#wyl 05
#Wyl 1 – Peter And The Wolf
Let me tell you about some times I fell down.
#wyl 03
#wyl 02
#wyl 01
Card-Planning For #NanoWriMo
Nanowrimo is a really interesting idea to me because it looks like something you can do badly or you can do well, and it’s mostly about giving yourself a kick in the ass to get it done. I did it once, and I didi t as a demonstration of what it meant TO do it. But then I sat down and looked at what I’d created and found that it wasn’t, well, it wasn’t BAD, but it could be a lot better. It could afford to be something better and what I’d learned in the doing was that I’d really enjoyed the structure of it.
The core structure of Immortal Engine was that of a fairly basic, fairly unimpressive little hero’s journey style novel. There are definitely some weak spots – bits where I just needed to get from A to B, where there’s connective tissue – and that meant I wanted to work out what I was doing wrong. That led to One Stone, a novel that I personally regard as pretty good, when I can be mustered to have an opinion on it. Still in need of improvement, but definitely ‘pretty good.’
So today I sat down to try and consider if I want to do something for Nanowrimo or not – and what I concocted was the idea of playing with this structure again. Structure helped me a lot with One Stone. Knowing I had three arcs of the narrative, that they fit these events, etc – that all worked out lovely. But in NanoWriMo, you have less space (if you want to hit the goal reasonably cleanly) but you also have more freedom. After all, I had to make One Stone make coherent sense across 52 weeks, each week being someone’s first week.
(By the way, that was a bad and stupid idea. I will try to do something better/smarter for 2016).
Anyway, what I’ve got here is a stakc of business cards, a small handful of 15 of them. I have drawn on each one, a row that indicates them as RED, GREEN or BLUE. Arranged in a grid of 3×5, I can see a line running down one side in red, one in blue, one in green. Then, those five nets are the five ‘throughlines’ of the story – each one showing a scene.
The thought at this point is that red is conclusions, blue is introduction and green is complication. Each card represents a scene in the narrative, and each scene has a connection to the scene that follows it left-to-right – but the scenes are all going to flow slightly differently.
Ideally the scenes will go B-B-B-B-B-G-G-G-G-G-R-R-R-R-R but I kind of like the idea of maybe weaving it a little – B-B-B-B-G-B-G-G-G-R-G-R-R-R-R. The idea however is that this keeps scenes and ideas from butting up against one another. It keeps ideas in somewhat separate spaces.
Now, then, how to make sure these ideas relate to one another?
Each of these is going to be a scene, a scene of some sort, and I’m not sure what order I’m going to do them in. I think for now I’m planning on writing out on each card a scene that needs to happen in the story, then I’m going to shuffle it up and write on each card, one after another, exactly what is in that scene. Then as those scenes fill out, I have to work on what exactly connects them. The idea is meant to make it feel a bit less like a long, slow run down from word 1 to word 50k, a downhill sluice. Also, just having a plan, in general makes things better.
If you do this exercise as a way to structure your novel, bear in mind that this is just a way to do it. It might not work for you. But if you need a way to keep your mind focused on things, if you need to be boxed into strange and twisted scenarios to make sure your work has some sense of cohesion to it, rather than just jumping from thing to thing to thing, then this technique might work out for you.
At fifteen basic scenes you’re looking at each scene representing something about 3,000 words, or, over the course of a 30 day month, about two days a scene. That’s a pace I think you can manage, even if it’s your first time. And it’ll give you something to start with, even if you decide you don’t want to do things this way.
Oh, and I’m not sure if I’m doing this. This is just me talking about how important structure is to getting your story finished.
Drabble: Thing Every Day
When you make it all about the excuses, about the reasons to not write, it becomes a sort of snide, look-down-the-nose self-important aura of disdain to those who don’t dedicate themselves to always writing, always producing, always creating, because the idea is there at the core of it all that just doing more will result in doing better, an idea belied by a cultural landscape defined by massive content machines churning out meaningless crap, and at odds with the personal paralysis that comes from not saying something not out of inability but instead out of a fear of hurting people.
Drabble: Making Enemies
How shallow is your love, if someone else not agreeing with you destroys it?
Do you need to have your worldview confirmed by all of your friends?
Can you not imagine the idea that someone, somewhere, might disagree with you?
We know the world is unfair; we know the world is not equal; we know that quality is subjective, our experiences contextualised by experience.
And yet still
still…
Thus, I live a life under surveillance. Waiting for the inevitable moment where I don’t love something right, or don’t hate something enough.
Media Studies is the best degree for making enemies.
Drabble: Pre-Interview Chatter With Professor Dawkins
“Ah, Professor Dawkins,”
“Good morning, ah – I can’t remember your name-”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m just one in a line, after all!”
