IWSG – Twas the Month Before NaNo…

Ack, I forgot to pre-write this!  *cough*

I find myself in pretty much the same place I was last month, with not getting much done on my re-write and desperately hoping I’ll finish it before NaNoWriMo starts.  Only it’s not just slow going because I’m having trouble motivating myself to get working on it.  It’s also slow because my class work picked up.  It’s been a while since I was in a really heavy-duty class (doesn’t help that I didn’t take a class last semester), and this one is turning out to be particularly intensive.  Like, one week the professor assigned us a thousand pages of reading and didn’t see what was wrong with that.  Even though she knows most of the students are either working full time or are taking multiple other graduate level courses.  Argh.

Speaking of “argh,” I had a strange dilemma come up a few days ago as I was working on the re-write.  The way this level of the re-write is going, I’m tending to copy-and-paste anything that doesn’t need to be changed to accommodate the new version of one of my leads, right?  (Because further refining those scenes can wait until the next draft.)  So in pursuing one of the radically, radically, radically different sequences, I had been so eager to move ahead (because it was just fresh composition, rather than trying to tell the same basic sequence of events with a different character) that I had skipped over a “cut-away” scene to show what some of the less prominent characters were up to.  After I realized that, and went in and put it in place, I remembered that at the last Camp NaNo session, I had written another “cut-away” scene to show what one of the antagonists was up to, and it had to go sometime in front of the previous one.  Then….

…..okay, let me start over with a few more details so it won’t get too confusing.  The main antagonist of this book is the prince of the country it takes place in, who is also the ex-boyfriend of one of the main leads.  However, the main antagonist of the series (yes, this is book one of a series) is the king, not the prince.  And although I talked a lot about the king in all the earlier drafts, he never once showed up.  So I had written a scene where the king is having a fit and orders his son to go hunt down that pernicious ex-boyfriend of his.  This was to lead into the “cut-away” scene I already had, where the prince goes to the bad-ass lady sky pirate and asks her help in approaching his ex-boyfriend.  So what happened the other day is that after putting in the scene with the lady pirate, I remembered the other scene, went to read it and figure out where best to insert it into the draft…and found out that I had written it in such a way that it was required to go after a battle against the Royal Navy that hadn’t happened yet.

*sigh*

Honestly, the worst part about that is that it meant that the entire writing session (most days I only manage to write in the interim between breakfast and leaving for work) turned out to be wasted, because everything I had done had to be undone because it was in the wrong place.

Delays like that are one of the main reasons I’m worried I won’t get the re-write done before November.  My class is the other reason, because I’m supposed to be spending October doing research for my final paper…not that she’s letting up with the heavy assigned reading for a second.  Ugh.  I am so ready to graduate that I can’t stand it.  (But I definitely need to take one more class after this, which really sucks.)

I’ve had some thoughts about my NaNo project, too.

My plan is to write out some of the myths of the world of this novel, because I keep having characters refer to their gods without my having a very firm idea of who those gods are or how they function in their societies.  One of the characters in the novel (in the new draft, anyway) is a scholar, so I just decided to set him up as more of a folklorist/mythologist instead of a historian, so he’s going to be the “author” of this book in-world, and that way I don’t have to worry about trying to change narrative voices between cultures.  And I think I may have said all that last month?  Well, anyway, my plans have narrowed and focused a bit since then.  Originally, I wanted to write every culture’s main myths, but since I want them all inspired by real cultures, that would require a lot more research than I have time for.  Instead, I’m going to just do the three cultures my three leads come from.  (If I finish all that and still have time, I might address the two cultures that are going to come up in the next book, one based on Nordic/Teutonic myth, and the other…uh…I have no idea what to base it on.  I need to research what little we know about Gaulish myth…but I fear it was not much different from the Celtic myths of the British Isles…)

So I’m going to write the main myths of three cultures, one inspired by Celtic, one inspired by Greek and one inspired by Roman myths.  Once I’ve done the basic mythic background material, then I’m going to do that character’s “paraphrases” of the major mythic cycles.  And that’s where it’s going to get tricky, because a large part of the plot of the series is that a thousand years before the action of the books, a mystical doodad was used to erase all knowledge and memory of war from the minds of the human race.  It began to wear off after about nine hundred years, so there’s war again in the present, but there can’t be any wars or knowledge of war left in their myths…

