10,502 words.
It was pretty obvious around 5k words or so that I wasn't going to have enough things to rant about for 50k words, and 10k was about as far as it was going to get. I got there, and have more words than I would've had if I hadn't participated, so, good enough. A lengthy worldbuilding exercise doesn't turn out to be as much
fun as writing an actual story, so I probably won't try it again.
I think mostly I was just doing it this year to be social, which is kind of ironic because there aren't all that many people in the local area to be social with about Nanowrimo. The write-ins weren't especially well-attended, and neither was the wrap party yesterday. I didn't go to the kickoff because I wasn't here, but from what the ML said, it was pretty small also.
Oh well.
Meanwhile, the academic paper I'd been working on for the last six months got officially submitted to the journal on Dec. 1, and that felt almost like winning Nanowrimo. So I definitely accomplished things in November that were writing-related, even if they weren't fiction. Again, good enough. :)
Showing posts with label nonfiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nonfiction. Show all posts
2015/12/07
2015/10/17
Status Check on Writing since Summer | Prepping for Nano 2015
I've not been in a fictional frame of mind for quite a while. Most of what I've been doing for the last several months (since early June) is academic writing for a couple of papers that are all getting submitted to a journal for a special issue, as part of a series. It's been slow going - partly because we're all making it up as we go along (this is new, groundbreaking type stuff), and partly because I haven't done any academic writing to speak of for over a decade and I'm rusty at being all high-falutin' conceptual about everything. There's about 20 of us involved, and another dozen papers besides mine supposedly getting submitted for this, plus a big joint paper that explains the whole project that has already been submitted.
I'm kind of super burnt out on it actually. I need to finish the second draft though, and then finish making all the ancillary packages to put into repositories so I can reference them in the paper, and then send it out for another round of feedback. I really wish that feedback would consist of "looks great, leave it exactly like that!" more often.
Meanwhile, Nanowrimo 2015 is looming on the horizon.
The only thing remotely fictional on my mind lately is the beginnings of an idea for an advanced spacefaring civilization - and that part is actually an afterthought. The real idea is basically: what kind of civilization would I want to live in, as influenced by my paying too much attention to national political and social current events? And what would it take to build it?
So now I want to write down an answer to that, and it'll be some form of socialist utopia, but it would have to be at least initially funded by unfettered capitalism. Then I'll make up a race of people who are doing that, and it can become a setting for some novels or a roleplaying game.
The people are currently called the Celestines. The name just appeared out of nowhere while I needed to name an organization for my current game on rpol (Numenera: something :p ). I figured, might as well go with that, and if my players actually head in the direction of investigating the plot hook involving them, I'll have backstory to work from.
Aside from running one game, I'm allegedly playing in two others, but they're both dead. One is Dante's latest VtM, and he has disappeared off the face of the earth again, and I'm sure he'll reappear at some point when it's least convenient for me to play, as usual. The other is a sci-fi horror game that Dana is running, except she seems to have lost interest in play-by-post for the moment. Then there's a weekly live game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying which is mostly going pretty well, when enough people can actually show up to it. So overall: roleplaying is at a manageable level, and I'm not horribly overcommitted like I used to be, nor do I plan to add any more games.
2010/02/24
More nonfiction updating
Of course, right after I decided to set up shop at Associated Content, I checked out Hubfolio. Then someone mentioned Bukisa - which does the same thing, pay per thousand views, but at over twice the rate. So: all mention of "Associated Content" in my previous post should be replaced with "Bukisa." I signed up and set up my profile, but haven't written any articles for them yet. Been feeling kind of lazy about moving previously existing articles off eHow. So I'll probably write my RotMK series there first.
I did some keyword checking, and nobody is searching for RotMK, period. It wouldn't be a good thing to put on Bright Hub, even if they approved, since it wouldn't give me the number of views I need to carry the science articles - which is the primary purpose of writing them there. However, because I'd already pitched Bloons (and the editor even approved it initially), and because I'd mentioned moving my Dragcave articles to Hubfolio, I'm going to hold off on doing anything with those just yet. At this rate, though, it doesn't look like I'm going to get added to Hubfolio anytime soon, and even if I did, I'm not allowed to link to any articles on it. So very likely the Dragcave ones will be going to Bukisa too.
Anyway: the month is winding down, and I did write five articles this month, two of which are still in committee. I also made some diagrams to add to the micro RNA article, but they got rejected. No explanation either - I'm planning to ask next month when editor crunchtime is over. Have to get the environmental science editor to kick the fish articles back out of her queue too.
But all that wasn't why I started this blog post. I also signed up for a free Intro to SEO series over email, and they keep giving me links to useful stuff. So the point of this blog post is to have a list in one place.
1. SEO Glossary
2. Google Traffic Estimator
3. Keyword Suggestion Tool
I did some keyword checking, and nobody is searching for RotMK, period. It wouldn't be a good thing to put on Bright Hub, even if they approved, since it wouldn't give me the number of views I need to carry the science articles - which is the primary purpose of writing them there. However, because I'd already pitched Bloons (and the editor even approved it initially), and because I'd mentioned moving my Dragcave articles to Hubfolio, I'm going to hold off on doing anything with those just yet. At this rate, though, it doesn't look like I'm going to get added to Hubfolio anytime soon, and even if I did, I'm not allowed to link to any articles on it. So very likely the Dragcave ones will be going to Bukisa too.
Anyway: the month is winding down, and I did write five articles this month, two of which are still in committee. I also made some diagrams to add to the micro RNA article, but they got rejected. No explanation either - I'm planning to ask next month when editor crunchtime is over. Have to get the environmental science editor to kick the fish articles back out of her queue too.
But all that wasn't why I started this blog post. I also signed up for a free Intro to SEO series over email, and they keep giving me links to useful stuff. So the point of this blog post is to have a list in one place.
1. SEO Glossary
2. Google Traffic Estimator
3. Keyword Suggestion Tool
2010/02/15
Just a general update
Well, let's see. Dragonfly didn't win, and didn't make the top 25 finalists list either. I showed it around to a local writing group I joined a few weeks ago, called The Matchbox Society, which is sort of like a critique circle. Every week we (supposedly) meet at the local coffeehouse (the same one we used during Nanowrimo, which is how these people found us) (and by "us" I mean me and one other diehard; there were four of us back in November but two of them disappeared over the break), and take turns sharing material for critique. The idea is to read stuff out loud - but, most of the group is poets, so it makes sense they'd come up with that rule; I'm not sure it works so well for longer prose. And I didn't read Dragonfly out loud to them, just handed out copies on paper.
The other thing I dislike about the group is their habit of posting up work for review on a public website. Low traffic perhaps, but even so, first publication rights can come into play. Which is why I printed out Dragonfly on paper for them. I should probably say something to them about this at the next meeting.
Anyhoo. So overall they liked it. One wanted me to go more into detail about the elephants. One pointed out that dragonflies don't have proboscises, they have mandibles. Several said that some of my extra phrases were repetitive and could be removed. So, all in all, I get to revise it some more before sending it out again. I haven't picked out the next place it's going yet - have to look around on Duotrope.
My next idea is to start showing them Edward in installments, one at a time. This would motivate me to actually work on it in advance of showing it to them. But, I haven't gotten back into fiction lately because nonfiction (aka Brighthub) has been eating up all my time and brainpower.
Ahh, Brighthub. Lots and lots of new bureaucratic hoops. Like only being allowed to write 5 articles per month as a newbie. In January I didn't manage to write anything at all for them due to all the snafus they were having. This month I've written three so far, two of which are published, one of which is still stuck in editor committee. I'm committed to a fourth and haven't figured out what to do for the fifth yet - ideally, something in genetics will grab my attention if the editor ever puts up the second list. If not, I'll probably end up doing a third gaming article, since that's where I'm most likely to get high views.
