Gratuitous? I like to think so.

As expected, I’ve still done next to no work on This is How it Ends. I’ve made a couple of maps, which is useful, and I’ve named the countries. I’ve even given them cities and such. But I’m in a lazy and weird sort of mood today/yesterday. To why I’m amusing myself in such a pointless way, a little backstory is required. The three continents on this planet were settled thousand(s) of years prior, and each of the three are based on one of the blocs that existed on Earth at the time of the flight (I should solidly define those…hmm…EuroAmerican, Middle East, Sino-Soviet, Everyone Else…hey, in thirty seconds, I’ve done more work on this project than I have most days this week!).

So, when they land they’re going to name places in recollection of places back on Earth. And then time passes, language evolves, history happens, etc etc, and so they get mutated. I had a bit of fun ages ago working out the Russian one – I took a linguistics course in college, Introduction to Language Change and so I spent the better part of an hour trying to imagine the things that could happen to Novaya Rodina (New Homeland) and Novaya Moskva (New Moscow), and I’m confident that you see no trace of that in the names they presently have. But then time passed, I got lazy, and it came to this week and two of the three continents still weren’t named. So I got lazier. The Middle East one will be painfully obvious once the backstory about the travel from Earth is introduced. We then go to the EuroAmerican one, which I suspect is largely unrecognizable but not because of any cleverness on my part, as above.  I was messing around with names in my head, and I was thinking about the way Americans talk, especially when they talk fast, and slur words together. So my three cities I have labeled on the map are Yark (New York), Shago (Chicago), and Deesay (D.C.). It’s not clever, it’s not funny and yet I’m not changing it until the second draft (if this monster makes it to that).

Now back to puzzling how squid aliens would name themselves…

Preternatural Calm

So in 5 days and a little under 6 hours, I’ll be sitting here probably in exactly the same bad-posture position (slouched back, one leg up on the desk, one leg folded under me) and be starting Nano 2009. Hell, by the time I’ve finished writing this post, I suspect that in 5 days and 6 hours exactly, I’ll have finished my first thousand, which is kind of cool.

I haven’t decided which project I’m going to lead off with. I’m still a little hesitant about This is How it Ends, and I don’t want to start slow and weak, but on the other hand, I’d rather get the more difficult ones done at the beginning before I hit fatigue.  And I’ve got the two short ones; I’m severely tempted to take one of those and attempt to hit 50,000 on Day 1, but I’ve not decided on that, either. It would be great to start over-target, as last year I was behind from Day 1 and it became a miserable battle with myself.  I’d be aided by the extra hour, which could be to my benefit.

I’m still not ready for This is How it Ends. I’ve still got a lot of work to do,but I’m hoping to break it up into small chunks to motivate myself to actually do it.  (For the record, it’s now 6:13, In 5 days and 6 hours, I should have the first thousand done).  I’m more or less ready for the others, though the fantasy one could use a title, but I could just keep calling it “Fantasy 2009 Nano” if I really have to.

The panic hasn’t set in yet. The panic will come on Saturday afternoon when I realize that I’ve still got to name all the squid aliens, half the humans, plus the other set of humans, plus this that and the other. But I have faith that come midnight, the calm will set back in, as it has settled in now.  This is something I love, something I look forward to, and something I will enjoy doing this year just as much as I have enjoyed it in the past.

(I even know where my wrist braces are!)

Knock on Wood?

So, no sooner do I put up a post saying I’ve made up my mind, than my mind goes off and changes itself. The alien story has been scrapped, which wasn’t hard as it never really got fleshed out. I decided I’m not funny enough to write it and don’t think I can pull enough plot in to make it anything other than excruciating torture. This coming month, I need things to write that I’m actually going to want to write.

What’s really annoying, though, is me sitting on my bed, happily reading a book when the kernel of an idea comes into my mind and 10 pages later in the book, I’ve no idea what’s happened because my brain is off somewhere else. Welcome, though, as I’m starting to get a little panicky about all the work that still needs to be done. Before I go to bed tonight, I want to outline this new idea and finish up the last smidges of planning for Just a Glimpse.