…and that means I have to write myths that have obvious places where there used to be war, but it’s been removed and/or replaced.  The Celtic mythic cycle will be easiest in that respect:  I plan on it being about a character who’s basically a fusion of Cu Chulainn and King Arthur, so I can replace wars with jousts and tournaments.  (And it’s not like personal violence between individuals went away along with wars…)  But the Greek and Roman mythic cycles?  How do you tell a “based on the Trojan War” story in a world without the concept of war?  Actually, the Roman one will be easier, since the major mythic cycle that the Romans don’t share with the Greeks is the journey of Aeneas (only important post-Vergil, of course) and the foundation of Rome, and I can always have their culture hero fleeing his distant home because of a natural disaster instead of it being destroyed in war.  But for the Greeks, it’ll be trickier.  All the more so because I’m flouting the typical thing and my based-on-ancient-Greece culture isn’t based on our modern idealized vision of Athens (because let’s face it, the real thing was not such a pretty, erudite democracy) but instead based on the horrible, slave-powered reality of ancient Sparta.  Which means their favorite god wasn’t the noble Athene but the brutal Ares.  Athene can be reworked easily without the war part (some people probably forget she’s a goddess of war as well as of wisdom) but Ares?  Without war, all he’s got is sleeping with Aphrodite and hiding in bronze jars when Olympos is invaded by giants.  It’s going to be a real challenge to reinvent him both without war and yet while making it clear that he’s supposed to be a god of war.  (I may have to make him a god of martial arts, as it were, but even that doesn’t work because “martial” is still a reference to war…)

Anyway, strangely, despite that it sounds like I’m filled with worries for my writing, my main writing worry is…okay, actually, I have two.  One, I feel like I’m gonna flip out if I can’t write some fanfic soon and let out all my crazy new fantasies about my current OTP, but I don’t want to do that before I finish my rewrite, because I don’t want to contaminate the characters, and my brain is slow to change over between sets of characters in my writing.  The second — and bigger — thing is that I seem to have totally lost my blogging habit.  (I don’t even want to think about how far behind I am in reading blogs, either…)  I think it’s because I started work on the review of a book I really didn’t like, and the idea of finishing it feels oppressive.  Maybe I should just write a preface and post it as an “abandoned” review…?

I did actually have a good idea for how to start blogging again, though.  One that should help with my writing, even.  I just can’t act on it yet.  Among the altogether too many things I’ve backed on Kickstarter have been some card-based party games that I plan to use as writing prompts rather than games.  For example, one of them is called “Pitch Storm” (I think), and you get a set of cards suggesting ridiculous movie premises, complete with asinine notes from an incompetent executive, and you’re supposed to pitch the movie that would result.  So, what I plan to do instead is to write a brief story (or possibly detailed summary) based on the cards.  And I thought I’d post that to my blog.  But the game hasn’t been produced and shipped yet, so I can’t do that yet.  (There’s one or two others I plan on using for writing prompts, too.  I actually have one of them already, but it’s going to be the hardest to use for the purpose, it turns out, and I haven’t had a chance to try yet.)

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IWSG – Stalled Out (+ An Idea Up For Adoption)

Lately, I  just don’t seem able to write.  Not much, anyway, especially not at a single sitting.  My blogging has almost stopped entirely (I seem to be averaging about 2 posts a month on this blog, and about 1 every other month on my other blog), and my regular writing has really stalled, too.

Part of that is due to the re-write in progress, I think.  I believe I said last time that I was currently re-writing last year’s NaNo novel (and had been for both this year’s Camp sessions) and that for the current attempt I’ve completely replaced one of the characters, which has necessitated massive shifts in story.  Some of the scenes are barely altered (largely because he’s not in them), some are still similar enough that they’re easy to deal with, and then you get to the sequence I’m currently in, where there’s more that’s 100% new than there is that’s been kept.  And I don’t mean how much text and I can copy-and-paste from the old draft.  I mean the entire situation of why they’re in town, what they’re doing there and how they’re going to get to the island off the coast has nothing in common with the original version.  Once they get to the island, things won’t be as different, but…they have to get there first.  Today (er, yesterday) all I did was look over what I’d written the last time I worked on it (some two or three days previous) and ended up doing nothing, because I just wasn’t feeling it.

I feel like that’s a big problem with this draft, is that while some scenes I’m really into (mostly the ones with the two male leads interacting and developing the possibility of the relationship I originally intended them to have before I started the initial draft) and then there’s scenes like this one that feel like a chore to write (mostly, these are purely story scenes that don’t develop their relationship, even though they do tend to develop their characters).  I think if I was going back to my fanfic, I probably wouldn’t be in this slump, but I don’t want to stop halfway through this kind of re-write, because I feel like if I did, I’d never finish it.