I joined gaming so that I could write some high-view articles to carry my low-view science articles, so that I'll continue to be allowed to write articles past April. So far it looks like it might actually work - especially if this month's science articles carry themselves. The new editors for those channels have both gone with "here's a list of keywords, pick two at a time." So, less freedom for me to write whatever I want. However, it makes sense to write articles that people are actually searching for, and in Environmental Science at least, they're still fairly interesting topics.
Gaming, meanwhile, is all about having people suggest what they want to write. It's a very large community, and the main editor doesn't actually pay much attention to individual articles. There's not a whole lot of editting going on. He just approves the topic idea, then when I submit it, he publishes it. I assume he must at least glance over it first, but he doesn't notice typos so it isn't a very close read. I'm also supposed to figure out all of my own keywords. Which means that a few days ago I got to playing around with SEO Book.
Basically, it tells me what people are searching on. It doesn't tell me how many good results they get, however, so I'm still out of luck on that one (though I suppose I could just google them all myself to see what comes up). On the other hand, I can use it for more than just Brighthub gaming articles, and thus, I have new plans...
1. Check and tweak the SEO of every eHow article, starting with the oldest.
I've already fixed up my earwax article; if it got as many views as the electric toothbrush one, it would actually be my top earner. I still need to tweak the toothbrush one too. Also did one of the two Dragon Cave articles (since my 4th Brighthub is also going to be about Dragon Cave, that's how I got to looking at the eHow articles...). After that, oldest first.
2. Once they're all tweaked, make blog posts that list all articles to date, both eHow and Brighthub.
Evilkate tells me that blog links are excellent for search engine rankings, and since I have two that get indexed (my main blog, also here on Blogger, and my LJ), why not use them? I might start posting monthly summaries of my articles if I really get prolific at this. Plus I've been putting the science ones at SFFMuse too, so I'll continue to do that. And tweet them of course.
3. It turns out that a lot of the eHow articles would've made more money at Associated Content after all. They pay $1.50 per 1,000 views. Basically what it boils down to is that high view, low earnings eHow articles would earn more at that flat rate. Which is, sadly, most of them.
a. Such as gaming articles. Those still work best at Brighthub rather than AC, because not only do we get paid by number of views, we also get the $10 advance. However, gaming articles rejected from Brighthub (if any) will just go there.
b. Also, new plan for the Bloons series. How to win for Bloons 1 and 4 are already at eHow and might as well stay there. Bloons 2 and 3 articles can go over to AC. The three-part guide I want to do for Brighthub will still go there if they ever let me into PC Gaming, and then my overall index to everything will be at AC as well.
c. The main Dragon Cave article is going to get copied over to AC under their nonexclusive display-only policy. That article gets a ridiculous number of views, like twice what the electric toothbrush article gets, and yet earns very little (like a third of what electric toothbrush gets). Having it in both places will mean that it competes with itself - but I've already linked everyone at Dragonspam LJ to eHow, and that's where all the links point, so I don't want to remove it. I did tweak up the SEO on it some though.
And speaking of Dragon Cave - there's a lot of search for guides about what egg hatches into what, so I'll be pitching to write a guide at Brighthub next month too. (Right after I pitch my Restaurant City ingredients guide that I'd also like to write; unless I write that this month if genetics falls through).
4. The other big thing I want to do for gaming is a series about Emperor: RotMK. The main con is that it's an older game, out since 2003. I'll probably have to prove that people search about it. However, I've been playing it a LOT lately, and want to write "how to set up housing right at the start", "how to set up trade", and "how to take care of menagerie animals." I could also do a review article, or an overall intro to the game kind of guide article (or several).
My first choice would be to put this up at Brighthub, if I get into PC Gaming. Failing that, Associated Content.
5. Any science article rejects are still planned for Google Knol so far. Though I've also looked at HubPages, which Robert likes. I'm kind of on the fence so far, and probably won't decide until/unless Brighthub actually rejects something. They haven't so far.
6. And speaking of Knol. I really, really should get around to Mandarin Teaching Alphabet to start myself off there. (Then again, there are a couple eHows I've had on my list for over a year - grid method on Robert's Celtic bird, and "how to eat healthy" which should do well at a place like eHow). (Plus I need to update my "how to make money online" article, even though it doesn't make any actual money.)
So, lots to do. And it's good to have a plan. Of course, so far I'm just doing the procrastination part of the proceedings. But I'll get going eventually...
The other thing I dislike about the group is their habit of posting up work for review on a public website. Low traffic perhaps, but even so, first publication rights can come into play. Which is why I printed out Dragonfly on paper for them. I should probably say something to them about this at the next meeting.
Anyhoo. So overall they liked it. One wanted me to go more into detail about the elephants. One pointed out that dragonflies don't have proboscises, they have mandibles. Several said that some of my extra phrases were repetitive and could be removed. So, all in all, I get to revise it some more before sending it out again. I haven't picked out the next place it's going yet - have to look around on Duotrope.
My next idea is to start showing them Edward in installments, one at a time. This would motivate me to actually work on it in advance of showing it to them. But, I haven't gotten back into fiction lately because nonfiction (aka Brighthub) has been eating up all my time and brainpower.
Ahh, Brighthub. Lots and lots of new bureaucratic hoops. Like only being allowed to write 5 articles per month as a newbie. In January I didn't manage to write anything at all for them due to all the snafus they were having. This month I've written three so far, two of which are published, one of which is still stuck in editor committee. I'm committed to a fourth and haven't figured out what to do for the fifth yet - ideally, something in genetics will grab my attention if the editor ever puts up the second list. If not, I'll probably end up doing a third gaming article, since that's where I'm most likely to get high views.
I joined gaming so that I could write some high-view articles to carry my low-view science articles, so that I'll continue to be allowed to write articles past April. So far it looks like it might actually work - especially if this month's science articles carry themselves. The new editors for those channels have both gone with "here's a list of keywords, pick two at a time." So, less freedom for me to write whatever I want. However, it makes sense to write articles that people are actually searching for, and in Environmental Science at least, they're still fairly interesting topics.
Gaming, meanwhile, is all about having people suggest what they want to write. It's a very large community, and the main editor doesn't actually pay much attention to individual articles. There's not a whole lot of editting going on. He just approves the topic idea, then when I submit it, he publishes it. I assume he must at least glance over it first, but he doesn't notice typos so it isn't a very close read. I'm also supposed to figure out all of my own keywords. Which means that a few days ago I got to playing around with SEO Book.
Basically, it tells me what people are searching on. It doesn't tell me how many good results they get, however, so I'm still out of luck on that one (though I suppose I could just google them all myself to see what comes up). On the other hand, I can use it for more than just Brighthub gaming articles, and thus, I have new plans...
1. Check and tweak the SEO of every eHow article, starting with the oldest.
I've already fixed up my earwax article; if it got as many views as the electric toothbrush one, it would actually be my top earner. I still need to tweak the toothbrush one too. Also did one of the two Dragon Cave articles (since my 4th Brighthub is also going to be about Dragon Cave, that's how I got to looking at the eHow articles...). After that, oldest first.
2. Once they're all tweaked, make blog posts that list all articles to date, both eHow and Brighthub.
Evilkate tells me that blog links are excellent for search engine rankings, and since I have two that get indexed (my main blog, also here on Blogger, and my LJ), why not use them? I might start posting monthly summaries of my articles if I really get prolific at this. Plus I've been putting the science ones at SFFMuse too, so I'll continue to do that. And tweet them of course.
