Meanwhile, now I'm stalled out...

No words of any kind since my last SFR update. :(

Even roleplay has been totally dead. I'm in three games with the same missing guy. I'm in another game that's missing the GM. Then my fifth game is not only missing the GM, it's also missing everyone else I'm in any scene with (including Robert). The top game on my waiting list of things to join? It's run by one of the missing people of the aforementioned fifth game. The next game on that list? Was a game in the works by the missing GM of the fifth game. :p So what am I doing? Twiddling my thumbs.

Also attempting to join what looks like might be a good Hunter: the Reckoning game, which will have a whole bunch of completely different people in it, none of which are any of the people mentioned above. I need my fix, dangit!

As for all other writing... heh, umm... *twitch* I'm going with the "deep rumination!" excuse and sticking to it. :D

Actually I sort of didn't really know where to go with Taint. After the scene I'm working on (they're getting acquainted in a carriage on the way to MC2's house), some time skipping needs to start occurring.

I'm thinking to do an alternating scheme with the timeline. There's a whole bunch of stuff that happened 80 years ago to MC1, when he was practically a whole different person. I can tell that story every other chapter, while telling the present-day story the other half of the time. I'm hoping this will give me enough variety in what I'm writing that it doesn't feel like I'm getting bogged down doing the *same* thing all the time.

At this point I'm not even sure if this is really going to be a single coherent novel. But I'll figure that out later. ;) If nothing else, I can turn it into a series of shorts/novellas in a single volume, that works as a companion to my other novels in the series. (Obviously this would mean it will not be the first one I attempt to sell...).

On the bright side, the 80-years-ago story is outlined in great detail. 6 single-spaced pages worth, in expository form. And it's even already written up from the point of view of MC1. (Because I originally wrote it up as MC1's backstory as a roleplay character.) All I have to do is alter the details to fit my updated setting, and I should be good to go with plenty of material for a good long time to come. (This same plot is going to be Amulet I as well. Except Amulet I is not from the point of view of MC1. MC1 was little more than a pawn in the grand scheme of things...).

As for Temple, that's sort of been rotated out of the way a bit. There's a very emotionally-heavy scene I still need to write, and unfortunately I haven't quite gotten around to summoning up the energy for it. Plus, when I do write it, it will probably have to come out in nearly-finished form. This could pose a problem if details get changed around afterwards, so maybe I should wait on that until after I start doing the heavy-duty second-draft rearranging.

I spent all yesterday reading a very long thread with Jim D. Macdonald talking about what he does to write. I got to about page 17 or so. One of the things they referenced was: http://www.critters.org/turkeycity.html (of which a slightly different version seems to be at http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html ). I read through that list and noticed that in Temple, I make roughly half of the mistakes they list. *head, desk* (but it'll still work! honest! ...) So that kind of deflated all the wind out of my sails all yesterday. Heh. I played Diablo 2 for five hours instead. :p

The main question I left with was: if you're not allowed to do infodumps of any kind, then how DO you tell the reader anything?

Anyhow, that's what I've been up to lately.

SFR end of Day 19

SFFMuse Summer Fun Run: [ 12,553/60,000 | 18 days down | 42 days left ]
Uneditted roleplay: 4932
Writing-heavy roleplay: 1794
Temple: 3886
Taint: 1941

Today was productive too. I finally finished that first Taint scene. :) The total came out to be 2724, including the part I had before June started. There's stuff I can still nitpick about, but I'm pretty pleased with it overall.

Then I got in a few quick roleplay posts, too, and there's two more of them that are going to take longer to do. They might even end up in the "writing-heavy" category if I can convince my brain to reboot for doing those characters. It might not happen until tomorrow, though. At the moment I'm definitely more in the zone for my novels, and so I can play pretty well the characters that are also in my novels, but not the ones that belong to whole separate storylines.

So, all in all, two days in a row where I did over 1k words. :)

Granted this was a weekend... during which I did pretty much nothing else. :p If only I can figure out how to keep that up during the week.

In the meantime, I better go figure out some food. Eating is kind of important too.

SFR Mid-Day 11

SFFMuse Summer Fun Run: [ 5921/60,000 | 10 days down | 50 days left ]
Uneditted roleplay: 1335
Writing-heavy roleplay: 1520
Temple: 2317
Taint: 749

I seem to be at almost exactly half the wordcount that I'm supposed to be at. Not so good. :p

Last night I wrote another 700ish words toward Taint. (It's listed as 749 because I included the portion that I was tinkering with at the time I stopped, even though it's not technically in the actual scene yet.) This first scene is looking like it's going to be in three parts - I. The king sitting there exchanging witty reparte'e with the two people already in the room, II. arrival of MC #1 with two others, and III. arrival of MC #2. So far I'm in the middle of II. Should be fairly straightforward overall - I know what I want to cover, plotwise, so it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it.

