Well, basically, I'm doing almost no fiction writing.
Roleplay load was exceptionally light in the past six months, after I mothballed my game. It was so light that I reached a point where I missed all my players, so I started it back up again a few weeks ago, right on July 1st. I'm also still technically helping with another game (though in practice I don't have to do much, just a couple posts every two weeks or so), and playing in three others. Grand total: playing 6 characters in 4 games, running one game with 9 active/semi-active players. Everything moves slowly. I'm allegedly trying to join a 5th game, but it might've already died.
Oh, and What is it to be Human? got deleted. Line hasn't been seen on RPoL since last June or so, so he wasn't around to undelete it, and then they purged it from the system entirely, so it's gone for good. :(
Aside from roleplay posts, my fiction writing is nonexistent. I did finish off Chapter 10 on the bus story, but it turned out to only need another 41 words. The lengthy scene I'd been thinking to write turns out to be superfluous, and so I'm going to skip some travel time and start Chapter 11 at the bus stop in Clarkston. So far I haven't figured out all the details of the setup to that yet.
I also figured out that the back part of Vengeance and Tragedy of the Hand are actually opposite sides of the same story. Which, well, should've been obvious, considering that I was using the same setting for both. That makes a lot of things easier overall. At the rate I've not gotten started writing any of it, though, it'll probably end up being my Labor Day 2008 project.
In nonfiction news, I've been writing articles on eHow. It's a website for how-to articles about anything and everything, and they have a program where you can get royalties (sort of). It's an ad-revenue-share scheme. Robert has had a bunch of art articles up there since last fall, and he's getting a lot of money off them, so I know it's legit. He also has a few articles up at HubPages, which doesn't have quite as restrictive a format, but he's not been there long enough yet to see whether it's worth writing for for me. I write extremely slowly, and he's highly prolific, so it works best if I just watch what he does instead of expending tons of effort personally. ;)
As for life in general. I took up yoga in January, quit the takeout job in May, rearranged my work schedule at the main job in June, and try to get offline more nowadays than I used to. I use the apartment complex pool more often than before (which was never), and have gotten to know some of the neighbors - including a rambunctious 5-year-old who is totally fearless when it comes to talking to strangers.
I also have a number of small potted plants - chives, basil, and tomatoes, and I've once again begun thinking about starting up my 20-gallon fishtank. Maybe this summer I'll actually do it...
Showing posts with label bus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bus. Show all posts
2008/07/21
2008/04/14
Things I'm allegedly working on
In no particular order:
1. Edward. Need to move forward with what happens after the ritual. Either that or rewrite the ritual from Charles' point of view.
2. The Emerald Sword story from last September. I'm five chapters into it. It's on the backburner at the moment, with some inspiration going into it from the (currently defunct) Dragon Cave game.
3. Vengeance. I started chapter 3, where Craig is standing in Hernando's main audience chamber, meeting the MOC for the first time. I sort of faltered to a stop when I realized that I don't understand Hernando's motives clearly enough - namely, why don't they just kill Craig off and be done with it? (And perhaps more important, do I actually need to have a motive worked out in advance or not?)
4. Tragedy of the Hand. This is the one I haven't started yet, just have lots of notes drawn up. It's inspired by the Within Temptation song. If my current level of procrastination keeps up, maybe I'll just do it for Labor Day novel next September...
5. Stranger on a Bus. My 2005 Labor Day novel. Ten chapters done, two or three left to do. I've been stalled a bit because I have to come up with some kind of coherent wrap-up ending, instead of just continuing to make stuff up off the top of my head ad infinitum.
6. At this point I haven't the foggiest idea what my 2008 Nanowrimo is going to be about. I might take another stab at Birthright. I tried that last November but then got very focused on Edward, and never really got into Birthright at all.
1. Edward. Need to move forward with what happens after the ritual. Either that or rewrite the ritual from Charles' point of view.
2. The Emerald Sword story from last September. I'm five chapters into it. It's on the backburner at the moment, with some inspiration going into it from the (currently defunct) Dragon Cave game.
3. Vengeance. I started chapter 3, where Craig is standing in Hernando's main audience chamber, meeting the MOC for the first time. I sort of faltered to a stop when I realized that I don't understand Hernando's motives clearly enough - namely, why don't they just kill Craig off and be done with it? (And perhaps more important, do I actually need to have a motive worked out in advance or not?)
4. Tragedy of the Hand. This is the one I haven't started yet, just have lots of notes drawn up. It's inspired by the Within Temptation song. If my current level of procrastination keeps up, maybe I'll just do it for Labor Day novel next September...
5. Stranger on a Bus. My 2005 Labor Day novel. Ten chapters done, two or three left to do. I've been stalled a bit because I have to come up with some kind of coherent wrap-up ending, instead of just continuing to make stuff up off the top of my head ad infinitum.
6. At this point I haven't the foggiest idea what my 2008 Nanowrimo is going to be about. I might take another stab at Birthright. I tried that last November but then got very focused on Edward, and never really got into Birthright at all.
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.
2006/06/27
Comprehensive Update
33 / 90 days to go | 57 / 90 days gone
32,798 / 90,000 words done | 24,202 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 17,658
Hmmm. Time just keeps slipping on by. Nearly two months into SFR, I'm 24k words behind, and I'm not likely to make a comeback anytime soon. Maybe after my friend's visit, which is creeping up on me a lot faster than I'd like. She's going to be here next week! :o
On the bright side, I cleaned most of two bathrooms. :) Both toilets are done now, at least as done as they can get. (Anyone have any clue how to get rid of ring-around-the-toilet?) I cleaned the worst of the three sinks, and I'd cleaned the tub and other two sinks in recent history so they shouldn't be too bad to do again. Now I'm eyeing the kitchen. I'm thinking baby steps there, too. Maybe if I just do one section of counter at a time and hope that I'm on enough of a roll by the end to do the fridge... The hard part is just moving stuff out of the way so I can get underneath things. The stovetop isn't too bad at the moment (I clean that off a lot more often than elsewhere).
Then there's vacuuming everywhere else, tossing a ton of paper-type things (mostly junk mail), hiding the rest in my pantry or something ... maybe some dusting. Also laundry; I need to wash all the comforters, which means lugging them down to a laundromat with a big enough washer and dryer, spending lots of quarters.
My friend isn't going to be here that long, and we're going to be out sightseeing for a lot of it, so hopefully she won't have time to notice anything I miss.
Yeah, okay, so I'm a total slob. At least nobody has to look at it most of the time besides me.
[members-only cut]
After the visit, though, it should be clear sailing through the rest of July. I have so many writing projects going on it's starting to get confusing. So ... a list:
1. Dragonfly. In light of ellsea's excellent critique, I now have a lot more of a clue what I need to do with it.
The whole thing was based on a couple of dreams, which is why it looks like a bunch of weakly connected fragments. But I know what it means to me. It's about my friend (the one that's visiting soon, actually), and how she pulled me out of the abyss I was in when we met. I was sitting around waiting to die, and she showed me life. Then last year (when I had the dream), our paths had already diverged though neither of us were quite ready to admit it yet; she had her own life to lead, her own errands to keep, and she couldn't forever stay. And so I had to let her go, and go on without her. But I didn't die. I guess it's more like an ascension than a death (if anyone here follows Stargate). I guess in some ways, she brought me to the wall but I had to cross it by myself.
I still don't know what the elephants mean, though. That whole thing was kind of nebulous. The way I wrote it, that was the way it happened in the dream. I looked over the wall and knew there were elephants, and there were signs of their habitation, but we didn't actually see any of them.
Hmmm. It's a lot like other animals in my dreams. The kind that lurk. Crocodiles hanging from trees by their tails, for example; that was in a dream several years ago. They were menacing with very sharp teeth, and I was afraid to pass them, even though that was the way I needed to go. Perhaps it's time to look up elephants in ye olde dream dictionary and see what they're supposed to mean...
(ten minutes later)
Elephants: strength, power, long memory; sometimes the ability to forgive and forget.
Domestic animals: a part of your animal nature that has been domesticated or tamed, i.e. integrated into your personality.
Hmmmmm. Think I'm going to need to sleep on that one. There's what that part of the dream means to me personally, and then there's working in the dream dictionary version into Dragonfly (if what it means to me personally turns out to be incompatible).
Either way, I ought to reread this whole book. It's Interpreting Your Dreams by W. Lindsay Jacob, M.D. It's a paperback I picked up decades ago, I have no clue where, but somehow everything it says seems to be spot-on for me. I've looked through other dream-related books before, but didn't like any of them as much as this one.
2. Stranger on a Bus. I started editting Chapter 1, and I basically know what rough spots need revising in it. The hard part is done; that was the first four paragraphs which got completely rewritten into three paragraphs that somehow managed to have more total words. As most people have commented, my first draft is remarkably clean overall, so most of it should just be light editting. I'm hoping once I get back into this, it'll go fairly quickly, and then I can get back to figuring out how to end Chapter 10.
3. Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout. I haven't written anything new for this one recently. Still one more lengthy setup post, and then I want to dump out a whole bunch of accumulated thoughts from the past couple months. Strangely, I didn't have anything noteworthy thoughts last weekend. Maybe my brain is pausing for me to catch up.
4. Fortress Launne. That's kind of a gigantic chunk that's all related. I have lots of ruminations going on all the time, thinking about my characters and plotting their dooms and such. ;) Most of it is just scattered stray thoughts that I don't write down.
4a. Temple. The opening scene needs a lot of work. Something C_Wolfe said in Writing Jam is kicking some gears into motion, though. Maybe if I ditched the first full paragraph entirely, or somehow found somewhere farther down to move it, and put the intro to Chance up top...
4b. Amulet II. I still need to finish the second half of this one. But it'll take a lot of immersion to get back into it, as the plot was a gargantuan tangled mass.
4c. Birthright. The more of these I write, the more clear and straightforward I seem to get. Birthright is going to be so simple compared to the first two. It'll follow a girl as she discovers everything along with the readers. Hopefully I won't need to sneak in infodumps much at all. And when I think about eventual marketing, Birthright would probably be the first one that ought to go out.
4d. Everything Else. I think about the original seed of the whole venture, Aliacorba Thomas Cougar. I listen to I Dare You by Shinedown, over and over, and he's speaking to me through them. "Even in madness I know you still believe. Paint me on canvas so I become what you could never be." And I do still believe. No matter how much doubt keeps sneaking up on me. And I will write him down so he becomes greater than me.
5. What is it to be Human? Rumen hasn't abandoned me. I see glimmers of him in my posts for other characters that are cut from the same archetype.
In his past, Rumen lost his first human servant to a vampire hunter - and for revenge he killed that hunter and the hunter's entire family line. When I made Craig Turner, a Hunter: the Reckoning character, for a different game, I used that plot thread; Craig was the only survivor of that line. I have some ideas baking about having him turn up in the same city and confronting Rumen. It might make for an interesting story of undetermined length.
The game itself is still dead. The GM doesn't seem to think so, but there's only three of us even looking anymore - me, him, and one other who is so swamped with Real Life that she barely has time to run her own game. I loved that game, but I'm thinking it's time to move on.