3. It turns out that a lot of the eHow articles would've made more money at Associated Content after all. They pay $1.50 per 1,000 views. Basically what it boils down to is that high view, low earnings eHow articles would earn more at that flat rate. Which is, sadly, most of them.
a. Such as gaming articles. Those still work best at Brighthub rather than AC, because not only do we get paid by number of views, we also get the $10 advance. However, gaming articles rejected from Brighthub (if any) will just go there.
b. Also, new plan for the Bloons series. How to win for Bloons 1 and 4 are already at eHow and might as well stay there. Bloons 2 and 3 articles can go over to AC. The three-part guide I want to do for Brighthub will still go there if they ever let me into PC Gaming, and then my overall index to everything will be at AC as well.
c. The main Dragon Cave article is going to get copied over to AC under their nonexclusive display-only policy. That article gets a ridiculous number of views, like twice what the electric toothbrush article gets, and yet earns very little (like a third of what electric toothbrush gets). Having it in both places will mean that it competes with itself - but I've already linked everyone at Dragonspam LJ to eHow, and that's where all the links point, so I don't want to remove it. I did tweak up the SEO on it some though.
And speaking of Dragon Cave - there's a lot of search for guides about what egg hatches into what, so I'll be pitching to write a guide at Brighthub next month too. (Right after I pitch my Restaurant City ingredients guide that I'd also like to write; unless I write that this month if genetics falls through).
4. The other big thing I want to do for gaming is a series about Emperor: RotMK. The main con is that it's an older game, out since 2003. I'll probably have to prove that people search about it. However, I've been playing it a LOT lately, and want to write "how to set up housing right at the start", "how to set up trade", and "how to take care of menagerie animals." I could also do a review article, or an overall intro to the game kind of guide article (or several).
My first choice would be to put this up at Brighthub, if I get into PC Gaming. Failing that, Associated Content.
5. Any science article rejects are still planned for Google Knol so far. Though I've also looked at HubPages, which Robert likes. I'm kind of on the fence so far, and probably won't decide until/unless Brighthub actually rejects something. They haven't so far.
6. And speaking of Knol. I really, really should get around to Mandarin Teaching Alphabet to start myself off there. (Then again, there are a couple eHows I've had on my list for over a year - grid method on Robert's Celtic bird, and "how to eat healthy" which should do well at a place like eHow). (Plus I need to update my "how to make money online" article, even though it doesn't make any actual money.)
So, lots to do. And it's good to have a plan. Of course, so far I'm just doing the procrastination part of the proceedings. But I'll get going eventually...
2009/12/23
December Progress
Well, so far my month hasn't gone at all the way I'd planned... instead of writing two BrightHub and two eHow articles, I ended up writing one BrightHub and (so far) seven eHows. None of the eHows I wrote were the two I'd originally had in mind. In fact I now have a whole series for eHow I could do, all based on Bloons Tower Defense.
BrightHub, meanwhile, is completely revamping the way they do things, which makes them less attractive to write for (which is why I only wrote one of my assigned articles). I'd signed up so I could write low-view basic science articles and get a $10 advance, rather than put them out on ad-revenue-only where they won't earn anything. But now BrightHub only wants high-view articles, and people who can't do it get axed in April. Which sort of defeats the whole point of writing for them. The environmental science channel editor thinks I can still meet their minimum quota though. So I'll give it the old college try...
They also added me to five more channels, all health related. I guess I should probably write at least one article for each of them. January looks like it's going to be pretty busy, nonfiction-wise.
As for fiction, well, the group that formed up during Nanowrimo is going to start weekly meetings in January, so I'll have ample opportunity to at least think about writing. Rationally, I should finish off Bus and start sending it around, then start working on Amulet I again. At this point I'm thinking I need to just let Aliacorba/Thomas tell me his life story in first person. He hasn't been very cooperative with most of what I want to do with the stories where he's a major character, so, I guess I should just let him do the talking for once.
Rumen, meanwhile, is starting to reassert his presence too. So I'll probably be back to working on stuff with him in it too.
Also, so far no response from Americorps. Of course, neither of the references I listed have returned their comments about me, and I'm hoping that it's not waiting on that. Meanwhile I found another science research assistant job to apply for, this one in Seattle. We'll see if that one pans out any better than any of the rest...
BrightHub, meanwhile, is completely revamping the way they do things, which makes them less attractive to write for (which is why I only wrote one of my assigned articles). I'd signed up so I could write low-view basic science articles and get a $10 advance, rather than put them out on ad-revenue-only where they won't earn anything. But now BrightHub only wants high-view articles, and people who can't do it get axed in April. Which sort of defeats the whole point of writing for them. The environmental science channel editor thinks I can still meet their minimum quota though. So I'll give it the old college try...
They also added me to five more channels, all health related. I guess I should probably write at least one article for each of them. January looks like it's going to be pretty busy, nonfiction-wise.
As for fiction, well, the group that formed up during Nanowrimo is going to start weekly meetings in January, so I'll have ample opportunity to at least think about writing. Rationally, I should finish off Bus and start sending it around, then start working on Amulet I again. At this point I'm thinking I need to just let Aliacorba/Thomas tell me his life story in first person. He hasn't been very cooperative with most of what I want to do with the stories where he's a major character, so, I guess I should just let him do the talking for once.
Rumen, meanwhile, is starting to reassert his presence too. So I'll probably be back to working on stuff with him in it too.
Also, so far no response from Americorps. Of course, neither of the references I listed have returned their comments about me, and I'm hoping that it's not waiting on that. Meanwhile I found another science research assistant job to apply for, this one in Seattle. We'll see if that one pans out any better than any of the rest...
2009/10/31
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. :)
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. :)
2009/09/24
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...
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...
2008/08/31
Labor Day Novel 2008
I'm 3925 words in to Tragedy of the Hand. Well, actually some of it is still technically called End of Vengeance (as opposed to the later half of it with Craig, which is Vengeance Returns) (although, actually, that back half might end up being End of Rage which is similar and yet completely different. I haven't decided yet.).
Uh, anyway. Most of the words is one chapter with four scenes in a market. It introduced Cassandra, the main MC who was originally going to get most of the viewpoints, and Gray, the second MC who is the tragic Hand. I'm only a paragraph into the second chapter.
Then I also wrote a small prologue-like opener to the Rumen half of the story, which happened sixteen years earlier. I'm not sure where I'm going with that part of the story yet - whether to continue from in that timeframe or jump forward to the "present."
And the third thread that I could continue, and have it still count since it's technically still all the same story, is Chapter 4 where Craig meets Aaron. I might end up doing that if I get stalled out on both of the other two too long.
I have no illusions that I'll end up with a finished novelette-sized story by the end of this weekend. Basically I'm just declaring the time Fiction Top Priority, and getting as much fiction written as I can.
After it's over, I'll have to switch to nonfiction (mainly eHow) for the next two months before Nanowrimo. Robert mentioned an excellent idea: I can write about stuff that writers will care about (how to attach lasers to the heads of sharks, etc.), and pimp them all on the Nanowrimo Q&A board. The obvious corollary is that I can get article ideas by reading the Q&A board as well. Writerly subjects might only be popular for two months per year, but there are a lot of writers...
Uh, anyway. Most of the words is one chapter with four scenes in a market. It introduced Cassandra, the main MC who was originally going to get most of the viewpoints, and Gray, the second MC who is the tragic Hand. I'm only a paragraph into the second chapter.
