Made it past 10k

Made it to 10,621 words yesterday, and also ended the first story. I also remembered to make a backup copy of it in RPoL Detroit.

There's already an obvious sequel setup with Adrian and Johan going to the wetlands where the Dahan are about to get pushed by Keeper into the jungle of C1, sweeping them along for the ride, and then there'll be a massive ravage. I'm going to need some Dahan characters for that though, starting with how to name them. I guess pick from various Polynesian.

After that, the third story is on the opposite side of the map, so I'll probably have to come up with alternate characters that end up going that way.

The next game with Sharp Fangs is off to a nice start. Sharp Fangs is already responsible for helping clear three lands, so that should make for some interesting stories involving jungle monsters. It'll be a while before I get to it though.

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.

Bottom of the 9th

5183 words.

I'm not doing great at racking up tons of words, but I do manage to get words written quickly when I'm writing. It's a very different process to just write thoughts about what I'm writing into the story as I go along. It definitely adds more words that way, and I don't end up stopping to worldbuild and etc instead.

I'm still in Round 1 of 4 for the story of Keeper wiping out all the invaders in its home jungle. I think part of what's keeping me slowed down is that it's not a very exciting story. I might skip to a story about a different spirit when I'm done with this one.

The game that I'm writing from is going to end soon. We are one fear card away from Terror Level 3, and there are only 3 cities on the map. We probably won't have too much trouble taking them out, once everyone figures out what they're doing.

Bottom of Day 6

2611 words so far.

I came up with a couple characters that can talk to each other, and now I'm rewriting my way through the same narrative as I wrote up in the overview. It's a lot more words when there are characters talking.

The game that I took the story from has continued on, and there are now two other big turns that Keeper has been involved in that I could write about next. It'll be a while before I'm done with the current story though. So far I'm still in Round 1, and the whole thing is four rounds long.

The next story (a sequel maybe) will be about Keeper wiping out another jungle on the edge of the island, by pushing around a whole bunch of Dahan. Thunderspeaker is also present, but doesn't do anything in that particular land, just removes some of the Dahan later to go wipe out somewhere else.

Then the one after that (we're currently playing through it), is about wiping out a mountain. That'll take two turns to finish, which means 20 years.

I guess the biggest challenge is just in getting the timeframe to stretch. I'm pretty good at writing minute-by-minute things via conversations and etc. between characters. Not so much with "time passes."

I'm not sure Keeper is the most exciting possible spirit to write stories about. Either that or I don't have enough imagination to make "wilds" more exciting than a bunch of trees. I'll have to think on it some more I guess, especially when I get to the mountain which won't have as many trees.

Welp, Day One

767 words.

I basically have no particular attachment to anything I've ever written before at this point. So I'm doing fanfic of Spirit Island instead. I figure, aim for a whole bunch of short stories based on things going on in various play-by-forum games, or if anything exciting happens in an in-person game.

So far I've written a fairly vague, overview-like narrative of the current story for Keeper, in PBF 035 at the Spirit Island forum on  Board Game Geek.

I guess we'll see how the rest of the month goes. I'll need to come up with more to write about if I'm going to get anywhere near 50k.

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.

Not doing so good so far...

It's almost the end of Day 3, and I haven't written anything yet. I tried to start, and read over a bunch of previous work, but it turns out that I'm not feeling Triangle II at all.

Not sure what else I'd rather write. Maybe some other part of Fortress Launne? I looked back over my previous posts about how I should add more about Arthur Glorian to Amulet II, but not sure how I want to do that yet either. I guess the most obvious way to do it without changing what I already have too much, is to do it from the Eenin perspective. That would probably mean adding a whole new storyline though.

Or I could go look at more Celestines. Or take another stab at Cosmic Potato. Or see if Rumen is around to let me write more on the Vengeance stories. Or do something completely different. I have an inkling to fanfic some Spirit Island (a board game), i.e. what's it like to be Dahan and pushed around by all these nature spirits all the time?

I'll think of something eventually, I hope.

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.

Thus Endeth Nano 2017

9500 total words on The Celestines, according to the official validator (Scrivener says 9494).
40,277 total words for Nanowrimo 2017.

Well, I didn't officially win, but I still accomplished a lot. :) Amulet II has a beginning, middle, and end now. The Celestines is off to a good start, and there's interest locally in continuing to do weekly write-ins even though November is over, so probably I'll keep working on that one as time goes on.