6. Roleplay. As usual, I'm being way too slow about updating my game. I have lots of scattered ruminative thoughts about that one, too. Mainly involving the mage backstory, which is going to get tangled up with some of what the wolves are currently doing. And some of which I need to pin down before I write the next round of posts. Like with every other writing task lately, though, it's going slowly. My players aren't being too terribly fast either, though, and the vampire side of things seems to have died entirely.
I'm mostly keeping up in my other games. Two of the Dante games are moving along pretty fast, and there's a third where I need to post. (Dante being my favorite GM on rpol; I've mentioned him a number of times in these blogs before. Dante is his GMing name, not his real name.)
32,798 / 90,000 words done | 24,202 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7813
Blogs: 17,658
Hmmm. Time just keeps slipping on by. Nearly two months into SFR, I'm 24k words behind, and I'm not likely to make a comeback anytime soon. Maybe after my friend's visit, which is creeping up on me a lot faster than I'd like. She's going to be here next week! :o
On the bright side, I cleaned most of two bathrooms. :) Both toilets are done now, at least as done as they can get. (Anyone have any clue how to get rid of ring-around-the-toilet?) I cleaned the worst of the three sinks, and I'd cleaned the tub and other two sinks in recent history so they shouldn't be too bad to do again. Now I'm eyeing the kitchen. I'm thinking baby steps there, too. Maybe if I just do one section of counter at a time and hope that I'm on enough of a roll by the end to do the fridge... The hard part is just moving stuff out of the way so I can get underneath things. The stovetop isn't too bad at the moment (I clean that off a lot more often than elsewhere).
Then there's vacuuming everywhere else, tossing a ton of paper-type things (mostly junk mail), hiding the rest in my pantry or something ... maybe some dusting. Also laundry; I need to wash all the comforters, which means lugging them down to a laundromat with a big enough washer and dryer, spending lots of quarters.
My friend isn't going to be here that long, and we're going to be out sightseeing for a lot of it, so hopefully she won't have time to notice anything I miss.
Yeah, okay, so I'm a total slob. At least nobody has to look at it most of the time besides me.
[members-only cut]
After the visit, though, it should be clear sailing through the rest of July. I have so many writing projects going on it's starting to get confusing. So ... a list:
1. Dragonfly. In light of ellsea's excellent critique, I now have a lot more of a clue what I need to do with it.
The whole thing was based on a couple of dreams, which is why it looks like a bunch of weakly connected fragments. But I know what it means to me. It's about my friend (the one that's visiting soon, actually), and how she pulled me out of the abyss I was in when we met. I was sitting around waiting to die, and she showed me life. Then last year (when I had the dream), our paths had already diverged though neither of us were quite ready to admit it yet; she had her own life to lead, her own errands to keep, and she couldn't forever stay. And so I had to let her go, and go on without her. But I didn't die. I guess it's more like an ascension than a death (if anyone here follows Stargate). I guess in some ways, she brought me to the wall but I had to cross it by myself.
I still don't know what the elephants mean, though. That whole thing was kind of nebulous. The way I wrote it, that was the way it happened in the dream. I looked over the wall and knew there were elephants, and there were signs of their habitation, but we didn't actually see any of them.
Hmmm. It's a lot like other animals in my dreams. The kind that lurk. Crocodiles hanging from trees by their tails, for example; that was in a dream several years ago. They were menacing with very sharp teeth, and I was afraid to pass them, even though that was the way I needed to go. Perhaps it's time to look up elephants in ye olde dream dictionary and see what they're supposed to mean...
(ten minutes later)
Elephants: strength, power, long memory; sometimes the ability to forgive and forget.
Domestic animals: a part of your animal nature that has been domesticated or tamed, i.e. integrated into your personality.
Hmmmmm. Think I'm going to need to sleep on that one. There's what that part of the dream means to me personally, and then there's working in the dream dictionary version into Dragonfly (if what it means to me personally turns out to be incompatible).
Either way, I ought to reread this whole book. It's Interpreting Your Dreams by W. Lindsay Jacob, M.D. It's a paperback I picked up decades ago, I have no clue where, but somehow everything it says seems to be spot-on for me. I've looked through other dream-related books before, but didn't like any of them as much as this one.
2. Stranger on a Bus. I started editting Chapter 1, and I basically know what rough spots need revising in it. The hard part is done; that was the first four paragraphs which got completely rewritten into three paragraphs that somehow managed to have more total words. As most people have commented, my first draft is remarkably clean overall, so most of it should just be light editting. I'm hoping once I get back into this, it'll go fairly quickly, and then I can get back to figuring out how to end Chapter 10.
3. Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout. I haven't written anything new for this one recently. Still one more lengthy setup post, and then I want to dump out a whole bunch of accumulated thoughts from the past couple months. Strangely, I didn't have anything noteworthy thoughts last weekend. Maybe my brain is pausing for me to catch up.
4. Fortress Launne. That's kind of a gigantic chunk that's all related. I have lots of ruminations going on all the time, thinking about my characters and plotting their dooms and such. ;) Most of it is just scattered stray thoughts that I don't write down.
4a. Temple. The opening scene needs a lot of work. Something C_Wolfe said in Writing Jam is kicking some gears into motion, though. Maybe if I ditched the first full paragraph entirely, or somehow found somewhere farther down to move it, and put the intro to Chance up top...
4b. Amulet II. I still need to finish the second half of this one. But it'll take a lot of immersion to get back into it, as the plot was a gargantuan tangled mass.
4c. Birthright. The more of these I write, the more clear and straightforward I seem to get. Birthright is going to be so simple compared to the first two. It'll follow a girl as she discovers everything along with the readers. Hopefully I won't need to sneak in infodumps much at all. And when I think about eventual marketing, Birthright would probably be the first one that ought to go out.
4d. Everything Else. I think about the original seed of the whole venture, Aliacorba Thomas Cougar. I listen to I Dare You by Shinedown, over and over, and he's speaking to me through them. "Even in madness I know you still believe. Paint me on canvas so I become what you could never be." And I do still believe. No matter how much doubt keeps sneaking up on me. And I will write him down so he becomes greater than me.
5. What is it to be Human? Rumen hasn't abandoned me. I see glimmers of him in my posts for other characters that are cut from the same archetype.
In his past, Rumen lost his first human servant to a vampire hunter - and for revenge he killed that hunter and the hunter's entire family line. When I made Craig Turner, a Hunter: the Reckoning character, for a different game, I used that plot thread; Craig was the only survivor of that line. I have some ideas baking about having him turn up in the same city and confronting Rumen. It might make for an interesting story of undetermined length.
The game itself is still dead. The GM doesn't seem to think so, but there's only three of us even looking anymore - me, him, and one other who is so swamped with Real Life that she barely has time to run her own game. I loved that game, but I'm thinking it's time to move on.
6. Roleplay. As usual, I'm being way too slow about updating my game. I have lots of scattered ruminative thoughts about that one, too. Mainly involving the mage backstory, which is going to get tangled up with some of what the wolves are currently doing. And some of which I need to pin down before I write the next round of posts. Like with every other writing task lately, though, it's going slowly. My players aren't being too terribly fast either, though, and the vampire side of things seems to have died entirely.
I'm mostly keeping up in my other games. Two of the Dante games are moving along pretty fast, and there's a third where I need to post. (Dante being my favorite GM on rpol; I've mentioned him a number of times in these blogs before. Dante is his GMing name, not his real name.)
2006/06/14
SFR nearly halfway point
46 / 90 days to go | 44 / 90 days gone
25,373 / 90,000 words done | 18,627 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 13,237
My Internet connection at home is a bit kablooey at the moment. Everything is loading at a glacial pace. (So much for their ads proclaiming "6 megs of speed." Hah! I'm looking at speeds more along the lines of 60-600 bytes.) I couldn't get the profile thing at SFFMuse to let me update it there. Here's hoping this will actually post here.
So what's on my writing plate at the moment?
Dragonfly started out at 898 after the first round of tweakage, then went up to 925 briefly, and finally settled in at 916. I'll look at again in another week or two to see if I still like it the way it is now. Then it's off to the submissions with it as soon as July comes around. I'm waiting for July because that way I can submit it to Glimmer Train under two different categories at once. (It's allowed.) Might as well see if they like it enough to buy it, even if it isn't good enough to win the annual competition. Both ways pay relatively well. I won't hear back from them until October, though. Of course, that'll give me a lot of time to look at other literary fiction places to submit if they don't like it there.
Next, Stranger on a Bus is up for some line editting, starting from the beginning. I'm reading over the critiques that Spiff gave it back last September, when I first posted it at SFFMuse. I have a hardcopy of it floating around here somewhere and will probably draw red ink all over it for the first pass, then type it all back in by hand. Hopefully I'll manage to do a chapter per night until I'm done with the first nine chapters. Meanwhile I'll post up what I have of 10 (for backup purposes if nothing else), in case anyone is still following along and wants the latest and greatest. (assuming my Internet cooperates. *sigh*)
Also, Amulet II is up for a reread, outlining, and hopefully finishing. I left off at 55k words back in November. At that point I discovered that the end of my outline was not the end of the story after all, but was somewhere around the middle. So I still have to write the other half. But before I can do that, I need to rewrite the outline. It's a story with two major plotlines and four(ish) minor ones, which means it's fairly complex; at the time I stopped in November, it was getting rather unwieldy. There were lots of holes developing, and I'll need to fill them before I can move forward.
Temple is still on the backburner as well, but at the moment I cringe too much when I look at the opening material. At some point I do need to get back to writing up the second full draft, though.
Then there's Birthright coming up for next Nano. I have lots of backstory material in mind for the main plotline, though none of it is fleshed out enough yet. I need to outline the second plotline as well, since at this point it consists of a one-paragraph blurb. So far it's looking like this will be even more straightforward of a plot than Amulet II was. The main protagonist will be discovering all the info at the same time as the readers. The secondary protagonist, of the other plotline, will be in a similar situation, I think. The scary part is that I have no real idea of how it ends. I know what I'd like to see happen at the end, but have no clue how it's going to get there.
Taint/Amulet I is just going to stay a pile of scattered scenes for now. Maybe I'll write more of them as my secondary project for Nano, the way I did last November when I was stalled out on Amulet II.
As for roleplay, it's deader than a doornail. I have exactly one active player in my game, but he can't move because there's four other people who aren't around much. There are two posts I need to make as a player but haven't worked up the energy for it yet. There's one dead game that's scheduled to be removed from my list next week (I give most games one month to come back to life before I remove them). All the other games are basically dead as well, though there are occasional signs that they might revive.
That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment. Now it's time to hit the "post" button to see if this will actually post...
...
(it wouldn't go until 12 hours after I wrote it. Grrrr.)
25,373 / 90,000 words done | 18,627 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 5110
Blogs: 13,237
My Internet connection at home is a bit kablooey at the moment. Everything is loading at a glacial pace. (So much for their ads proclaiming "6 megs of speed." Hah! I'm looking at speeds more along the lines of 60-600 bytes.) I couldn't get the profile thing at SFFMuse to let me update it there. Here's hoping this will actually post here.
So what's on my writing plate at the moment?
