Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
So, yeah. I have completely nothing to write about today. Sorry. There’s probably going to be more game drivel tomorrow but for right now, nothing of importance happened so far this week. Maybe on Thursday I’ll have more of “The Emily Story” written (a short story tying into Harvesting Blueberries). ‘Till then, ciao.
So, I’ve got a couple short story ideas that tie into the Harvesting Blueberries world. Some take place before the book, and some take place after it; if I want to publish any of these in advance of the novel, I have to make sure to concentrate on the ones that take place before. So I’m likely to do that here in the next few weeks, once I start writing hardcore again. Letters for the agents are getting put together this weekend, and the first set of ten should be out on Monday. Beyond that, everything’s peachy.
I also managed to pick up a couple of relatively old role-playing game manuals on the cheap. And here I thought getting back into RIFTS was going to be expensive.
Not much to say except that if I’m good with my time management, I might be able to get through more/most of Eternal Sonata over the weekend and can have that to talk more about on Monday.
All right, I promised you guys that I would talk about GASP. The Gaming Association of Southwest Pennsylvania is a regional board and tabletop gaming group that meets monthly. We play obscure board games and on occasion roll a little of the polyhedra. Coincidentally, I tracked down an old module and have begun preparations to run a one-shot D&D session of my own during these times (there’s on the order of 50 of us, so it’s not like there won’t be people doing other stuff or I’d be monopolizing the event). So, that’s that; it’s pretty basic and nothing too spectacular.
I also said I’d talk about the whole ‘workout’ thing that I’ve been doing. To be honest, there’s not much to say– I’ve gone to the gym four times so far, today was the fifth, and I’m working on increasing stamina and maybe a little bit of ab definition and arm strength. The primary purpose is to just get me moving in a comfortable environment. I’m certainly not going to suddenly go overboard and work towards being an Arnold-like muscle mass. I’m about twenty years too late to want to do that.
There’s also my task of finding a literary agent for Blueberries; letters are going to be written and sent out, if not during the week, then on Saturday. I have my resolution to keep, after all, and a list of forty agents with more to come. I’m probably going to start sending out review copies to friends and family soon, so if you’re interested in giving it a look, please let me know.
Finally, MacWorld is tomorrow. I’m severely psyched for the show and the announcements, but the problem is that the odds are starting to swing away from an iPod/Touch refresh and more towards a MacBook announcement. Whatever “Air” is, it’s going to be ‘big’ but not for me. Moreover, it’s only been three months since the Touch was released, and I don’t think Apple would be willing to take that kind of a bath by dumping a new model this soon after Christmas. I’m looking forward to whatever’s up tomorrow, but for now my expectations are a little deflated.
Catch you folks tomorrow.
(Quick Gaming Note: I’m aware of some problems with Xbox Live right now that are preventing the gamercard above from functioning properly. This all stems from a glitch with Soltrio Solitaire not properly giving me credit for an achievement, and it threatens to put me out of the running in the Achievement Race. Gah. More news as it develops.)
So, I might not have mentioned this, but I wrote a novel this year. (You may commence with the throwing of heavy objects to get me to stop bragging… now.) It’s not the first one, really, and that’s what worries me. Harvesting Blueberries is my second novel, but it’s not like I can go around and say “Oh, yeah, I’ve done this before,” because they invariably ask me about the first novel, and my response is usually a mumbled “we don’t talk about the first novel anymore”. So my second big resolution is going to be a stronger commitment to editing and submitting Blueberries for publication.
(side note: I realize, actually, that if I wanted to, I could write an FF8 fan novella remarkably similar to Blueberries… and the title would have to be “Sowing the SeeDs”. Yeah, not gonna happen.)
I only sent about seven query letters for Inconsequential. I really did mean to send more. Honestly. The problem is that that book was just such a weird niche title as to be almost unsellable as a first novel. (Or I could be rationalizing my crappy-ass writing, but I doubt that just enough to keep me out of Aerobic Brooding territory.) I did get some positive feedback from a couple of the rejections, though– particularly from a source I definitely would not have expected (Launchbooks sent me a personalized letter; I did indeed emit the squee of joy). So I figure that I just didn’t get it to the right people.