I think basically what most motivates me to write The Celestines is that it's my way of responding to how the real world seems to be crashing and burning, as the U.S. slowly spirals down into the Dark Ages. :p

I started off the story the way I was figuring to do it back in October. A squad of soldiers get captured and taken into a Celestine outpost. The story then follows one of the soldiers around while he finds out what the Celestines are all about. At the moment, I'm not sure there's much actual story there, so much as a guy just wandering around exploring. He's out of stuff to look at in a basic exploratory outpost though, so maybe I should ship him off to an established city soon. Either that or some plot needs to actually happen.

Most of my names for people and places are coming from a random sci-fi name generator, which speeds things up quite a bit.

Done with Amulet II!

30,751 words to complete Amulet II. 254 of those were added to Triangle II, and 503 are discard words. (The official validator says 30,777.)

This is in addition to the 55k that I wrote in 2005, though a large amount of that version is getting moved into Triangle II. Most importantly, the story now has a reasonably workable beginning, middle, and end. :)

About half of the last 5k words was about Sue Ellen. I'm not actually sure it fits where it does, but not sure what else to do with it. Almost all of her story has to happen after Antoine has left, and it can't be immediately after - but there's not really much to Amulet II after his departure, so it pretty much all gets tacked on to the end. Maybe I should split it off into a separate short story or something.

Oh well. Now I have to figure out whether I can come up with 20k words on something else. I'm kind of thinking to maybe try out that starting premise I had in mind for the Celestines...

Now I just need to tie up all the loose ends, once I figure out what those are...

25,717 words.

I'm kind of lost on how to actually finish things off, so I figure it's time to write another blog post to figure that out. Lessee, so, what's everyone doing...

Adrien's funeral went along well enough (for everyone other than Antoine), and now he's good and buried.

Mindy has all the historical and cultural artifacts she needs at this point, and doesn't need to steal more things. Her deal with Plushenko is working out fine, and Bossdon is going to attack Plushenko on schedule. None of this has anything to do with the main story so...

Antoine has been recalled out of the city, and the elder mages have promoted Chance and Felicia to replace him. They are now busy doing paperwork related to that and aren't going to get back to the art project for a while, by which time they will have lost all momentum, because it wasn't their project in the first place, it was Adrien's and Antoine's, and they will neglect to get back to it and forget all about it.

Felicia might get around to visiting the Eenin Culture Center to look for the pearl, but not in a timely manner and she won't actually find it.

Need to mention that Rita Harwood gets promoted to journer. Possibly some other random character along with her, to replace Chance and Felicia.

Nathaniel has gotten what he wanted - to distract the mages away from looking at the Golden Flame.

The Eenin are happy again. No one is coming to steal their stuff after all, as far as they ever knew.

According to my original notes, Sue Ellen was supposed to have been freed from Antoine when he left, and been passed over to Mindy. That's actually a whole extra side story that I completely forgot about. Maybe I should figure out how to put that back in... Sue Ellen does come back up in Myan.

Maybe need a scene about Jacob returning to the university after he finds out Antoine has left.

I also need to rewrite the spirit cougars in Temple. They really aren't anything at all like the spirit wolves. The wolves come about when humans are bestowed a fire petal from the Golden Flame. There are no actual wolves in Aunlania - the spirit wolves got there because of Edward.

The spirit cougars, meanwhile, are all from actual cougars. Their views and outlooks on life are very different from human norms, and this is reflected in how they communicate (to Janis, it was mostly in riddles). I'm probably going to have to redo Iorli from the beginning.

I need to add something about the lemming basket back in Amulet I, assuming I hadn't already (I might've done that actually and just forgotten about it). And figure out what chunks of Amulet I v2 about Hidden Glory I can salvage, and where to add it in Amulet I v3 part 2.

Bottom of Day 20

23,291 words.

This is not turning out to be a very wordy Nanowrimo for me. At this point I'll be happy if I get to the end of Amulet II. Which is likely within the next 5k words or so. Of course, I thought that I'd be done by 20k words, and then ended up going off on lots of roundabout tangents, and that might happen some more...

I've written most of what I said I needed to write in the previous post at this point. Haven't got back to the lemming basket, not sure if I will or not. There was one snag in there, when I reread Amulet I to refresh my memory on what happened with the pearl, and noticed that Aliacorba had actually taken it with him back then. So I had to write about 300 words of Triangle II to get Janis to put it back, so that it would be in position for the mages to steal it.

Overall, this whole story feels like it's just there to bridge gaps between stuff that happened earlier, and stuff that happened later. I'll have to assume that when I come back to it again, after some time off, that I'll be able to figure out how to make it its own worthwhile tale.

Next up: writing out the fallout after the funeral, where Antoine leaves the city. The original point of the story was to get Antoine and Adrien out of the picture via clashing with Mindy. I no longer remember why they need to be out of the picture, but, well, it's what my master timeline says happened, so...