So the project that we’re going to pretend is the last one my brain is going to come up with is a play on the traditional fantasy hero quest. The ideas are still working through my mind, but it might be worth something, and I think I’ve already thought of more than enough plot. I just need to let the idea simmer through my skull. In more good news, my 15 viewpoint characters for Just a Glimpse now all have names!

I have all my music bought for the coming month, and am refusing to let myself start listening to it until the stroke of midnight next Sunday. (In case anyone cares, the music in question is/are Dear Agony (Breaking Benjamin), Everything Ends (Ground to Dust), Maybe I’m Dreaming (Owl City), Awake (Skillet), The Alchemy Index, Vol 2. (Thrice), and Wounds Wide Open (To/Die/For)…and no comments about my taste, or lack thereof, about music!)

Nearly November 1!  (Feels almost like Christmas!)

The Final Lineup?

When I sat down at the beginning of the month to think about what I was going to write in November, I had a vague idea of several projects that I was going to embark on. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, things have oscillated widely as my opinion has changed about them. But as we’re only a week and a few days away, I should probably settle down on what projects I’m actually going to pursue. And I think I’ve finally got it. So, the lineup for November 2009:

This is How it Ends (600k): A trilogy spanning at least a thousand years with all of its interrelated plotlines. Earth gets hit by a meteor (I think), and so a few thousand, from the 4 major blocs in the future-Earth depart to look for an Earth-like planet to resettle humanity. They find one, but discover that there are two sentient species on it, squid-aliens and humanoid aliens. They make a treaty with the squid-aliens, but slaughter the humanoid ones because they take up too much land. A thousand (or so) years later, the descendants of the first humans are engaged in an all-out war with the squid-aliens, and both species end up destroying each other out of nothing more than sheer hatred. Meanwhile back on Earth, not all of humanity was wiped out, but inbreeding and disease has whittled down the population to almost nothing, and one tribe/group sends out a healthy young man to go and find the repository where hundreds of embryos have been stored, in order to restart humanity. But, as it turns out, they can’t reproduce successfully, meaning humanity can’t survive. Everyone dies. Everything ends.

Just a Glimpse (300k): A dystopian massive novel. It has many (15) viewpoints, and illustrates a society that is on the brink of collapse. It is a highly stratified society, but one that cannot exist for too long, because the ones on top do  not want to work and the ones on the bottom can hardly work at all. It is a society controlled by three things: religion, drugs, and television and ruled by a leader that cannot control his family, let alone a whole country. This story doesn’t have a lot of plot and the plot is going to come as I write; here I simply have a fairly developed society and a lot of characters, and I’m just going to go with the flow. It’s “just a glimpse” of what a society can become. (I think).

Under the Infinite Skies (50k): A serial killer is hunted by a cop. This is all complicated by the fact that five years ago, when their two countries were separated by a wall at the border, on the last night when they were accessible to each other, the cop and the serial killer slept together. The serial killer thinks that when the cop returns, it means that it was true love; the cop slowly becomes more suspicious as the pseudo-relationship progresses. The reader should understand pretty damn early on what is going on; the drama is going to be in the fact that the cop doesn’t know.

Untitled Alien Story (50k): An alien who was born and raised in Area 51 wants to go and explore the human world. A human goes with him, but cannot (obviously) share what his past is, and so must create a new life for himself (he did not leave entirely with permission, so he cannot have a happily falsified past courtesy of the government). Hijinks ensue as the alien and the human learn how to live in the “normal” world. This one I only came up with last night, so it’s not properly fleshed out yet.

Still loads of work to do, but at least I think I’ve come up with the final lineup. And that’s a start.

Progress!

So when I finished my outlines for the long trilogy I’m writing for November, there still remained a lot to be done. Hardly any of the characters were named, and I refuse to write something 600,000 words long and continue to use “unnamed nobleman” for the whole thing. So I sat down late last night. Now I’ve got a map of the capital city (click to embiggen), all of the important noble families named and family-tree-ed (at least to the extent I need them to be), and I’m working on finishing up the description of my pastoralist terrorist group, which is progressing nicely to the point of me tweaking the outline a little to give them a slightly bigger role (okay, they do plenty of nasty stuff as is, but now they’ll actually have a name and a face to go with them). I feel like I’m making progress, but then I realize how much more work I’ve got to do: I’ve got two more continents and cultures to flesh out, my squid aliens to give some identity to, the ancient humanoids have to have a culture (and names and stuff), as do the Earth humans.  Plus, I’m not done my outlines for the rest of my projects, let alone fleshed them out.