“Still-”
“So Professor Dawkins, you do plenty of interviews, what would you like to…?”
“This recent Texas business.”
“Oh! Yes, Ahmed, I can see the relation-”
“Yes, I’ve things to say.”
“Ah, about the anti-science nature of the teachers?”
“No, no-”
“The way that the education system is broken if they’re so unfamiliar with circuitry they assume-”
“Oh goodness no.”
“What, then?”
“I want to be thoroughly clear that I’m not very impressed with this child’s work.”
Drabble – KR01
The wheels hum.
There’s this, this feeling when you drive too long when you’ve run out of things to say. When there’s no conversation, no chatter, just the repeating dance of tall, lopsided power poles on the highway appear in the distance, sojourn up to the side of the windshield, then wipe across the window so fast. It isn’t meditative, because you can’t stop paying attention. You can’t talk, because there’s nothing to say. And you don’t even rightly remember the last time things changed.
You don’t know where you’re going, but you’re not sure that’s important.
The wheels hum.
B’s Green Stone
Walking down the beach, he felt the sand pushing up between his toes. A had had a long day, with mud in his hair, sweat on his back and blood under his fingernails. It was, however, okay – he knew he could get home. He knew others had it worse. On the way back to rest, he could just take his time, and maybe feel a bit less bad. One way to feel less bad, one way he had been working on for some time now, was to do things that would make the people around him happier.
Prince In Yellow Update 1
It’s mostly been planning at this stage. Part of what I’m doing involves taking apart the basics of the Twilight series, and since that series is, itself, mostly trash, that involves casting a wide net and trying to find somethings, anythings to latch on to.
I’m also in that stage where naming major characters is on the cards. This is a pain in the ass. Particularly if I ever talk to Fox about it because then I’ll wind up watching her scrunch up her nose because she dislikes how a name sounds.
Still, we have some good bits! I have some motifs, and I have the structure and framing device I want to use. Given that I am feeling quite ill (still recovering from the convention) this seems like a net win to me.
Current Word Count: 2,214 almost all not part of the book
Writing Update
Buncha words on my uni blog. I feel a bit like I should treat uni blog days as if I wrote them on my main blog so I don’t wind up dividing effort that should be rather focused. Fridays are going to be my Prince In Yellow updates day, I think.
That’s Not A-
A few things before we get into full swing though: I am not a trained linguist. I am as with all sorts of things, a sort of general-application nerd, interested in a lot of things, and what I know is not based out of a serious linguistic degree. I’m a media studies student and not even a qualified one at that. This is going to be dealing with words, and how defining them is really ambiguous, too! Not a content warning, I just imagine this will be a little bit boring.
Here’s a jump:Continue Reading →
The Prince In Yellow; Project
I’m experimenting with writing, a lot these past few years. This is a project I’ve had on my mind for two years now, and I figure it’s best to do it now, while there’s no other creative project eating my time.
The plan for the Prince in Yellow is as follows; rather than release each chapter or chunk of text I create, I’m going to instead work on making sure each week, I make myself accountable by posting an accurate and honest word count and an explanation of what, if anything, I’ve felt about the writing so far.
Subjects Objects, And Monsters
One of the simplest lines you can draw in storytelling is between subjects and objects. Again, being as simple as we can, subjects do things while objects have things done to them. Characters are often objects, and machines or the like are often subjects, but basically, it’s a question that these days you hear in a lot of videogame conversations, where we point to player characters as subjects, and non-player characters as objects. That’s a simplification, but whatever.
Right now on my mind is an idea I’m working on for the structure of Prince in Yellow. In this story, we have three central characters, and I was kicking around the idea of changing each of them throughout the story; specifically, the notion of something changing them at a fundamental level. For simplification, we’ll say they’re all going to become monsters, but cool monsters. Good monsters.
This idea is reasonably flexible for me right now.
But.
Those three characters are all girls; one of them is a woman of colour, one of them is trans. That is to say, I have these three characters who are all marginalised, some on multiple axes, and then my story is going to be about them discovering some monstrous thing about themselves, or having monstrous traits put onto them.
And I’m not sure if I want to do that.
I’m not sure if a trans girl character discovering, unrelated to her trans-ness, that she is in fact, an inheritor of a magical lineage and now she has gills and can breathe underwater, sends a right message; if it implies that her trans-ness is part of this monstrosity. If a black girl developing magical power like a witch implies that her outsider status overlaps with unnatural powers.
Basically, I am cautious about making unintentional statements. Not in a great, vast, dreadful way, but it’s something on my mind.
On the other hand… it’s still going to be a story about teens with superpowers.
So…
What do I do?