Top of Day 12

12,317 words. The standard goal by the end of today is supposed to be 20k, so I'm kind of behind... I think my personal goal is just to reach a The End on Amulet II by the time I'm done messing with it, before I allow myself to move on to work on something else.

So, lessee, where are we...

1. Nathaniel and Mindy have made a deal, where Mindy will stand up and denounce Antoine at Adrien's funeral, in exchange for a rare book from Nathaniel's collection to give to Treehouse, who is currently blackmailing her for rare local artifacts. Nathaniel just wants to see Antoine's status undermined enough that he'll get called out of the area so he will stop trying to mess with the north anchor of the binding spell.

2. Allen and Thomas both went to visit the Eenin at the same time for the same reason. Nathaniel sent Allen; Chance sent Thomas. They met each other for the first time in Branitel. The Eenin are now alerted that the mages are going to try to sneak onto their lands to do archaeological digs without permission.

3. The mages are getting ready to try a translocation spell on the Hall of Trees. What they're seeing is actually the pearl. I need it to be unburied and removed from the Hall of Trees, so, I guess during Amulet II is when it'll have happened. Not sure yet how far the pearl is going to get - not all the way to the mages probably. Eventually it needs to find its way over to Janis.

Messing with the pearl will also mess with Thomas and the sentient spirit cougars.

4. Somewhere in all this I need to put the spirit wolves back into the story. They were part of the land dispute storyline the first time, but that's mostly getting moved to Triangle II, so now they need at least a cameo or some tangential references. Especially considering that it's their totem in the second point that the mages are in.

5. Somewhere in there, should throw in that all of the other faint points the mages see on their map are amulets bestowed by Hidden Glory that have been passed down as heirlooms for hundreds of years. I guess one of the mages needs to get ahold of one at some point and comment about this.

6. Hmm. Actually, the Eenin are getting ready to send a messenger to the king to strongly remind him that trespassers aren't allowed on Eenin lands. Maybe the messenger could be wearing one of the amulets.

7. I guess I should probably figure out some backstory to that lemming basket. It was lost and buried at the site of Mindy's farm some time back during (before?) Amulet I. At the moment, the king has it. Not sure what he's going to do with it. Frank collects such things, so maybe it just ends up in his collection.

8. Jacob is basically out of the story until the end. He's not going to want to go back to the university until Antoine has left.

Top of Day 4

4094 words so far.

Adrien is dead (well, "dead") and out of the story.
Sarabelle has found out from Felicia that they've spotted the north anchor point, and is going to tell Nathaniel.
Felicia is going to the library to research translocation spells, which she will eventually present to Antoine.
Chance has issues of conscience regarding Jacob.
Thomas is going to talk to the Eenin about how the mages are planning to show up and excavate their sacred lands.

Stuff needs to happen, that causes Nathaniel to decide that the best course of action is to let loose Mindy on Antoine.
Somewhere near the end there's going to be a funeral scene for Adrien.

I guess I'm at the "stuff needs to happen" part and kind of stuck on what to put there.

At the starting line for Nanowrimo 2017

I've managed to read Amulet II in detail and make some notes. Broadly, about a third of it is getting moved to Triangle II.

Specifically, the parts about land disputes that I was originally just going to cut for being boring. It turns out that in there was my perfectly plausible motivation for Janis to set up her culture center, which is what Triangle II part 3 is supposed to be about. I will probably still change the details so that they're less boring, but the general gist is that a real estate developer wants to turn portions of sacred native folk land into a suburb, and the native folk need to unite to stop that. It will also be a good time for Amato Bordoni to have met Mindy in the first place, since that's about when he first appeared in the area.

The rest of Amulet II then just becomes Antoine and Adrien collecting magical artwork, discovering that some of it is on Mindy's secret farm, and trying to convince Mindy to let them onto her farm. While they're doing that, they veer uncomfortably close to Nathaniel's north anchor point, which would be why he wants to get rid of them, which would be why he would've told Mindy about Antoine's dirty secrets from his past so that she can embarrass him in public and cause his superiors to recall and reassign him.

There are hints in there about how Mindy has problems of her own with smuggling rare artwork to please a faction in Myan. I was trying to come up with a reason why Mindy wouldn't've just handed over (or sold at exorbitant rates) the artwork she found on her farm. So that needs to get more fleshed out and will tie into stuff that happens in Birthright and possibly also Fall of Myan.

There are also character bits about Thomas and Jacob getting to know each other better, Felicia getting introduced in general and to Mindy, Chance and Sarabelle being friends, etc. Some of that needs to be reworked, but the general gist should stay the same.

