Bottom of the 13th

8388 words.

1933 words just now, which is sadly my highest word count day so far.

The words flow pretty well when I write, I just haven't had very many writing sessions. Lots going on in the rest of life. The ex-flatmate became an ex-flatmate, and he still hasn't paid up on his share of bills and probably never will, which means I have to prepare to take him to Tribunal. They're preparing the house for selling, and I'm looking for somewhere else to live. I also have to prepare to move out, including packing up my own stuff and also cleaning out all of everyone else's stuff that they left here.

Meanwhile, the PhD project is going pretty well. The first draft of the MRIO table is getting constructed over the next month, and meanwhile I've turned my attention to the various risk weights.

I've reached the part of the timeline in the story where I'm about to destroy the second town - but not in the same way as the first town. The first town was destroyed with Sacrosanct Wilderness. This one is getting destroyed by Punish Those Who Trespass. I haven't worked out yet what that looks like. That'll be the main course of the next writing session.

Well, it's almost time for Nanowrimo 2019...

So I guess to catch things up from where I last left off a year ago: my flat situation is more or less stabilized, and my shipped stuff eventually did arrive two months later - right before I left for Sydney for three months. But it's all here in my new flat that I picked out specifically because there's enough space in here for it, at a rate that I can afford (provided I have at least one flatmate to pay half the rent and utilities, which at the moment I do). Aside from that, a whole lot of travel and first-year PhD stuff happened in the past year, and I didn't have much time to think about fiction.

Things are also going very well with Brett, the guy I met last year. Our relationship is pretty stable, and I should be able to do Nanowrimo this year and maybe even get him to try it too. He's not much of a writer though.

So, what to do this year?

I don't have any brand new ideas since the last time I tossed out a bunch. I could work on Triangle II part 3, like I was planning to last year. I could work on The Celestines. I could work on Vengeance. I could fanfic Spirit Island. Or even Cosmic Potato, which for some reason on the latest version of the Nanowrimo site, is pinned to the top of my profile and I can't get it off.

I guess I have almost a month to figure it out. Other people will probably start talking about potential projects to work on, and maybe we can build up some excitement.

Well, there went Nano 2018

177 words. I added a bit to the end of the ritual scene that Aaron was doing in Vengeance, and I'm still not sure what should happen next. After that I got distracted. >.>

More or less, I met a guy, and decided that it was more important to get our relationship off to a good start. There's always a tricky transition period between when we're still just friends, and when we've stabilized into happy dating. For us this was a couple weeks long, right in the middle of the month of course, but relationships in general can't really be scheduled - they happen when it's time for them to happen.

 I also moved flats and had to do a bunch of shopping for stuff I didn't need at the original flat but do now. My shipped stuff was supposed to arrive, but so far it still isn't here.

 I guess I'll try again on the fiction front next year.

Prepping for Nanowrimo 2018!

It's been a busy year since last Nanowrimo, and very little of it had anything to do with fiction writing. I applied for and got accepted into a PhD program at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Then I severely downsized my possessions to less than a quarter of what I had at this time last year, packed the surviving stuff into a U-Haul trailer that was just slightly less than the total weight that a Prius V could haul, drove it from Alabama to California, shipped it, sold the car, and got on a plane. And now I'm living in Nelson, NZ. The shipped stuff should arrive next month, by which time I will hopefully be living in a flat big enough to hold all of it without having to rent extra storage.

Needless to say, I haven't thought much about fiction in the last year. I did start cabins for Camp Nanowrimo both times, but mostly just watched the rest of my cabin mates write lots of words and cheered them on.  I'm relatively settled at the moment however (up until I move again and sort in my shipped stuff at least), so I took a look at the situation here.

On the Nanowrimo site, Nelson is under "New Zealand - Elsewhere" - which is basically everywhere that isn't a big city. So far no one has posted from the south island except me, so I assume I won't be going to any write-ins. (And even if there were people on the south island participating on the forum, I still probably wouldn't be able to go - it's a big island and I have no car).

So. What to work on this year. The two leading contenders are to continue with the Celestines project that I started last year, or to do more work on Fortress Launne. I'm leaning in the direction of the latter. About a third of Amulet II is getting moved into Triangle II Part 3, so the obvious next step is to write a full coherent version of Triangle II Part 3. I'm not sure I'll have anywhere near 50k words by the time I'm done, so I figure I'll do like last year and continue the Celestines from where I left off (if I have time).

The synopsis I just posted on Nanowrimo:

Triangle II is a three-part story where I've written most of the first draft material for the first two parts as parts of previous Nanos and other writing events, though mostly with the idea that they would be parts of other things than Triangle II, which didn't exist as an entity until after I'd written them (and large amounts of other Fortress Launne).

In Triangle II Part 1, the story follows Janis as she goes deep into the swamps to find a mythical medicine man named Aliacorba, because the city of Fortress Launne has a severe plague going on. Aliacorba agrees to come out and help. In the process he becomes Thomas Cougar.

In Triangle II Part 2, the king of Fortress Launne finds out about Thomas. Due to various political complexities, Thomas is (more or less) kidnapped away from Janis, and the royal intention is that they'll never see each other again. Thomas then goes on to finish solving the plague with all the resources of the king and court.

