11.12.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Shameless Self-Promotion, Writing
at 7:10 pm
This evening, Blessings and Curses (working title) reached the 50K mark for its first draft. I estimate that I am about 33% of the way through the outlined story at this point, but that percentage is misleading because plot elements which were not in the outline are starting to come together to both truncate and extend the remaining ‘time’. This is the fastest that I have ever completed a NaNoWriMo challenge, and only the second time that I have completed the 50K challenge. It is also only the third original story idea that I have taken past 50,000 words. More updates as events warrant; I’m officially shifting focus to this project as my ‘next book’ and putting the revision of Inconsequential on the back-burner for now.
Oh, don’t think for a second that I’m going to take a break now. Today might be a slow day in terms of writing, but that’s just because I’m a little burned out on words after the 22,000 word weekend I just had. I’m just resting tonight, maybe… I have so many ideas on where the story could go next and stay within the bounds of the ‘plot’, but I’m just too whacked to think any of them through right now. Catch you tomorrow.
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11.09.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Rants, Writing
at 5:15 am
This is gonna be one of those weird, “you got your gaming in my writing!” posts, so for those of you interested in only one of those particular topics, please bear with me. I promise it makes sense if you just bend your mind around the paradigm for a few seconds.
There are two pretty big non-secrets about me. The first is that I’m a major game fanatic, and I’ve played far more than my share of 40-hour, multi-disc RPG epics along the lines of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. The other is that I’m a nascent writer who has the usual tendency in geeks to overanalyze my work, and how I work, and what works about how and why I work. So, it’s only natural that I would wind up getting some cross-pollination in terms of these interests. Prior to this, it pretty much was limited to standing up, banging my hands on the nearest desk, and shouting, “This game is poorly-written crap! I could do better than this, and in fact, I believe I have!” whilst pointing at the screen dramatically. The preface of “Objection!!” is usually optional.
What’s happened recently, though, as I’ve immersed myself in NaNoWriMo, is that ( I’m seeing my writing as a game in and of itself… » )
Anyway, as you can see from the Twitter thingy up there, wordiness is a problem for me, and I’m sincerely not looking forward to tearing this story apart. I do, however, think it’s one of the best tales I’ve come up with to date, and I am looking forward to the ultimate final product. (Optimism is also one of those pesky traits I’ve yet to purge myself of as a properly-jaded member of Generation Y. …dammit, that’s a good line for the book.)
I’ll catch you all tomorrow with some Bailout (for real this time) and after the weekend we’ll probably talk more about writing. Seeing how as I tend not to shut up about whatever it is I’m currently doing, at any rate.
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11.07.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Rants, Writing
at 12:18 pm
So this morning I took a look at my current progress (just a hair under 20,000 words) and compared it to the progress I’d made in 2005, when last I managed to hit 50K before the deadline. On November 7th, 2005, I was complaining that Guitar Hero had sapped my time and was, and I quote, “the reason I’m not at 20,000 words”. If pressed to determine why I’m not at 20K right now, though– and arguably I’m close enough to spit, and if I elected to go back and polish a scene I’m feeling iffy about, I certainly could be at 20K– it would have to be the word that is the title of this post. Motivation! I have it; my characters kinda don’t.
The biggest problem that I’ve run into over the writing so far is the willfulness that my characters are exhibiting in terms of how they’re reacting to the situations that arise. I find myself detailing to an almost painful degree the minutae of every single action that they’re taking; I literally spent a page and a half detailing what was ultimately maybe an hour and a half’s worth of boring action– weeding the garden and taking showers. It’s good writing, don’t get me wrong, and there were some bits of characterization in there that I really liked, but ultimately, it was just detail of questionable necessity. Of course, this is why I’m forcing myself to think of this as just a draft… because this stuff is going to get cut, or expanded, or whatever later on.
Anyway, I’m actually glad to know that, in the long run, I’m still on track and doing well; I expect that I’ll be closer to 30K in a day or two depending on my level of dedication tonight and tomorrow. What a lot of people seem to misunderstand about NaNo is that the entire story is to be written in 50K words; that’s a feat few writers could pull off in one draft. For me, at any rate, the 50,000 word mark is where I start really becoming invested in the story; it won’t leave me, and I start extending it more and more, and giving it a lot more detail, internally and on paper. The scenes “play” more internally, and I start noticing things that weren’t there before. I can easily see this story running upwards of 100K, if my current progress through five of forty plot points is any indication. Those 100K words most certainly are NOT going to be all within November; you saw it took me a year and a half to scrape 99K for Incon, right? We’ll see, though; I’m kind of hoping I get this draft done before next November.
I’m hoping that everyone else who’s writing is having as much fun doing it as I am, regardless of how much progress they’re making with their stories. I do feel for those of you who can’t write due to time constraints. Regardless of your situation, I just sort of hope that everyone at least sees the tales they hold within themselves, and even if they never get told, just realizes that there’s nobody in the world who’s completely uncreative. Ciao for now, folks. We’re likely to have Bailout for the remainder of the week while I try to focus.
