Words are inadequate

Words: 500ish?
Total words: 668
Neat things: If I prayed, I would have breathed a prayer of thanks to the maintenance staff. If I breathed.

Just realised I've not been logging words here for awhile. I've been meeting up with Steph C-- most Wednesdays for a write-in, and getting some extremely sporadic other words down. Most of it's been on the bloodmagery story.

Which is intensely grim, and is about to hit the grimmest of grim sections, and is not really something I need or want occupying my brain-space these days. So I've shifted gears again.

What now? It's a story that I've had the opening bit of (not even a scene, just a scene-setting) for years, and for whatever reason felt compelled to briefly revisit a couple of weeks ago. And now I have probably about a quarter of it done. (Rough guess. I've almost outwritten my knowledge of what's going on.)

Weren't you working on something novel-shaped? Drowned City remains in limbo for now. Jasper happened to be to hand when I went looking for something to attack.

Shouldn't you have picked the novel back up again instead of starting something new, thus initiating a neverending chain of endless beginnings? "Shut up," he explained.

From Wednesday:

Words: 1270
Total words: 6292
Neat things: Family. Also, the antagonist is a jerk. (Quelle surprise.)

Wording continues apace, in large part thanks to weekly writing sessions with Steph C. I have just about written up to the point where I know what happens, and I keep hoping a Brilliant Revelation will occur to me. Hasn't yet, but hey. I did find some family for my protagonist to bounce some characterisation off of so there's that.

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Today was supposed to be writing, or at least plotting, in lieu of going out to Jericho Beach with folks. Instead there has been general poking at the internet, reading FILM CRITIC HULK's excellent article on Matthew Vaughn and Kingsman, playing backlogged Humble Bundle games, a little bit of plotting and worldbuilding and such, poking at BoardGameGeek, discovering a new game, going out and picking up said game at my Friendly Local Game Store, and a little bit of actual writing. Mostly in that order, although any of those that can be scattered throughout were.

I am not really 'stuck' so much as 'afraid of being stuck.' I am afraid of writing this scene because I don't know where it's going, which means I am going to turn my characters loose and let them yell at each other and see what they do. And I don't know them well enough to know at all what they're going to do, and I don't have enough scaffolding in place to know what (if anything) will happen plot-wise, and ... mostly I'm terrified that I'll write this and it will be pointless and will run me into a dead end I can't get out of.

I don't really understand this fear. I mean, I do, I live with it, but at the same time when I shine an outside light on it I don't, because it makes no sense. This is what writing is! I'm okay with writing that may be crap on the sentence level, that I can fix in editing. I guess now I have to get okay with writing that may be crap on the structural level, plot dead ends and contradicted character development and all of that.

Write to find out.

Dammit.

Also, I don't mind naming characters but I hate naming a whole bunch of them at once, and if my protagonist is going to have a family they do kind of need names.

... which leads down the rabbit-hole of naming conventions, and honorifics, and all of that. Bleh.

What a week, and it's not even over yet.

( Mon thru Wed )

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Today I finished reading Samuel Delany's Babel-17, which is brilliant and everyone should read it. The most recent edition (from Vintage) also includes Delany's story "Empire Star," which is written by a character in Babel-17, and is either brilliant or stupid and I cannot decide which.

Also today there was ziplining, which wants its own rant. But I'm tired and this is quite long enough already. Tomorrow.

Words: 658
Total words: 658
Neat things: "Fish and fishfolk circled below her." Questionable, unstable, and possibly-explosive technology.

New project, from a scrap of an idea I wrote down years ago (thanks to Vesper for being a note-taking app that's a delight to use, even though I'm only using the barest minimum of its functionality).

I have a setting, a Spunky Young Protagonist, and a general sense of brightly-colored fast-paced action. I know the next couple of scenes, and beyond that I have no idea whatsoever where this thing is going, or even how long it wants to be. To paraphrase Vincent "Apocalpyse World" Baker, Write to find out.