Dragonfly started out at 898 after the first round of tweakage, then went up to 925 briefly, and finally settled in at 916. I'll look at again in another week or two to see if I still like it the way it is now. Then it's off to the submissions with it as soon as July comes around. I'm waiting for July because that way I can submit it to Glimmer Train under two different categories at once. (It's allowed.) Might as well see if they like it enough to buy it, even if it isn't good enough to win the annual competition. Both ways pay relatively well. I won't hear back from them until October, though. Of course, that'll give me a lot of time to look at other literary fiction places to submit if they don't like it there.
Next, Stranger on a Bus is up for some line editting, starting from the beginning. I'm reading over the critiques that Spiff gave it back last September, when I first posted it at SFFMuse. I have a hardcopy of it floating around here somewhere and will probably draw red ink all over it for the first pass, then type it all back in by hand. Hopefully I'll manage to do a chapter per night until I'm done with the first nine chapters. Meanwhile I'll post up what I have of 10 (for backup purposes if nothing else), in case anyone is still following along and wants the latest and greatest. (assuming my Internet cooperates. *sigh*)
Also, Amulet II is up for a reread, outlining, and hopefully finishing. I left off at 55k words back in November. At that point I discovered that the end of my outline was not the end of the story after all, but was somewhere around the middle. So I still have to write the other half. But before I can do that, I need to rewrite the outline. It's a story with two major plotlines and four(ish) minor ones, which means it's fairly complex; at the time I stopped in November, it was getting rather unwieldy. There were lots of holes developing, and I'll need to fill them before I can move forward.
Temple is still on the backburner as well, but at the moment I cringe too much when I look at the opening material. At some point I do need to get back to writing up the second full draft, though.
Then there's Birthright coming up for next Nano. I have lots of backstory material in mind for the main plotline, though none of it is fleshed out enough yet. I need to outline the second plotline as well, since at this point it consists of a one-paragraph blurb. So far it's looking like this will be even more straightforward of a plot than Amulet II was. The main protagonist will be discovering all the info at the same time as the readers. The secondary protagonist, of the other plotline, will be in a similar situation, I think. The scary part is that I have no real idea of how it ends. I know what I'd like to see happen at the end, but have no clue how it's going to get there.
Taint/Amulet I is just going to stay a pile of scattered scenes for now. Maybe I'll write more of them as my secondary project for Nano, the way I did last November when I was stalled out on Amulet II.
As for roleplay, it's deader than a doornail. I have exactly one active player in my game, but he can't move because there's four other people who aren't around much. There are two posts I need to make as a player but haven't worked up the energy for it yet. There's one dead game that's scheduled to be removed from my list next week (I give most games one month to come back to life before I remove them). All the other games are basically dead as well, though there are occasional signs that they might revive.
That pretty much sums up where I am at the moment. Now it's time to hit the "post" button to see if this will actually post...
...
(it wouldn't go until 12 hours after I wrote it. Grrrr.)
2006/06/13
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I spent last night tweaking up Dragonfly (again). I won't inflict it on the rest of you here (again), as this is a place for speculative fiction, not literary fiction, and the piece is still the epitomy of passivity and navel gazing. ;) It says what it needs to say to me, though.
Final wordcount is 917 words. Somewhere I read that if I'm turning my commas into periods in the morning, then turning them back into commas in the afternoon, it means it's ready to go. I'm at that state of tweakage now. I might show it to a few people who appreciate literary fiction if I can find any before July.
It's always odd to me how that works out. I don't like to read what I tend to write. Fortress Launne is best classified as fantasy, and there's very little fantasy that I enjoy reading. I don't particularly care about other people's renditions of classical music but greatly enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm just a narcissist, in love with my own creations to the exclusion of everyone else's. But then again, I also greatly enjoy listening to all sorts of music that I haven't a clue how to create, and the things I enjoy reading are the types of things I wouldn't ever think to write. In the latter case, in recent times anyway, that would be nonfiction science-related articles in things like Discover Magazine, Smithsonian, Science News, etc. I'm a scientist, and I have no inspiration to write any of the articles in the magazines I most enjoy reading. Meanwhile my reaction to most fiction magazines (the types of places I'm likely to attempt to submit stuff in the future) leaves me "ehh" for actually reading.
Anyway, back to Dragonfly. I went and looked up the Emily Dickinson poem that apparently had a much greater influence on the piece than I thought. I'd read it back in high school or somesuch and forgot all but the very first line. In fact, up until I reread it just now, I could've sworn it was an abstract 4-line poem - and not something with 4 stanzas and concrete imagery. And here I thought I didn't much care for Emily Dickinson. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Stranger on a Bus is still stalled out. I've been a bit depressed in the past few days, and this makes it hard to work on things that are high-speed action-adventure. However, I have a friend originally from Russia who gets quite passionate about all things Russian, and I'm planning to inflict him with Chapter 5 (when a band of rogue Russians try to hijack the bus) for his thoughts on cultural accuracy. The names I use for the hijackers are definitely wrong, so hopefully he'll feel inclined to rename everyone involved for me. That should hopefully give me the kick in the pants I need to start line-editting things from the beginning, too, which I need to do before I finish Chapter 10. The last bit of Chapter 10 needs to draw rather heavily from everything that went on in the first nine chapters, and the details are a bit fuzzy since the last time I looked at them back in September.
And finally, yesterday I wrote a blog entry elsewhere about hurricanes. Alberto is hitting Florida right now, on its way up through Savannah GA (where I am) and I felt inclined to wax poetic about my past experiences with hurricanes. After I was done, I noticed that I'd managed to put it into the approximate format for creative nonfiction. I'd spend quite a bit of time looking that up, while pondering the possibilities of a Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout which is kind of tabled at the moment. Apparently stuff sank in that I can use elsewhere, though.
[members-only cut]
I'm putting the full text of the other blog entry here in case anyone is curious. It could use some tweakage but the overall form is right. Thinking about my process while writing it, I kind of wish I'd saved some intermediate stages for my own personal amusement - from the "blurt out a bunch of disjointed thoughts onto the screen" stage to where it is now. I call these things "first drafts" but in retrospect it isn't really, because there's already been a ton of editting gone into it before it sees the light of day. On the other hand, the "blurt it all out" stage could be classified under "prewrite" mode too. Overall, it's not really a process with discrete stages, as everything sort of grades into each other.
Anyway, here it is:
Final wordcount is 917 words. Somewhere I read that if I'm turning my commas into periods in the morning, then turning them back into commas in the afternoon, it means it's ready to go. I'm at that state of tweakage now. I might show it to a few people who appreciate literary fiction if I can find any before July.
It's always odd to me how that works out. I don't like to read what I tend to write. Fortress Launne is best classified as fantasy, and there's very little fantasy that I enjoy reading. I don't particularly care about other people's renditions of classical music but greatly enjoy playing it. Maybe I'm just a narcissist, in love with my own creations to the exclusion of everyone else's. But then again, I also greatly enjoy listening to all sorts of music that I haven't a clue how to create, and the things I enjoy reading are the types of things I wouldn't ever think to write. In the latter case, in recent times anyway, that would be nonfiction science-related articles in things like Discover Magazine, Smithsonian, Science News, etc. I'm a scientist, and I have no inspiration to write any of the articles in the magazines I most enjoy reading. Meanwhile my reaction to most fiction magazines (the types of places I'm likely to attempt to submit stuff in the future) leaves me "ehh" for actually reading.
Anyway, back to Dragonfly. I went and looked up the Emily Dickinson poem that apparently had a much greater influence on the piece than I thought. I'd read it back in high school or somesuch and forgot all but the very first line. In fact, up until I reread it just now, I could've sworn it was an abstract 4-line poem - and not something with 4 stanzas and concrete imagery. And here I thought I didn't much care for Emily Dickinson. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Stranger on a Bus is still stalled out. I've been a bit depressed in the past few days, and this makes it hard to work on things that are high-speed action-adventure. However, I have a friend originally from Russia who gets quite passionate about all things Russian, and I'm planning to inflict him with Chapter 5 (when a band of rogue Russians try to hijack the bus) for his thoughts on cultural accuracy. The names I use for the hijackers are definitely wrong, so hopefully he'll feel inclined to rename everyone involved for me. That should hopefully give me the kick in the pants I need to start line-editting things from the beginning, too, which I need to do before I finish Chapter 10. The last bit of Chapter 10 needs to draw rather heavily from everything that went on in the first nine chapters, and the details are a bit fuzzy since the last time I looked at them back in September.
And finally, yesterday I wrote a blog entry elsewhere about hurricanes. Alberto is hitting Florida right now, on its way up through Savannah GA (where I am) and I felt inclined to wax poetic about my past experiences with hurricanes. After I was done, I noticed that I'd managed to put it into the approximate format for creative nonfiction. I'd spend quite a bit of time looking that up, while pondering the possibilities of a Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout which is kind of tabled at the moment. Apparently stuff sank in that I can use elsewhere, though.
[members-only cut]
I'm putting the full text of the other blog entry here in case anyone is curious. It could use some tweakage but the overall form is right. Thinking about my process while writing it, I kind of wish I'd saved some intermediate stages for my own personal amusement - from the "blurt out a bunch of disjointed thoughts onto the screen" stage to where it is now. I call these things "first drafts" but in retrospect it isn't really, because there's already been a ton of editting gone into it before it sees the light of day. On the other hand, the "blurt it all out" stage could be classified under "prewrite" mode too. Overall, it's not really a process with discrete stages, as everything sort of grades into each other.
Anyway, here it is:
Later tonight, Alberto will hit Florida. First tropical storm of the 2006 hurricane season. Possibly a weak category 1 by the time it makes landfall. Nobody is out trying to catch the big waves this time. They're being sensible and stocking up on supplies, or evacuating. The pall of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma last year, and the quadruple-whammy on Florida in 2004, still hangs over everyone.
My personal experiences with hurricanes have been remarkably uneventful by comparison. I was in Wilmington, NC during the time period when every single Atlantic hurricane seemed intent on making landfall in Wilmington, NC; I missed out on Bertha and Fran of 1996, but was there for Bonnie in 1998, and Dennis and Floyd in 1999. (My best friend at the time saw all five of those, plus he was in Charleston for Hugo in 1988. He figured he was cursed.) In all of those cases, I lived on relatively high ground (as high as one can hope for in a place that's totally flat). There was lots of wind and rain, but no thunder or lightning. And the power was out. Which meant hours upon hours of sitting around in the dark with nothing to do. We saw the eye of Bonnie as it passed right over my apartment complex, on such a slow trek that we were in it for an hour. That was about as exciting as things ever got.
Hurricanes are rather boring. It's the aftermath that sucks. That's when all the flooding problems start, with all the overflowing rivers. The full impact of a hurricane tends not to be immediately evident, because it isn't so much the downed street signs and power lines as it is when all that extra water starts coming back downstream to get back to the ocean.
Wilmington is in the part of the southeast coast that juts outward, making it a prime target for hurricanes going by. Savannah, GA is in the part of the coast that indents inward, which makes the odds of something hitting here much less. So far since I've lived here, there have been some near-misses, but nothing to cause much alarm.
The projected path of Alberto has it hitting Savannah from behind by Wednesday morning - going over a bunch of land, so it will hopefully just be severe thunderstorms by the time it gets here.
As for the rest of 2006, the hurricane specialists predict another highly active year, though it will be extremely difficult to top last year, which broke an enormous number of records.
