Nano 2015 - Epilogue

10,502 words.

It was pretty obvious around 5k words or so that I wasn't going to have enough things to rant about for 50k words, and 10k was about as far as it was going to get. I got there, and have more words than I would've had if I hadn't participated, so, good enough. A lengthy worldbuilding exercise doesn't turn out to be as much fun as writing an actual story, so I probably won't try it again.

I think mostly I was just doing it this year to be social, which is kind of ironic because there aren't all that many people in the local area to be social with about Nanowrimo. The write-ins weren't especially well-attended, and neither was the wrap party yesterday. I didn't go to the kickoff because I wasn't here, but from what the ML said, it was pretty small also.

Oh well.

Meanwhile, the academic paper I'd been working on for the last six months got officially submitted to the journal on Dec. 1, and that felt almost like winning Nanowrimo. So I definitely accomplished things in November that were writing-related, even if they weren't fiction. Again, good enough. :)

Nano 2015 Day 7

3875 words so far.

I missed the first five days by being on a work trip, and didn't get started until yesterday (1405 words). Today was the first official write-in. Tomorrow there's another one, semi-official, for the other half of the region. I'm kind of thinking that I'll probably do almost all of this year's words at the write-ins and on Friday evenings, because I've got a ton of work work to do this month too. Chances are I'm not going to get anywhere near 50k, but the month is still young...

So far it's been going exactly the way I figured it would - mostly a worldbuilding exercise. I have some history for the Celestines who founded the network of civilizations that I'm describing in great detail, and a couple of named characters, but mostly I'll start saying something about the character, and then segue into detailed setting description, and never get back to the character. It's almost like freewriting. I'm just pouring out all my thoughts without putting a whole lot of effort into organizing them.

I haven't done a whole lot with freewriting in the last few years. For a while I was trying to do them once a month, just to get a snapshot of the state of my life at that time. I did one last December, and one again sometime around July I think. I should probably do another one some time soon. Maybe again in December. Might be fun to compare to how things were a year ago.

Worldbuilding for the Celestines is almost like that, except I'm focused on specific topics. But I do have a ton of thoughts about everything, and it's all layered, so it comes out in the same way - lots of tangents until I run out of steam on them, whereupon I scroll back to the beginning to find out what I was originally trying to say before I went off on the tangent. It's all very circuitous and somewhat repetitive, but hey, more words.

Status Check on Writing since Summer | Prepping for Nano 2015

I've not been in a fictional frame of mind for quite a while. Most of what I've been doing for the last several months (since early June) is academic writing for a couple of papers that are all getting submitted to a journal for a special issue, as part of a series. It's been slow going - partly because we're all making it up as we go along (this is new, groundbreaking type stuff), and partly because I haven't done any academic writing to speak of for over a decade and I'm rusty at being all high-falutin' conceptual about everything. There's about 20 of us involved, and another dozen papers besides mine supposedly getting submitted for this, plus a big joint paper that explains the whole project that has already been submitted.

I'm kind of super burnt out on it actually. I need to finish the second draft though, and then finish making all the ancillary packages to put into repositories so I can reference them in the paper, and then send it out for another round of feedback. I really wish that feedback would consist of "looks great, leave it exactly like that!" more often.

Meanwhile, Nanowrimo 2015 is looming on the horizon. 

The only thing remotely fictional on my mind lately is the beginnings of an idea for an advanced spacefaring civilization - and that part is actually an afterthought. The real idea is basically: what kind of civilization would I want to live in, as influenced by my paying too much attention to national political and social current events? And what would it take to build it?

So now I want to write down an answer to that, and it'll be some form of socialist utopia, but it would have to be at least initially funded by unfettered capitalism. Then I'll make up a race of people who are doing that, and it can become a setting for some novels or a roleplaying game.

The people are currently called the Celestines. The name just appeared out of nowhere while I needed to name an organization for my current game on rpol (Numenera: something :p ). I figured, might as well go with that, and if my players actually head in the direction of investigating the plot hook involving them, I'll have backstory to work from.