Then I also wrote a small prologue-like opener to the Rumen half of the story, which happened sixteen years earlier. I'm not sure where I'm going with that part of the story yet - whether to continue from in that timeframe or jump forward to the "present."
And the third thread that I could continue, and have it still count since it's technically still all the same story, is Chapter 4 where Craig meets Aaron. I might end up doing that if I get stalled out on both of the other two too long.
I have no illusions that I'll end up with a finished novelette-sized story by the end of this weekend. Basically I'm just declaring the time Fiction Top Priority, and getting as much fiction written as I can.
After it's over, I'll have to switch to nonfiction (mainly eHow) for the next two months before Nanowrimo. Robert mentioned an excellent idea: I can write about stuff that writers will care about (how to attach lasers to the heads of sharks, etc.), and pimp them all on the Nanowrimo Q&A board. The obvious corollary is that I can get article ideas by reading the Q&A board as well. Writerly subjects might only be popular for two months per year, but there are a lot of writers...
2008/08/12
Shifting my writing schedule and priorities ...
I finished Chapter 3 of Vengeance last night. It's not as pretty as the first two chapters, but it's done. Everything that needed to happen in it happened, and a motive for why Hernando wants Craig alive just dropped out of the sky while I was writing it. In short, Jessica's task can no longer be completed by any vampire, and here comes a non-vampire who could possibly do it. Just because he's a mortal enemy is only a minor problem. ;)
So in Chapter 4, Craig will be visiting the bookstore, and I'll be introducing Aaron to the non-game audience for the first time. Should be fun. While Craig was talking to Hernando, Aaron's love interest Alice was getting kidnapped by Hernando's rival, so Aaron isn't having a very good day...
That's what's happening with the front half of Vengeance. The back half, meanwhile, is now the opposite side of Tragedy of the Hand - which, right on schedule, I've still not gotten Round Tuit and it'll be what I tackle for Labor Day Novel 2008 coming up in a few weeks.
In general, I realized last night that at the rate I keep pushing fiction to the bottom of the priority list, I was never going to get anything done. Meanwhile the not-having-written pressure mounts while I'm at work or trying to sleep. So I need to prioritize better. I have four workdays and three free days per week. I have four categories of writing things to fit into those three free days - fiction writing, roleplay writing (RPoL), free nonfiction (my blog), and mercenary nonfiction (eHow and whatever I expand to for writing for pay).
Mercenary writing has to be at the top, just because I will be needing that money in a few more months when it (hopefully) starts paying off, assuming I invest enough time-capital into it at the beginning (i.e. now). Ideally I'd like to be making at least as much with it as I was getting from the takeout on weekends - around $200 per month. It wasn't a lot, but it took the edge off on rising gas prices and such. At the moment I no longer have that padding there, and while I'm not in trouble, it's still alarming to see how close I come to running down my checking account to the no-fees minimum.
RPoL writing I really can't seem to get away from. I'm in five slow but stable games, and I run mine slowly as well. None of them are at all likely to end anytime soon. I have no plans to join any more of them, like, ever. As a general rule, I pretty much have to devote one full day out of those three free days to RPoL to keep up.
Blog writing, on the other hand, I can draw back a bit. Daily posts took a lot out of me, and I'm down to 1-2 times per week nowadays, but the community I'm in doesn't at all mind. There's about 20 of us who read and comment each other's blogs, and I can just comment on theirs without posting much on mine.
So that leaves fiction. As with roleplay writing, to really do a good job it's better to give it big chunks of uninterrupted time. Last night I squeezed it in after I got home from work and before bed, but that meant going to bed at dawn, so I don't know if that's such a good idea every time. Certainly not if I have something scheduled in the morning/early afternoon.
So... merc writing gets one day, RPoL gets one day, and fiction gets one day. Blog now goes to the bottom, basically to squeeze in whenever I'm taking a break from the other three (instead of having fiction in that capacity and therefore never doing any).
One thing I've noticed is that the nonfiction writing can be done basically anywhere, and I can be interrupted without too much impact. Fiction can really only be done from home; with roleplay, I often have to look up stuff in my books, and with the writing I need to avoid distractions. So, I just need to do more nonfiction writing while I'm waiting around on errands (in lines and waiting rooms, etc.) to make better use of that offline time, and therefore give me more time for the fiction.
So in Chapter 4, Craig will be visiting the bookstore, and I'll be introducing Aaron to the non-game audience for the first time. Should be fun. While Craig was talking to Hernando, Aaron's love interest Alice was getting kidnapped by Hernando's rival, so Aaron isn't having a very good day...
That's what's happening with the front half of Vengeance. The back half, meanwhile, is now the opposite side of Tragedy of the Hand - which, right on schedule, I've still not gotten Round Tuit and it'll be what I tackle for Labor Day Novel 2008 coming up in a few weeks.
In general, I realized last night that at the rate I keep pushing fiction to the bottom of the priority list, I was never going to get anything done. Meanwhile the not-having-written pressure mounts while I'm at work or trying to sleep. So I need to prioritize better. I have four workdays and three free days per week. I have four categories of writing things to fit into those three free days - fiction writing, roleplay writing (RPoL), free nonfiction (my blog), and mercenary nonfiction (eHow and whatever I expand to for writing for pay).
Mercenary writing has to be at the top, just because I will be needing that money in a few more months when it (hopefully) starts paying off, assuming I invest enough time-capital into it at the beginning (i.e. now). Ideally I'd like to be making at least as much with it as I was getting from the takeout on weekends - around $200 per month. It wasn't a lot, but it took the edge off on rising gas prices and such. At the moment I no longer have that padding there, and while I'm not in trouble, it's still alarming to see how close I come to running down my checking account to the no-fees minimum.
RPoL writing I really can't seem to get away from. I'm in five slow but stable games, and I run mine slowly as well. None of them are at all likely to end anytime soon. I have no plans to join any more of them, like, ever. As a general rule, I pretty much have to devote one full day out of those three free days to RPoL to keep up.
Blog writing, on the other hand, I can draw back a bit. Daily posts took a lot out of me, and I'm down to 1-2 times per week nowadays, but the community I'm in doesn't at all mind. There's about 20 of us who read and comment each other's blogs, and I can just comment on theirs without posting much on mine.
So that leaves fiction. As with roleplay writing, to really do a good job it's better to give it big chunks of uninterrupted time. Last night I squeezed it in after I got home from work and before bed, but that meant going to bed at dawn, so I don't know if that's such a good idea every time. Certainly not if I have something scheduled in the morning/early afternoon.
So... merc writing gets one day, RPoL gets one day, and fiction gets one day. Blog now goes to the bottom, basically to squeeze in whenever I'm taking a break from the other three (instead of having fiction in that capacity and therefore never doing any).
One thing I've noticed is that the nonfiction writing can be done basically anywhere, and I can be interrupted without too much impact. Fiction can really only be done from home; with roleplay, I often have to look up stuff in my books, and with the writing I need to avoid distractions. So, I just need to do more nonfiction writing while I'm waiting around on errands (in lines and waiting rooms, etc.) to make better use of that offline time, and therefore give me more time for the fiction.
2008/07/21
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...
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...
2007/08/07
Still alive now, too
Well, I basically spent SFR time working on a Wikipedia article about the place where I work. This included online research, offline research via books from the library, interrogating three people who work there, making photos, and politicking to have a couple small maps added in (which aren't there currently because that part isn't done yet). Then there was all the writing, revising, more writing, more revising, reorganizing, and still more revising. At this point it's looking pretty good. There are three other small blurbs of info I want to add in later on, but probably not for a couple weeks while I take a break from it all.