Guess we'll see what happens.
2006/06/06
Bus story moving forward at a good clip
54 / 90 days to go | 36 / 90 days gone
21,673 / 90,000 words done | 14,327 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,970
My brain is starting to settle back into the rhythm of actual writing again. It feels good. The bus story is probably the easiest for me to get into, in terms of its lack of high-falutin' language, and the fact that I pretty much know what I want to do. Once Ned got away from the news reporter, things started moving forward quite fast.
He has now stolen the armoured car that Alan is imprisoned in, and they're going down the highway trying to evade the cops. I just finished some complex passing maneuvers, and the next thing will be a long stretch of deserted road. I'm planning to hit him with miniature versions of everything he ran into in the past nine chapters, as an increasingly desperate attempt by Nature to stop them from getting to the bus station.
Once they get past all that, I probably should end the chapter and start a new one. Chapter 10 is already going to be five times longer than the previous nine chapters.
So that would mean Chapter 11 is the scene in the bus station where Alan gets the phone call he needs. Not sure how long this will be yet. Depends on whether there will be any complications resulting from the car chase. It could be as short as Chapter 6, which was only around 1k words.
Then Chapter 12 will wrap it all up.
Hmm. Every time I say that while I'm running a game scene, it means that plot complexities will mushroom things out into the stratosphere and it'll take ten times longer for anything to even start looking like a conclusion... if that happens with this story, I might end up with a novel after all. ;)
At the moment, the total on Bus is 22,234 words. Guess we'll see.
21,673 / 90,000 words done | 14,327 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 2181
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,970
My brain is starting to settle back into the rhythm of actual writing again. It feels good. The bus story is probably the easiest for me to get into, in terms of its lack of high-falutin' language, and the fact that I pretty much know what I want to do. Once Ned got away from the news reporter, things started moving forward quite fast.
He has now stolen the armoured car that Alan is imprisoned in, and they're going down the highway trying to evade the cops. I just finished some complex passing maneuvers, and the next thing will be a long stretch of deserted road. I'm planning to hit him with miniature versions of everything he ran into in the past nine chapters, as an increasingly desperate attempt by Nature to stop them from getting to the bus station.
Once they get past all that, I probably should end the chapter and start a new one. Chapter 10 is already going to be five times longer than the previous nine chapters.
So that would mean Chapter 11 is the scene in the bus station where Alan gets the phone call he needs. Not sure how long this will be yet. Depends on whether there will be any complications resulting from the car chase. It could be as short as Chapter 6, which was only around 1k words.
Then Chapter 12 will wrap it all up.
Hmm. Every time I say that while I'm running a game scene, it means that plot complexities will mushroom things out into the stratosphere and it'll take ten times longer for anything to even start looking like a conclusion... if that happens with this story, I might end up with a novel after all. ;)
At the moment, the total on Bus is 22,234 words. Guess we'll see.
2006/06/05
SFR Month 2 Day 5
SFR 2006:
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281
Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.
I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.
I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).
Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.
Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).
I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.
Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...
55 / 90 days to go | 35 / 90 days gone
19,243 / 90,000 words done | 15,757 words behind
Dragonfly: 925
Stranger on a Bus: 440
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 4784
Blogs: 10,281
Well, after that good start to the month, I went back to doing what I was doing before - nothing. :p No writing, anyhow. Lots of reading of other people's blogs, though. I seem to be drawn to stuff that inspires crippling doubt in my writing abilities, or the paltry sums of money I can look forward to if I wanted to try to make a living off of writing... Lots of things about finding agents and submitting work. Also lots of searching around for various markets. Definitely not going to quit my day job anytime soon.
I guess I'm a bit worried at the rising cost of living, and the corresponding lack of rise in my raises at work. I can't ask for pay raises; it's a soft-money institution, and I'm glad to be employed at all. Lower pay over a longer period of employment is better in the long run for me than higher pay followed by being out of a job when the grant funds run out. I took on the job at the Chinese takeout partly to help compensate, though there has been a lot of rewarding aspects to that gig other than financial. However, in a year or two I'm probably not going to be able to afford to work where I'm working now. Something will have to give. Either I cut expenses (mainly by moving somewhere cheaper and/or going back to having housemates), or I increase income (most likely route would be to get a full-time day job that pays more). In light of that, working harder on writing sellable stuff sounds like the least productive way to go about it, with the slowest return, but it's what I most want to do.
I've tweaked Dragonfly a bit more, expanding one of the middle paragraphs and trying to come up with a good way to expand one of the opening paragraphs to match the closing paragraphs. However, it seems to be true what James Macdonald says about short stories - it's like a pie. It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, there's not much you can do except make a new pie. And in the case of Dragonfly, where one of the themes seems to be passivity, there's not really much room to introduce any new ideas into it without weakening what's already there. Oh well. If it gets rejected by all the literary places, at least I'll have had some experience with submitting something (and submissions count for 1k words in SFR).
Roleplay has been pretty dead lately. Even at my glacial pace of writing the posts on my list, I'm still keeping up remarkably well. I've got two other posts left on the list but haven't yet worked up the motivation to do them. Everyone else is busy doing things in Real Life - final exams, crosscountry moves, messy relationship breakups, or work overload.
Meanwhile, I got back into the bus story a bit. Wrote another 440 words tonight. Probably spent more time staring at the screen wondering what to do, and deleting things, than writing. Ned the bus driver was stuck in front of a camera crew, and it took me a while to figure out how to get him away from them, and toward the next exciting part of the chapter - a high speed chase scene. He's now talking to the driver of the armoured car with which they will be doing the speeding, whereupon I stalled out again to look up information about truckers. Tomorrow I'll pick up from there and finally get the scene going (I hope).
I've also been spending a lot of time brainstorming possible nonfiction things I can write. Scenes from Inside a Chinese Takeout being a nice little memoir thing, for one. I can also write stuff about scientific field research, which can certainly have an adventurous angle to it - I've done some fun things as a geologist and marine ecologist, and stuff I've written here about my cruises has certainly managed to entertain people.
Guess that's where I am at the moment. Now I need to get some sleep...
2005/09/24
bus story, roleplaying, moves, new computer! :)
I'm psyching myself up for writing the last 3 chapters of the bus story. Tomorrow shall be the official day for it. :)
I might end up combining chapters 10 and 11, or moving events around between 10, 11, and 12. The rockfall chapter (the next one), it occurred to me last night that it would make sense if I took the standard formula for most of the previous chapters, only twist it around to be completely backwards. ;) That is, Alan will save the day - but he will be doing it right at the very beginning of the chapter, and then he will get into a heap of trouble for doing it. The goal of the whole journey will be in jeopardy and he might have to start over completely from scratch if Nature wins. It will then be up to Ned (the bus driver) to rescue him, save all their efforts, and keep things moving along to the goal.
The chapter after that will then be the phone call from the Pope, which is the whole payoff for the entire story (for Alan). After that point, I really don't see why Alan would hang around, so this might actually make more sense to occur in Eugene. (In which case, the rockfall chapter will also be the Clarkston, Idaho chapter.)
I've got an awesome set of pics of the area around the Greyhound station in Eugene, courtesy of a friend over at SFFMuse who lives in Oregon and went there with his digital camera. 479 shots plus an annotated map with comments. I spent all last night engrossed in pics of parking lots. :) Not sure whether I'll manage to work in all of the details I now have, but it was neat to see a step-by-step street tour of the area. Thanks Spiff! :D
Other random thoughts ... Alan's mysterious book will probably get left with Ned. What will it actually say to him? My best thought at the moment is that it will be an account of the bus trip from Alan's point of view, so that Ned knows what really happened. (Even though the readers never will. ;) ) (The way more obvious choice was to have the book be equivalent to a 'bible' - but ... I don't really wanna go there. :p And it wouldn't be very fitting anyhow.)
And somewhere in there I need more character development for Ned, too. Stuff about his own family that he's about to visit in Eugene, that sort of thing. He's really not that complex ... he's a bus driver who enjoys driving. A bit on the dense side when it comes to not recognizing what Alan is (but that might be on purpose on his part too).
Roleplaying is still pretty dead. My favorite roleplay buddy has been missing for two weeks now. :( My own game has kind of come to a halt because we're waiting on him for two out of three threads. If he doesn't post by the end of the weekend, I'll resort to calling him. I do have his number, because we traded numbers to arrange that dinner meeting in Macon. I just don't really want to bother him if he's got major Real Life issues...
In other news ... I'm moving into my new office on Monday. My boss has been moving into his all last week, while they were renovating the space I'm going into. There's a bit of work I need to get done over the weekend before the move, and I'll probably wander over there later today.
Much more importantly, I have my new computer! :) It's a G5 iMac with a 20 inch screen. All the components for my new setup arrived last week, and I got it all set up yesterday. I now have a wireless network, wireless keyboard and mouse, and way more disk space than I know what to do with (the old comp has 5 gigs total space, with less than 200 megs left available). And the ability to burn things to CDs and DVDs! (The old comp has a CD-ROM.) And an iPod Nano! Finally I can get sucked into the whole downloading craze for music and videos. :) And I have expensive APC UPS's so now I never have to worry about power surges again.
Next month's credit card bill is going to be horrendous. Oh well. ;)
And then two or three months down the road when I'm back in the black again, I'll get the printer/copier/scanner that I've got my eye on. Then it'll be off to looking at digital cameras. :)
Life is looking pretty good overall. Anyway, I better get going and get stuff done.
I might end up combining chapters 10 and 11, or moving events around between 10, 11, and 12. The rockfall chapter (the next one), it occurred to me last night that it would make sense if I took the standard formula for most of the previous chapters, only twist it around to be completely backwards. ;) That is, Alan will save the day - but he will be doing it right at the very beginning of the chapter, and then he will get into a heap of trouble for doing it. The goal of the whole journey will be in jeopardy and he might have to start over completely from scratch if Nature wins. It will then be up to Ned (the bus driver) to rescue him, save all their efforts, and keep things moving along to the goal.
The chapter after that will then be the phone call from the Pope, which is the whole payoff for the entire story (for Alan). After that point, I really don't see why Alan would hang around, so this might actually make more sense to occur in Eugene. (In which case, the rockfall chapter will also be the Clarkston, Idaho chapter.)
I've got an awesome set of pics of the area around the Greyhound station in Eugene, courtesy of a friend over at SFFMuse who lives in Oregon and went there with his digital camera. 479 shots plus an annotated map with comments. I spent all last night engrossed in pics of parking lots. :) Not sure whether I'll manage to work in all of the details I now have, but it was neat to see a step-by-step street tour of the area. Thanks Spiff! :D
Other random thoughts ... Alan's mysterious book will probably get left with Ned. What will it actually say to him? My best thought at the moment is that it will be an account of the bus trip from Alan's point of view, so that Ned knows what really happened. (Even though the readers never will. ;) ) (The way more obvious choice was to have the book be equivalent to a 'bible' - but ... I don't really wanna go there. :p And it wouldn't be very fitting anyhow.)
And somewhere in there I need more character development for Ned, too. Stuff about his own family that he's about to visit in Eugene, that sort of thing. He's really not that complex ... he's a bus driver who enjoys driving. A bit on the dense side when it comes to not recognizing what Alan is (but that might be on purpose on his part too).
