01.16.07
Once Around The Writer’s Block
Writers have a pretty peculiar thing with certain characters. I think every writer has one of their characters sitting somewhere in the back of their minds, commenting every once in a while, asking questions and wondering what’s taking the writer so long to write their story. Sometimes the character offers constructive criticism, while for other folks their inner muse is a vicious, unfeeling creature forged from pure hatred. It’s not without a certain amount of amusement that I think about this, especially given some of the stuff that I’ve read. On occasion, some of what I read makes me think that the author is genuinely schizophrenic. Usually when I look back at my archive of unfinished stories.
Thinking about this, I’ve recently had occasion to be reminded of a story that I was following for a while, by a occasional webcomic artist Ewen Cluney. It started life under the title “Haunted House”, but glancing through his site and DeviantArt profile, he seems to have re-titled it after the main character, Evangeline. Unless he’s decided to drop the entire storyline and just keep the character (which I can hardly blame him for, as I’m not completely innocent of that), I still remain interested. Heck, even if all he chose to do was keep the name and character design, I’d still want to take a look. When it’s finished, of course.
With regards to my own long-running project, Inconsequential, I’ve actually had a nice little breakthrough. The tale is outlined and plotted out to the finale, and depending on how long I run with it, that’s about sixty-five more pages or so. That is one of the most surreal things for me to look at: the page count reading well over a hundred and twenty right now, and all of it garbage that I wrote. Seriously. When it’s over, there will be close to two hundred single-spaced pages of pure drivel that is all my fault.
You cannot imagine how absolutely thrilled that makes me to even contemplate.
I came across my file of old stories, and I think that if there was something I wanted to try after this, it would be short stories. Don’t get me wrong, I like writing longer pieces, and eventually I want to tackle a second novel. But most of the ideas I’ve had of late really lend themselves to shorter spots. Also, I would love the challenge of establishing a story and getting it done under a certain number of words. Now that I’m finally back in the writing groove, I feel like I really ought to be writing more. I look back at 2006 and I see that I accomplished just about nothing. But now, it does me no good to get depressed over that year. Stuff Happened and it’s past now.
I’ll have stuff to relate about Kino’s Journey tomorrow.
Update: Oh yeah, Phoenix Wright: Justice For All ships today. I was under the odd impression that it would be in stores today, but I forgot about the holiday. Anyway, the only reason I bring this up is because I actually miss the “damn-that’s-creepy” automated alert system that EB/Gamestop uses to remind customers to pick up their games. The name for this system is, I kid you not, Aeris.