Aside from that, I have a newish daily blog. Now that it's been up and running for nearly two months, I think I can safely say that keeping up with daily short blog entries isn't as out of my reach as I'd originally figured. I try to include a wide variety of topics for a very general audience. Some days I can't come up with anything worth saying, but people seem to like the inane things too, so it isn't too totally pointless. Come visit. :)
I've started reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne but haven't gotten too far into it yet.
Next on my list of Wikipedia articles to reconstruct is RPoL's. Coincidentally enough, I just got warning today that some of the site's "favorite" idiots are plotting to mangle it for their own purposes. The politicking never ends, I guess. What it means for me is that I better get cracking. (No rest for the weary either.)
As for roleplaying, it's still exactly the same as the last time I posted here about it. I've slowed down to once-a-week posts for everywhere. It isn't that I post everywhere once a week, it's that I post in a few places every day or so, and these rotate along with stuff I'm doing on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Everything advances slowly together.
As for fiction writing... looks like I'm slowly ruminating toward yet another attempt at Amulet I for Nanowrimo 2007. That'll be my third attempt. I guess each iteration does get me closer to the story I'm actually trying to tell.
Aside from that, I have a newish daily blog. Now that it's been up and running for nearly two months, I think I can safely say that keeping up with daily short blog entries isn't as out of my reach as I'd originally figured. I try to include a wide variety of topics for a very general audience. Some days I can't come up with anything worth saying, but people seem to like the inane things too, so it isn't too totally pointless. Come visit. :)
I've started reading Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne but haven't gotten too far into it yet.
Next on my list of Wikipedia articles to reconstruct is RPoL's. Coincidentally enough, I just got warning today that some of the site's "favorite" idiots are plotting to mangle it for their own purposes. The politicking never ends, I guess. What it means for me is that I better get cracking. (No rest for the weary either.)
As for roleplaying, it's still exactly the same as the last time I posted here about it. I've slowed down to once-a-week posts for everywhere. It isn't that I post everywhere once a week, it's that I post in a few places every day or so, and these rotate along with stuff I'm doing on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Everything advances slowly together.
As for fiction writing... looks like I'm slowly ruminating toward yet another attempt at Amulet I for Nanowrimo 2007. That'll be my third attempt. I guess each iteration does get me closer to the story I'm actually trying to tell.
2007/06/20
still alive
I'm still here. I pass through at least once a day, even though it's been a while since I've felt up to saying anything.
Basically it's a lack of time. I'm incapable of just dashing off something short. Instead I must ramble on at great length about anything and everything - and the longer this gets put off the longer the ramble must be. I don't technically have time for a lengthy ramble now, either, but I'm procrastinating doing something else, so here I am. ;)
(I've also noticed a distinct lapse back into starting every single sentence with "I" ... guess I really am that egotistical. :( Must ... figure out ... how to stop that...)
Things going on:
I'm still reading stuff for the Book Challenge, but because I've fallen behind on writing up reviews like I told myself I would, it's gotten to the point where catching up would be a monumental effort.
I've become addicted to Wikipedia. Mostly I sort songs into categories, but have put some serious work into a couple of articles. The one on John Two-Hawks is almost entirely mine. At the moment I'm working on a fairly big article on the place where I work, and there's another big article I want to do about RPoL after that. It's an entirely different kind of writing than fiction - lots of research and stating of facts.
Roleplaying is still its usual huge timesink. Things I'm doing:
a) Running my Dark Ages game with 10-11 active characters.
b) Helping run a modern-day game, with two threads assigned to me at the moment, and also playing a character in it.
c) Playing six other characters in five other active games.
d) Running a Roundrobin game. It supposedly has two active stories in progress, but so far the majority of participants grossly overestimate the amount of time they actually have to commit to the venture, so it's basically dead.
e) Involved in one other dead game with three characters (the one set in the Anitaverse).
f) Moderating a forum (which mostly means I must read every single post, whether I'm interested or not; this can be a problem if it's extra busy at the same time as me). Also I recently got promoted to channel op for the chat channel, though that doesn't really take up any more time than I was already spending there.
Officially I'm signed up for Summer Fun Run 2007 at SFFMuse, but it isn't really working out very well. Basically I'm too busy to count fiction words. I sort of rotate between tasks on a weekly basis, because my roleplaying speed certainly hasn't gotten any faster. It doesn't help that I keep running off after shiny objects. Lately I've been looking into wiki software in general, at a number of different wiki farms, to find something useable for my extended family to post stuff about our daily lives. So far I like Wikidot.com best. I've also started a new personal blog in the hopes of getting into the practice of dashing off short posts on a daily basis.
As for Fortress Launne? Erm... *shifty eyes* I think about it a lot, actually. Nearly every day. But I'm not writing anything down.
One thing I did discover while looking at wiki stuff and talking to people about things I could do with them, is Scrivener. It's corkboard based writing software for Macs, supposedly similar to Rough Draft for the PC. It's just gotten out of the beta phase. Just in time for Jer's Novel Writer to also come out of beta. Jer's is the one I'd been using for a year and a half now, and I really like it when I'm doing the actual writing of the prose. However, Scrivener's looks much more up my alley when it comes to organizing my notes beforehand. They have completely different philosophies behind how novels get created, each based on how their programmers write. I don't really want to move away from Jer's since I'm rather loyal to Jerry, having spent quite a bit of time helping beta test and just watching its progress. But it may ultimately end up not fitting what I need.
I've also decided that I'm not a writer. At least, not in the way everyone else is. It's not a calling that I must do or else. Instead, my calling is to be an editor. This has become abundantly clear to me by getting sucked into Wikipedia. I've watched alcar (a "real" writer) in the SFFMuse chat, and how he'll just spontaneously write something whenever any kind of idea whatsoever strikes him. We'll be discussing something off-the-wall, and then he'll go quiet for about twenty minutes, and then he'll announce that he's just written a short story or poem, and link us to where he put it on the SFFMuse forum. It's like he breathes writing.
Meanwhile, I breathe editting. I'll sit there and compulsively fix things in Wikipedia articles that I see are wrong. It's a little like finding a loose piece of yarn in a sweater. I have to pull on it to make it go away. So I do that, and pretty soon the first string leads me to more strings that are also loose, and then I'm unravelling the entire sweater so I can put it back together again properly. I've sat around grinding through mindless tedious edits for hours on end, way past my bedtime, because I can't get myself to stop until it's all done.
As for Zette's class, I've sort of dropped out of it entirely. It wasn't even a lack of time as the assignments got more complex - they weren't really that much more of a stretch than what I do for roleplaying posts. However, I just couldn't connect to my story. Every time I tried to do the assignment for the Zette class project, thoughts of Fortress Launne (and Amulet I in particular) would get in the way, and then I would go into a mental tailspin of thinking about neither one. Eventually I gave up.
I guess that's basically been my writing life for the past four months or so. Lots of writing is going on, but almost nothing is happening on the noveling front, alas.
Basically it's a lack of time. I'm incapable of just dashing off something short. Instead I must ramble on at great length about anything and everything - and the longer this gets put off the longer the ramble must be. I don't technically have time for a lengthy ramble now, either, but I'm procrastinating doing something else, so here I am. ;)
(I've also noticed a distinct lapse back into starting every single sentence with "I" ... guess I really am that egotistical. :( Must ... figure out ... how to stop that...)
Things going on:
I'm still reading stuff for the Book Challenge, but because I've fallen behind on writing up reviews like I told myself I would, it's gotten to the point where catching up would be a monumental effort.
