The lamp: taken.

I wonder...: "I wonder if people would say that we shouldn't rush to levy judgement on Dave just because I blogged that he punched me in the face." (Context is everything.)

Are polyamorous relationships hard?: "I just don’t buy that relationships are anywhere near the hard work that self-development is. Once you start focusing on the self-development part, the relationship part seems to be a pretty nice side effect of that." Word.

Tobias Buckell makes a good point in the steampunk war: "[S]teampunk is a just a modern iteration of the previous generation's pastoralism. Tolkien was looking back a couple hundred years to a time just outside his horizon and thinking of it as 'a better age' ... Now in the 21st century, our previous age was industrialization, that’s the age we look back to that’s *just* outside of our horizon where we can strip out all the negative stuff of the Industrial Age and think of it as a simpler age." Fair enough.

(Somehow when I linked to Charlie's rant I neglected to also link to Kate Beaton's definitive takedown of steampunkers. Now I can rectify that, and can also link to Eeyore's steampunk infestation of Star Wars.

Speaking of Star Wars, Ben Kenobi, Private Jedeye: "That's Greedo, the guy Han Solo shot first!"

---

The showing of GET LAMP and discussion afterwards were neat ("When Dave Lebling was writing Shogun, he'd write to Clavell's agent and ask 'why is this character doing this here?' and after awhile the agent would write back and say 'James doesn't remember.' I have footage of Dave apologizing for Shogun. It's great."). Seen a second time, it's... not exactly unfocused, but sprawling. It touches on an awful lot of stuff. The Richard Bartle rant ("Wouldn't it be great if we had the technology to tap directly into the imagination, so you could see all these things... well, we do, it's called text, and it's been around for about three thousand years") is still my favorite bit. I do want to sit people down and make them watch the Infocom "featurette" and the bit on A Mind Forever Voyaging, though.

And it was good to briefly see plumbob78 and baranoouji, and to hang out and talk with daghain and LJless-as-far-as-I-know Jen for awhile. I'm no longer feeling either shut in or overpeopled, which is kind of nice. Balancing the proper quantity (and quality) of People tends to be hard.

But I have books, and writing, and a shiny new computer, and when I need good people I can generally find some. It just takes some looking, sometimes.

nano day 10

Word count: 8500, give or take.
Expected word count: 15000

Yeah, that looks about right. By the end of Day 1 I was slightly over my required word count ("required" average words per day to hit 50K by the end of the month), and it's been all downhill since then. I spent the evening of Day 2 engaged in conversation that was ultimately more important than noveling, and other days have involved Being Sociable and such in the evenings, and and and.

Oh well. This is exactly why I took tomorrow and Friday off, so I could sit down and just plain write for hours at a time. Or at least stare at Scrivener and push things around.

The real problem is that when I went to bed last night I was pretty much done with the setup for the plot, and now I have to figure out what to do with the actual plot itself. Which requires time spent composing but not actually writing. argh.

The process fascinates me. I'm writing crap. I know I'm writing crap. It takes conscious effort to keep writing forward, to not go back and fix the crap I'm writing. (I can't help myself in some cases, particularly where the structure's so bad that it's making the rest of the story unstable.) Of course, not letting myself worry about the sentence-level flaws just means I can see all the massive structural flaws. There may be something salvageable in this mess but I can't see it from here.

And I can't tell from here if it's being at all helpful. There are certainly days when I don't want to get up and go to work, I want to stay home and work on the novel. Which is a nice feeling. But in terms of encouraging me to finish writing things... I really don't know.

I guess I'll see in another twenty days.