Triangle II Part 3 goes back to following Janis, who is not happy at all about Thomas's disappearance. Up until last year I didn't have any good ideas of what she was going to do next. I knew where things were supposed to end up, but not how to get there. Last year while preparing to rewrite Amulet II, I noticed that a good third of the first draft material would work a lot better if it was part of Triangle II instead.

So, this year I plan to properly write up Triangle II Part 3. Like last year, it might not be 50k words long (if it works the same way as for previous novel parts, the final result will be around 20-25k). If I have time at the end and still need words, I'll tack in work on something unrelated.

Just a short update

I've done basically nothing since the last post. Originally I thought I'd spend some time working on it over Labor Day Weekend (going on right now), but then the apartment complex said they wanted to raise my rent by $56, and that kind of threw me out of writing mode. I've lined up a new place to move into in a couple months though. And I need to start packing.

Things that have occurred to me however:
For Amulet I Part III, what needs to happen is wrap-up for both James and Charles. So it won't just be James going back to Lagarnica. It will also be the other end of what happens with Charles and Felna, during the Sundering. What will that be exactly? Well, it so happens that I also need to put in a battle between Nathaniel and the Demon somewhere, scheduled to happen less than a decade after the events of Amulet I. So now I'm entertaining the notion of somehow having both of these events happen at the same time. And it would also explain how Nathaniel knows about the Duchenes during the court scene in Triangle II if he has met Charles.

Meanwhile, Rumen is tugging for my attention again. I'm now in the middle of ruminating about the part where he carries Jenya to her people. Might do another attempt at writing that soon.

Status of Fortress Launne, writing in general, and life

Well, Birthright came to a halt as I ran into problems with not knowing what happened in Triangle and by the end of Amulet I. This seems to be par for the series as a whole, so I'm not surprised. Most of the month was spent on developing Myan (i.e. the various mobster groups beat the crap out of each other) rather than on the actual alleged main plot with the magic treasure box, but I laid down a lot of good groundwork. And also worked out a few things that need to go into Triangle next year.

That will be the last of the big pieces of this series. It's set in the period when the city of Fortress Launne was first getting set up. There were three key players at the time: Nathaniel, Stranahan, and Antoine. Nathaniel needed the city plan to be an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle due to his gigantic binding spell for the demon below, and so he dictated a lot of stuff that Antoine wasn't entirely happy with. That's the main conflict - the fact that Antoine didn't like being told where to put his university, and what he therefore does to one of the Stranahans in response, and the fallout from that (some of which came up in my failed attempt at a Janis novel in 2006, which had lots of stuff about a plague, which means it was the sequel to Triangle). (And, in thinking about this plague, Triangle II would be the actual story whereby Janis goes to fetch Aliacorba from the swamps. Because he's a medicine man with miraculous healing powers you see...).

Anyway. So the stuff that came up in Birthright pointed out another major plotline, which is: how the spirit wolves got started up in the first place. That is, at some point during the time period of Triangle, they received their totem, the Golden Flame. It almost has to have had Nathaniel's involvement, since one of the three points of the spell triangle is their sacred cavern. The totem itself - a sculpture of a phoenix - probably wasn't in Nathaniel's hands originally, and so far I'm thinking it came into Aunlania with the Stranahans. But it would've been Nathaniel (or someone loyal to him) who recognized what it was good for and how to use it.

Meanwhile, what I most want to do next with all this is piece together a coherent version of Amulet I. I have three versions of it so far. The first one can pretty much just be tossed out entirely; it was important to write it because it helped a lot when I wrote the third version, but none of the actual material is useful. So, I have two versions that are going to become fodder for the fourth version. I need to go over them and figure out what I'm doing. The troublesome part, as always, is what happened after the Duchene brothers came to the ruins of the old fort, and how Aliacorba became Tainted, and what he did in response to protect his family line. Every iteration seems to be getting it closer to the way it actually needs to be.

And, sadly, there still aren't any actual amulets in the story. Oh well.

Then there's still the Vengeance storyline that has stalled out since I switched to Fortress Launne for November. At some point Rumen is going to insist that I continue with that.

In other news, I'm probably going to take December off from fiction. There are four articles on my todo list on the nonfiction front, two at BrightHub and two at eHow. I figure one article per week should be reasonable. (There are people who can write four per day, but alas I'm not that fast.) Especially since at some point I'll have to drive back to Indiana and do some social obligation things. I also have to get back to serious hardcore job hunting - putting out apps and things so that they can be ignored and rejected. And finish sorting out all my life detritus - I got a lot done last summer, but there's a lot left to do.

What I'd really prefer to do at this point, aside from sitting around writing full time I mean, is join Americorps. If there's ever going to be a time in my life where I can make that big a commitment to volunteer work, it would be now. I've looked into Peace Corps too, which is also on the table, but I'd prefer to be somewhere with Internet access, and I'd prefer not to be a classroom teacher (which seems to be the vast majority of what they need). The main con of working for Americorps, meanwhile, is ... and this is going to make me sound like a racist... that I don't want to help American white people. I've spent most of my life in places dominated by white conservatives, and really, the concept of helping people that are just going to turn around and shun me for not being a "real American" isn't really doing it for me. (There. I said it. In public. But there it is.)