The main problem is that I seem to get started really late in my day, and then have to cut myself off by going to bed. Which is already at dawn. :p

The other pattern I've noticed is that my productivity occurs every other day. I'll have a day of lots of words, followed by a day of very little, followed by a day of lots of words... I noticed this during Nano, too.

So far today I've basically been doing a lot of roleplaying. I'm really glad that I get to count roleplay words. It means I can go ahead and enjoy it, not to mention fulfill commitments to playing with other people, without feeling like I ought to be writing "real" words instead. I feel pretty strongly about roleplaying games. If I've signed up for it, I've made a commitment to participate and be a reliable player. Not ditch the game on a whim. Roleplaying is a group activity and you have to be considerate of the enjoyment of the whole group, not just yourself. So it's good that I don't have to feel guilty for doing it while not working on novels.

The mass pingpong session seems to have faded out, though, so now I'm thinking to go get in a nap and then try to finish the rest of the Taint scene from last night. There's one writing-heavy roleplay post that I also need to get started on. (Two of them really. The other one, I'm procrastinating again in the hopes that another player will go first. ;) )

State of my personal endeavors

1. Taint
I wrote the first scene last week. Introduced three minor background characters, and now three more characters are about to arrive - including one of the two MCs. I'm debating whether I should switch POV to the MC, or leave it at the original guy.

2. Temple
I finished off one of the unfinished scenes. Started it back in February and then stalled out. Ran across it while I was looking something up for my Taint scene. As it stands now, the last 5 paragraphs will need some heavy revising later on, but I definitely have some idea of what direction to go next with it. I've pulled out my index cards again, too, to see what I still need to write to finish telling the whole story. There's about 5 major scenes still to be covered.

3. Freewriting
I'm working on another 25k word freewrite. I've decided to drop the bar to 25k. So far there's about 15k in it, and I have two more days to finish it up before May runs out.

It would be done by now except that I've been seriously sucked into Diablo 2 lately. It's kind of analogous to comfort food for my mind. Very long story short, I seem to have lost almost all of my friends at the same time. :( (See #4 for one of them.)

4. Roleplay
At the moment, almost at a standstill. Two active games. I'm a bit blocked for a post to one of them at the moment. The rest are dead because my favorite roleplay buddy has a brand new son. :) So he's kind of not around much for roleplaying right at the moment.

The major downside of this is that I severely lack my primary muse right now, and I can definitely feel his absence.

5. House stuff
I finished assembling the second new bookcase and arranged my electronics on it. This means that my other desk is now cleared off and ready for my new computer, when I have the funds to get it this summer. :)

Next up is to clear off the two tall shelves that are basically filled with mounds of random stuff. Paper sorting and filing is one of the next major steps. At a time like this, I definitely wish I could just fly in ellsea and get her to do it instead. ;)

After the paper storm, I'll finally be able to finish shelving the rest of my books. My textbooks are currently stacked against a corner, and the stack of hardbacks measures about 5 feet tall.

I'm going to need to buy something for my CDs/cassettes too. Guess that's next on the furniture purchases list.

6. Stranger on a Bus
That's gone back to the backburner for more rumination again. I bought a new road atlas last weekend, though, so I can get some idea of what exactly the bus route is going to be, and then try to invent fictional town names that sound like they are consistent with what's in the rest of the state. (Going the route of fictional towns because I don't have a clue what the bus stations look like at most of the real ones...).

7. Summer Fun Run at SFFMuse
I'm beginning to think that this might be just the right kind of kick in the pants I need to get going on Taint and finishing up Temple. 1k words a day should be fairly simple, compared to the average 2300/day that I did for Nano, right?

***

I think that pretty much covers what I've been up to lately. I know I've been quiet. Not really feeling all that sociable. Just been a bit down in the past week or so.

Stranger on a Bus

I figured it out. :)

Okay. So God is this average-looking guy on the bus, and he's trying to "go home" by taking the bus from the east coast to the west coast. Just now I figured out exactly why he's doing this (which helps solve what specifically he's doing). It goes something like this...

God is a computer programmer who created the universe. Unfortunately, he has inadvertently misplaced the root password. So the whole point of the bus ride is that he's trying to finagle it back out of the universe so that he can get back to being root. (This also has the side effect of answering the first question in the song: "If God had a name, what would it be?" ... Answer: "root." :p)

Somewhere near the end of the story, the Pope in Rome is going to call him on the phone and tell him what the root password is. Everything else that happens, leading up to it, is where he's trying to set up reality to cough up that bit of info for him. Meanwhile, the universe itself (aka "Nature") is not exactly willing to just hand it over... It'll be surreal and completely incomprehensible to the outside observer, meaning the MC, who is the bus driver.