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11.04.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Rants
at 7:51 am
In past years there were all those wonderful widgets involved in the NaNo site that allowed me to put a real-time word-count… thingy… in the main page. Well, three days in, and the NaNo server is a molten heap burning its way down a hole that started in some godforsaken data center and is now most likely to end at the center of the Earth. So, I’m forced to do what the entire freaking concept of NaNoWriMo is at its core– improvise. I’ll be putting my most recent progress in the Twitter box up there at the top of the blog front page, and if time and fate permit, updating the NaNo site’s word count whenever possible. Most likely the first thing in the mornings. In any event, this year is likely the last one where I’ll be actually using the NaNo site to track the word count; I’ll probably be working more-or-less independently from here on out.
Incidentally, I should be writing. Like, right now. Not quite when you read this, but more when I’m writing this blog post. Which reminds me, I’ve already veered away from my outline; my characters decided they didn’t want to do what I’d set out for them, and had a nice quiet evening weeding the garden and watching a movie. I would have just time-jumped over it, but something told me they wanted to do that. It worked, I suppose.
Right. Write.
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10.31.07
Posted in Anime, Gaming, NaNoWriMo, Rants, Writing
at 5:18 pm
Tonight’s the night of magic, folks. In order to prepare for that, though, I think it best to just do a great big thought-dump and have all the stuff cluttering my mind just out. So, here we go.
Tabula Rasa starts up this week– pre-order folks are already enjoying the game. I logged in last night and intend to do so again tonight; the quick verdict is that I’m really excited. I hadn’t played the beta much– well, at all– since about early July, and that was due to the fact that it was a beta, and I was sort of impatient. I’ve since learned my lesson that I’m not exactly the kind of person suited to being a beta tester, which makes sense now, but disappointed me initially. Regardless of my own perspective, though, I can honestly say the game has made significant improvements over what I saw in June and July. It’s rock-solid and fantastically engaging, and many of the issues I’d had with performance are completely gone. Yes, it is still a level treadmill, but it’s a fun one. I’ll probably be playing it off and on through November, while the last mass-access bugs are kinked out and while the majority of my time is spent writing, but in December, things should heat up on that front.
Speaking of games, I’ve been quite reluctant to play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but I did finally swallow my pride and set the game on my rental queue. It should arrive tomorrow or Friday, and likely won’t be touched for weeks. But I’ll at least make an effort. The thing is, I haven’t really gotten over my distaste for Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker just yet, but I’m hoping that the new rendition will be worth a look. It’s the same thing with the Final Fantasy games; some of them have been less than stellar, but I’ll more than likely always give them a try to see if the next one will be good. Though I will say this, actually, about FF: the WiiWare-exclusive game, something about the “small king”, looks really interesting.
Continuing a little bit with yesterday’s random incursion into “More Posts About Writing And Food”, I had to get Halloween candy this morning, because I completely forgot about it up to this point. I wound up getting a bag of Smarties. Now, I realize that some of the non-American readers might wonder at the bile I have for relatively inoffensive candies. What are called “Smarties” in, say, Canada, are chocolate bits covered in candy shells; Americans know those as “M&Ms”. I like M&Ms. What Americans know as “Smarties” are in fact small, button-sized multicolored discs of pure, flavorless tart sugar. Outside of the US they’re known as “Rockets” or “Fruit Tingles”. Presumably the different colors indicate different flavors but they all taste like pure concentrated citric acid to me; I actually have a hard time taking vitamin C pills because they remind me of the taste so much. They are the single most vile candy on the face of the planet, and I despise them unequivocally. So, naturally, when I was a child and I went trick-or-treating, I would invariably wind up with a ton of them in my bag. So, yes, I willfully bought candy I would never even consider eating myself, for two reasons: One, at least I’m not the jerk who hands out raisins or pennies or something silly; and two, if I had to eat those nasty things, then by God, the kids of today are going to eat them too. I also bought a bag of Dum-Dum pops because I actually like those, and because I am a pretty big jerk, in point of fact.
GMail is nice, and I’m pretty much pot-committed to it– it’s got the better part of four years of email in it now. There are, however, some minor issues I’m shocked to note are still in the service. Primarily, the fact that there’s no “Mark as Read” action that can be applied to incoming messages via filters. Good Lord, this is something that’s been in Outlook since day one! I am a bit of a pack-rat, admittedly, so I keep every non-spam email I get, but I don’t need to have my Receipts label permanently bolded because I haven’t taken the time to read the receipts that pile up in there. There’s reports that a new version is coming soon, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the filters get improved as much as the contacts tool did.
Unrelated: Kotaku’s comments system is just plain broken; I tried making a remark on this bit of Pokemadness but the login button didn’t respond for me in Firefox. While I was able to log in using IE6, I then couldn’t actually submit my comment. I am irritated.
Back to food, I went on a neat little rant about blueberries this afternoon and I’m thinking it has a place in the novel. You know, establishing the nature of the kids. I’ll save it for the book, where it will be expanded.