It’s the damnedest thing, honestly. I wrote Incon because I specifically did not want to write a fantasy story. So what should I find when I started leafing heavily through the 2007 Writer’s Market? “We want fantasy!”. That’s the other thing, though. I gravitate towards fantasy naturally anyway. I suppose Blueberries could be called “magical realism”, except that I certainly don’t get into any huge philosophical debates as Gabriel Garcia Marquez does. It’s not exactly “modern fantasy”, either, as there’s only the lightest of fantasy touches added in (I took great pains to not let the characters rely far too much on their less mundane aspects). Still, the fact that Blueberries is so wide open actually works in its favor, as opposed to how narrowly Incon was defined (”modern literary satire” wasn’t in terribly many agent listings).
So, the goal right now is to get ten letters sent a month, regardless of response times or rejections. I’m going to send letters based on this draft, as well, for January; editing will continue on it as I send out, but this is the biggest stumbling block I’ve had to deal with. Like yesterday, it boils down to laziness, but laziness of a different sort– I, previously, didn’t see the value in the whole endeavor. It’s a matter of risk versus reward, and blowing a couple hundred dollars on paper, toner, stamps and envelopes is a small price to pay to get published. Plus, well, the next one will be easier, or so I hear. And the next one might just be Incon… maybe.
Oh, I want to make 2008 a two-novel year, too. I’m thinking May or June as a writing month, depending on how the gaming goes. I’ve found that this dedication stuff works wonders for me, and putting enough pressure on myself to do it helps out quite a bit. So, I might take late spring or early summer to do up a novel, or more likely, write up some short stories. A 100K word novel is a rough job, but four or five 10K word short stories, with a handful of shorter ones, would probably be enough to spur me into remaining creative the whole year around. And I’ve got a ton of stuff on my scrap pile to look through; what I outlined as the ‘06 NaNo could probably be reworked into a longer-form tale.
Fair enough, I suppose; we’ll see how well this turns out. Tomorrow, let’s have a look at the gaming and anime plans for the new year.
So maybe I lied a little when I said that I wasn’t going to type much. I’ve just been thinking a little bit about Blueberries and getting it ready for the first looks. It’s one of those strange things– I’m done with the story, yes, but there’s still a ton of work left to do with it. Even at about 114K, there’s still a few thousand words of detail that I’d want to put in– one of my original character sketches from September has the walkthrough of the house that I basically relied upon throughout the writing, but I realized last night that I sort of took it for granted that the reader would be able to visualize the house as well as I did.
It’s the strangest thing, really. The house is a composite of a number of places I’ve lived in, so I’ve never actually set foot in it. At the same time, I seem to have these strong memories of the walkthrough, and I can replay pretty much every step I’ve never taken in it. I feel like I’ve lived there for ten years. It’s quite an unusual feeling, really; I see all the details of the house– the study, the game room, the parlor and the foyer, and that’s just in the lower wing– and I realize that I will never actually see them, because they don’t exist. No other location I’ve written about has gotten into me so deeply, and it’s as awesome as it is frightening.
So now that the story’s over, it’s a little depressing to have to say goodbye to it. I really like that house. I might go back to it, might see how the characters are doing in five years or so, but really, it’s just a strange attachment. Ah well.
Speaking of the characters. I had a conversation with Rick last night about the traumas I’ve put them through. One of my big worries about the story is that I painted the events in an unrealistic light– either by having things be too rosy in the end, or by not getting into the horrible gory details of the actual troubles. I think I did a fairly good job of showing the aftermath– the main characters are really only involved on the periphery, are intervening– but I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to be received. That’s probably the crucible, in my mind– if the characters can make it through, can live through the disaster, then I’ll feel I did a good job.
Survival is not the same as living. Some characters merely survive trauma, but the most memorable ones are the ones who stay believable and don’t fall victim to becoming one-dimensional criers of woe when disaster befalls them. This does not necessarily mean they make it through the encounter with their life; some memorable characters live through their fatal encounters just by dying in a believable manner.
So what’s the next step? Obviously, I have some coding work to do that I’ve been neglecting. I intend to continue to neglect that until after Christmas. In truth, I’m probably going to hold off on the New Year’s Project until February (but will enact most of the changes on the 1st anyway). Trust me, things are gonna change around here, and hopefully for the better.
As always, new year’s resolutions are coming up, as well. I’ve already laid out a couple of them but some new ones have popped up as well, and I’m curious to see if I can accomplish one or more of them. I’ll still be keeping them mostly private, but if and when they get accomplished, you’ll know. Just as an example, Inconsequential was one of them. (It kinda still is… sort of. I figure it’s going to be like “Lifehouse”, “Duke Nukem Forever”, or “Chinese Democracy”… I keep talking about it but it never gets done.) Anyway, we shall see. It depends a lot on certain other factors, but I’ll be working towards most of these pretty hardcore throughout the year.