Of course, this all speaks to a certain common theme in me: I’m an inherent procrastinator. The less time I have to do something, the more diligently I’ll actually set about doing it. I just can’t make myself really set into a project when I know I’ve still got a month to get all the planning done. I’m fairly sure this is a big character flaw, but I don’t think it’s a terribly rare one.  Maybe by the end of tomorrow, I’ll have got all three continents’ cultures dealt with and can move on to the myriad other ones. (Of course, first I’ll have to name the other two continents!)

A Short One

While I write this, I’m watching the Eagles (go Eagles!) winning, so I’m in a fairly good mood. Annoyed at not being as far in my planning as I should/could be, but there’s even good news on that front.

Firstly, I’ve actually decided the projects that I’m going to be working on this November, even if they’re not outlined yet. I think they’re a fair mix of what I could do, but we’ll see how they all pan out. All I was missing, as of when I went downstairs to watch TV last night, was a 50k piece. I got a few ideas over the course of the three hours of TV (none of them related to the actual plot, though), and when I came back up, I started outlining. At about 2 this morning, I finished the outline and now have a 50,000 word piece planned, which brings my total words-planned-and-outlined to 650,000. 3 other projects will take up the remaining 350,000.

I got a reply today from someone who I had sent one of my existing projects on, pre-Nano (actually an ‘06 project), for critique, someone on the NaNo site. It was a fairly critical review (and if you’re reading this, you know who you are, this isn’t a bad thing in my eyes), and pointed out some fairly enduring problems with that project, but things that I’ve also been criticized for in the past. Too many of my stories end up existing in a white box, that is, settings are poorly defined/described, and you could imagine the whole thing taking place in a white box. Characterization is a less enduring problem, but it’s still something I’ve heard in the past, and in this particular project, I was never completely confident about it (I always thought its strong points were the concept and the plot, for which I didn’t really get criticized by this reviewer). I’m not perfect, know perfectly well that I may never be, but I’ll take these comments to heart, put that project to the side, and after November is over, attack it once more to see how good I can make it. Thank you.

Going Back to the Past?

So I get a lot of my ideas from really myriad places. It can be a twist off of something I see or hear on TV, a conversation I have with someone, something I see on the internet: anything that makes me think: “hmm, what if?”

Anyway, last night I was up late watching the History Channel (yes, judge away) and I saw a commercial for the new Halo 3 game. After the show was over (it was The Universe, if anyone cares), I came back upstairs and searched on youtube for the same thing and found this , which was an extended version of it. The combination of the visual and the music really set me off, and reminded me distantly of the project I affectionately call the Novel from Hell. It’s something I’ve been working on since spring of 2001 (when I was 13), and has gone through more revisions and reimaginings than I would have thought possible. I think…I feel, everyone has one magnum opus in them. When I figure out how to do this one right, this will be it. I know it. I have no characters so real as these, no ideas so thought-out. Yes, there are still a hundred thousand things wrong with it, things I don’t have the writing maturity to solve yet, but I’ll get there. For now, it sits on the back burner and about once a year, I play with it, rewriting sections or the whole thing, changing the setting dramatically (it’s been to the Balkans and Canada and back again).

So, back to this commercial. It sparked an idea which I know won’t be quite like the Novel from Hell, but will play on a number of different parts of it – and because of that, I feel the whole process of writing it will be so much easier. The outline, which I’ll write tomorrow, will probably take less than an hour (compared to the outlines I finished the other day, which took weeks). Because this protagonist will likely resemble the protagonist of the Novel from Hell. There’s also a dim part in the back of my mind that stepping away from the novel and rewriting the concept will help fix even a tiny part in the patchwork that is that novel.

