Last Day of November

And one last writing prompt to fill out my NotNaNo experience!  Using Pitchstorm again.

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Once upon a time, the senior swim team at the 13th Street Y was big enough that they had trouble coordinating practices; inevitably, the lanes got too clogged and everything slowed down.  When they were kids, Barry and Terry found that hilarious.  They would sit in the lobby and watch the old people running into each other as they tried to swim laps, and they would laugh their impertinent little asses off.

Now, sixty-five years later (give or take half a decade), they didn’t find it so funny.  And it didn’t matter anyway, because there were only five people on the senior swim team now:  the two of them, Matilda (who was ninety-seven if she was a day, yet claimed to be only seventy), Mary-Jane and Marianne.  Before Marianne joined the team, Barry and Terry referred to their teammates as M&M when the ladies couldn’t hear them…which was most of the time, since Matilda’s hearing aid batteries were constantly depleted, and Mary-Jane insisted that she didn’t need hearing aids yet, despite being completely deaf in one ear.

Still, it was a puny team, and the Senior Olympics were coming up in just a few months, and they couldn’t hope to qualify at this rate, let alone win.  They desperately needed some fresh blood on the team.

So, when Marianne came to work practice one day gushing about the new man who just moved into the house across the street from her son, Barry and Terry were quickly excited.  The man, Marianne insisted, was about seventy and strong as an ox.  She also said he was the most handsome man she’d seen over sixty-five since Sean Connery, but they doubted the judges at the Senior Olympics cared about attractiveness.

After talking about it for a couple of days, Barry and Terry asked Marianne to bring them over to meet this man she was so enamored with, to see if he was interested in joining the swim team.  Being glad of any excuse to talk to her crush, Marianne eagerly agreed to meet them the next day at her son’s house.

About yesterday…

So, in my post yesterday, I said I only had a wordcount for the day of 440.

That turned out not to be true.

You see, after I posted that, I was poking around looking at stuff about this year’s Yuletide fanfiction exchange challenge.  Specificially, I was looking to see if there were any requests for Velvet Goldmine stories that I could actually write as a treat, since I didn’t sign up to take part in the regular exchange.  (Even more specifically, I was hoping for requests that said more than “anything Curt/Arthur” which is kind of what they’ve said lately, which is not enough to give me any inspiration, because that’s pretty much all I write in that fandom already.)

And I found one where the requester suggested a fusion, combining Velvet Goldmine with one of the other movies from the very diverse filmographies of Ewan McGregor or Christian Bale.  At first, I thought I was supposed to fuse three fandoms, one for each of them, but after realizing it was just Velvet Goldmine and one other, I was like “hmm…”

Today’s writing prompt…

…was a bust.

It just didn’t do a thing for me. This is what I got for today’s prompt:

It’d be great for actually playing Pitchstorm as a game, most likely, but as a writing prompt…well, the character and plot work together way too well, for one thing! (So maybe that means it would be a bad draw for the game, too? Or at least one that wasn’t very funny for other players.)

Anyhow, since today is a holiday and all, I had decided it was okay to just have a word count of zero for the day, but then I remembered that there was one spot in the Velvet Goldmine/Doctor Who crossover fanfiction that I had left to be filled in later that I could go and fill in now. (I’d left it open so I could fill in anything weird I came up with later on that needed to be set up earlier. Like, as it turned out, that the planet’s guidebook was an electronic guidebook with a GPS map in it. That was necessary for the finale, and I didn’t think of it until I got to the point where I needed it, but this spot I had reserved for that kind of thing gave me a nice spot to set that up seamlessly.)

Anyhow, that let me add a whole 440 words, giving me a total of 50,864.