Woot. :) This is going to be fun to write. I just have to figure out the details now. By the way, for anyone with strongly religious beliefs of any kind, please do tell me if anything I have planned is going to be offensive (or, well, moreso than the original song). This is supposed to be a comedy, not a blasphemy. ;)

***

In other news, Taint is still languishing in the first scene. I got through the first few paragraphs and don't like most of it, so now I have to rewrite them. This is going to take a while. :p Hopefully only the first scene will take so long to work out, though - once I get started, I don't usually have as much problem. It's just that this first scene has to introduce the reader to the world as a whole and hook them into wanting to keep reading. And it has to do it from scratch. Something out of nothing. Once I have the first scene down, I can build from it and it'll snowball its way along until I get to the end. But getting the initial seed down is hard.

the wheels ... kind of go in fits and starts

Well, it's been almost a week since my last little fit of brainstorming. And since then there's not been a whole lot. I finished up the backstory on my vampire hunter and submitted him, and I've written down some notes for the two novels that I'm working on. The vampire character is still languishing back there somewhere... guess he's not ready to put in a serious appearance yet. Then again, I haven't really been trying all that hard.

I don't really get writer's block so much as a total loss of all motivation to do anything productive with my time. I can come up with enough ideas to keep me occupied, most of the time. I have plenty of things I need to be doing right now, in fact. But instead I sit around all day long playing solitaire. Yesterday I even ventured into Diablo 2 for a few hours. At first I was just there to update my characters on battlenet (they expire if you don't play them for more than 90 days; by the time I checked I had 17 days left on the clock). Then I decided that mindlessly killing things sounded like a very good idea. So I sat there for a couple more hours whacking stuff in Act 4 normal with a 26 necro. Then I chickened out when I got to the Chaos Sanctuary (where the superboss of the level is), and stopped. Necros don't do so good against Diablo by themselves, and I didn't really feel like repeated dying and losing all my gold.

That pretty much fulfilled my Diablo 2 playing urges for another month or so. When I'm the only one playing, it's a really boring, tedious game that sucks out all of my brainpower and I can't see why anyone would want to sit around playing it for hours. (And yet I keep doing it. Hmm.) At the moment everyone else I know is busily playing World of Warcraft, and I doubt they're going to come back anytime soon - if ever. So it's just me now. At least I inherited all the socket mules. I've got an um rune that I'm going to stick into something just because there's no one around to tell me I can't :p. The only reason the mules still exist is because I updated them.

The other major thing I've done lately is: another cruise. :) I guess my boss has finally noticed that I'm good for doing other things besides being holed up in my office crunching numbers. So that's where I was on Thursday and Friday. It was relaxing, and went more smoothly than the last one overall. (Which in turn went a lot more smoothly than the one that I was on last summer.) I even got a bit of brainstorming and note-jotting down for the two novels, though I stalled out when it came time to figure out my vampire.

A few days before the cruise, I had a dream about being on one where the seas were rather rough. I remember thinking that I'd forgotten to take my seasickness pills. And then noted that I wasn't, in fact, actually sick at all. I'm hoping that this dream is trying to tell me something about seasickness, because I wasn't sick at all on this last cruise. I'd taken a bonine beforehand, but didn't feel a darn thing the whole time. Even though I skipped the pill on the second day. And now that I'm back on land, I'm not even landsick. Maybe I've finally developed some sea legs after all these years. :)

Anyhow. The change of pace was really nice. Hopefully I'll get invited on more of these trips from now on.

On the downside ... I'm beginning to think that part of my fits and starts problem has to do with the fact that my work is very left-brained, while writing/roleplaying is right-brained, and I don't shift between the two modes very easily. There will be a couple days where I'm sailing along great with whatever I'm doing at work, and writing is basically shot. Then there's a day where I can't get myself to do do much of anything. Then I'll have a day or two of really great writing, while work seriously drags. If I can just figure out a way to work around it so I can be maximally productive in spurts for both categories ... hmm.

Oh well. On my writing plate at the moment: create the vampire character for the game, at least one fairly complex post for another game, continue to hack out the outline for the Labor Day novel, write the first scene to Taint.

I figured out where to start with Taint. It's going to be a scene where my two MCs first meet, as told from the point of view of a third character who is basically a plot device. As mentioned in a couple past blogs, the idea here is to write one scene per week or so, as if it were a roleplay post. And when I'm done, I'll post it up in my non-game game where a small group of other people can read along if they really want... they probably will want, which is kind of a scary thought all by itself. :p Kind of like baring my soul in public, especially with what I'm planning to write. Even though it's only about 5 people... but it's 5 people whose opinions I care about. However, it feels kind of like the next step up from what I was doing before with the roleplay. A very reachable next step at this point, and one I am ready to take. So... one small step forward for Nerwen ... one giant leap for Kayara? ;)

the wheels they be a'turning

Lots and lots of brainstorming going on lately, working out a large number of different creative projects.