Aside from running one game, I'm allegedly playing in two others, but they're both dead. One is Dante's latest VtM, and he has disappeared off the face of the earth again, and I'm sure he'll reappear at some point when it's least convenient for me to play, as usual. The other is a sci-fi horror game that Dana is running, except she seems to have lost interest in play-by-post for the moment. Then there's a weekly live game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying which is mostly going pretty well, when enough people can actually show up to it. So overall: roleplaying is at a manageable level, and I'm not horribly overcommitted like I used to be, nor do I plan to add any more games. 

Winding Down Camp Nano for July

1917 words.

There's almost a week left to the month, but I'm not likely to do any more fiction during it. On the bright side, this is the first time I've been in a cabin where no one did zero words. All six of us did at least 500, two have reached goal, and a third is really close to it. Hooray for the cabin as a whole!

All 1917 of my words happened in the first week. I fast forwarded through the sea voyage so that they could get to the inside-facing continent, which is populated by giant sentient telepathic plants. Most of the words established setting info about the plants and what they're up to, and then there was an opening conversation between a plant and Our Heroes.

I have no idea what to do with it next, plotwise or otherwise. The other big thing I kept stalling out on was how to describe the sky at any given point, and what direction the voyagers are going relative to what things in the sky are doing. What I really need to do next is to make a scale model of the planetary system with all the moons in it, so that I can point a flashlight at it in the dark.

Either that or what I really have here is an idea for a video game, and now I should go learn digital art. This seems to happen to most of my space-based sci-fi ideas.

Camp Nanowrimo Again

Well, it's July, and time for the second Camp Nanowrimo this year. I'm not really in a fiction frame of mind at all at the moment, but a couple other people are pretty gung-ho (Alcar and ugottafriend), and so I made yet another cabin and added them to it, plus a couple others out of the regional forum that I'd never seen before but expressed an interest. So far, ugottafriend doesn't have any words yet either, but everyone else does.

My tentative plan before was to try to work on Cosmic Potato. At the very least, I should probably write down all the backstory that has been simmering in the back of my mind since 2013. If I can remember any of it at the moment. I guess I'll start by reading over what I wrote before and see where I can go from there. Really I just need to get a basic plotline hammered out, I think, and it might be slow going while I build setting and create key characters at the same time, as I go along. I believe this is what they call "pantsing."

Winding Down Camp Nano for April

5780 words.

Sort of. It's not the actual number of new words I wrote, because I wrote one scene three times. But it's not the net total of new words either, because I saved a bunch of fodder from previous versions of that scene, plus made a discard pile, but only saved some of it. I guess overall it doesn't matter. I made a lot of progress on the story, and that was all I was really aiming for.

There's a few more days of April left, but I'm not likely to get back to it again until Friday, which will be May 1, so that's going to be my official final score.

The entire thing is now at 18,470. 6964 of those are about them bumbling around in the warehouses, starting with being ambushed in the first one, then getting sidetracked into a second decoy, before finally getting to the door of the correct warehouse. The latter two parts were nearly all written this month, for 3910 words (not counting discards). That's a lot more than I originally envisioned, but it makes sense that it would've been that complicated, and there was a fair bit of character development along the way. So much so, that I'm going to have to go back and make sure everyone is still consistent with themselves from before all that...

Then I finally got to the ritual scene that I'd been waiting to write for years. It's the scene I've written three times now, and probably the next time I look, I'll find more things I'll want to change about it. That's how this story has been going though. One scene at a time, edit it to perfection, before moving on to the next part.

Which, now that I think about it, I don't actually have any plans after this scene ends. This could be a problem if nothing suggests itself by the time I'm done. Hopefully the characters will figure something out by then.

Camp Nano April 2015 - and we're off!

1434 words so far. The goal this month is 15,000, or 500 words per day, which I figure should be doable for something like Vengeance that has to be written slowly. I'm figuring on two scheduled timeblocks per week for writing that include sitting next to other people - Friday evening and Sunday evening. That probably won't be enough to cover quota, and the only other time I can reliably fit a big block of writing would be Wednesday morning. Three times a week of 2-3 hours each, with lots of downtime in between (because this story needs lots of downtime in between). Maybe bits and pieces on Saturdays also. Should work.