Roleplaying is still pretty dead. My favorite roleplay buddy has been missing for two weeks now. :( My own game has kind of come to a halt because we're waiting on him for two out of three threads. If he doesn't post by the end of the weekend, I'll resort to calling him. I do have his number, because we traded numbers to arrange that dinner meeting in Macon. I just don't really want to bother him if he's got major Real Life issues...
In other news ... I'm moving into my new office on Monday. My boss has been moving into his all last week, while they were renovating the space I'm going into. There's a bit of work I need to get done over the weekend before the move, and I'll probably wander over there later today.
Much more importantly, I have my new computer! :) It's a G5 iMac with a 20 inch screen. All the components for my new setup arrived last week, and I got it all set up yesterday. I now have a wireless network, wireless keyboard and mouse, and way more disk space than I know what to do with (the old comp has 5 gigs total space, with less than 200 megs left available). And the ability to burn things to CDs and DVDs! (The old comp has a CD-ROM.) And an iPod Nano! Finally I can get sucked into the whole downloading craze for music and videos. :) And I have expensive APC UPS's so now I never have to worry about power surges again.
Next month's credit card bill is going to be horrendous. Oh well. ;)
And then two or three months down the road when I'm back in the black again, I'll get the printer/copier/scanner that I've got my eye on. Then it'll be off to looking at digital cameras. :)
Life is looking pretty good overall. Anyway, I better get going and get stuff done.
2005/09/11
Labor Day Novel: The fun continues!
If anyone is signed up at SFFMuse, I now have the first 9 chapters of Stranger on a Bus in its own separate novel forum. Drop by, read, enjoy. :) (Try to forget everything I've ever said about the plot in these blogs...).
I'm also signed up to analog's Short Story challenge (details in Robert's last blog entry). Not so I can write tons of short stories - I don't think that's the right thing for me to be doing right now. However, I do tend to write better when there's other people writing with me. So, that's the plan. Write something when other people are writing. It worked out pretty well over Labor Day when it was me and Robert working on our novels. Others will work on their short stories, while I work on various projects I've got ongoing.
The first one, of course, is to finish up Stranger on a Bus. ;) Three more chapters to go. It's my plan for tomorrow. If I write at the same speed as last weekend, this should be no problem.
After that ... I've been ignoring Taint since last June. July hit me pretty hard, first with the science paper that ultimately got rejected, and then with the two back-to-back work cruises. By the time July ended, I was also getting my Dark Ages game started up.
The Dark Ages game focused me in ways that I really needed for a very long time. I stopped GMing my last game over a year ago - in August of 2004. Since then I kept thinking I ought to start something, but never had time. I still didn't have time when I started the Dark Ages game, but it kind of fell in my lap when I signed up to help GM a different game. That game fell apart when the primary GM vanished without a trace, leaving several of us co-GMs with viable games on our hands. We launched them separately, and now there's 3 of them running (including mine) that originally started there.
It's been very helpful for writing - looking at how to make open plots that are tailored to the characters, without knowing who the characters are going to be. Working up setting on the fly. All the sorts of things that go into organic writing, which I just don't do all that well when I'm actually writing. My GMing approach is very organic, however. It's kind of odd that it works out that way. If I can GM a game organically, and I can play characters well in other games, why can't I do both at the same time and write novels?
The other thing is, I'm rampantly borrowing setting elements and plot premises out of my Fortress Launne series for the game. This is helping me work out a bunch of things for one of the novels that I'm going to attempt to write in November for Nanowrimo. Amulet I has the same key characters as the Dark Ages game (though not other ones that I've also tossed into the mix who are technically from other parts of the timeline...).
Then there's Amulet II which is the other novel I'm considering writing in November. It has nothing to do with Amulet I other than the fact that it's the same amulet as the point of contention. Completely different parts of the timeline, different casts, etc.
Mmm. Where was I? I went off on a tangent again.
Anyway, so I'd been ignoring Taint since June. Now there's this short story challenge going on. I'm figuring to see if I can get some more work done on this novel - write five key chapters in the next six weeks. (The first week being reserved for the bus novel).
Taint is very different, structure-wise, from the other novels in the Fortress Launne series. It's the only one that doesn't have a huge complex plot. Instead, it's about the lives of two characters, so it has to be exceptionally character-driven. At the moment I'm not sure if it should be an actual novel, or a collection of short stories. If it turns out to be more of a short story collection, though, this challenge would be a good way to go about writing some of them. ;)
Mmmmm. It feels like I originally wanted to say more about that, but I think that covers it.
*wanders off in an absentminded daze*
I'm also signed up to analog's Short Story challenge (details in Robert's last blog entry). Not so I can write tons of short stories - I don't think that's the right thing for me to be doing right now. However, I do tend to write better when there's other people writing with me. So, that's the plan. Write something when other people are writing. It worked out pretty well over Labor Day when it was me and Robert working on our novels. Others will work on their short stories, while I work on various projects I've got ongoing.
The first one, of course, is to finish up Stranger on a Bus. ;) Three more chapters to go. It's my plan for tomorrow. If I write at the same speed as last weekend, this should be no problem.
After that ... I've been ignoring Taint since last June. July hit me pretty hard, first with the science paper that ultimately got rejected, and then with the two back-to-back work cruises. By the time July ended, I was also getting my Dark Ages game started up.
The Dark Ages game focused me in ways that I really needed for a very long time. I stopped GMing my last game over a year ago - in August of 2004. Since then I kept thinking I ought to start something, but never had time. I still didn't have time when I started the Dark Ages game, but it kind of fell in my lap when I signed up to help GM a different game. That game fell apart when the primary GM vanished without a trace, leaving several of us co-GMs with viable games on our hands. We launched them separately, and now there's 3 of them running (including mine) that originally started there.
It's been very helpful for writing - looking at how to make open plots that are tailored to the characters, without knowing who the characters are going to be. Working up setting on the fly. All the sorts of things that go into organic writing, which I just don't do all that well when I'm actually writing. My GMing approach is very organic, however. It's kind of odd that it works out that way. If I can GM a game organically, and I can play characters well in other games, why can't I do both at the same time and write novels?
The other thing is, I'm rampantly borrowing setting elements and plot premises out of my Fortress Launne series for the game. This is helping me work out a bunch of things for one of the novels that I'm going to attempt to write in November for Nanowrimo. Amulet I has the same key characters as the Dark Ages game (though not other ones that I've also tossed into the mix who are technically from other parts of the timeline...).
Then there's Amulet II which is the other novel I'm considering writing in November. It has nothing to do with Amulet I other than the fact that it's the same amulet as the point of contention. Completely different parts of the timeline, different casts, etc.
Mmm. Where was I? I went off on a tangent again.
Anyway, so I'd been ignoring Taint since June. Now there's this short story challenge going on. I'm figuring to see if I can get some more work done on this novel - write five key chapters in the next six weeks. (The first week being reserved for the bus novel).
Taint is very different, structure-wise, from the other novels in the Fortress Launne series. It's the only one that doesn't have a huge complex plot. Instead, it's about the lives of two characters, so it has to be exceptionally character-driven. At the moment I'm not sure if it should be an actual novel, or a collection of short stories. If it turns out to be more of a short story collection, though, this challenge would be a good way to go about writing some of them. ;)
Mmmmm. It feels like I originally wanted to say more about that, but I think that covers it.
*wanders off in an absentminded daze*
2005/09/05
Labor Day Novel: End
17,942 total words.
The first 9 chapters came out to be 17,638 words. Then I wrote four extremely bad paragraphs to try and launch into chapter 10, but they were not only extremely bad, they also didn't lead anywhere. I'm out of steam, I think. Might as well stop until I can do something only semi-bad instead, and with content that actually makes sense. ;)
So ... to catch up from my last blog, I ended up combining chapters 8 and 9 (now chapter 8), and it was told as an on-the-road scene. Then chapter 10 became chapter 9, and it was told at a diner in Driftwood (instead of being an on-the-road scene). The lost hiker chapter is one of the least action-packed chapters; the only other one with no action was chapter 6, which was basically an infodump chapter. (But it was a good infodump - by the time I spelled it all out, hopefully the readers would've actually wanted to know all that).
That leaves 3 more chapters to go before the story is done.
Chapter 10: The rock fall scene. It's Friday morning (story started on a Tuesday night), and the bus is now driving its way through the Bitterroot Mountains. Nature is going to take God by surprise by trying to smash the bus with a giant boulder. Alan has no choice but to catch it in mid-air, without any prep time to make it look natural to casual observers. The aftermath of the event is probably going to be long and drawn out.
Chapter 11: A diner in Clarkston, Idaho in late afternoon. The Pope calls. This is where the root password is finally given out. This is the chapter where everything in the preceding chapters has to get tied together. I wrote up a lot of weird stuff at random, whatever came to mind at the time of writing. Before I can write this phone conversation, I have to reread everything I wrote before and see if I can make them related to each other in some cool way.
Chapter 12: Eugene, Oregon. God tells all (to Ned) and goes back to Heaven. ;) Most of the relevant bits from the actual song will play out in this chapter. The lyrics like "If you had one question what would you ask" etc.
So... when am I going to write this? I'm debating whether to do a chapter per night until it's finished, or if I should wait until next weekend and do them all at once. All at once might work out better, just to get myself completely immersed again. Also gives me more time to recharge from this weekend, mull over what I've written already, and reread the first 9 chapters before plunging in again. Plus the work week tends to be full of daily life distractions.
Robert is reading it now. He seems to be liking it. ;) If anyone else wants to see it, it's up at my dead rpol game (in a non-public thread). Send me a PM and I'll give out details for how to access it.
The first 9 chapters came out to be 17,638 words. Then I wrote four extremely bad paragraphs to try and launch into chapter 10, but they were not only extremely bad, they also didn't lead anywhere. I'm out of steam, I think. Might as well stop until I can do something only semi-bad instead, and with content that actually makes sense. ;)
So ... to catch up from my last blog, I ended up combining chapters 8 and 9 (now chapter 8), and it was told as an on-the-road scene. Then chapter 10 became chapter 9, and it was told at a diner in Driftwood (instead of being an on-the-road scene). The lost hiker chapter is one of the least action-packed chapters; the only other one with no action was chapter 6, which was basically an infodump chapter. (But it was a good infodump - by the time I spelled it all out, hopefully the readers would've actually wanted to know all that).
That leaves 3 more chapters to go before the story is done.
Chapter 10: The rock fall scene. It's Friday morning (story started on a Tuesday night), and the bus is now driving its way through the Bitterroot Mountains. Nature is going to take God by surprise by trying to smash the bus with a giant boulder. Alan has no choice but to catch it in mid-air, without any prep time to make it look natural to casual observers. The aftermath of the event is probably going to be long and drawn out.
Chapter 11: A diner in Clarkston, Idaho in late afternoon. The Pope calls. This is where the root password is finally given out. This is the chapter where everything in the preceding chapters has to get tied together. I wrote up a lot of weird stuff at random, whatever came to mind at the time of writing. Before I can write this phone conversation, I have to reread everything I wrote before and see if I can make them related to each other in some cool way.
