Regular Spelling
Thoughts on language and more

NaNoWriMo III: Stretch Goals

So it's near the end of the month, let's take a moment to look at the progress: 

What's that? Over the 50K goal? Yep. And I'm not done with the story yet, I still have quite a bit more to write. But unlike last year, where I just wrote to the minimum goal and quit writing because of other work, I want to finish. I want to finish by the end of the month. And i want to finish with an even better milestone, having really pushed myself. Because while I said originally I wasn't going to be particularly looking at publishing this in any way (although I will be, as before, ordering myself some self-published draft copies for my collection), I have been showing this to several people as I've went along, and will show it to some more, and I want them to have a full story to read. And I want myself to have a full story to read. I still don't know what new twists may come up that i hadn't planned, like has been happening so far. So I want something rich.

So I set a new goal. Finishing by the end of the month. Finishing with over 75K word count now, since I've surpassed the 50K goal already. I've come this far, but I still have a lot farther to go. But I can do this.

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:00:00 -0600

NaNoWriMo III: This Isn't What We Meant

Writing fiction isn't so much about ordering characters around, so much as it is about letting them express their story their way. Sometimes you may get an idea of how a scene will go, but then when you actually sit to write it it doesn't work out the way you thought it would. Often only slightly, but sometimes drastically. Writing yesterday gave me one such experince like that: back when I first wrote down notes for this story I had thought up a scene for this book where Exelia would get drunk and get into a fierce argument with James. I had thought it all out, planned, and wrote down the points that I wanted to hit on in their argument. But when it came down to actually writing it, what the two of them did wasn't even close to what I had in mind. And it baffled and surprised me.

As it turned out, despite what I thought would happen, the character of Exelia's not at all an angry drunk. What I figured was sure to be an argument ended up turning into Exelia being a remorseful emotional wreck. And it worked perfectly. I sat back after finishing last night, looked at what i had written, and found no reason to try and change it to match what my idea was. This is who they were, this is what they did, and this is what fit their personalities. But then I was faced with a new problem. James was supposed to storm out in the argument, leave, and have the next thing in the story happen to him that would move the story along. Now, without the argument, there was no more reason for him to leave her, and now I didn't know how to move along the story.

It was on my mind all morning trying to reconsile this scene. I couldn't figure it out. Letting the characters do their own thing ended up veering so far off course than what I had envisioned that I couldn't find the path back. I spent all day trying to figure it out, trying to undo the mess they created, when i finally realized I should just leave it to them. Let them progress naturally from there. And so once i put hand to keyboard and started letting them play it out from there, everything fell neatly into place, creating the perfect opening to continue with where I wanted to take the story, the setup even better than what I had planned ahead for.

In short, sometimes it's best to just let the characters write your story themselves.

Sat, 08 Nov 2014 10:00:00 -0600

NaNoWriMo III: What Happened To NaNoWriMo II?

Well it's been a while since I've written anything on here, much longer than it should have been. It's NaNoWriMo time once again, and time to write a novel once again. This will be the third time I participate in this. But it turns out I wrote nothing when I did it last year, so what happened then? 

Well last year I was busy with a contract during November as well, so any time I wasn't spending writing was spent programming that, so apparently it just slipped my mind right after that. Last year's novel was a new original story and not in any of my existing storylines, and when I hit the goal I was only 2/3 of the way done with the story I had come up with. But since I was in the middle of contract work at the time once I hit the goal I pretty much had to stop, and after that I lost my stride and haven't really been able to figure out where I want to go with it to finish the story. Once I do I want to really look at cleaning that up and getting it published, because I think that one has so much more potential being standalone then what I worte the year before being part of a larger story, so that's what I want to work on after this month. But that's then.

As for now, what I'm writing this year is a side story in the middle of one of my main storylines, titled tentativley Project "James And Exelia Go On Vacation" because I suck at coming up with titles until later on. It's basically a workup of a few various ideas I've had pop into my head over the last year or two mostly as I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV, since I'm known to make up random fake lore on the spot to other players in my Free Company in the game to explain things in the game. A culimnation and reworking of the fake lore items I've come up with peiced together to tell their own story, which if you were familiar with XIV you migth recognize where some of it was inspired from, but if I hadn't told you beforehand you probably wouldn't. But either way this one necssarily won't be published in this form anyway, because it's being written as a standalone work and would have to be heavily edited later as I wrote other works around it so everything would line up correctly. 

Aside from that, there's more work that I need to get around to doing on this site, of course. The Twitter feed's been broken ever since the 1.0 API cutoff was done, and I don't think it even works anymore. There's a few pending articles I started and never finished, I was going to dump an archive of old dream journal things I recoverd from NotebookForums when it shut down earlier this year but haven't yet, and there's an article I want to write thats actually on topic of what the original theme of this blog was (which I haven't written much on topic for quite a while, really), but that's based on a TV show I've been watching, which actually ended a while back and I don't want people to spoil the ending for me by saying what show it is, so that will come up later. Also, I've been working on a text adventure again, which I'll be hosting on this site, which I'll go into more in December when I get back to working on it more. 

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 09:00:00 -0500