Then I found an Americorps posting that involves helping Native American elderly. Now that, I can get behind. These are the people who are poorest of the poor in the U.S., the people who live in a third world country within a first world country, and who have been ridiculously wronged (even if it wasn't my particular ancestors that wronged them). Plus, I would still have Internet, still have time to work on writing, and still be within a reasonable distance of my family - which has become a lot more important now that my sister has a daughter that I someday want to be able to afford to see. I applied for it, and it's currently my top choice of things to do next with my life.

My tentative plan from there: if things go well and other opportunities involving helping Native Americans open up, that would be awesome. If not, I'll look into Peace Corps again. If they reject me from Americorps, I'll also look at Peace Corps.

I guess on the whole I'm trying to get out of science for a while. Americorps comes with educational benefits that I could use to set myself up to do something else entirely. Peace Corps has some too, I think, and also some advantages for applying to federal jobs afterward. And maybe by the time all this volunteering work is done, the economy will be good enough for me to actually get a job again in something anyway, science or otherwise.

Nanowrimo 2009

Once more unto the breach...

I've prepared notes to finally get around to writing Birthright this year. I've detailed out the treasure box that everybody wants. I've detailed out all the opposing mobster factions that want it and why. I've even come up with most of what I need to get a good start on the Felicia/Janis secondary plotline.

What I don't have at all, so far, is anything whatsoever about the originally-intended protagonist. o.O

She's supposed to be a 12 year old girl, living in poverty with a single parent and a half-brother who is getting sucked into a life of crime. But everything about the plot so far is stuff that happens to her because of the box; she has no motives of her own. I don't have a good feel for what she's like, or what her purpose is in the story, other than as a plot device. This does not bode well for the original story I had in mind, I think...

On the other hand, I'm not sure what story I originally had in mind, either (if there ever was one).

On the good news front: it is possible to get back into Hobgoblin.net - by signing up anew. Whatever is keeping out the established membership, it doesn't block new members, so I signed up with a different name to be able to reach the members-only portions of my past blog posts. Those have now been copy/pasted over, leaving just one completely-private post that I still can't reach. No Birthright notes were in them, however.

On the bad news front: no luck on the job. The interview went well enough, but they went with someone else. So I'm back to idling while I continue sending out apps and collecting rejections. At least this means more writing time. Some of it will be spent building up my list of science articles at BrightHub - the pay isn't great, and the pageviews seem to be lower than eHow, but it'll be good to have a variety of writing samples that I can show off for better-paying gigs later. Also, they're pretty fun to write due to actually being about stuff I'm interested in, which is definitely a plus.

On a somewhat neutral front: this year I'm test-driving Scrivener as my writing software. It has rave reviews, it's in active development, and there's a Nanowrimo-specific trial going on, so I'm hoping it'll be useful. On the other hand, I really liked Jer's Novel Writer, which I'd been using since 2005. Jer is busy with other things in life at the moment though, and not paying much attention to JNW. I suspect what will likely happen is I use Scrivener to organize my notes, and Jer's to do all of the actual writing. But we'll see, depending on how much I like Scrivener's full-screen mode.

Anyway. Last day before the writing starts. I'm going to sleep some, relax some, maybe get a pizza, and probably start at midnight. Should be fun. :)

Dragonfly revisited

Back at the beginning of the year, I vowed to actually finish something and submit it for publication somewhere. Then it somehow got to be October while I wasn't looking. o.O So I picked the shortest of my WIPs, Dragonfly. It's a piece of literary fiction based on a series of dreams I had back in February of 2005. I wrote most of it back then, then revised it in the summer of 2006, then got a crit pointing out that it needed more work before it was a coherent story, which stalled me back out again for a good long while while I tried to figure out what I was really trying to say with it.

I finally finished it on the 15th. Most of it what it needed was already there from when I was spinning my wheels, I just needed to smooth it out and add a few extra lines here and there to make it complete. And now it is. :) My current plan is to submit it to Glimmer Train. That was the place I was going to submit it in 2006 too, so it makes sense to start there. They have a Short Story Award for New Writers contest that opens in November. If that doesn't turn out to be a good fit, I found a bunch of other places on Duotrope to try.

I don't normally read or write literary fiction at all, so this will probably be my only foray in that direction.

Next up on the list of things to finish: Bus. We'll see if that happens, which depends quite a lot on how next week's job interview turns out. The job would be for January to mid-May, and if I get it, I'm going to need to do a lot of packing and moving. One option would be to leave most of my stuff here (they provide housing), then come back in May to move out officially when the lease ends in June. More financially sound but also more logistically complicated would be to break lease and move 95% of my stuff into a storage place in Indiana, stay with my mother before the job, then find somewhere to live after (preferably by lining up the next job). Either way, I should pack up as much as possible (that is, pack up at a faster rate than what I'm currently doing).

Of course, if I don't get the job, then I'll just keep doing what I've been doing, and I'll look at Bus. It's second shortest, weighing in at around 25k words, and there's only a chapter or two more to write.

grrr. arrrgh. *hobgoblin withdrawal* o.O [posted at SFFMuse]

Site is still down, and I'm beginning to think I should move my blog to somewhere else. I still can't access the parts I'd locked out of public view. With Nanowrimo looming, this vexes me mightily. In public, I allude to stuff I planned out for the story I have in mind to write, Birthright in the Fortress Launne series, but I can't check whether I wrote any detailed notes.