There's also the matter of the portal into the fae realm that the mages discover, and whether they're going to do anything interesting about it at some point in the story. At the very least, this would've been when Felicia first saw the Golden Flame, which means in Temple she would've known about what and where it is (so, more revisions to Temple). I'm kind of thinking I can't just leave all of that hanging while the plot twists away from it and never goes back... is Amulet II the best place to reveal all the details about Arthur Glorian? I'm not sure. Maybe it's as good a place as any, since I'm not sure what else Amulet II is good for. At the moment it kind of feels like a filler story. It would probably have some strong effects on all the books that happen after it though.

Finally, my current thought about Triangle I from Antoine's perspective is that the poisoning of Frank was an accident after all. That would make things simpler than coming up with some sort of complicated plot about it. What he was trying to do was establish a secret control mechanism on Frank, unbeknownst to Frank and Henry, that he could activate whenever Frank was asleep. That would've been his way of fulfilling the assignment to gain a foothold on the king. Only, it went wrong...

I'm not sure how to proceed with all of that worked out. The obvious next step is more a matter of revision than writing anything new, and I'm not sure new writing is going to come anywhere close to 50,000 words. I might also put some more work into Triangle II this month to round things out.

Thinking about starting to think about prepping for Nanowrimo 2017

It's almost time for Nanowrimo 2017. My plan is to rewrite Amulet II. It and Temple both need to be redone, and I did Temple last year, so it makes sense to take a stab at Amulet II next.

So of course most of my fiction thoughts lately have been about The Celestines. I have the beginnings of a story premise worked out. A squadron of soldiers on the losing side of a battle for a planet find out that they're the only ones still alive. They get captured by the winning side, taken to the Celestine exploratory outpost, and slowly assimilated into the Celestine way of doing things. It would introduce the Celestines in a gradual way that readers could follow along, before getting to anything epic. I can already tell this'll be the beginning of another massive series...

I guess I could always try to do both. I've worked on two separate stories before, though in past cases I took a ton of time off work to do it. Not sure I'll be able to do that this time. I guess I'll figure out what I end up doing right before the starting line...

Camp Nano April 2017 Summary

1348 words toward the Emerald Sword story.

I'd originally figured on using the time for revisions to Fortress Launne, but when the month started, I really wasn't feeling it. So then I just started reading over stuff from the top, and the top of the file is Emerald Sword because it's a likely prequel to the rest of Fortress Launne, and I thought: hmm. Maybe I should finish that instead.

Obviously that didn't happen. I stopped before because I needed to figure out what the prophecy with the shetils was all about. I still haven't done that yet, but I did advance Flaunbere (the protagonist) farther along. They are now all standing under the magic birch tree where the prophecy part of it is supposed to start - just as soon as I figure out what that is.

Overall it was a fun little revisit. I really like the first 6k words and do want to finish it eventually. The whole thing will be probably end up around 20k words, just like every other story arc I've ever written in the Fortress Launne series.

Done with Nanowrimo 2016

50,208 words.

7,550 words for Amulet I.
42,623 words for Temple.
Discrepancies because the Nanowrimo validator counts more words than Scrivener.

So now I've set up James for a staged assassination by the Mudawi Three. I'm not sure at this point when I'll try to write the rest of it out. Maybe during Christmas break.

It's been a fun month. I think I'm getting better at this writing thing. Other than that, I don't have anything profound to say.

Working on Amulet I Part 3

48,457 words. I've started using the official validator to count my words for me, and it gets more words than Scrivener does. Somewhere I've gotten padded up by about 50 words.

Aliacorba's second ritual didn't turn out to be an actual official ritual. It turns out that the cougars were already bound to the pearl from a previous arrangement, and so when Aliacorba finds it, the cougars transferred over to him with it. Sentient cougars for basically the same reason as there were sentient wolves. I like the way that the scene turned out, but it didn't get me as many words as I was hoping. It was close to 4k by the time I was done.

So then I had to come up with another 5k words from something else. I reread what I'd written for James after he went back to Lagarnica. I liked the first two scenes. I also recalled that I need to put the Mudawi Three somewhere in Amulet I, so why not have them try to kill James for Lady Celena, who wants him dead so that her own son William will inherit House Duchene? Only, James runs into them first before they meet up with Lady Celena, and now he's going to talk them into helping him fake his death so he can run away again. Then he'll go back to his beloved Moraina, who will hopefully still remember him and want him back by then, and everyone will live happily ever after.

That's the plan, anyway. I'm about halfway through the conversation between James and the Mudawis. I think I can come up with 1500 more words for this by the end of tomorrow...