1. For the roleplaying game I just joined, I have to make two characters. One a vampire, and one a vampire hunter. (The idea is to play both sides of the coin.) The setting of this game is fairly unique, so I can't just look at my stock of possible characters I already have and pick one of those. I have to make them from scratch.

I can't make characters from scratch to save my life. :p Any time I have to do that, it takes me a good couple of weeks before I have enough ideas to start writing anything down. For the past two years, I think I've made .. like ... 3 characters entirely from a blank page. Every other character is either based on (heavily plagiarizing) someone I've made before, or it's something slapped together by taking bits and pieces of other backstories and sticking them all in one character to see what happens.

So my vampire character is kind of sitting there on backburner because I have some beginning stirrings of ideas brewing, but not much to write yet. My human, on the other hand ... I started with a viable seed that just grew and blossomed like no tomorrow. ;) I borrowed (shamelessly lifted) an idea from someone else's NPC in another game (NPC's parents were killed by vamps when she was a child). Then I threw in some elements of backstory from one of my own characters (Rumen's last rampage after he went mad from losing his human servant). And voila ... now I have this guy who hates vampires because they killed his entire family when he was 6, and also royally screwed up his life, and now that he's grown up he wants nothing better than to kill them all.

It also meant I got to work in the opposite angle to part of Rumen's backstory, which makes it just that much more meaningful to me personally, even if Rumen's side of it isn't terribly relevant to the game this is for and probably won't ever come up. Basically, since I know exactly why my character's family line was killed, it makes it a lot easier to write what it looked like from his point of view.

I wrote up the first half of the human's story, and it's about 6 large paragraphs already. By the time I'm done it'll probably be around 10-12. Then I submit to the GM, who will tell me what I can do with the stats. I'm allowed to play a Hunter: the Reckoning hunter if I want, but haven't decided whether I will do that or not.

Gotta get back to the vampire at some point soon...

2. Labor Day novel. I scrapped the entire outline that I had going before. The more I got into it, the less I liked it. It was starting to feel like I was trying to force things to go the wrong way, and that the theme wanted to apply itself in a completely different way than what I was thinking. So now I'll be doing something similar to what I had in mind originally, but completely different at the same time. A lot of the scenes I was going to include will still be in there - but the details will be drastically altered. It should all fit a lot better.

In a nutshell ... the original spark for this was the song by Joan Osbourne - "What if God was One of Us?" So my question became, "What if God was a stranger on a bus trying to make his way home?" And the working title of this novel will be: "Stranger on a Bus." Makes sense, huh. ;) (I have a previous blog entry where I ranted at length about the details, if anyone wants to dig for it.)

Well, in the new improved version, the main point-of-view character is going to be the bus driver. Not God. God is going to be this perfectly normal looking guy who's taking the bus from the east coast to the west coast. Except that he keeps doing wild and wacky miraculous things along the way. The bus driver is sort of this wisecracking sarcastic guy who's going to watch all this and think "who the hell is this? Is he some kind of superhero?"

(The bus driver, incidentally, is not a from-scratch character. There are elements of three other (roleplay) characters going into him. :p)

Also, the entirety of the novel is going to take place from the bus trip. No flashbacks to incidents past in other places or anything. So every single scene is going to be something that could conceivably have occurred while on a roadtrip. This might sound like it's a limit, but it's actually the exact opposite. It provides me with some structure to work with so that I can get very creative within the bounds of the structure. That's how I work best. I can't do anything from scratch, or when the sky's the limit, because then I just get frozen with indecision and never start. But put down some boundaries and boom. ;)

This also takes me back to making it a comedic novel. The ideas I had before were threatening to make it a lot more serious than I can possibly do if I'm going to write this in three days.

3. Taint. As I said in my last blog entry, I'm thinking to write this in roleplay format. One scene at a time polished to perfection, one per week (or so). So... I need to start. But where? I need a good opener, and I haven't figured out what would work yet. There are a lot of scenes going into this, all of them personally important to one or both of the MCs, but they're really kind of scattered. There's nothing really tying it all together. The time range is fairly significant as well - about 150 years between the earliest and the latest event.

This is making me want to come up with a single main event that sparks them to have lots of flashbacks. I do have a single main event at the near end of the timeline, and it's even still vague and flexible enough that I could do all kinds of things with it, add personally meaningful elements to make them think about their pasts. But ... the structure feels kind of wrong. Something I can't quite pinpoint that I don't like about it. So I probably won't do that. But I don't know yet what I'll be doing instead.

***

Anyhow, so that's what's on the plate at the moment. Still got a lot of thinking to do, but gotta braindump some of it soon. Should be fun however things turn out. ;)