I've become addicted to Wikipedia. Mostly I sort songs into categories, but have put some serious work into a couple of articles. The one on John Two-Hawks is almost entirely mine. At the moment I'm working on a fairly big article on the place where I work, and there's another big article I want to do about RPoL after that. It's an entirely different kind of writing than fiction - lots of research and stating of facts.
Roleplaying is still its usual huge timesink. Things I'm doing:
a) Running my Dark Ages game with 10-11 active characters.
b) Helping run a modern-day game, with two threads assigned to me at the moment, and also playing a character in it.
c) Playing six other characters in five other active games.
d) Running a Roundrobin game. It supposedly has two active stories in progress, but so far the majority of participants grossly overestimate the amount of time they actually have to commit to the venture, so it's basically dead.
e) Involved in one other dead game with three characters (the one set in the Anitaverse).
f) Moderating a forum (which mostly means I must read every single post, whether I'm interested or not; this can be a problem if it's extra busy at the same time as me). Also I recently got promoted to channel op for the chat channel, though that doesn't really take up any more time than I was already spending there.
Officially I'm signed up for Summer Fun Run 2007 at SFFMuse, but it isn't really working out very well. Basically I'm too busy to count fiction words. I sort of rotate between tasks on a weekly basis, because my roleplaying speed certainly hasn't gotten any faster. It doesn't help that I keep running off after shiny objects. Lately I've been looking into wiki software in general, at a number of different wiki farms, to find something useable for my extended family to post stuff about our daily lives. So far I like Wikidot.com best. I've also started a new personal blog in the hopes of getting into the practice of dashing off short posts on a daily basis.
As for Fortress Launne? Erm... *shifty eyes* I think about it a lot, actually. Nearly every day. But I'm not writing anything down.
One thing I did discover while looking at wiki stuff and talking to people about things I could do with them, is Scrivener. It's corkboard based writing software for Macs, supposedly similar to Rough Draft for the PC. It's just gotten out of the beta phase. Just in time for Jer's Novel Writer to also come out of beta. Jer's is the one I'd been using for a year and a half now, and I really like it when I'm doing the actual writing of the prose. However, Scrivener's looks much more up my alley when it comes to organizing my notes beforehand. They have completely different philosophies behind how novels get created, each based on how their programmers write. I don't really want to move away from Jer's since I'm rather loyal to Jerry, having spent quite a bit of time helping beta test and just watching its progress. But it may ultimately end up not fitting what I need.
I've also decided that I'm not a writer. At least, not in the way everyone else is. It's not a calling that I must do or else. Instead, my calling is to be an editor. This has become abundantly clear to me by getting sucked into Wikipedia. I've watched alcar (a "real" writer) in the SFFMuse chat, and how he'll just spontaneously write something whenever any kind of idea whatsoever strikes him. We'll be discussing something off-the-wall, and then he'll go quiet for about twenty minutes, and then he'll announce that he's just written a short story or poem, and link us to where he put it on the SFFMuse forum. It's like he breathes writing.
Meanwhile, I breathe editting. I'll sit there and compulsively fix things in Wikipedia articles that I see are wrong. It's a little like finding a loose piece of yarn in a sweater. I have to pull on it to make it go away. So I do that, and pretty soon the first string leads me to more strings that are also loose, and then I'm unravelling the entire sweater so I can put it back together again properly. I've sat around grinding through mindless tedious edits for hours on end, way past my bedtime, because I can't get myself to stop until it's all done.
As for Zette's class, I've sort of dropped out of it entirely. It wasn't even a lack of time as the assignments got more complex - they weren't really that much more of a stretch than what I do for roleplaying posts. However, I just couldn't connect to my story. Every time I tried to do the assignment for the Zette class project, thoughts of Fortress Launne (and Amulet I in particular) would get in the way, and then I would go into a mental tailspin of thinking about neither one. Eventually I gave up.
I guess that's basically been my writing life for the past four months or so. Lots of writing is going on, but almost nothing is happening on the noveling front, alas.
2006/07/20
SFR: 10 Days Left
10 / 90 days to go | 80 / 90 days gone
47,474 / 90,000 words done | 32,526 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
What is it to be Human: 726
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 11,326
Blogs: 27,057
RPoL: 1038
Actually there's 11 days left, because July has 31 days. One freebie day isn't going to help me much, though.
I've added a new category of "RPoL." For the past week or so, I've been doing category descriptions - which take a lot of thought and editting. Since they are, in fact, intended for eventual publication, by the SFR rules they do count. The final arbiter of whether they're used will be jase, the RPoL admin. While I was at it, I also snagged the portion of the RPoL wikipedia entry that I wrote back in May. It's not much, but every little bit helps...
For my next trick, I should finish editting Dragonfly. But I'm not going to stress about it. If it doesn't make deadline, I can always submit it next year instead.
The What is it to be Human? game has two new players, and I've been pimping it to more. It's coming back to life, and I need to write posts for my characters soon. So far nothing is coming to mind though.
47,474 / 90,000 words done | 32,526 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2673 (301 edit words)
What is it to be Human: 726
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 11,326
Blogs: 27,057
RPoL: 1038
Actually there's 11 days left, because July has 31 days. One freebie day isn't going to help me much, though.
I've added a new category of "RPoL." For the past week or so, I've been doing category descriptions - which take a lot of thought and editting. Since they are, in fact, intended for eventual publication, by the SFR rules they do count. The final arbiter of whether they're used will be jase, the RPoL admin. While I was at it, I also snagged the portion of the RPoL wikipedia entry that I wrote back in May. It's not much, but every little bit helps...
For my next trick, I should finish editting Dragonfly. But I'm not going to stress about it. If it doesn't make deadline, I can always submit it next year instead.
The What is it to be Human? game has two new players, and I've been pimping it to more. It's coming back to life, and I need to write posts for my characters soon. So far nothing is coming to mind though.
2006/06/21
Writing via the Distraction Method
39 / 90 days to go | 51 / 90 days gone
30,611 / 90,000 words done | 20,389 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7018
Blogs: 16,567
Still no new progress on Stranger on a Bus. Instead of working on it, and as a method of procrastinating working on it, I keep wandering off to work on other writing instead.
I've been putting a lot of setup work into the Chinese Takeout blog lately. The layout is done, and now I'm writing backstory posts to explain what the blog is for. There's one more big one of those left. I might think of more, but once the third post is up, I should be good to go for plunging into random miscellany. I'm still kind of waffling over whether I want to put all of it in public. On the one hand, if I wanted to turn it into a published memoir, it would be better to keep it all under wraps. On the other hand, I kind of think it might turn out to be a better project if I had the kind of daily give-and-take of people reading, commenting, and asking questions. I guess it all depends on what I'm trying to accomplish here, and I'm not real clear on that yet myself.
All my roleplay is up to date again except for one game, which I'm procrastinating. I have to finish blowing up the warehouse in the game with the Sabbat pack. The PC has run out the door now, so it's just a matter of writing something horrific as the people still trapped inside die screaming. Hmm. That probably explains why I haven't done it yet. It takes the right kind of mood, I think.
Meanwhile, I have a friend visiting from out of town in early July. This means I need to get my place cleaned up. So now I have something else to distract me from writing - but it's necessary anyway even without visitors. I just hope I can get it presentable in the next two weeks. Must toss all the accumulated junk mail, hide the rest of the unfiled paperwork, clean both bathrooms, clean the kitchen, vacuum, and wash all the sheets and blankets. If I'm extremely productive and lucky, I'll manage to clear the living room clutter, too. I've got stuff stacked everywhere.