So last night (a Friday) I'd intended to rough out the ritual scene with Aaron and Thorme, but instead I got there and hit the ground running on the rest of the warehouse scene. 1434 words in about two hours is a lot faster than I was expecting all that to come out. The excuse to keep them delayed for another three hours is kind of flimsy, but it worked well enough to get things going. Basically I made it extremely difficult to repair the control panel to the hydraulic lift that would let them get back to the surface.

Now I'm kind of stuck at a bit of a plot hole - namely, how could Alice have been backtracked through the underground tunnel after being in the second warehouse, and our heroes didn't pick up on her scent the first time? So I might move her (and the ritual) to a whole different block of warehouses instead. That kind of screws up the entrance I'd intended though - they're supposed to go in from the back, not the front. It also means I have to renumber all of the warehouses again...

Getting ready for Camp Nanowrimo April 2015

In the last couple months, I've compiled everything I've written related to Rumen into a single Scrivener file. Including all the parts from the original roleplaying game (What is it to be Human?). There was a lot, and it wasn't organized very well for copy-paste, but it was a lot of fun to go back and reread all that. In total, I copied about 90k words - nearly all of Rumen's scenes, all of Katrina, and the first night for Aaron. That's an entire novel right there, and of fairly publishable quality as-is. Actually doing anything with the original game is unlikely though, because there's no way I'm going to track down all of the other people who wrote for it, now that it's ten years later. I might go back and copy out all the rest of Aaron's scenes at some point (everything involving Samuel and Mariah, the second scene with Aniqa) but the point of divergence for my story was after the first scene with Aniqa, so it's not a high priority.

Organizing all of my own stuff was quicker overall. For Vengeance, the version that I had in the Jer's file was very well polished already, and I don't even feel like I need the earlier drafts for those anymore. The other two stories (Tragedy of the Hand, End of Rage) were more of a mess, but there wasn't as much of it, so it balanced out.

My plan for April's Camp Nano is to continue from where I left off. So far I've only done some minor tweaks to Vengeance while I was compiling, and managed to write about 300 new words to the Warehouse Ambush scene. They had broken out of the first warehouse when I last looked, and now they've broken into the second warehouse and found that it was a sidetrack. I have to come up with something to keep them occupied for another three hours so that they'll match up with the timepoint of what Aaron is doing. Then I'll finally get to the next "fun" scene: they break into the correct warehouse and find Alice, and watch Aaron's ritual with Thorme in progress.

I'm also assuming that by July's Camp Nano, Rumen is going to have faded back out of my mind again. He only seems to show up in winter for some reason. So my tentative plan for July is to take another stab at Cosmic Potato - my Nano 2013 failure, where I only got about 6k words into it before Battle Pirates distracted me. I have all sorts of fun ideas running through my head for what I could do with it, and I need to get around to writing it down.

Going back to Rumen and Aaron

It's the beginning of February, and I've been ignoring fiction for nearly a month due to work-related writing commitments, that I'm finally done with, and can now get back into things. I don't really feel like working on Fortress Launne. For some reason, this part of the year seems to have become dedicated in my mind to Rumen's story. There have also been a number of recent events in my personal life that have set off a ton of strong emotions of all kinds, and aside from a sudden urge to write angsty poetry, I think a better outlet would be to get back to writing for Rumen.

It's been around 4 years since I even looked at anything related to Rumen. I think for starters, I'm going to assemble all the pieces of everything I've got scattered everywhere into a single Scrivener file - just like I did with Fortress Launne. That would be Tragedy of the Hand, End of Rage (which will become the opposite half of Hand eventually), and Vengeance Returns. A first glance tells me this is going to be kind of a pain - apparently I started lots of files with different names, and then didn't do anything with them, and then forgot I had them. :p

That'll be tonight's main task anyway. I'm sitting at a Panera, like I plan to do every Sunday evening from now until whenever Kristin gets bored and wants to stop. It was the regular Nanowrimo write-in time from last November, and we decided we should just keep going. She says she'll be here every week that she doesn't have to work. She's not here tonight, so I guess she's at work. Oh well, here goes some concatenating...