get far enough away from it before I could figure out what it meant. Eight months later, here I am.
The main problem I struggled with is that, looking just at the framework of the actual story, what I have is a choice between death and death. So the question was: what's the difference?
That's not what the story is about though. What we have is a man that is bored (and boring), because from his view, he's sitting there waiting while nothing much happens. Ultimately his existence is meaningless. As far as he can tell, nothing much will ever happen, there will never be anything but the waiting, and eventually at some point it will end.
Then a dragonfly comes and shows him that there is a different way. That there is a place with meaning, and it's over a line that he didn't know about before.
Once he knew it was there, he had to make the decision to cross it. He knows that there's a lot to explore on the other side, and elephants to find, but he can't see them without crossing the line - he has to trust that they are there. It's a leap of faith that he has to take.
So it's not a choice between death and death. It's about either staying still and dying where he is, or crossing over and transcending into new life.
This is a metaphor that I've been discussing with my brother for a long time now. Life is like a holodeck. Everything is illusory on the inside, which means that everything is ultimately meaningless. But there's an outside to the holodeck. It's a scary place, and you can't know what's out there unless you actually leave. There's only so much information you can gather about the outside from the inside, and at some point there's nothing left to do but to actually go there and see.
My brother is still stuck in that holodeck. I took a leap of faith and crossed over. My dragonfly was a young girl named Dana who came along in 2002 and dragged me out of an abyss. The line appeared while we roleplayed. And now I know what's on the outside, but I can't show him. He demands proof that there's meaning and wondrous elephants. But he has to come over on his own.
How to convey all that in Dragonfly though. I could take the easy way out and make that playground more significant instead. Give the man a choice - get well and be able to go out to the playground with the laughing children, or die and be able to explore the other side of the line and find the elephants.
Hmm. I guess I'm still not really sure what the elephants mean. Memory would be the obvious thing. But memory of what?
Also, why a dragonfly? I think I know the answer to that one, though whether it's relevant to the story remains to be seen. My grandfather was born in a dragon year (Chinese zodiac). In early 2004 we all had to fly out to see him because he'd collapsed and everyone figured he was about to die. He was on a respirator when I got there; he'd survived tuberculosis several decades earlier, but it permanently damaged his lungs. When I went to hold his hand, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. After that he made a miraculous recovery, and not long after I left, he was able to go home. There's a bit more to that than I'm saying, but I think that's where the dragonfly came from.
I guess my grandfather, being a grandfather, would have a lot of memories. Hmmm.
So that's where I am with that.
Two young boys from different nations played together as children when their families met while stationed in a third nation. Fifty years later, their nations are at war with each other, and they meet again as emissaries for peace. Can they draw on their shared childhood to find common ground?
Obviously I decided against the plot I mentioned in my last entry (though I might use it for something else later on). The above idea came to me last summer, while we had two visiting scientists on campus, one from Japan and one from Norway. They were both here for several months and they'd brought their families. They each had sons that spent a lot of time playing together.
I came up with the idea, didn't really know where to go with it from there, and filed it away. It occurred to me that Zette's class would be a perfect place to try to develop it, since I'm not doing anything much with it anyhow, and it's very different from everything else I'm doing.
Meanwhile, I wrote 992 words last night toward Amulet I. Since Nanowrimo ended I've managed to come up with around 4500 new words, mostly in fits and starts as the mood moves me. The good news is that the mood moves me rather more often than for either of my previous Nanowrimo novels. I've barely looked at Amulet II since Nanowrimo 2005 ended, and I'm holding off on any more fiddling with Temple (as well as Janis) until after Amulet I is done, and the setting ... umm, settles. Right now it's about as solid and stable as quicksand. Every time a character sneezes, it turns out I need to do more worldbuilding and change things around. (Note: no characters have ever actually sneezed in any of my efforts thus far. Hmm. Maybe someone should.)
As for Stranger on a Bus, it's still languishing on the backburner. I've decided that the next scene will involve a blizzard, however. So far I've managed to go ten chapters without any whiteout driving conditions; I need to "fix" that.
[members-only cut]
Then there's Dragonfly. I needed to get far enough away from it before I could figure out what it meant. Eight months later, here I am.
The main problem I struggled with is that, looking just at the framework of the actual story, what I have is a choice between death and death. So the question was: what's the difference?
That's not what the story is about though. What we have is a man that is bored (and boring), because from his view, he's sitting there waiting while nothing much happens. Ultimately his existence is meaningless. As far as he can tell, nothing much will ever happen, there will never be anything but the waiting, and eventually at some point it will end.
Then a dragonfly comes and shows him that there is a different way. That there is a place with meaning, and it's over a line that he didn't know about before.
Once he knew it was there, he had to make the decision to cross it. He knows that there's a lot to explore on the other side, and elephants to find, but he can't see them without crossing the line - he has to trust that they are there. It's a leap of faith that he has to take.
So it's not a choice between death and death. It's about either staying still and dying where he is, or crossing over and transcending into new life.
This is a metaphor that I've been discussing with my brother for a long time now. Life is like a holodeck. Everything is illusory on the inside, which means that everything is ultimately meaningless. But there's an outside to the holodeck. It's a scary place, and you can't know what's out there unless you actually leave. There's only so much information you can gather about the outside from the inside, and at some point there's nothing left to do but to actually go there and see.
My brother is still stuck in that holodeck. I took a leap of faith and crossed over. My dragonfly was a young girl named Dana who came along in 2002 and dragged me out of an abyss. The line appeared while we roleplayed. And now I know what's on the outside, but I can't show him. He demands proof that there's meaning and wondrous elephants. But he has to come over on his own.
How to convey all that in Dragonfly though. I could take the easy way out and make that playground more significant instead. Give the man a choice - get well and be able to go out to the playground with the laughing children, or die and be able to explore the other side of the line and find the elephants.
Hmm. I guess I'm still not really sure what the elephants mean. Memory would be the obvious thing. But memory of what?
Also, why a dragonfly? I think I know the answer to that one, though whether it's relevant to the story remains to be seen. My grandfather was born in a dragon year (Chinese zodiac). In early 2004 we all had to fly out to see him because he'd collapsed and everyone figured he was about to die. He was on a respirator when I got there; he'd survived tuberculosis several decades earlier, but it permanently damaged his lungs. When I went to hold his hand, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. After that he made a miraculous recovery, and not long after I left, he was able to go home. There's a bit more to that than I'm saying, but I think that's where the dragonfly came from.
I guess my grandfather, being a grandfather, would have a lot of memories. Hmmm.
So that's where I am with that.
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