And, once again, instead of being able to write a blog post there, I'll just write it over here.

I've settled fairly comfortably into the laid-off life at this point. So far the plan is to finish all the paperwork-sorting that I've been doing for the past three months, get stuff I'm not using packed up or freecycled or goodwilled, and prepare as much for a move as I can while still living here without any idea when the move will be. Unemployment money lasts until February. After that, I have enough savings for a few more months. If I still don't have a job by the time my lease ends here, I'll likely be moving back in with my mother in Indiana.

Meanwhile, I apply for jobs and collect rejections, get in some weekly exercise in the form of cheap yoga classes, and try to put together the database for Robert's art. I'd like to dive into a ton of writing once the paper sorting is taken care of, now that I seem to have a lot of time on my hands. Aside from fiction, I've signed up to write articles for BrightHub. It's a science and technology site, and I definitely know lots about science, at least. They pay $10 per article plus ad revenue while also taking nearly all publication rights. Not a great deal, but it'll let me see how well I'm suited to freelance writing in the first place and whether I want to pursue it with something of more reasonable pay. And, on the other hand, financially speaking it's a step up from writing for Wikipedia where there's no pay and no rights, and sort of comparable to eHow where there's only ad revenue but more rights retained... Anyway, I've submitted my first article to them - about alternation of generations in plants. I'll link to it if they accept it and put it up. If they don't accept it, I'll probably put it up as a Google Knol and sign up for Adsense. That seems like a good backup plan for any rejects, so that I still might get some ad revenue out of my efforts.

Hmm. I should probably plan in time for fiction too. There's lots of stuff on the backburners that I could try to finish up. I need to find any notes about Birthright outside of Hobgoblin, at least; the plan is to go ahead and do Nanowrimo this year, though that's subject to change on no notice. Guess we'll see what happens in the next month...

The Sad State of My Life

Been a while since I've been by here. Been busy. Sent a PM to Jeanene about the spam - hopefully she gets an email when she gets one of those..

The biggest thing going on with me at the moment: I'm being laid off at the end of August.

That means I'm trying to find another job and prepare for a move at the same time - because in my field (basic science research), there aren't huge numbers of them in any one place. Before I pack, though, I'm trying to get rid of as much crap as possible. I'm a hopeless packrat and there's nearly two decades' worth to go through, one individual piece of paper at a time.

I'm also looking into tech jobs instead of just marine science. To that end, I'm trying to get up a demo site of my leet skillz. So far it's just barebones basic, but most of the actual content is there. The biggest piece still to come is a SQL database I'm making of Robert's art. I've made two SQL databases for work, but they aren't viewable by the general public, so I asked Robert if I could do one of his art. He said yes, and (nearly) voila...

So, all in all: no fictional writing to speak of. I've even stopped roleplaying (though my games have been dead for quite a while now). No time. If I find a job, I'll need to be able to move quickly to it. If I don't find a job, I'll have all the time in the world to sit around sorting (at least until I run out of savings). Either way, I'm pressed for time.

[members-only cut]

Meanwhile, to entertain whoever is still here, a poem-like thing I found from 22 Aug 1991:

(moved to my Livejournal to retain original privacy)

Days 4, 5, 6, and 7: 13,473 words

Well, I didn't write a darn thing on Election Night. Nor did I get done anything else I'd planned for that evening, which meant I did those on Wednesday and didn't write anything novel-related then, either. On Thursday I was sick, but managed about a hundred words just before midnight, before giving up and just going to bed.

Friday came and I was all better and ready to go. I have a lot of catching up to do, if I still hope to reach 100k.

The problem is that I think I'm bored with my story. It's easy enough to write, and I do enjoy parts of it as I go along, but only mildly. The downside of the lack of emotional investment is that, well, I'm not drawn in. It's easier to write, but at the same time it's not as much fun.

Oh well. I just need to reach 50k on it, and then I can go on to something else. Only 36,527 more to go...

Day One: 2687 Words

Not bad for the first 24 hours, during which I had to do some heavy-handed modding of a chat channel, and for which I got cussed out and insulted yea verily. Not very conducive to thinking about novels, lemmetellya.

Anyway, I completely ditched all of my writing plans on Friday, and now I've somehow started working on The Fall of Myan. It's the story at the end of the Fortress Launne timeline, where a neighboring city gets overrun by zombies.

Since I didn't know that's what I'd be writing, I had to do a lot of cramming before I started. My notes are from 2003. There are details of the plotlines that I still don't fully recall, even with the notes in front of me. There are parts where I apparently assumed I'd remember what I was talking about and wouldn't need to explain. ("Party A does X to Party B to distract Party C from Y ... yaddayaddayadda ... and all of this was a clever ploy to distract everyone from realizing that Party A is really after Martha." Who is Martha? Doh!) Then I found some more notes (my notes organization "scheme" isn't terribly organized), in the form of a Corel Wordperfect 3.5 file for OS pre-X - which my current computer doesn't run. Luckily, Wordperfect files still display a lot of the text in a text editor, even if there are a bunch of weird symbols everywhere. (And Martha was fully explained in them. Yay!)