Everything forgotten…

Today I did another writing prompt using Pitchstorm, and it rapidly turned into Velvet Goldmine fanfic.  I may (or may not) eventually post it to AO3, and if I do, the title of this post will be the title of the fic there.  It comes from the opening narration of the movie, which includes the line “While everything forgotten hangs in dark dreams of the past, ever threatening to return…”

Today, a Writing Prompt

So, with one thing and another, finding myself without a project (between projects?), rather than trying to start up a new one, with all the quasi-planning (and sometimes (quasi-)research) that involves, I decided to just do writing prompts for the rest of the month.  Or at least until I figure out something better today.

And I thought I’d share today’s with you.  In the past, I’ve put the prompt first (I’m using Pitchstorm again), but this time I thought I’d put it after the story.

And now, on with the show…

So…things change

(What does not change is that I’m lousy at typing on my phone. That post title kept coming out as “thongs change”…to the point that I was tempted to keep it.)

I decided to just set Merlynne Jones and her crazy universe aside until I have some idea what the heck I’m trying to do with the story.

So today I decided to work on finishing up my long-stalled Doctor Who/Velvet Goldmine crossover fanfic. Which is not as bizarre as it sounds, because it’s an alternate version of the Velvet Goldmine characters where they’re pretty much exactly the same, personality- and career-wise, only they’re living in the far future on Earth colonies on the other side of the galaxy. And from there it’s just a standard Doctor Who story…except I did a mix-and-match with one original companion (Ace) and a new Doctor (13, naturally!).

Aaaaanyway, it had been stopped at 47,708 words, right before the finale, because I couldn’t quite figure out how to handle a small detail of same. Finished the fic at 50,143 words (after rereading the whole thing, mind you!) making today’s total 2,435 words, and November’s total 47,409.

Getting really close now!

Not sure what I’ll be writing tomorrow, but I’ll think of something…

andiamtotallynotintothis

When you find yourself writing the above word, you know something’s wrong.

I know I’ve been delayed by a lot of stupid stuff on this year’s (unofficial) NaNo project, and much of it’s actually, you know, valid stuff that would get in the way of any writing project. Like the chair thing.

But this is…I don’t even know what this is.

I’m not gelling with this project, for whatever reason. I love the idea behind the world of it, but I just don’t have any feel (or feeling) for the characters, and I don’t even know who the baddie is or what his/her agenda is or anything.

So for tonight I’m calling it quits at a measly 201 words written (for 44,974 total so far) and doing something I should have done on Thursday, since the universe was clearly telling me I should.

That, of course, is to watch Velvet Goldmine.

See, on Thursday, I went to see Ford v. Ferrari. Which stars Christian Bale. And there was a trailer in front of it for a new movie directed by Todd Haynes. The only way the universe could have been more obvious about it would be if there had also been a trailer for Birds of Prey in front of it, too. (I wish there had been; I don’t go looking for trailers online, so I haven’t seen any trailers for it yet. Not that I want to see Ewan as a bad guy (like, ever), but I do hope the movie will be good, ’cause Harley’s a great character I’m really fond of…when she’s written well…)

If everything I just said sounds like nonsense, then click on the Velvet Goldmine tag on this post (I’m on the phone app right now and can’t figure out how to do links to old posts) and find my Netflix review of it, and then all will make sense. 😉

Anyway, I hope watching my favorite movie will reenergize my writing juices (ew, that sounds gross), and that tomorrow I’ll get plenty of writing done. Even if it’s on some other project.

I now have to sit on the floor…

…if I want to write at home.

It could be a lot worse, so I’m counting my blessings, but it’s also really frustrating in a lot of ways. Especially since I have to sit on the floor to do pretty much everything other than my resin work. (I mean, unless I get my act together and clean out one of the other wooden chairs…)

I need to swallow my pride and use the warranty/replacement program to get the chair fixed/replaced…but first I have to have time to clean up some of the crap in here.