The only other interesting thing for the time being is my previously-stated goal of getting another Game Cleared notice up for 2007… with less than two weeks to go, the odds of that happening are increasingly small, but I could probably blast through Touch Detective 2 1/2 or maybe some other shorter DS game over the time before Christmas. We’ll see– I’m not likely to rush through a Rock Band campaign, but I do have four days alone with the 360 after I get home to hone the skillz (Guitar Solo Tour on Medium… that would count, right?). If I’m lucky– and I think I am– I might even be able to squeeze a third Clear in, bringing me to an even twenty for the year. I have no idea which one that would be, but odds are good for LocoRoco. don’t quote me on that, though.
That’s all I’ve got for this week, folks. We’ll definitely have Bailout tomorrow through until Friday, at least. Catch you folks soon.
At 5:46p, I completed the first draft of Harvesting Blueberries. The final word count for this draft is 114,037 words according to OpenOffice’s word count tool. (A substantial blog post for the day is still forthcoming… just wanted to get this out.)
This evening, the total word count for Harvesting Blueberries reached 100,600 words. This makes it, officially, the longest single work of fiction I have written to date. In comparison: The sum total of my completed fan fiction (14 stories) is approximately 158K words. The initial draft of Inconsequential, counting author’s notes, is 98.7K words. And the sum total of all of my blog posts between January 1st and November 30th, 2007, not counting comments, is 114K words. The Blueberries draft is still in progress; I expect it to be finished before the end of the week, with a final word count around 110-120K.
Well, no better sign than to start off with the now-obligatory Harvesting Blueberries Update: The Twitter feed is a lie. 96K words is correct, yes, but now I’m up to 10 scenes left to write. Given an average of about 2,000 words per scene, this works out well. I just have to remind myself to take my time and let the conversations flow naturally; there’s no longer a real rush, story-wise or externally, and skimping now will just make it harder later.
I take that back, there is sort of an external rush. Anyone who ever tells you being a writer is easy work is lying. I’ll be in dire need of a vacation once this draft is finished. Fortunately, I’ve been trickling through a couple of anime series here and there in order to have a rolling start once the draft is done… but that’s still at least a solid week of writing away. Maybe. Depends on how much I can manage these next few evenings and this coming weekend– the last weekend I’ll have before Christmas break, actually. But, well, I’m this close. I’m not going to give up now.
I also want to try to manage one more Game Clear notice before the year is up, but that might be something I do over the break itself, or more likely over New Year’s Weekend. Two long binges are incoming, and I’m really looking forward to them.
Ciao, folks. We’ll probably have Bailout tomorrow.
So. I’m normally in support of any experimentation with regards to existing properties being taken in different directions, mostly for the sheer novelty of it. But after reading the headline to this announcement from Del Rey and Marvel, my immediate reaction wasn’t just “no”. It wasn’t just “hell no”. It went even beyond “excuse me wtf r u doin”. No, this pretty much is the epitome of “what are you smoking, why haven’t you stopped, and for the love of crap please don’t share next time because that way someone might be able to stop you from carrying this idea to its end”.
Really. “X-Men Meets Fruits Basket”? And then they go ahead and try to explain it further, in the hopes that it won’t sound so dumb. It doesn’t work. Mark my words: This Will Not End Well.
Harvesting Blueberries Update: Had a good, 4000 word night last night, which jumped me across six plot points faster than I would have expected. In my defense, I’d mangled the outline to a point where those six points were really only me trying to stretch out two points’ worth of conversation to make up the Big Twist Conflict. By going back to it, however, I’ve realized that I’ve got ten or so left. I’m at 92,000 words, and I’m taking my time with this ending, pacing it naturally and keeping things moving along smoothly. There’s a handful of additional scenes being added in– I have to make up a final outline here to map out everything that I want to get into the ending together, but overall I think I’m about on track for maybe 110K, or 120K if I get really lucky with the Twist Fairy bringing me more wonderfully unexpected scenes of character interaction.
Of course, GASP is today, so I’ll be doing that. I might get home in time to do some more writing– I don’t want to lose too much momentum, especially given yesterday’ post– but we’ll see. Besides, I ought to leave slightly early anyway due to the Parkway West having some nasty construction late tonight. Catch you folks tomorrow, hopefully with an update.