This doesn't sound like much - maybe a day's work if I had a full day and put my mind to it. But I never have a full day anymore, and even back when I did, I was busy waffling about writing at the same time. Hmm. I don't know what I can do to entertain them either, actually. They won't be here long, but they'll still need to eat a few times at least. Maybe Chinese takeout? :)
30,611 / 90,000 words done | 20,389 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 7018
Blogs: 16,567
Still no new progress on Stranger on a Bus. Instead of working on it, and as a method of procrastinating working on it, I keep wandering off to work on other writing instead.
I've been putting a lot of setup work into the Chinese Takeout blog lately. The layout is done, and now I'm writing backstory posts to explain what the blog is for. There's one more big one of those left. I might think of more, but once the third post is up, I should be good to go for plunging into random miscellany. I'm still kind of waffling over whether I want to put all of it in public. On the one hand, if I wanted to turn it into a published memoir, it would be better to keep it all under wraps. On the other hand, I kind of think it might turn out to be a better project if I had the kind of daily give-and-take of people reading, commenting, and asking questions. I guess it all depends on what I'm trying to accomplish here, and I'm not real clear on that yet myself.
All my roleplay is up to date again except for one game, which I'm procrastinating. I have to finish blowing up the warehouse in the game with the Sabbat pack. The PC has run out the door now, so it's just a matter of writing something horrific as the people still trapped inside die screaming. Hmm. That probably explains why I haven't done it yet. It takes the right kind of mood, I think.
Meanwhile, I have a friend visiting from out of town in early July. This means I need to get my place cleaned up. So now I have something else to distract me from writing - but it's necessary anyway even without visitors. I just hope I can get it presentable in the next two weeks. Must toss all the accumulated junk mail, hide the rest of the unfiled paperwork, clean both bathrooms, clean the kitchen, vacuum, and wash all the sheets and blankets. If I'm extremely productive and lucky, I'll manage to clear the living room clutter, too. I've got stuff stacked everywhere.
This doesn't sound like much - maybe a day's work if I had a full day and put my mind to it. But I never have a full day anymore, and even back when I did, I was busy waffling about writing at the same time. Hmm. I don't know what I can do to entertain them either, actually. They won't be here long, but they'll still need to eat a few times at least. Maybe Chinese takeout? :)
2006/06/19
Lack of following my own plans continues ...
41 / 90 days to go | 49 / 90 days gone
28,418 / 90,000 words done | 20,582 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6259
Blogs: 15,133
My weekend plans were to do a bunch of household chores, and a bunch of editting for the bus story. Well, household chores are basically a lost cause at this point. I got some laundry done (good thing because I was running out of underwear). I did almost no writing at all.
[members-only cut]
What happened instead? A bunch of friends from RPoL managed to convince me to get a Livejournal. Finally, after months of talking about their friends-only posts that I can't see without being a member there. And it turns out that there's all sorts of shiny buttons involved in setting up an LJ blog.
Several hours later, when I was tired of tinkering with the color scheme, I ended up with this. :D
Meanwhile, unbekownst to them, I started a different blog there. A topic blog. I decided that Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout needed to be one. Every weekend I end up with more stuff I want to say - but it's day-to-day things, mostly, about whatever happened while I was there. I have a lot of anecdotes about ways I've managed to screw up, like the time I hit a wrong button on the credit card machine, which caused all business at the front counter to come to a halt (with like ten people in line) while Linda figured out how to fix it. Or the two new-hire cooks who didn't understand the concept of "why don't we let the English-speaking people speak to the customers and pass out food, while the cooks stay in the back and cook the food to be passed out, so that they aren't standing there waiting for it and therefore needing to be talked to."
There's a lot of stuff like that going on all the time, and there was nowhere really to go into it at great length before. I'll probably write lots of lengthy entries at first as I catch up the blog for the first couple months of those. Then it'll move into a weekly format, for just whatever happened during that weekend.
(Incidentally, I'd prefer that Galen not tell everyone about this blog, as it will include a lot of information about me that I'd rather some of them not know. Of course, for that matter, there's a lot of info in this blog that also qualifies... erm. Keep up the good work of keeping quiet. :D )
Anyway, so I really need to get started editting Stranger on a Bus. I don't know why I keep putting it off. It's like I have to psych myself up for it. And each chapter is good for around 2k words toward my SFR wordcount, which is sinking farther and farther behind... :( Must... begin... editting...
28,418 / 90,000 words done | 20,582 words behind
Dragonfly: 1841 (916 final count)
Stranger on a Bus: 2372
Temple: 2813
general roleplay: 6259
Blogs: 15,133
My weekend plans were to do a bunch of household chores, and a bunch of editting for the bus story. Well, household chores are basically a lost cause at this point. I got some laundry done (good thing because I was running out of underwear). I did almost no writing at all.
[members-only cut]
What happened instead? A bunch of friends from RPoL managed to convince me to get a Livejournal. Finally, after months of talking about their friends-only posts that I can't see without being a member there. And it turns out that there's all sorts of shiny buttons involved in setting up an LJ blog.
Several hours later, when I was tired of tinkering with the color scheme, I ended up with this. :D
Meanwhile, unbekownst to them, I started a different blog there. A topic blog. I decided that Scenes from the Inside of a Chinese Takeout needed to be one. Every weekend I end up with more stuff I want to say - but it's day-to-day things, mostly, about whatever happened while I was there. I have a lot of anecdotes about ways I've managed to screw up, like the time I hit a wrong button on the credit card machine, which caused all business at the front counter to come to a halt (with like ten people in line) while Linda figured out how to fix it. Or the two new-hire cooks who didn't understand the concept of "why don't we let the English-speaking people speak to the customers and pass out food, while the cooks stay in the back and cook the food to be passed out, so that they aren't standing there waiting for it and therefore needing to be talked to."
There's a lot of stuff like that going on all the time, and there was nowhere really to go into it at great length before. I'll probably write lots of lengthy entries at first as I catch up the blog for the first couple months of those. Then it'll move into a weekly format, for just whatever happened during that weekend.
(Incidentally, I'd prefer that Galen not tell everyone about this blog, as it will include a lot of information about me that I'd rather some of them not know. Of course, for that matter, there's a lot of info in this blog that also qualifies... erm. Keep up the good work of keeping quiet. :D )
Anyway, so I really need to get started editting Stranger on a Bus. I don't know why I keep putting it off. It's like I have to psych myself up for it. And each chapter is good for around 2k words toward my SFR wordcount, which is sinking farther and farther behind... :( Must... begin... editting...
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.
2006/06/05
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...
2006/05/21
Haircuts and Chinese Takeouts
I got a haircut today. Lopped off over 12 inches so I could donate it to Locks of Love. It cost about $16, which in the grand scheme of things with average barbershops these days, is really quite cheap.
The manager of the chinese takeout where I work weekends took one look at it and said "I could've done that for you for free!"
Oh well. Next time I guess. :) Next time won't be for two years, though, because that's how long I intend to wait before I get another haircut. Must allow hair to grow long enough to donate again. This latest batch is my third donation. My hair is good quality for it; a color-in-demand (black), very healthy, etc. Grows fast. Never abused with styling or perms or whatnot. I do nothing with it but wash it and drip dry.
[members-only cut]
I haven't actually mentioned the chinese takeout in these blogs here, have I? Well, I look like a 19-year-old Asian girl. This means that in about half the chinese takeouts I go to, I get job offers. They figure I'm a college student. It's a little amusing when even the Asians think I look young. ;) But that's one of the perks of being trans - eternal youth. Then again, the downside is I get taken for being a naive child, too, and people (including my mother!! >.<) are always surprised when they notice I'm capable of doing things like an average 30+ year old normal adult. (My younger sister doesn't get this from my mother. :p But then again she looks her actual age...)