*sigh*

Anyway, today’s writing went okay (except for my backside starting to ache after sitting on the floor too long), except that I did something really dumb. I needed this alien world to be a paradise to my werewolf character because there was no such thing as a full moon there, so she’d never transform (she’s the Wolfman type of werewolf, only without losing control of her actions), and after I spent a fair chunk of time trying to male my heroine explain full moons to people who live on a planet where the moon has no phases, I sat down to think about how that would even work…

…and I came to the sudden realization that it made much more sense if the world in question simply had no moon.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of that right off the bat! Would’ve saved a lot of time.

Still, at least I thought of it eventually! :p

My word count for today was 1,727, giving me a total for the month of 44,773.

Getting close!

(Though it’s plain the new (i.e. main) project won’t hit 50k by itself.)

Things are still bad,

but not quite as bad as they seemed last night.  Though it’s still a race to see if my back can get enough good out of the heating pad before my legs decide that having a chair under them is the most awful torture in the history of the world.

Fortunately, I was able to do some writing at my brother’s place by borrowing his kitchen table and its accompanying chair.  I’m not sure if it’s the slight give of the chairs I’ve been sitting in (recliner, movie theater seat, driver’s seat of my car) or if I was just sitting far enough forward that the affected part of my leg wasn’t on the chair, but I was fine to write there.  Except it was getting cold after a while (I’m used to being under blankets in the winter because I am a loser) and also it was getting late.  More the latter, really.

Unfortunately, I can’t really do the same thing at my own house, because my kitchen table (or dining room table, more accurately, as there’s no room in the kitchen for a table, but it’s a hand-me-down table that used to be in my parents’ kitchen, so I still think of it as the kitchen table) is covered in stuff that has no home and is also my resin workshop.  (Yes, I eat my meals in my recliner.  Because I suck.)

Still, I am hopeful I will come up with some kind of solution that will not involve me going insane.

My word count for today was a paltry 1,229 words, which brings me up to 43,046 for the month.

Tried a chart today…

…let’s see how it looks shrunk down to fit.

Uh…not great.

Plus I’ll have to re-input the data every single day.  😦  Not the greatest solution.

Annoyingly, it turns out there actually is a plugin for charts on WordPress…but you have to be a on a paid plan to use it.  :<

Maybe I should just buy some graph paper and make the graphs myself by hand. ;P

In case you can’t read the chart, my word total today was a measly 1,310, and my total is 41,429.

My word count today was really stymied by the fact that I meandered down a dead end and was temporarily stopped at a bit over 300 words.  The problem with being a pantser — the problem with being mentally hardwired to change things on the fly as I go — is that sometimes you make a wrong turn.  I mean, I was still following the minor outline I had earlier.  Specifically, this part:

it’s a local nobleman who tells them about the way they might be able to undo some of the flood’s effects, though he begs them to stay on at his court, offering such great rewards that they’re sorely tempted to stay.

So, the thing is about this nobleman.  I had them arrive in a strange new location, and they had to meet the local lord, who was going to tell them about something that could help them do whatever they need to do (I have an idea about that part, but it’s still nebulous), but also tempt them with offers to stay and work for him.

I’m not sure why, but the first time around —

Okay, no, let me back up.  See, I decided that I was going to make the planet a paradise, especially in that it wasn’t simply a matriarchy in name while still reflecting the male-dominated cultural attitudes we see on this planet.  (I’m looking at you, Alexandria in Final Fantasy IX.)  That, however, made it rather awkward for the noble to be male instead of female, though.  So I figured a teenage king who had inherited the throne when his mother died in childbirth.

Only he ended up being shallow, boring and…I don’t even know what he was.  I couldn’t find a way to work with him.

No, I couldn’t find a way to work with the attitude he injected into his entire atmosphere.

If that makes sense.

Anyway, after thinking about it for a while, I decided the teenage version had to go.  But I liked the inherited at birth thing, so now the king is four, and it’s his father, the Prince Regent, who’s asking them to stay.  He can be more like a proper nobleman than the teenage version of his son could, without sacrificing what I wanted for that world’s civilization.

Of course, that delayed me.  And also life happened.  Because, you know, life does that.