I wrote the first scene and a half last night, for 1566 total words, slept a bit, got woken up around 11am, trundled downstairs around noon, did a few other things, and then finished that scene and another one. Now I'm a bit lost on what to write next.

See, the problem is that although I have notes for Fall of Myan, they're notes for a roleplaying game, not a novel. Which means that I have a lot of backstory and plotting, but no actual viewpoint characters. In a roleplaying game, that's what players are for. So I've been limping along trying to figure out how best to actually tell the story.

So far it's looking like I'll have to invent some main characters lickity split. It might be the pack of mercenaries that are (one of the groups) behind the existence of the zombies. Of course, in my notes, they're the bad guys and they're supposed to lose, which doesn't make them very good protagonists unless they're going to change sides at the end. I won't say they wouldn't, because I don't actually know them (not having developed them as characters at all so far), but I can't assume they will, either. Because characters never do what I hope. :p

My longterm plan is to get to 50k on this story as fast as possible, no matter how crappy (first drafts usually are, aren't they?) and then hope to have time to write another 50k on the Rumen stories. We'll see...

State of My Life: Mid-2008

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...

New Year 2008

I don't have any big resolutions this year. Basically my plan is to keep doing what I've been doing.

Some specific things:

1. Make an attempt to clean at least one thing in my apartment every day. Tiny things count.

2. Do the hard things more. Try not to wimp out and run the other way.

3. Get more exercise. I'll be looking into some yoga classes next week, doctor's orders more or less, because sitting around in front of a computer all day every day isn't doing good things for the rest of my body...

Other than that, it's basically just a matter of chugging along. Write more, read more, keep blogging, do productive things at work. Possibly finish writing something enough to actually think about sending it somewhere, though I don't know if I want to make it a full-blown resolution (must do or else). Possibly start another hobby or two - I could try getting back into art, for example.

Writing plans for the rest of this month

Well, it looks like I've basically reached a longterm stall point on Edward at 53k words. My current plan is to see if I can get back into it when Christmas Break starts.

I won't be seeing family this year. They can't afford to come down here, and I'm not keen on driving back up there again since I was just there in October. Where I work, we get 12 total holiday days per year - and 7 of them are all in a row for Christmas. Also, I don't actually celebrate Christmas. All of that means that, including weekends, I have eleven days of (nearly) uninterrupted time coming up (I'll probably still be working at the takeout). It could be a mini-pseudo-Nanowrimo!

Hopefully that'll give me the time to break through the stallpoint on Edward and finish the damn story. I'm still where I was when last I posted - just before the big ritual. But for some reason I don't feel like I'm ready to write it yet - like there are still pieces missing, probably an entire subplot involving Charles and Felna, which I've only barely roughed in thus far. So I have about a week to ruminate on it and figure out what I'm doing next.

In other news, most of my non-work/non-sleep time lately has been more focused on my blog. It sucks up a lot more time than it really probably should, especially taking into account that I seem to have gotten sucked into a whole network of daily blogs, and I read and comment on other people's even moreso than I spend trying to think of stuff to say on my own.

My game is still creeping along. I've only managed to update it once this month - after not updating it at all in November, and not much in October. I haven't been able to get my mind into roleplay mode for quite some time, and deep down I think I might never get back fully into it again. Not anytime soon, anyhow. I've been moving on to doing all sorts of other things and would really like to focus more on writing again.

Of course, I think that every year at this time, then end up majorly blocked on writing, and then get seriously into roleplaying from January to March ... so who knows. Maybe it's just part of the yearly cycle. ;)

AIIYIIEEE!!!!! O.O

Less than an hour and a half away from the starting gate, and I don't really have any clue what I'm doing.

Uh. Thus far, a possible Main Character has presented himself to me as a young, arrogant nobleman who is going to get mugged in a dark alley. I think this is a mortal Edward Duchene, in the process of becoming Tainted. Which is not a story I had ever planned to write but, who knows, maybe it'll be interesting to see where it goes. If it turns out to be a dead end, I'll just start over with something else. By that point maybe I'll actually think of something else. :)

My October has been unspeakably busy. Until an hour and a half ago I was still in coding mindset, writing up complicated PHP scripts while going back and forth changing things in a corequisite matlab7 script and a postgresql database. Changing from coding-mindset to fiction-writing-mindset is never an easy feat, but I've been puttering around at home now for a while (read: going around in circles like a headless chicken), drinking in some caffeinated soda (Sunkist), and hoping for the best.

Well, I'm signed up

I have no idea what I'm doing this year. But I've settled into the new 2007 Nanowrimo digs. I've decided to use the tree picture from here as my avatar. I'm signed in as Nerwen again too, but don't know how many novels I'll attempt this year.

Possible ideas:
a) yet another attempt on Amulet I - third time's the charm, maybe?
b) Birthright
c) come up with something entirely different, like the story behind Nerwen and Kayara
d) slack off and do nothing but dares the whole time

Decisions, decisions. I'll figure it out after I survive October. Got the annual Open House at work in a week and a half to help prepare for, a high school reunion newsletter to put together, then attending of said reunion which will include a long-distance road trip. Things will be quite frantic for a little while...