Anyway, so they needed some help working cash register during dinner, and I said I could help on weekends. Why? I still don't know. I already have a full-time job with lots of good benefits and other assorted perks. Granted cost of living is rising much faster than my annual cost-of-living raises ... but I'm not desperate for cash (yet).
Either way, I love the job. :) It's just 3 hours a day Saturday and Sunday - not long enough to get bored. I take orders and run cash register and put fortune cookies into the bags, and I'm finally getting the hang of the menu and remembering the prices of the most commonly ordered items (which seems to be the deep-fried things, oddly enough. Wings and egg rolls are popular.).
The most embarrassing thing has been discovering that I can't count change to save my life. I've spent too long using plastic for all my purchases and using a calculator and/or Excel or Matlab to do complex mathematical feats at my desk job. I can code Matlab to do all sorts of things to gigantic blocks of numbers that have decimals to the 8th place, and I can't count change back without major help. :( It's very humbling watching Linda (the manager) do it entirely in her head in a split-second.
They figured out fairly quickly that my Mandarin is very poor; I've lost a lot of basic vocabulary over the years, and they tend to speak English to me (though there's only two who actually know any English). Amongst themselves they're speaking Fujian dialect which I don't know at all.
They treat me like family. As Chinese families are, they're always trying to feed me. The manager will wander by and hand me a slice of watermelon if things are slow. ;) I must say that I've never worked a food service job where I'm not only allowed to eat and drink on the job, they actually give me food. In this place, though, there seem to be random watermelon-eating times where everyone will stop working to eat. They deep-fried some pillsbury biscuits one time too; those taste sort of like the elephant ears at carnivals and are quite a treat because they remind me of my childhood when my mother occasionally did the same things. (I grew up in a Chinese restaurant.)
It's an interesting perspective, too. The people who work there have all sorts of skills that I don't. They lead what look like very simple lives - chop up fresh vegetables, cook all sorts of great food, wash things in the sink that have no business being in a restaurant (could've sworn the manager's mother was washing a slip (the undergarment) one time). But because I knew what my own parents were like, they actually do more than just the facade most people see. It's an interesting and marketable front that tends to get people tipping generously when they see "poor Chinese family who barely speak English and work their fingers to the bone, and really know how to cook." For the first couple weekends I was the manager's cousin. Today I got downgraded to "friend" though, perhaps because I really am not similar enough to them and also my English is too good. ;)
I suppose in a lot of ways it's me going back to my roots. My parents owned a Chinese restaurant for 14ish years of my childhood, and we lived upstairs to it. I worked there only occasionally, but we were really spoiled brats. :p Or, more likely, my mother had more ambitious things in mind with our futures and we therefore weren't required to work in the restaurant much. But my family did all the usual sorts of things beyond restaurant-running, too. Went out to eat at other restaurants, for example. All of the normal regular things people do.
Going back to it 15 years later after having rambled around in the world doing other things for a while, though, it's been intriguing to compare perspectives. What it looks like from the average customer's point of view, what it looks like from the other side of the counter, what the facade is in between. Also, what the kitchen help was like in my parents' restaurant compared to how they are in this takeout, how everyone was treated, etc. Also how laidback and simple it all is.
It's a very happy takeout. I'm glad to be a part of it.
The manager of the chinese takeout where I work weekends took one look at it and said "I could've done that for you for free!"
Oh well. Next time I guess. :) Next time won't be for two years, though, because that's how long I intend to wait before I get another haircut. Must allow hair to grow long enough to donate again. This latest batch is my third donation. My hair is good quality for it; a color-in-demand (black), very healthy, etc. Grows fast. Never abused with styling or perms or whatnot. I do nothing with it but wash it and drip dry.
[members-only cut]
I haven't actually mentioned the chinese takeout in these blogs here, have I? Well, I look like a 19-year-old Asian girl. This means that in about half the chinese takeouts I go to, I get job offers. They figure I'm a college student. It's a little amusing when even the Asians think I look young. ;) But that's one of the perks of being trans - eternal youth. Then again, the downside is I get taken for being a naive child, too, and people (including my mother!! >.<) are always surprised when they notice I'm capable of doing things like an average 30+ year old normal adult. (My younger sister doesn't get this from my mother. :p But then again she looks her actual age...)
Anyway, so they needed some help working cash register during dinner, and I said I could help on weekends. Why? I still don't know. I already have a full-time job with lots of good benefits and other assorted perks. Granted cost of living is rising much faster than my annual cost-of-living raises ... but I'm not desperate for cash (yet).
Either way, I love the job. :) It's just 3 hours a day Saturday and Sunday - not long enough to get bored. I take orders and run cash register and put fortune cookies into the bags, and I'm finally getting the hang of the menu and remembering the prices of the most commonly ordered items (which seems to be the deep-fried things, oddly enough. Wings and egg rolls are popular.).
The most embarrassing thing has been discovering that I can't count change to save my life. I've spent too long using plastic for all my purchases and using a calculator and/or Excel or Matlab to do complex mathematical feats at my desk job. I can code Matlab to do all sorts of things to gigantic blocks of numbers that have decimals to the 8th place, and I can't count change back without major help. :( It's very humbling watching Linda (the manager) do it entirely in her head in a split-second.
They figured out fairly quickly that my Mandarin is very poor; I've lost a lot of basic vocabulary over the years, and they tend to speak English to me (though there's only two who actually know any English). Amongst themselves they're speaking Fujian dialect which I don't know at all.
They treat me like family. As Chinese families are, they're always trying to feed me. The manager will wander by and hand me a slice of watermelon if things are slow. ;) I must say that I've never worked a food service job where I'm not only allowed to eat and drink on the job, they actually give me food. In this place, though, there seem to be random watermelon-eating times where everyone will stop working to eat. They deep-fried some pillsbury biscuits one time too; those taste sort of like the elephant ears at carnivals and are quite a treat because they remind me of my childhood when my mother occasionally did the same things. (I grew up in a Chinese restaurant.)
It's an interesting perspective, too. The people who work there have all sorts of skills that I don't. They lead what look like very simple lives - chop up fresh vegetables, cook all sorts of great food, wash things in the sink that have no business being in a restaurant (could've sworn the manager's mother was washing a slip (the undergarment) one time). But because I knew what my own parents were like, they actually do more than just the facade most people see. It's an interesting and marketable front that tends to get people tipping generously when they see "poor Chinese family who barely speak English and work their fingers to the bone, and really know how to cook." For the first couple weekends I was the manager's cousin. Today I got downgraded to "friend" though, perhaps because I really am not similar enough to them and also my English is too good. ;)
I suppose in a lot of ways it's me going back to my roots. My parents owned a Chinese restaurant for 14ish years of my childhood, and we lived upstairs to it. I worked there only occasionally, but we were really spoiled brats. :p Or, more likely, my mother had more ambitious things in mind with our futures and we therefore weren't required to work in the restaurant much. But my family did all the usual sorts of things beyond restaurant-running, too. Went out to eat at other restaurants, for example. All of the normal regular things people do.
Going back to it 15 years later after having rambled around in the world doing other things for a while, though, it's been intriguing to compare perspectives. What it looks like from the average customer's point of view, what it looks like from the other side of the counter, what the facade is in between. Also, what the kitchen help was like in my parents' restaurant compared to how they are in this takeout, how everyone was treated, etc. Also how laidback and simple it all is.
It's a very happy takeout. I'm glad to be a part of it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