*sigh*

It’s very frustrating, because I feel like there are a lot of wrong answers about what I need to do right now, and no right answers.

Another thing that’s bugging me is the world-building.  Specifically, the world’s religions.  I’ve based each culture loosely on a real world culture, and I’ve tended to have the characters just toss off mentions — generally in the form of oaths — to their gods, pretty much on the assumption that they’re identical to their Earth counterparts.  (To the extent that some of them don’t even have their own names yet, and just get [Athene] or [Aten] or whatever for now.)  I’m thinking of using this November’s NaNo to write up the mythology of their world, so I can have them more organically reference their myths and stuff.  Since I’m planning on releasing the final book (for free via LeanPub) when the re-writes are finally done, I could just release the myths as well, either before, after or simultaneously.  I haven’t at all started planning it yet, aside from trying to decide some of the details of what kind of myths I want to write (cosmogonies and theogonies, first off, then stories of the gods and major heroic tales for the cultures of the three leads), but I feel like it’s probably a good idea.  I hope.

The idea is that what I’ll be writing will be a book from that world, specifically a book on world mythology.  I’ve already set up a character in the novel who’s a professor studying mythology, so I can have him be the “author,” and that way I don’t have to worry about setting up extremely different voices for the myths from the different cultures, because they’re all being re-told by the same author.

Given the way my writing seems to go, the myths will probably make better reading than the novel.

*sigh*

Aaaaaaanyway, it’s not that I’m running out of ideas.  It’s just that almost none of my ideas are about how to approach this rewrite.

However!  I had a great idea the other day (at least, I think it’s a great idea) for a movie musical, and I wanted to share it, on the off chance that someone might read this who happens to be (or know) a screenwriter.

The movie would be a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.  Now, it’s been a very long time since I read the novel, but I seem to recall that Big Brother never showed up (in fact, the way I remember it going, I’m not sure he even existed) and I’d want that to stay the case in the movie adaptation…but he’d still get a theme song.  The way I envision it, the Big Brother posters would feature an artist’s rendition of Sting at whatever age seems appropriate for Big Brother (I’m picturing him the way he looked in the mid-’90s, but that might not be old enough), and the theme song would, of course, be “Every Breath You Take.”  Possibly with new lyrics that removed the lines that make some people mistake it for a love song.

I can honestly say that I think Sting would sign on.  (Of course, I don’t actually know much (or anything) about the man aside from his lyrics (mostly from the ’70s-’80s) and a couple of quotes I’ve seen.  But those lyrics lead me to believe he would be receptive to the idea.)

So, if anyone reading this happens to work in the movie industry (or know Sting), please think about this idea seriously!  I think that if the movie hewed as closely to the book as possible (using actual novel text for the lyrics of the new songs, etc) it could be quite something.  I give you this idea freely, and I want neither compensation nor credit should it be made.  I totally want to see it if done right, though.

IWSG – It’s almost April…

…and that means Camp.

Not camp like “cheesy, over-the-top” but camp like CampNaNo.  (But you knew that.)

Actually, I’ve never done the April session of CampNaNo before, just the July session.  But I’m not taking a class this semester, not doing April A-to-Z (or maybe I should, just to try and jumpstart my pathetic blog), so there’s no reason not to.  Plus I haven’t been very motivated lately (getting addicted to a couple of video games in a row has definitely not helped, of course), so I’m hoping this will get me back into a good writing habit again.

I’ll be re-working my NaNo novel from this November, which is a first:  I’ve never done a rewrite as a NaNo project.  I’m also doing a first for me and have set my goal as 30 hours instead of a number of words.  I generally get about half an hour’s writing time before I leave for work in the morning…though I don’t always use it to write.  In fact, lately I’ve loaded up my current project (essentially an RPG in fiction form), written about two sentences (if even that much), and then opened a file of one of my past projects that needs editing.  Not that I actually edited the past projects when I opened them; I just read over bits I liked and made mental notes about the parts that needed fixing.  (Yeah, not the least bit productive, I know.  That’s part of my worry.)

Of course, I have new worries about doing this revision for camp.  Like, for starters, I haven’t even opened the file since early December.

I should probably read it over before April gets here.  Especially since the idea is to start out by writing the long dead guy’s journal in order to use it as chapter-openers throughout the book.  I need to remember what he was writing about before I can actually write it.  And refreshing my memory about the world I created would probably be a good idea, too.  (I mean, I could look at my notes file, but it’s a freakin’ mess, so I’m not sure that would actually be helpful.)