I go now to frighten and mildly irritate children who dare pass my threshhold. Catch you all in November.
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10.30.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Rants, Writing
at 4:36 am
Whenever I get a rejection letter or something similar with regards to my writing, the people around me who hear about it react with some sense of wonder. “You’re so creative,” they say; “How do you come up with that kind of stuff?” I always tend to shrug it off– or, more likely, point to the rejection letter as proof that I’m not nearly as ‘creative’ as they or I seem to think I am. But to be honest, I’ve been giving a little bit of thought to it, and I might have a little insight into it.
First, though, I did want to share this link, 110+ Resources of Creative Minds, which actually got me thinking about it. There’re a lot of things in there which I feel are pretty universal– that is, stuff that applies to everyone, regardless of whether they are creative or aspire to creativity. I encourage everyone to give it a look (and 110 is really such a small number, actually…).
A few weeks ago, Pez said something that got to me– he said that I was a “naturally creative person” (and I hope he’ll forgive me if perhaps that’s a slight paraphrase. I’m pretty sure that this was in regards to Incon, or a different project (which got shot down recently). Anyway, it did trigger me to wondering just why I was so creative. My ‘natural ADD’, as I’ve put it, makes me predisposed in some cases to looking at multiple projects at the same time, and finding parallels and similarities in them that often would not be seen. In all honesty, my creativity is just taking advantage of perhaps an overactive pattern-recognition engine somewhere within my head.
That’s actually the majority of creativity in general. You’ve heard the concept that “two heads are better than one”? It’s the same way with ideas. Just because someone else has taken a look at an idea and come to a conclusion, doesn’t mean you can’t. More to the point, it’s entirely possible that you’ll add something to the discussion. At the very least, you’ll be agreeing with somebody. That applies not just to blog posts or matters of opinion, but to fiction ideas, too. If you accept that gamma radiation makes the Hulk… Hulk-y, then write about that! If not, then tell your story of why the Hulk is green and upset! It’s all a matter of perspectives: yours and your reader’s.
Creativity is, at its core, opinionatedness junctioned onto fearlessness.
Anyway, I have some words to say about Tokyopop’s novel line… but I’d rather not actually say them right now. Not until I’m sure that what I’m going to say is actually accurate. Though this hint is pretty obvious: the incident with the Slayers novels does not look to be an isolated case…
I’ll likely have Bailout tomorrow or something brief.
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10.24.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Writing
at 4:33 am
We’re just about a week away from the start of November, which is National Novel Writing Month. I’ve harped ont he event for a while now, but at last I’m really ready for it. I’ve done the kind of preparation that, in 2005, led to the creation of Inconsequential and its ultimate completion. That’s right, I’ve completed a full outline of the story. Two and a half pages of solid text that wind up being a complete and concise retelling of the story. Unlike Incon, however, I’m hoping that I actually stick to this one rather than veering ridiculously off-course and having to arbitrarily make up plot points some ten months after starting. Actually, no, scratch that. Unlike Incon, I’m hoping that I actually finish this one in a reasonable timeframe.
It’s been tricky, of course. I had the genesis of the idea back in the beginning of September, and I tried to keep the story within my head and ‘live’ throughout these past eight weeks, but it wasn’t to be. See, what happens to me is that I tend to have stories running in the background, and I flesh them out internally during times when I’m otherwise not mentally engaged. I can usually keep the stories running for a week or so; oftentimes they go for the better part of a month, but once they’re gone, or a newer tale replaces it, they’re gone. I was lucky in that when the current story was germinating, I started making tons of notes so that I could sort through it later and hopefully restore it. After today, I think I’ve succeeded. It’s not my ‘current’ story, actually– for some reason I’ve had trouble figuring that one out– but it’s fleshed out enough that I can get to the work of actually sitting down and writing it. The weekends of November are going to be spent like the day I first found this story– stashed safely in a Panera Bread, frantically typing on the MacBook, dumping as many words as will come to me as possible. Though unlike those marathon sessions, I have an idea as to what I’m working towards before I get there.
Inconsequential was initially written from beginning to end, but I started jumping around about 33,000 words in. I intend to write this book sequentially, as I’d done with “A Game of Lords” and as I’d planned for “Metal Rogue” (which is now officially on the back-burner). To be completely honest, I still have no idea what I want to call this one. I’m sure a title will come to me, but for right now I’m thinking that I might want to go with the ‘working title’ of “Five Hundred Prayers”. Even though this story has absolutely nothing to do with the concept that had initially spawned that title. As always, we’ll see.
Also as always, wish me luck, folks. One week to go.
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08.06.07
Posted in NaNoWriMo, Writing
at 9:55 am
About this time last year, I started thinking pretty heavily about what I was going to do for my 2006 NaNo project. Naturally, Real Life got involved and I wound up canning the project three days in. However, this year looks to be different. So, I started going through some of my old idea files in order to get some inspiration.
Read the rest of this entry »
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