2007 Book Challenge 1: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars is available as a free online read in its entirety. It's a humorous science fiction story about a Hollywood agent who is assigned to figure out a way to introduce Earth to an alien race that looks like gelatinous blobs. The blobs in question are mild-mannered beings with great senses of humor.

It was John Scalzi's first novel, and he originally had it out as "shareware" - but by this point he's doing well on the whole novel-writing front and no longer asks for donations. It's been put into print by a small press, and at some point it'll be a Tor mass-market paperback, at which point I'll probably buy it.

I was at work for 16 hours yesterday, trying to meet a deadline that I hadn't known about until an hour into my workday, wherein I had to do over two days of work in one day. Much of that work - about 10 hours of it - was mindless data crunching; all I had to do was sit there and click some buttons every 5-10 minutes. I was bored out of my mind.

I figured that it was a good time to finally read some fiction from the guy whose blog I'd been reading for the past several months. I wasn't expecting much when I started, figuring I'd read a chapter to see if I liked it, and if not there were other things on my list of things I could read instead.

By the time I finished work, I'd read the first 19 chapters. It's a great fast read. Sucked me right in and kept me extremely well entertained all night. The whole thing is 22 chapters and based on the comments from past readers, most people read it in one sitting.

Some nitpicks: The grammar is a bit crummy in some places, especially when he shifts between past and present tense at random. There's typos and missing words everywhere, though really only one that actually slowed me down when I had to reread the sentence to figure out what it was trying to say. I assume these get cleaned up for the print versions. But it's definitely a story that demonstrates well that, if you have a good, fast-moving plot and interesting characters, mechanics can be easily overlooked.

The ending is a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but works well enough if you stick with looking at it as comedy. And there are a few questions that never got answered, such as why Michelle was so dead set on playing Rachel Spiegelman. The surface answer wasn't plausible enough to me by itself. Also I wanted to know more about the newbie agent Amanda; her subplot was short and though it did resolve, she disappeared after her part ended and never came back.

Overall though, it was a very well constructed story. Aside from reading it for entertainment, I was also looking at it in relation to chess, Celtic knots, and organic linear plots. So it was educational as well.

My favorite line: "Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm." I had to stop reading to laugh my head off when I saw it. (And I'm not going to explain the context here because it'll spoil it.)

End of Year Summary

(I wrote this over on SFFMuse, and then decided to put it here as well, since it covers everything. And then I added more to it too.)

Well, for starters I need to finish Nano 2006 - Amulet I. I managed another 2k words this month, and every time I pick it up it sings to me again. I just need to find the time and motivation to start each time. As Uncle Jim (Macdonald) would put it, Butt in Chair. ;)

The second Nano 2006 novel - Janis - turns out to be on the backburner for a while, until I figure out the rest of the backstory behind it. Also it has occurred to me that I've got my plotlines reversed. The side plot should be the main plot and vice versa. If that's the case, though - if the main plot is really about the plague - then what I'm really writing is the sequel to Triangle. (I haven't written Triangle yet.)

Then of course there's the minor problem that I've yet to finish any of my prior projects. Amulet II has at least a third left to go (probably around 30k more words). Temple, meanwhile, is rapidly falling apart as I shift around the backstory while writing Amulet I. Approximately a third of the original Temple setting is obsolete at the moment.

Outside of Fortress Launne, Stranger on a Bus still has a couple chapters left to go. Dragonfly needs to be revised.

I suspect what I most need to do is finish something. Anything.

Beyond that, I've been spending a lot more of my time learning about the industry in general, and ruminating on nonfiction things I might be able to do. The problem there is, I'm not convinced I have anything worthwhile to say. But I do have the 2007 edition of Writer's Market, bought after reading some advice from John Scalzi's blog, and I've been browsing through it while reading things like Miss Snark.

So, what about 2007 then? Well, for starters, I'm trying to come up with a project that I could use for Zette's 2-Year writing course at Forward Motion, which will be starting up in January. I haven't officially signed up yet since I don't have any workable ideas (now I wish I'd written down all the plot bunnies from back in October, while I was getting ready to write Amulet I and Janis). She wants people to start out with something that's not had any development to it yet. Just basic plot premise. Which means I can't use anything I already have.

While reading back over some of my past blog entries last night, I came across the whole debacle with RPoL's move to a new server. The migration disaster with the Russian mafia and all that. Apparently the Russian mafia is cliche' according to Miss Snark, but in this case it really was them... Anyway. At the time it was happening, I noticed that it would probably make for a good fictional story, so maybe Zette's thing would be a good chance to try turning it into one.

And while I'm tossing around links willy-nilly, the other main site I've been reading regularly in the past several months: Making Light. A lot of it is liberal politics, but they talk about writing, publishing, and a variety of other interesting topics as well.

Meanwhile, over on roleplay, I'm currently playing 10 characters in 7 games, running one game, and helping run another. Theoretically. However, in practice all of them are dead. This may just be due to Christmas though, as everything tends to slow down in December and not pick up again until mid-January, so I'm not too terribly worried overall about most of the games.