Part of me thinks I should see if anyone in my Cabin (once I’m in a Cabin, anyhow) wants to look over my first draft and see if they have any suggestions, and the rest of me thinks that wouldn’t be at all fair to them (I know it’s a convoluted mess with ghastly pacing and a tendency to take back doors to avoid anything actually, you know, happening) and might serve no function but to make them hate me.

…

….so, I just re-read my IWSG post from December, where I was talking about NaNo, and there was a lot there I’d already forgotten.  Am I getting senile in my early 40s?  That’s a terrifying thought…but either way, at least I have that post to help me remember what I wanted to do in the re-write.

But I think I definitely need to re-read the original draft before April 1st.  I guess, since my current project isn’t grabbing me, I’ll set it aside for now and use my mornings before work to re-read my NaNo novel and get some planning done about how I want to proceed through April…

…and maybe make some plans to do April A-to-Z after all…

IWSG – This year’s NaNo

As I said last month, this year’s NaNo project started out as an AU (alternate universe, for those not acquainted with fanfic terms) fanfic of my favorite movie, Velvet Goldmine.  But this wasn’t going to be one of those “serial numbers just barely filed off” projects; I did so little planning before it became an original project that almost nothing about it ever had a connection to the movie.  (The movie’s main three male characters were imported, but none of them have much connection to the originals.  Cal is the most like his inspiration, Curt Wild, but even he has a lot of differences, given his knowledge of steam-powered airship design, affinity with giant birds of prey and his tragic first love, who is the person he loved most in the world, and who was always totally original.  Except that he kind of looks like Ichabod Crane.  (From the Disney animated version.)  I’m not sure why he looks like that.  It just sort of happened.)

So, my reflections on finishing the project:  first and foremost, it’s a mess.  The point of this first book (in a series of eight, as currently planned) was to get them to learn about the MacGuffin (it doesn’t have a name yet) and get their hands on the book of clues as to where to find the pieces of it.  Well, okay, that’s not the whole point, but that’s its role in the bigger story.  So part of the process of finding out about it was to find the journal of the dead fiance of one of the main characters.  He had been researching the MacGuffin (and was killed over it), and had in turn learned a lot of his information from the journal of a man who lived a thousand years earlier.  (Very sturdy paper!)  So I kind of had this huge info dump as one of the characters was reading the dead fiance’s journal.  I mean, I broke it up over a few days, with other things happening in between, but…not good storytelling.  I’m thinking that my first task in a re-write will be to write the entire journal of the man from a thousand years earlier, divide it up into neat little chunks, and stick them at the beginning of each chapter.

But that’s barely scratching the surface of what needs to be done.

Missing Letter Monday No “V” – Another Author’s Oracle Tag

So, in trying to decide what to post for my last Missing Letter Monday until December (yeah, it’s going away for NaNo), I looked through to see what I’d done in the past with this letter, and found this post with a series of questions for an author to answer about their current WIP.  And I decided that hey, I could just answer the questions again, only this time for the project I’m going to work on next month.  These questions were initially encountered on Sara Letourneau’s blog, in an open-ended “consider yourself tagged if you’re reading this” kind of thing.  So I guess that means I’m re-self-tagging?

Er….anyway…on to the questions, though (as before) I used some * in the questions when this week’s forbidden letter came up.

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The Author’s Oracle Questions

The answers this time are going to be NaNo prep, for next month’s project, which I am planning as the first in a series.  (Who knows what I’ll actually end up writing, but…)  I keep putting off filling out the cool character sheet I found on the NaNo forums, so maybe this will help me with that.  It’s a genre-ignoring project with elements of the fantastic, elements of steampunk, and an LGBT romance.  And giant eagles.  Because all things are better with giant eagles.

0. The Fool: Which of your characters is the most intuiti*e?  The worst decision-maker?

The best decision-maker would be Ouden, the 12 year old girl on the crew of the airship.  She considers herself the one who keeps Cal, the captain, from dying all the time, and she’s pretty much right about that.  As to the worst…hmm.  That’s a tie between Cal and Elliot (the romantic leads), but for different reasons.  Cal is extremely passionate, and short-tempered.  He acts on impulse, but he’s also slow to trust, so he’ll do dumb things because he doesn’t trust someone yet, only then once he does trust them, he’d bend the fabric of reality if he could for someone important to him.  He was hurt horribly not too long before the book starts, so he’s become more slow to trust than before.  Elliot, on the other hand, is the ultimate naïf.  I mean, the guy took a madam’s word for it that she was just sheltering him out of the goodness of her heart, and had no idea she was charging the men who were also just taking shelter in the same room with him and who just happened to want to sleep with him.  (In his defense, he is quite young (about nineteen) and recently ran away from his sheltered home on the family farm.)