Chapter 12: Eugene, Oregon. God tells all (to Ned) and goes back to Heaven. ;) Most of the relevant bits from the actual song will play out in this chapter. The lyrics like "If you had one question what would you ask" etc.
So... when am I going to write this? I'm debating whether to do a chapter per night until it's finished, or if I should wait until next weekend and do them all at once. All at once might work out better, just to get myself completely immersed again. Also gives me more time to recharge from this weekend, mull over what I've written already, and reread the first 9 chapters before plunging in again. Plus the work week tends to be full of daily life distractions.
Robert is reading it now. He seems to be liking it. ;) If anyone else wants to see it, it's up at my dead rpol game (in a non-public thread). Send me a PM and I'll give out details for how to access it.
Labor Day Novel: since I'm still awake and thinking about it ...
"If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." -- Somerset Maugham
I'm liking that quote right now. My writing is abyssal, but boy am I having fun devising incidents...
At least, that's what happened in Chapter 7. A cow jumped over a green cheese moon, some cactus tried to eat the bus driver, and he also fought off a stampede of jackalopes and a swarm of woozles while defending an 80-foot brontosaurus. Which actually isn't purple, by the way - I remembered wrong. The dinosaur is green in real life. The main goal of the chapter was a weasel hunt. They were hunting for a mauve weasel in Wall. Get it? The weasel and Wall? Har har har ... it's a Nano in-joke, sorry I'm easily amused right now.
I'm at 14,143 words now. Haven't started chapter 8 yet. Haven't figured out what it's even going to be yet, though I am leaning toward a scene where they're safely sitting in a bus stop, discussing the aftermath of everything that happened at Wall Drug. I sort of left a lot of things hanging at the end of chapter 7.
Over on SFFMuse, Alcar suggested that I have a scene where the bus breaks down. Not just run out of gas, but die completely. And so does everything else electronic on the bus - radio, cell phones, etc. For no apparent reason. This is a slightly more intriguing idea than what I originally had in mind (as my chapter 6 of the previous posted outline), which was just for the bus to run out of gas somewhere.
I thought about that one and it would actually work out well as the followup crisis to the Wall Drug adventures. Maybe Chapter 8 can be another short scene (chapter 6 was too). Then Chapter 9 can be the bus breakdown chapter. Then I can resume my original outline as planned.
So here's the revised outline:
Chapter 6 - sitting in Choctaw, IA, followed by a conversation during the next leg of the bus trip wherein nothing bad happens to them. Alan (God) finally gets around to telling Ned (bus driver) exactly what he's up to and why, but he's thinly metaphorical about it, and it goes over Ned's head. Ned still doesn't have a clue. Any readers should be able to pick up on it pretty easily, though. ;) This chapter was relatively short compared to my other ones. Most of them have been running around 1800-2000 words or so, while this one was more like 1200ish, I think.
Chapter 7 - Wall Drug. See highlights listed above. This chapter ran longer than average, which made up for the shortfall of Chapter 6 and also the slight shortfalls of all the other chapters (if 2k was the goal).
Chapter 8 - sitting in a bus station talking about Wall Drug. Probably Driftwood, Montana. At the end of Chapter 7, I had Ned wake up in the cafeteria with no clue how he got there or where Alan is, and he was about to be late for bus departure. The last thing he did was run toward the bus station. So I need to wrap up a few loose ends from Chapter 7, and it would best be done if they're sitting somewhere safe so they can talk. This'll probably be fairly short as well.
Chapter 9 - the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason, and so does everyone's cell phones and radioes. How exactly to get out of that one? I haven't a clue right at the moment. God will think of something I'm sure. ;)
Chapter 10 - a lost hiker in the mountains of Montana. The bus hears about it over the radio. God hears about it because the hiker is praying. God saves the hiker. I'm not sure what the point of this scene is anymore. It probably should've been earlier, but I wanted it to be somewhere with mountains, and there aren't any elsewhere. I'll have to see if I can come up with something useful to reveal about any of the characters. Maybe focus more on Ned again. He hasn't had much backstory development since the first two chapters.
Chapter 11 - on the road between Montana and Idaho. Nature makes a last-ditched effort to stop God. By trying to smash the bus with a giant falling boulder. God really shows his true colors here, because Alan catches it with telekinesis.
Chapter 12 - a diner in Clarkston, Idaho. Alan receives a phone call. It's the Pope. He's trying to reach God to confess a sin. Alan uses all the scattered bits of knowledge he's acquired during the rest of the book to come up with a task for the Pope to do to absolve himself. The pope also inadvertently tells Alan the root password during this conversation, which was Alan's quest in the novel.
Does anyone have any good ideas for what kinds of sins a Pope might commit?
Chapter 13 - Eugene, Oregon. Another real city. I'm using it because of the name. This is where Alan finally tells Ned everything that happened, and then he gets to ascend in a puff of white light. The end. ;)
So... if I wanted to actually finish this off tomorrow, I have 6 chapters to write. Will I make it? Guess we'll see. Right now it's 4am though and I need to get some sleep.
I'm liking that quote right now. My writing is abyssal, but boy am I having fun devising incidents...
At least, that's what happened in Chapter 7. A cow jumped over a green cheese moon, some cactus tried to eat the bus driver, and he also fought off a stampede of jackalopes and a swarm of woozles while defending an 80-foot brontosaurus. Which actually isn't purple, by the way - I remembered wrong. The dinosaur is green in real life. The main goal of the chapter was a weasel hunt. They were hunting for a mauve weasel in Wall. Get it? The weasel and Wall? Har har har ... it's a Nano in-joke, sorry I'm easily amused right now.
I'm at 14,143 words now. Haven't started chapter 8 yet. Haven't figured out what it's even going to be yet, though I am leaning toward a scene where they're safely sitting in a bus stop, discussing the aftermath of everything that happened at Wall Drug. I sort of left a lot of things hanging at the end of chapter 7.
Over on SFFMuse, Alcar suggested that I have a scene where the bus breaks down. Not just run out of gas, but die completely. And so does everything else electronic on the bus - radio, cell phones, etc. For no apparent reason. This is a slightly more intriguing idea than what I originally had in mind (as my chapter 6 of the previous posted outline), which was just for the bus to run out of gas somewhere.
I thought about that one and it would actually work out well as the followup crisis to the Wall Drug adventures. Maybe Chapter 8 can be another short scene (chapter 6 was too). Then Chapter 9 can be the bus breakdown chapter. Then I can resume my original outline as planned.
So here's the revised outline:
Chapter 6 - sitting in Choctaw, IA, followed by a conversation during the next leg of the bus trip wherein nothing bad happens to them. Alan (God) finally gets around to telling Ned (bus driver) exactly what he's up to and why, but he's thinly metaphorical about it, and it goes over Ned's head. Ned still doesn't have a clue. Any readers should be able to pick up on it pretty easily, though. ;) This chapter was relatively short compared to my other ones. Most of them have been running around 1800-2000 words or so, while this one was more like 1200ish, I think.
Chapter 7 - Wall Drug. See highlights listed above. This chapter ran longer than average, which made up for the shortfall of Chapter 6 and also the slight shortfalls of all the other chapters (if 2k was the goal).
Chapter 8 - sitting in a bus station talking about Wall Drug. Probably Driftwood, Montana. At the end of Chapter 7, I had Ned wake up in the cafeteria with no clue how he got there or where Alan is, and he was about to be late for bus departure. The last thing he did was run toward the bus station. So I need to wrap up a few loose ends from Chapter 7, and it would best be done if they're sitting somewhere safe so they can talk. This'll probably be fairly short as well.
Chapter 9 - the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason, and so does everyone's cell phones and radioes. How exactly to get out of that one? I haven't a clue right at the moment. God will think of something I'm sure. ;)
Chapter 10 - a lost hiker in the mountains of Montana. The bus hears about it over the radio. God hears about it because the hiker is praying. God saves the hiker. I'm not sure what the point of this scene is anymore. It probably should've been earlier, but I wanted it to be somewhere with mountains, and there aren't any elsewhere. I'll have to see if I can come up with something useful to reveal about any of the characters. Maybe focus more on Ned again. He hasn't had much backstory development since the first two chapters.
Chapter 11 - on the road between Montana and Idaho. Nature makes a last-ditched effort to stop God. By trying to smash the bus with a giant falling boulder. God really shows his true colors here, because Alan catches it with telekinesis.
Chapter 12 - a diner in Clarkston, Idaho. Alan receives a phone call. It's the Pope. He's trying to reach God to confess a sin. Alan uses all the scattered bits of knowledge he's acquired during the rest of the book to come up with a task for the Pope to do to absolve himself. The pope also inadvertently tells Alan the root password during this conversation, which was Alan's quest in the novel.
Does anyone have any good ideas for what kinds of sins a Pope might commit?
Chapter 13 - Eugene, Oregon. Another real city. I'm using it because of the name. This is where Alan finally tells Ned everything that happened, and then he gets to ascend in a puff of white light. The end. ;)
So... if I wanted to actually finish this off tomorrow, I have 6 chapters to write. Will I make it? Guess we'll see. Right now it's 4am though and I need to get some sleep.
2005/09/04
Labor Day Novel: End of Day Two
13,083 words. I'm halfway through Chapter 7 and slowing down at an alarming rate. This chapter has definitely been more surreal than the previous ones, and I've let myself stay free to write in whatever I want no matter how silly, and yet ... I think I'm just really sick of this story now. I'm very tempted to just slip off to play Diablo 2 for a few hours instead of working on this thing.
It looks like my best fiction-writing speed is 500 words per hour, too.
On the bright side, I've definitely written way more (fiction) words in such a short timespan than I've ever done before.
One more day to go. Not sure if I'm going to get the whole thing finished tomorrow. There's at least 5 more chapters after this one. Heh. Ironic that I spent all of yesterday wishing I was already at these later chapters, and now that I'm almost there I don't want to do them anymore. *sigh*
Oh well. I'm going to try and at least finish Chapter 7 before quitting for the night.
It looks like my best fiction-writing speed is 500 words per hour, too.
On the bright side, I've definitely written way more (fiction) words in such a short timespan than I've ever done before.
One more day to go. Not sure if I'm going to get the whole thing finished tomorrow. There's at least 5 more chapters after this one. Heh. Ironic that I spent all of yesterday wishing I was already at these later chapters, and now that I'm almost there I don't want to do them anymore. *sigh*
Oh well. I'm going to try and at least finish Chapter 7 before quitting for the night.
Labor Day Novel: Halfway on Time
Well, it's past noon on Sunday. 36 hours are gone and 36 hours are left. I have 8025 words and I've just started Chapter 5. I should be at the fun parts of this novel by the end of the day.
What have I got so far:
Chapter 1 - Paynetown, PA. Alan does an amazing physical feat while saving a little girl from being run over by a train.
Chapter 2 - Somerville, OH. Alan gives his leftover salad to a homeless bum, who then gets a phone call and her life gets turned around very suddenly.
Chapter 3 - Indianapolis, IN. A baby elephant breaks loose of a mall display and runs amuck until Alan creatively stops her using a piece of string, a block of swiss cheese, and 6 mounds of dirt.
I used a real city because I've actually been to the Greyhound station here. It's at Union Station. Granted I've only ever been there once for the station, though numerous times for the mall as a kid, but I decided to use it anyway.