Excerpt from my rough notes about it (project yet untitled):

Boy watches father’s funeral, becomes a ward of the state, does as he’s told because he’s afraid. Then one day…he begins to plot to destroy from within, to destroy the blight that his country has become. He plays as though in chess, moving all of the pieces without anything ever being traceable…until the day he tips the final piece, and ends up with a total collapse, a complete coup, and becomes the leader of the country…He wonders how he became the man who killed his father.

At any rate, after writing the trilogy described earlier, this will probably be a refreshing breath of something easy and familiar to write, something to get me going again. I’m actually looking forward to writing it. But then again, while I may call it the Novel from Hell, it’s always been my favorite thing to work on.

Peace out; hope the planning is going well for everyone in NaNoLand

Hhhrm

It might be the kahlua talking, but I think the Princess project is getting scrapped. There’s something else I want to do that I think would work out too similarly but would be more fun to write.

(Like people care XD)

This Is How It All Ends (Status Update)

Well, today I finally finished the outlines for the trilogy that’s going to make up the first 600k of this endeavor. It’s as bad as it sounds. It’s nominally science fiction, but has turned out to largely be my explorations in how to kill off as many sentient species in as logical and interconnected method, over millenia, as I possibly can. And worse, I think I might actually work out to be an interesting read, though I can tell that it’s not the kind of thing that one first sells in one’s writing career; there’s plots here and there, but this is probably as dangerously close to literary fiction as I’m ever likely to get (I’m just not deep enough for lit-fic, I don’t think).

Next up to begin to think about and then outline is a fantasy standalone about a princess choosing her husband. In my mind, it’s going to be funny and stuff, as well as being a little political (hey, I majored in political science; I’ve got to put my degree to some use now and then), but my suspicion is that in both the outline and the execution of the writing, it’ll be a lot less funny. I’m not funny enough for humor, and I tend to find deliberate humor in fantasy off-putting unless very well down.

Still undecided on the third project, but still got the Princess story to develop first.

On another note, it’s been great to get back onto the NaNo forums. Relaunch is something that I look forward to every year, and this has been the best yet; in all the time that I’ve spent there, only today was it even slightly slow/down, and even then not for very long. Kudos to the whole NaNo team, you make these couple of months the most fun ones of the year! It’s been great getting to see old faces and trying to make some new friends along the way too. I’m better with people online than I am in person, so this is a great avenue for me.

And kudos to those who are joining the overachiever’s club this year, and to the ones who are going to attempt the million alongside me. I know that we’ll all have a blast doing it, as long as we keep in mind that we only get one set of hands/wrists/arms/shoulders! It’s not so much the destination (i.e. the wordcount goal) as what you get out of it on the journey there over the 30 days of NaNo.

Finally, good luck and have fun to everyone doing it this year. Whether it’s your first year, 8th year, never-won-yet-but-still-trying year, it’s under your skin now, isn’t it? Could you really, really not participate? (Major Life Events aside, of course).

Hope everyone’s novel plotting (or not!) is going well. Probably next update when I’ve got the princess thing figured out.

And So It Begins

Well, the new NaNoWriMo forums are up and the writing season has begun again in earnest. It reminds me how badly I need to get my outlines finished and prepare myself mentally for the stress that I know comes along with writing so much in such a short period of time. (I just wish I wasn’t having to do it while living at home. At once, I suddenly sympathize with all the high school NaNoers I’ve been alongside who’ve had to do this)

My outlines are nowhere near finished, and I was hoping to have the bulk of them finished by this point so I could get on with really fleshing out my world(s), but as usual, it seems that I’m going to be hanging on for the ride as the months progress.

In an interesting side-note, when I was watching tv with the parents the other day, and we were discussing my lack of finding a job, they brought up how I should become a published author, which I must say surprised me, given that they’ve really given no credence to anything I’ve written (though, granted, they’ve never read anything). Still, it gave me something of a warm fuzzy feeling. I’ve not sent out anything in months, though depending on how well outlining and job-hunting go this month, I might specially take out time to work on (what I feel is) my most promising novel to send out for agent-ship. We’ll see.

In any case, I’m just enjoying being back up on brand-new, shiny NaNo forums.