My game is slightly more worrisome. As far as I can tell, I really only have one active player right now, out of nine. There's two more in active chargen but they haven't said anything in a few days. If things don't pick back up by the end of January, I might just let it end. It had a good run of things, about a year and a half or so, a year of which was very active and fun. I'm a bit burnt out with roleplay in general anyway, so it would be somewhat of a relief to not have to keep running it. Really, at this point it almost hinges on whether one particular player finishes up the last of his chargen or if he's already disappeared to greener pastures (as I somewhat suspect he has).

In other news, I've started reading the first book I've opened in months. (That whole reading thing, heh. I used to be a voracious reader in my youth; now I don't read hardly at all. It's a little strange....) This one is a science nonfiction about the history of animal life on Earth. Out of Thin Air by Peter D. Ward, a professor at the University of Seattle. The author purports that the observed history is due in large part to levels of oxygen in the atmosphere (and oceans) and how this has fluctuated up and down over the eons. I've only just read through the introduction so far, but it looks interesting.

The reason I'm reading it is because one of the regular customers at the chinese takeout where I work gave it to me yesterday. Or well, lent it to me. Basically, as I understood things, he tried to read it, couldn't understand it, and now wants me to read it and tell him what it says. This could be interesting, because one of the comments he made was something like "did you know we came from the sea?" So it possibly means that I have to explain the basics of evolution to him. Which, I suspect, is going to be chock full of the creationism debate. Fun fun fun...

I guess that pretty much sums up where I am at the moment.

More Worldbuilding Rumination

I haven't written anything since Nanowrimo ended. Real Life sort of came flooding back in to inundate me, and although this has been bad for writing time, I've noticed that a month-long break has renewed my energy for getting work done. Especially work at work. I was getting pretty burnt out and feeling like I was in a rut, and spending way too much time doing personal stuff and web-browsing than working, and not feeling sufficiently guilty about it; now I'm attacking my to-do list with renewed vigor.

Meanwhile, I've gotten back into the swing of things for roleplaying. Not that it's needed. It turns out that most of my players aren't around much anymore, and although nobody has actually left the game, it's not looking like it'll revive anytime soon. Which is fine. Christmas break is coming up to throw a wrench into things anyway, so I'll worry in January.

A lot of my non-work time has been spent beta testing the next version of the roleplaying website. The admin guy is going full steam ahead trying to finish it up so he can release it, but there's still lots of bugs to find and fix. Beta testing is always interesting and fun to me, when I have time for it. Stumbling across bugs isn't so hard on its own. But writing down the steps taken to reproduce it takes some time and effort. Writing up bug reports takes as much skill as any other kind of writing, really - there's a need to be concise, precise, and clear. Also, a lot of policy issues seem to come up, when trying to decide how best to implement things. Those generate a lot of interesting discussions.

Meanwhile, to stop blathering meaninglessly and actually get to the original point of this entry...

So, 75k words later, I've managed to pinpoint a whole lot more holes in my setting. Now I'm working on filling them by doing a lot of thinking instead of writing. Once I figure everything out, I'll continue.

[members-only cut]

So, holes. Namely:
1. What exactly do I mean, everything in reality exists in layers?
2. What exactly is the spirit world, and how do the shamans get to it?
3. What's a shaman again? How are they different from regular people?
4. What are spirits? Which things have them? Where do they come from?
5. How is the dream realm related to the spirit realm? And where are they in relation to the physical realm?
6. If Charles is partly fae as he claims, what exactly is fae? Why can't he do what Aliacorba does?
7. What's the Great Cycle? How's it relate to the Great Mother? Where does this leave the Tainted?
8. What kinds of energy are there and how are they related to each other? Physical I know, but emotional? Life? Tainted? psychic? Other?
9. Do souls exist? If so, what are they in relation to everything else?
10. Amulets? Huh?

So basically, my setting has always been extremely flimsy. ;) Getting less so in the past week, though.

I saw a short cartoon film back in high school, called (I think) Flatlanders [from 1982]. Basically it was about a family of 2D objects living on a plane. One day, the protagonist (I can't remember what he was - a circle, a square, a triangle maybe...) meets a 3D object. Only, because the 2D object can only see in 2D, the 3D object looked like a circle. Furthermore, the circle just sort of magically appeared in the protagonist's house, and had a magical power of being able to make himself grow and shrink in size.

It wasn't a circle though. It was a sphere, intersecting the plane. And the sphere pulled the protagonist off of his plane and took him on a merry jaunt through a 3D world, then returned him safely back to his house where he spent the rest of his life trying to tell other people about all the wonders he saw, except they didn't believe him and thought he was mad.

So ... that's sort of the nutshell summary of the layers of reality in Fortress Launne. Each layer is like a different plane. The Vinithi shamans can see the ones nearest to the physical plane (a "realm") in addition to the physical plane, and they can also reach these other realms by walking to them. When they do, they disappear off the physical realm. Like a sphere going all the way through a 2D plane until it no longer intersects.

In Amulet I I've so far mentioned "dream realm" and "spirit realm" and "abyss." The shamans mostly walk to the spirit realm. I've decided that they can't reach the dream realm - not because they can't see it, and attempt to walk there, but because the environment is not conducive to life. Sort of like you could send a human to the moon without benefit of, say, a rocketship around them. However, the chances that they'll survive the trip are nonexistent, and even if they did somehow survive, they wouldn't last long on the moon, either.