Chapter 4 - en route to Ellington, IL. Freak traffic accident caused by a deer jumping in front of a sedan driven by a little old lady, who then collides with a semi, which jacknifes across the highway. Alan doesn't actually do anything for this one, but he does hand out lunch to everyone at the scene. There's a wisecrack about turning water into wine, but I've forgotten exactly how it goes with the bread and fish stories, so couldn't work those in. (Anyone want to explain it to me?)
Chapter 5 - the bus is going to get hijacked while en route to Choctaw, IA. Alan is going to save the day by summoning tornadoes.
Chapter 6 - the bus is going to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, probably in South Dakota. This is because the terrorists of Chapter 5 somehow managed to damage the fuel tank.
Chapter 7 - Wall Drug. :) They have an 80 foot purple dinosaur. Somehow that's going to be involved. This is going to be a very surreal chapter no matter how it turns out.
That's what's on my immediate radar for this afternoon. I'll continue outlining out the rest of it after I'm done with chapter 7.
What have I got so far:
Chapter 1 - Paynetown, PA. Alan does an amazing physical feat while saving a little girl from being run over by a train.
Chapter 2 - Somerville, OH. Alan gives his leftover salad to a homeless bum, who then gets a phone call and her life gets turned around very suddenly.
Chapter 3 - Indianapolis, IN. A baby elephant breaks loose of a mall display and runs amuck until Alan creatively stops her using a piece of string, a block of swiss cheese, and 6 mounds of dirt.
I used a real city because I've actually been to the Greyhound station here. It's at Union Station. Granted I've only ever been there once for the station, though numerous times for the mall as a kid, but I decided to use it anyway.
Chapter 4 - en route to Ellington, IL. Freak traffic accident caused by a deer jumping in front of a sedan driven by a little old lady, who then collides with a semi, which jacknifes across the highway. Alan doesn't actually do anything for this one, but he does hand out lunch to everyone at the scene. There's a wisecrack about turning water into wine, but I've forgotten exactly how it goes with the bread and fish stories, so couldn't work those in. (Anyone want to explain it to me?)
Chapter 5 - the bus is going to get hijacked while en route to Choctaw, IA. Alan is going to save the day by summoning tornadoes.
Chapter 6 - the bus is going to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, probably in South Dakota. This is because the terrorists of Chapter 5 somehow managed to damage the fuel tank.
Chapter 7 - Wall Drug. :) They have an 80 foot purple dinosaur. Somehow that's going to be involved. This is going to be a very surreal chapter no matter how it turns out.
That's what's on my immediate radar for this afternoon. I'll continue outlining out the rest of it after I'm done with chapter 7.
2005/09/03
Labor Day Novel: End of Day One
Final tally for Saturday: 5755 words in 3 chapters. Three fun events at three really big bus stations so far. :)
Hmm. I'm thinking the next station ought to be one of those small dinky ones. That should mix things up a little...
I guess I need to catch up the 4000 words I fell behind today, too. That means 12k words per day for the two remaining days. We'll see if I make it. Hopefully this will go a lot faster once I get to the good parts in the second half of the story. And there shouldn't be any more interruptions either. Nothing but me, my novel, and lots of Chinese takeout.
Hmm. I'm thinking the next station ought to be one of those small dinky ones. That should mix things up a little...
I guess I need to catch up the 4000 words I fell behind today, too. That means 12k words per day for the two remaining days. We'll see if I make it. Hopefully this will go a lot faster once I get to the good parts in the second half of the story. And there shouldn't be any more interruptions either. Nothing but me, my novel, and lots of Chinese takeout.
Labor Day Novel: midway through Chapter 3
So far it's looking like I have chapters of 2k words apiece. I'm about halfway through chapter 3, trying to figure out what kind of excitement I can come up with involving a baby elephant in a mall, that still manages to be relevant to the rest of the story. I just need something to liven things up in this mall. ;)
So, 5005 words. I thought I'd post an update since I finally managed to pass 5k. I was aiming for 10k words per day, but that doesn't look like it'll happen today given there's only 2 hours left.
At least the Sam's trip is over with now. And I also bought enough Chinese takeout to last two days. No more interruptions until Tuesday. It's just writing, sleeping, and eating takeout.
On the bright side, I do believe that 5005 is the most words of fiction I've ever written in one day. :D
So, 5005 words. I thought I'd post an update since I finally managed to pass 5k. I was aiming for 10k words per day, but that doesn't look like it'll happen today given there's only 2 hours left.
At least the Sam's trip is over with now. And I also bought enough Chinese takeout to last two days. No more interruptions until Tuesday. It's just writing, sleeping, and eating takeout.
On the bright side, I do believe that 5005 is the most words of fiction I've ever written in one day. :D
Labor Day Novel: Mush, mush!
Actually that pretty much describes how I feel about Chapter 2, too. It's awful. So bad that I'm a bit blocked at the moment for how exactly to keep going with the scene I'm trying to write.
Chapter 1 didn't turn out that bad at all - but that was probably because I kept editting things as I went along. It took me 4 hours to write slightly under 2k words, so I guess my cruising speed is 500 words an hour. I'm in trouble if I can't speed up. 500 words an hour means 20 hours a day, which is bad.
3343 total words so far. Unfortunately I'm about to get interrupted because my coworker with the Sam's Club card, who has a knack for only being available to take me to Sam's Club during the most inconvenient possible days ... wants to go this afternoon. *sigh* I should decline, but I need to pick up a few things and have needed to go for over a month.
Chapter 1 didn't turn out that bad at all - but that was probably because I kept editting things as I went along. It took me 4 hours to write slightly under 2k words, so I guess my cruising speed is 500 words an hour. I'm in trouble if I can't speed up. 500 words an hour means 20 hours a day, which is bad.
3343 total words so far. Unfortunately I'm about to get interrupted because my coworker with the Sam's Club card, who has a knack for only being available to take me to Sam's Club during the most inconvenient possible days ... wants to go this afternoon. *sigh* I should decline, but I need to pick up a few things and have needed to go for over a month.
2005/09/02
Labor Day Novel: At the Starting Gate
Technically I'm half an hour into the writing time already, but I had some delays with getting things set up. Namely, the cable to my new USB drive finally arrived today - after the ebay seller forgot to include it in the box with the drive. So I've been spending my evening getting data files backed up for the first time in who knows how long... and this took a lot longer than I thought it would.
Also I needed to transfer a file off my Alphasmart to clear off space for the novel. Since I only have two USB ports, and the other one is taken by my mouse, I couldn't do it at the same time as the file copying.
I'll just pretend I'm in Robert's time zone instead. ;)
I should probably also have printed out my outline instead of having to scroll through looking at my notes on a screen. Doh. Also, I had wanted to look up the city names that I'd made up for each bus stop with the hopes that all of them really are fictional. They have to be fictional because I don't want to inadvertently use a real city with a real Greyhound station and describe the place as being nothing like what it really looks like. I guess these sorts of details will get taken care of after the fact now, since this thing isn't going to get submitted anywhere immediately after I write it.
Hmmm. How do I feel so far? A lot calmer than I thought I would. I was nearly panic-stricken when I signed up to Nano last November, on the 6th, with no clue what I was going to write about. But I managed to pull it off then so theoretically I can pull it off now too, right? Just as long as this doens't lull me to complacency. That would suck.
Guess I better get started. I'm aiming to do one chapter before going to bed tonight. The opening scene, when the bus pulls up to the first stop in Pennsylvania, and the main character (the bus driver) introduces everything ...
Also I needed to transfer a file off my Alphasmart to clear off space for the novel. Since I only have two USB ports, and the other one is taken by my mouse, I couldn't do it at the same time as the file copying.
I'll just pretend I'm in Robert's time zone instead. ;)
I should probably also have printed out my outline instead of having to scroll through looking at my notes on a screen. Doh. Also, I had wanted to look up the city names that I'd made up for each bus stop with the hopes that all of them really are fictional. They have to be fictional because I don't want to inadvertently use a real city with a real Greyhound station and describe the place as being nothing like what it really looks like. I guess these sorts of details will get taken care of after the fact now, since this thing isn't going to get submitted anywhere immediately after I write it.
Hmmm. How do I feel so far? A lot calmer than I thought I would. I was nearly panic-stricken when I signed up to Nano last November, on the 6th, with no clue what I was going to write about. But I managed to pull it off then so theoretically I can pull it off now too, right? Just as long as this doens't lull me to complacency. That would suck.
Guess I better get started. I'm aiming to do one chapter before going to bed tonight. The opening scene, when the bus pulls up to the first stop in Pennsylvania, and the main character (the bus driver) introduces everything ...
2005/08/07
On roleplaying
So it's now a month later, and I'm finally making the beef barley soup I said I was going to make. It was a busy month. First the science paper, then the two cruises, then that new game I'm running.
The primary GM never did come back, so I finally moved the Dark Ages Werewolf plotline out of his game and into a new one. My players (all two of them :p) both wanted to continue, and I do have enough interest in the plot premise that I think I can do it. It's a fairly simple plot premise. Basically, a major caern has fallen to the Wyrm (the really evil bad guys), and the PCs are going to need to form a pack and win it back and restore it to its original pristine condition. Since the game is a play-by-post, though, this all by itself is enough material to keep the game going for at least a year - and that's not including how complex and interesting the character interactions will probably end up getting.
I'm planning to screen pretty heavily for good players, so there should hopefully be minimal morons in the game. The tome of submission guidelines alone should scare off the vast majority of people I don't want to play with. The ones who aren't scared off will be easy to spot because they won't have read the guidelines in the first place, and are therefore the bottom of the barrel. Hence, I'll end up with good players with good characters who interact with each other and develop intriguing and wonderful relationships.
That's the plan, anyway. This is going to take a while. Weeding the gems out of the muck requires a lot of patience. (Then when you're all done finding them and putting them into the game, they suddenly develop offline lives and stop playing. :p)
I'm also planning to take a serious left turn away from World of Darkness canon, now that the game is truly my own and I can do whatever I want with it. I've never much cared for a good chunk of the published material, though Werewolf bugs me a lot less than most. At this point I've decided that the manifestations of the Wyrm will resemble the Zerg from Starcraft. That should give me all sorts of bizarre creatures to describe for them to kill. :) Obviously, a good chunk of combat might end up being more freeformed than anything else, since there aren't exactly any published stats on zerglings.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in following along to the story, I'm planning to keep everything in public threads. It's here.
I love running play by posts. It means that I don't have to figure anything out until the last possible minute. ;) And even then, I have hours to think stuff up. I've never been a fast thinker and there's no way I could ever run something tabletop. I'm hoping I can run this game about like the last one I did (Stargate). It's a plot-directed game, in that the PCs have an actual end goal to work toward, but they can get there any way they want. Things that they do will have consequences in the setting and to each other. If the players are good, I'm mostly just sitting there as a referee, playing the bad guys based on the very simple motivations that they have (defend this desecrated caern :p). Any new setting detail that gets developed will be when a PC needs to ask a question about it, at which point I'll make stuff up on the spot. The trick is to keep it all consistent with whatever I've made up before that point, and the farther in the game goes, the more complex it'll get. Should be fun if it works. :)
It worked very well for Stargate for almost a year. Eventually that game ended, just before the conclusion, because the number of dorks reached my breaking point and I just couldn't take it anymore. There were also some other OOC issues with players who were formerly friends. Plus the fact that most of the best players had wandered off due to circumstances in Real Life. By the time I called it quits, I only had 4 players left, and they weren't positioned well to continue the plot. So I just ended up writing a bunch of fast-forward conclusions to get them to the end. Which they were pretty much there already anyway. If anyone is really bored and feels like reading the Stargate game, it's here [2009 Sep 26 - long gone now]. :p It's been deleted but not yet wiped from the rpol database. Despite all the OOC problems associated with the game, we wrote a lot of good stuff in there together.
