Thoughts about Vengeance

Last night I cranked out another scene to the story that I'm now going to call Vengeance as its working title. The "present day" part of it that follows Craig is now about 2000 words or so.

I also wrote nearly 3k words over Christmas break, on a "flashback to 200 years ago" segment that follows Rumen.

The two parts are coming out very differently, in terms of how I write them. The Rumen part just flowed along with very little editting. It stalled out when they finally reached the town, and I've not yet figured out what exactly will happen next. So now they're standing outside a tavern while I ruminate. In general, this part of it has been a lot like writing a Nano, except very low-key and unstressy. The story wants to write itself. I just have to sit down and get away from life distractions enough to do it.

The Craig part, on the other hand, consists of a lot of editting. I'm very slowly cranking out perfect prose. This isn't as straightforward as it sounds; generally I'm doing the same thing I've always done - write a draft to figure out what happens, fiddle with it to death, then chuck it and start over. Before last night, I'd been fiddling around with scattered fragments that were going to be somewhere in the scene but I didn't know where. Last night I got around to tossing it all out and writing the "real" version (the one that's presentable to the general public).

In a lot of ways, this is exactly how the roleplaying game went. We advanced at a glacial pace, largely because we had to wait for each other to post. There was a lot of in-between waiting time. This turns out to be helpful for the Craig part now - because even though I sometimes go a long time without actually writing anything, the story is still right there where I left off, waiting for me to come back and work on it some more. As long as I have a clear outline (which I do, two blog posts back) and know what I'm doing, it doesn't stall out too terribly. It doesn't disappear into the murk of my subconscious, never to be seen again, like a lot of my other stories have done.

It probably also helps that one of my most strong-willed characters is involved. Rumen can be very demanding and exacting for what I do with him and how I write him. During the game, he would often drown out anything my other character Aaron might want to say, sometimes making it very hard to post for Aaron. So now that Rumen is awake in the back of my mind, he's quite insistent that I proceed with this project. Ahh... muses. :)

And the finished segments end up very readable. Back when I was doing it for the game, they had to be - because people would be reading whatever I wrote within minutes of posting. All in all, the game has trained me very well.

I have one alpha reader for this. Fortunately he's very appreciative and encouraging - which is exactly the kind of support I need while it's still an alpha.

In general I don't actually know where I'm planning to go with all this. I'm writing it because it wants to be written, and there's only so long I can hide from it by doing other things (bill paying, household chores, playing endless rounds of jigsawdoku, stressing about work or moderating a chat channel, blogging, etc.). Every time I sit down and look at it, it's calling to me. I don't even know how long this is planning to be yet, or what its future is after I'm done. It's all kind of irrelevant in the moment, and who am I to question why. :)