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.