I guess I should mention that Stargate worked best when there were around 10 active players going at any given time. I'm hoping I can build up the Werewolf game to be around that same size as well. I'm hoping that there's enough interest on rpol for a Dark Ages Werewolf game at all :p - I'm the only one, as far as I know, so they would at least all have to come to me.
Play by posts are nice in that you can have more players than you can in offline games. Offline, you have to deal with separate groups one at a time, while everyone else sits around waiting. Online, you can post for all of them at once. The dynamic is entirely different.
Slower, but no better or worse. You do have to have a lot of patience, as you don't often get a response to your post for quite a while. Sometimes your entire group is online at the same time, and then everyone can post pretty fast - which averages out around 10-20 minutes between each post. Most of the time, though, you have to wait a few hours or days.
I was in one game for a while, a Vampire, that had a meteoric life. The first two in-game days took us only three months to play - not because we were fast-forwarding through everything, but because we really were playing that fast. One GM, around 10 players, and at our peak we were doing 70-100 posts per day, every day, most of them between 10pm and 2am U.S. east coast time. For three months. And these were not one-liners, these were good quality posts. We were insane.
Needless to say we burnt out. That game sucked up most of my time outside of work, and *cough* some of my work hours as well. I was obsessed. The GM was obsessed. 5 months later it just wasn't going to work anymore. The GM had serious issues that came to a head, and I was the one taking the brunt of her venting because somehow we had become friends-like. It kind of died a slow, agonizing death for the following 5 months, until finally we just couldn't do it anymore. It never did come to an official end. The GM just stopped coming back. I still have the game on my sticky list, mainly because I haven't gotten around to archiving it yet, and at this point I still don't know whether I would want to finish playing out the plot. It's been over a year since it stopped. I know that several of the players still don't want to even think about that game again. But the ride, at least the first part, was fun while it lasted.
Hmmm. And here I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my roleplaying to indulge PoetMage's curiosity. :p Guess I can really work up a rant when I get going on something. Which parts did you most enjoy reading about? I can rant about that more than the other parts next time. ;)
In other news... August is looking like it'll be more quiet overall. I'm going to need all the time I can muster to work out Stranger on a Bus. Especially if I do cough up the $50 to enter it officially.
At the moment I have a very sparse plot outline for where it starts and where it ends. There's a bunch of possible scenes in the middle, and I have a list of locations that the bus will stop. I have no clue what exactly will happen at most of those stops, except that it will probably involve Alan (God in disguise) doing something incomprehensible. I've also decided that the bus driver, Ned, is going to drive the bus personally the whole way. He's going to inexplicably not need to sleep or rest, as well as inexplicably be scheduled by Greyhound to do all of that driving. He's not going to understand that at all, but that's okay, he doesn't need to.
I need to work out names for all the places, and maybe some of the minor characters. In my mind it sort of resembles a roleplaying game. I have two key characters (two PCs) with fairly straightforward motivations and abilities, the key obstacles to overcome and antagonists with motivations and abilities, some helper minor characters (friendly NPCs), a point A and a point B, and some vague setting info for the bus trip along the way. That's all you really need to start a roleplaying game. Not sure how well this'll work for a novel - especially a novel that's to be written in 3 days.
I think I can I think I can ...
I've read through the Survival Guide on the 3-Day Novel website too. There's actually a whole discussion thread buried in there, where you can get a play-by-play of a bunch of people doing it. Before, during, and after. I didn't read all of it, but got enough of a flavor that it looks like the crack version of Nano's cocaine. ;)
And now I'm enjoying my beef barley soup. It tastes pretty good already, straight after cooking it, and it'll be marvelous tomorrow. I always eat a bowl of my soup right after it's done, even knowing it isn't done done yet. Call it my personal soup-making tradition.
The primary GM never did come back, so I finally moved the Dark Ages Werewolf plotline out of his game and into a new one. My players (all two of them :p) both wanted to continue, and I do have enough interest in the plot premise that I think I can do it. It's a fairly simple plot premise. Basically, a major caern has fallen to the Wyrm (the really evil bad guys), and the PCs are going to need to form a pack and win it back and restore it to its original pristine condition. Since the game is a play-by-post, though, this all by itself is enough material to keep the game going for at least a year - and that's not including how complex and interesting the character interactions will probably end up getting.
I'm planning to screen pretty heavily for good players, so there should hopefully be minimal morons in the game. The tome of submission guidelines alone should scare off the vast majority of people I don't want to play with. The ones who aren't scared off will be easy to spot because they won't have read the guidelines in the first place, and are therefore the bottom of the barrel. Hence, I'll end up with good players with good characters who interact with each other and develop intriguing and wonderful relationships.
That's the plan, anyway. This is going to take a while. Weeding the gems out of the muck requires a lot of patience. (Then when you're all done finding them and putting them into the game, they suddenly develop offline lives and stop playing. :p)
I'm also planning to take a serious left turn away from World of Darkness canon, now that the game is truly my own and I can do whatever I want with it. I've never much cared for a good chunk of the published material, though Werewolf bugs me a lot less than most. At this point I've decided that the manifestations of the Wyrm will resemble the Zerg from Starcraft. That should give me all sorts of bizarre creatures to describe for them to kill. :) Obviously, a good chunk of combat might end up being more freeformed than anything else, since there aren't exactly any published stats on zerglings.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in following along to the story, I'm planning to keep everything in public threads. It's here.
I love running play by posts. It means that I don't have to figure anything out until the last possible minute. ;) And even then, I have hours to think stuff up. I've never been a fast thinker and there's no way I could ever run something tabletop. I'm hoping I can run this game about like the last one I did (Stargate). It's a plot-directed game, in that the PCs have an actual end goal to work toward, but they can get there any way they want. Things that they do will have consequences in the setting and to each other. If the players are good, I'm mostly just sitting there as a referee, playing the bad guys based on the very simple motivations that they have (defend this desecrated caern :p). Any new setting detail that gets developed will be when a PC needs to ask a question about it, at which point I'll make stuff up on the spot. The trick is to keep it all consistent with whatever I've made up before that point, and the farther in the game goes, the more complex it'll get. Should be fun if it works. :)
It worked very well for Stargate for almost a year. Eventually that game ended, just before the conclusion, because the number of dorks reached my breaking point and I just couldn't take it anymore. There were also some other OOC issues with players who were formerly friends. Plus the fact that most of the best players had wandered off due to circumstances in Real Life. By the time I called it quits, I only had 4 players left, and they weren't positioned well to continue the plot. So I just ended up writing a bunch of fast-forward conclusions to get them to the end. Which they were pretty much there already anyway. If anyone is really bored and feels like reading the Stargate game, it's here [2009 Sep 26 - long gone now]. :p It's been deleted but not yet wiped from the rpol database. Despite all the OOC problems associated with the game, we wrote a lot of good stuff in there together.
I guess I should mention that Stargate worked best when there were around 10 active players going at any given time. I'm hoping I can build up the Werewolf game to be around that same size as well. I'm hoping that there's enough interest on rpol for a Dark Ages Werewolf game at all :p - I'm the only one, as far as I know, so they would at least all have to come to me.
Play by posts are nice in that you can have more players than you can in offline games. Offline, you have to deal with separate groups one at a time, while everyone else sits around waiting. Online, you can post for all of them at once. The dynamic is entirely different.
Slower, but no better or worse. You do have to have a lot of patience, as you don't often get a response to your post for quite a while. Sometimes your entire group is online at the same time, and then everyone can post pretty fast - which averages out around 10-20 minutes between each post. Most of the time, though, you have to wait a few hours or days.
I was in one game for a while, a Vampire, that had a meteoric life. The first two in-game days took us only three months to play - not because we were fast-forwarding through everything, but because we really were playing that fast. One GM, around 10 players, and at our peak we were doing 70-100 posts per day, every day, most of them between 10pm and 2am U.S. east coast time. For three months. And these were not one-liners, these were good quality posts. We were insane.
Needless to say we burnt out. That game sucked up most of my time outside of work, and *cough* some of my work hours as well. I was obsessed. The GM was obsessed. 5 months later it just wasn't going to work anymore. The GM had serious issues that came to a head, and I was the one taking the brunt of her venting because somehow we had become friends-like. It kind of died a slow, agonizing death for the following 5 months, until finally we just couldn't do it anymore. It never did come to an official end. The GM just stopped coming back. I still have the game on my sticky list, mainly because I haven't gotten around to archiving it yet, and at this point I still don't know whether I would want to finish playing out the plot. It's been over a year since it stopped. I know that several of the players still don't want to even think about that game again. But the ride, at least the first part, was fun while it lasted.
Hmmm. And here I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my roleplaying to indulge PoetMage's curiosity. :p Guess I can really work up a rant when I get going on something. Which parts did you most enjoy reading about? I can rant about that more than the other parts next time. ;)
In other news... August is looking like it'll be more quiet overall. I'm going to need all the time I can muster to work out Stranger on a Bus. Especially if I do cough up the $50 to enter it officially.
At the moment I have a very sparse plot outline for where it starts and where it ends. There's a bunch of possible scenes in the middle, and I have a list of locations that the bus will stop. I have no clue what exactly will happen at most of those stops, except that it will probably involve Alan (God in disguise) doing something incomprehensible. I've also decided that the bus driver, Ned, is going to drive the bus personally the whole way. He's going to inexplicably not need to sleep or rest, as well as inexplicably be scheduled by Greyhound to do all of that driving. He's not going to understand that at all, but that's okay, he doesn't need to.
I need to work out names for all the places, and maybe some of the minor characters. In my mind it sort of resembles a roleplaying game. I have two key characters (two PCs) with fairly straightforward motivations and abilities, the key obstacles to overcome and antagonists with motivations and abilities, some helper minor characters (friendly NPCs), a point A and a point B, and some vague setting info for the bus trip along the way. That's all you really need to start a roleplaying game. Not sure how well this'll work for a novel - especially a novel that's to be written in 3 days.
I think I can I think I can ...
I've read through the Survival Guide on the 3-Day Novel website too. There's actually a whole discussion thread buried in there, where you can get a play-by-play of a bunch of people doing it. Before, during, and after. I didn't read all of it, but got enough of a flavor that it looks like the crack version of Nano's cocaine. ;)
And now I'm enjoying my beef barley soup. It tastes pretty good already, straight after cooking it, and it'll be marvelous tomorrow. I always eat a bowl of my soup right after it's done, even knowing it isn't done done yet. Call it my personal soup-making tradition.
2005/05/30
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.
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.
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