Do I let this caution of unintentional sentiment lead me to not make these kind of characters? Or do I just act as if the characters are exactly what I would expect? I’m not a marginalised woman, after all. I like writing action stories about punching things and smooching things – so I’m left wondering if maybe, just maybe, I can just do what I’d ordinarily do, and hopefully, just treating these marginalised people as if they can be the standard protagonists of stories without ‘serious thoughtful treatment.’
Choices, choices, choices.
Writing: Tangled Ideas
The past few days I have been haphazardly trying to string together the space of some story or other, a piece of writing I want to make, knowing that it’s all a bit of a mess in my head and that to do the things I want to do, I need to have decisions made more or less at the start of the writing process. It’s a bit spoilery but not necessarily, since I don’t know if this thing will even get written or if it’s just a maybe or an idea or whatever, if you like my writing and want to stay untainted, feel free to slip away.
Adventures In Rudeness – Confederate Car Trip
“Look, I have some sympathy for those soldiers. Some of them – I mean, look, just because they fought for the south…”
“Fuck those people.”
A burst of laughter from the back seat.
“No I’m serious. Fuck those people. Fuck every last one of them. Fuck those brave and hard done by working class dudes who signed up to defend their homeland-”
“Well, it was their-”
“Yeah, it was their homeland! It was their territory! Which is to say, every last one of them, every last fucking one of them, when you solve them down to the purest and nicest and best and most noble of every last one of those fuckers, when he was presented with the choice between his efforts perpetuating slavery or ending it, he chose to fight to perpetuate it because it was his homeland. There’s nobility in sacrificing for your ideals but if your ideals are fucking vile bullshit then that pisses all over the sacrifice. No. No, it was a slow motion genocide. It was torture and death and it was for people who legitimately felt there was no better idea and the best people in that army were still people who were happy to fight and die to save the lives of the terrible fucking shitheads alongside them who would beat runaway slaves to death for the sin of touching them. Fuck. Those. People.”
It was a good minute before anyone said anything.
“Well!” A beat. “Don’t think… yeah. Well.”
Drabble: The Lecture About The Internet
“The internet is an amazing place,” said the lecturer. “It’s removed all the barriers for publication, it’s this endlessly creative space, it’s where you can say whatever you want and you’ll find people based on the quality of your work, it’s meritocratic and it’s attention-driven, it’s an entirely new type of economy, where value derives not from scarcity in the conventional money economy, and where you can say whatever you want in communities you curate, where love and joy and expression are unbound and valued and pure, where you can explore literally any idea you want.”
“Oh really.” I asked.
Secret World Problems
I have been sitting in this room for roughly a day.
Sometimes I fade out, distracted by the reassuring buzzing in my skull. I have walked the path of the butterflies, stood in the presence of this man, without his shirt and with his robe, while he tells me of the tools of warfare. Blood and blade, fist and hammer, the tools of war in their purest senses, the craft of violence which, let’s face it… is what I am here to do.
But I don’t know what two to pick.
I reach for my phone, to look up guides again, huffing to myself… after all, I want these powers to have some synergy but I also want the style of them to work well together and ugh ugh ugh oh god it’s four in the morning again and I still haven’t decided.
I guess what I need is a backup plan. A plan bee, if you will.
Mycroft Mysteries: An Announcement
There will be no more Mycroft stories. A short explanation follows. It is not a very happy explanation, and maybe you want to go check out some cute puppies instead.Continue Reading →
Mycroft Mysteries, Case Four, Part 5
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #4, Part 4
Know any Turtles?
Slowly, the turtle moved his head towards the mouth of his shell, “What if,” he said, just ruminating, in the gentle, round-about, toe-in-the-sand voice he knew he had to use, “What if maybe someone you knew was a turtle?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I mean, surely a turtle would know,” The little window of light was closer. “I mean, I guess maybe even I could be a turtle.”
“No, you’re definitely not. You’d never be a turtle.”
And he stopped, and shrank back.
Probably best to stay in the dark more.
Not like anyone needed to know he was a turtle.
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #4, Part 3
Her Knife
Her knife
in his hand
was warm
and wet
but so
were her lips
and she was
after all
right that
it kept him
standing still so she could
do what they both wanted
and then she
only twisted
it just
a
little
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #4, Part 2
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #4, Part 1
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #3, Part 4
Drabble – How To Explain?
Sitting on the porch
and watching the dog
The dog didn’t want to sit still,
– because he was young –
but he didn’t have a friend to chase
So the little black-and-white head, triangular and pointy,
picked up a stuffed toy
– left in the yard for another dog, of course –
flicked it up into the air
And chased after where he threw it
Bouncing in the grass, overshooting it, skidding around
Throwing up clods of dirt.
He looked down at his phone.
And wondered how he could ever share this
The feeling
Of sitting on the porch
and watching the dog