I. The Magician: What character, location, or object has the most positi*e influence in your story?

(OMG, I skipped this one last time!)  Probably Cal’s airship, the Audacity.  The cast would be utterly lost without it.  Although Cal wouldn’t be hunted without it, so maybe it’s not all good.

Missing Letter Monday – Repeat (11/30)

The Spirit of November

The Spirit of November is relentless.
He bellows for his dinner.
“Words!” he cries.
“More words!
“Give me 1,667 words for dinner!
“Give me 1,667 words tomorrow, too!
“Give me nothing less!
“Or else you suffer!”

Countless numbers write, write, write on,
To indulge his hunger.
Never enough.
It’s never enough.

I write.  I write.  I write on.
It’s never good enough.
He returns it with disgust:
“Better words!” he insists.
“Give me better words!
“Or else you suffer!”

I tell him those are the best I possess.

But he’s furious none the less,
Sending me to the dungeons
Of lousy-writer misery.

The Spirit of November, The Novel Writing Month [(c) Nintendo]

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How else would the spirit of November look, right?

(First posted: 11/30/15.  Serendipitous timing for both of this forbidden letter’s posts to come in November.)

Missing Letter Mondays – No “W”

One Day to NaNo

It’s one day to NaNo!
(I can’t say the full name.  Not today.)
It’s one day to NaNo:
Happy All Saint’s Day Eve!
(I can’t use the regular version.  Not today.)

Are you gonna do NaNo, too?
Plotter or pantser?
I’m a planster, myself.
I plan some,
And fly the rest by the seat of my pants.
Or the seat of my pajamas.
(I often type in bed.)

I keep trying to dedicate novels
— Or other bits of fiction —
To things I’m clueless about.

I need to stop doing that.

(So I say, but this year’s is no different.
A rock star discovers he’s got a seven year old son
He never heard about before,
And then his boyfriend the reporter gets offered a better job,
In distant London (in his native land)
And the fledgling family moves across the sea.
And later still, they have another kid,
So the reporter can pass on his genes, too.
Because NaNo.  I guess.)

Rambled long enough,
I guess.

(Yeah, my fiction’s like this, too.)

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IWSG – July CampNaNo

I’m not sure if it was a good decision or a bad decision, but I think it was the only decision I could make.

I’m doing July’s session of CampNaNo.

Okay, that part is a good decision.  No question of that.

But the part I’m still not sure about is that I’m writing fanfic.  It’s the first fanfic I’ve written since…January of…2013? 2014?  Well, one of those two.  It was definitely in a January that I last touched fanfic.

I guess, looking at it that way, it doesn’t sound like a long time.  And compared to the twentyish years I spent writing fanfic (exclusively for more than ten of those years) it really isn’t all that long a time.  But I’d been proud of myself for getting away from fanfic and only writing original stuff.  (Even though much of my “original” material wasn’t really all that original, being based heavily — or entirely — on Greek mythology.)

So why am I doing something I said I wouldn’t do again?

I feel like I didn’t have a choice.  I mean, it’s been taking over my brain, so maybe if I write it all out, it’ll let go, and I can get back to the WIP that was already in progress.  Right?

IWSG – NaNo Failure

For the first time, I’ve failed NaNo.

In the future, anyone who chances upon my profile will see four wins followed by a loss.  They might think something like “Oh, what a shame she messed up after so many successes!”

Of course, if they click further and look at the stats for the failed novel, then they’ll probably ask themselves “Why in the name of sanity didn’t she validate her novel if she had 87,474 words?!”

Well, the obvious answer is that to me, the goal of NaNo isn’t to write 50,000 words.  To me, the goal is to write a complete novel.

And I didn’t do that.

Missing Letter Monday – No “A”

The Spirit of November

The Spirit of November is relentless.
He bellows for his dinner.
“Words!” he cries.
“More words!
“Give me 1,667 words for dinner!
“Give me 1,667 words tomorrow, too!
“Give me nothing less!
“Or else you suffer!”

Countless numbers write, write, write on,
To indulge his hunger.
Never enough.
It’s never enough.

I write.  I write.  I write on.
It’s never good enough.
He returns it with disgust:
“Better words!” he insists.
“Give me better words!
“Or else you suffer!”

I tell him those are the best I possess.

But he’s furious none the less,
Sending me to the dungeons
Of lousy-writer misery.

The Spirit of November,
The Novel Writing Month
[(c) Nintendo]

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How else would the spirit of November look, right?