So it is with the dream realm, which can only be reached by ... umm, dreaming. Shamans have to get there the same way as everyone else, and can't take their bodies with them.

Then there's spirits. Everything on the physical realm has one. There are also others that didn't originate on the physical realm, but can manifest there if they really want to.

Some of those become fae. And some of those fae blend with living creatures to form ... uh, whatever Charles' mother was. And then somehow got passed on to Charles. Who can't actually do any of the things that the Vinithi shamans can, because he's sort of the opposite thing - a spirit that originated from Somewhere Else and manifested permanently in the physical realm. While the shamans originate in the physical realm and can walk elsewhere. (Sort of. This one still needs work...)

There are more spirit realms than just the ones that the shamans can reach. For example, the spirit wolf pack of Temple are not on the same realm, though I need to go back and figure out exactly what the differences are at some later point.

There can be more dimensions beyond the 3D analog too. Souls, I've decided, when the bodies they're attached to die, leave the 3D analog as well and go off in some 4D direction, where not even the shamans can follow. Souls are sort of a type of spirit.

Then there's the whole thing with the Great Cycle. Which mostly refers to the great cycle of life and living in particular. Life energy, therefore, is generated by the Great Cycle. The Tainted, meanwhile, have stepped outside of the cycle; Tainted energy is the energy of death, and it comes from ... elsewhere. Some place dark and unspeakable, and possibly what will eventually spark any horror I try to do with this setting in the future.

There's also been the dynamic of light vs. shadow. The realm of the abyss is where shadows come from, and it's a place where darkness isn't just an absence of light, and shadows can be entities in their own rights.

My model for the Great Cycle has mostly been shaped by my lava lamp, I think. It has a very predictable cycle of what the lava does, from the time I turn the thing on, until the blob of lava no longer rises and just sits on the bottom.

I've named the stages. There's gestation, which is when the light is on but everything is still cold. There's birth, when the first tentacle of lava shoots out from the bottom, gets most of the way to the top, and instantly hardens. Infancy is the period after that, when nothing much happens while lava continues to heat up. Sometimes more spikes of lava shoot up and instantly harden, or the bottom disk tilts and causes the solid tubes to break and fall down. Childhood is when there are many small lava bubbles going up and down, while most of it is still solid or semisolid, and there's hills and peaks and up to three individual geysers putting up bubbles at the same time. Bubbles start getting gradually larger.

Adolescence begins when all of the lava at the bottom suddenly rises up together and goes up to the top of the lamp in a single column. Adolescence is the period of one single undulating central column, where sometimes it looks like it might break into a stalactite and stalagmite, but mostly doesn't.

Finally the thing reaches maturity. The column breaks up into blobs of lavas of all shapes and sizes. This then continues for a long time. Lava spends a lot more time at the top than bottom overall. At first everything moves up and down fairly quickly, but it gradually slows down after a while.

At senescence, the blobs have slowed down so they look like they're having trouble coming up with the energy to rise again, after falling to the bottom. They tend to have a distinct shape to them too, sort of like a 3D comma or an upside down teardrop where the end is sort of curved inward. Sometimes it will form a senescence column, which looks a lot like the adolescence column, though it doesn't last as long. Sometimes a column will seem to revive the lamp a bit, allowing for more time of "maturity" like activity.

Eventually, though, all the lava falls to the bottom and becomes one or two big blobs. Sometimes they'll continue trying to rise, in that they'll get up far enough to break contact with the bottom. But they only go up halfway if they're lucky before they start falling. Finally they just sit at the bottom, and their 'heads' continue to sink lower and lower. At that point, the show is over. I turn the lamp off.

Ummm. Anyway. To get back to the worldbuilding... so the Great Cycle is just like that, where each individual life of a creature is like a small blob of lava, going up and down in the lamp, over and over in many reincarnations. Eventually the cycle will run down, which will possibly generate all sorts of interesting horror stories later on down the line when my original Fortress Launne material has run out. That's not going to happen for a while, though.

I was also going to talk about energy. Physical energy is obvious - it's exactly the same kind people are familiar with, with lightning being the example in nature that comes to mind. Then there's life energy. Life generates it and radiates it as a part of the business of living. Tainted Ones feed off of this to stay animated, though they also transform it into something called Tainted energy, which they can use to do a number of things that living things can't. The original Tainting happened from ... "elsewhere." Outside of the Great Cycle. Something that is a symptom of the fact that things are running down, I think.

Then there's emotional energy, which is generated by souls. Spirits run on emotional energy. Then there's general run-of-the-mill psychic energy, which is basically the same as it is in the real world. Which at the moment I'm having some trouble distinguishing between the two, because I'm an empath and think of everything in terms of emotions, though I also know that it doesn't work that way for everyone.

And the Great Mother, which is the main deity that the Vinithi refer to all the time, is basically the same thing as Mother Nature. There's a duality to the world - God who created everything and Nature who runs it. This is pretty close to what I actually believe, though it doesn't translate exactly to the world of Fortress Launne. And I'm not sure if it'll ever actually come up to the point where I need to detail it out (though I've been wrong before...).

And now I've blathered longwindedly, and I'm still not even done covering everything I've come up with this week, but I'm going to stop now and go to bed.