Eventually I'm going to need a title, but that can come with the plot.

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"Weren't you writing something else?" Yep. New project is a result of stalling out on "Blood On Her Hands And A Stone At Her Throat," partly because I am unsure of the proper capitalisation for the honking long title but mostly because I can't come up with a plot climax to fit the emotional climax I want. This may be a case of being kneedeep in a story and thinking it's terrible (step 3, or possibly 4, of Marcus Romer's six steps of the creative process) but I'm pretty sure it's more than just that. It Does Not Work on a fundamental level and I just can't get it to work.

My options include "write it anyway," which I am not thrilled by, "rip the middle of the story apart again and rewrite it," which I am not thrilled by, and "set it aside for awhile and come back to it later," which I am not thrilled by but which at least doesn't make me want to tear my hair out. Hence, new project.

This A Softer World comic hits uncomfortably close to home, and would have reduced me to tears and speechlessness about five years ago.

Let's see.

Foot: still sore, still a little swollen. Going back to icing it today.

Viola: Went to pick it up on Monday. I am much less of a fan of the colour than I'd hoped: it's a lot flatter than anticipated, and it makes it look... cheap. More importantly, there was an inch-long crack next to the tailpiece. Looked like someone had dropped the package on its end and hit the tailpiece just right. So it's going back to the factory. I'll call the store today and see if I can talk to a human being and cancel the dye job, just get a glossy-black hybrid.

On the bright side, they loaned me the standard carbon-fibre viola they had in stock, and it sounds roughly a zillion times better than the $200 rental I had before. So there's that.

Writing: Been plinking away at this %&$ story. It looks like I'm going to have to do something I've never done before: write a scene or three from a different character's perspective so I can figure out what happens, even though I know for a fact I'm not going to use those scenes. Oh well. Going out to sit in a coffeeshop & write with Steph this evening, which will be pleasant.

Role-playing: reached a stopping point in the Lords of Gossamer & Shadow game last week. I made a rookie-GM mistake in the Big Fight Scene and had an NPC doing a lot of the actual fighting but apart from that it went reasonably well. We're now taking a break to play 13th Age, which appears to be "D&D with fewer rules and more cool storytelling tools."

There's also been some friction with the perennially difficult player, which might warrant its own post later. Or maybe not.

Boardgames: Forgot to mention that I spent much of last weekend at another boardgame convention thing. This one's run by a local wargame club, but they have a small contingent of 18xx players. It was decent: got in three games, and enjoyed the company alright. They have regular meetings one Friday a month, to which I may go.

I leave for the Gathering (ten-day gaming convention in Niagara) in eight and a half days. Based on the cost breakdown and the general state of finances this is probably a mild error in judgement, but it'll be fun.

Speaking of money, I'm also sorting through taxes, which are slightly complicated this year. That's why we pay Chris-the-accountant the small-to-medium bucks. On the "bright" side we're likely to get a small-to-medium refund depending on how some things get classified.

Cats: Are adorable. Chaos is a lot more mobile, and also a lot less steady on his feet than he wants to be, especially when jumping. But he *is* jumping, so that's a good sign. Mostly they both do a lot of sleeping, as is appropriate for elder kittens.

Overall things are good, I think.

I am home from the Rainforest Writers Village retreat, where I coined a new-to-me word (thaumobabble, the urban fantasy equivalent of technobabble), saw some old friends and met some new ones, and generally had a good time.

The weekend is best summed up by this photo.

More seriously, I wrote some 2600 fiction words, interspersed with stream-of-consciousness plot noodling to figure out how I'm actually getting from point A (the opening) to points X, Y, and Z (the action/suspense climax, emotional climax, and aftermath), and whether any of those points will look at all like my original conception. (Spoiler: kind of but not a lot.) This is kind of a big deal: in the last three years I've noodled on a couple of stories but never got past the 'crap what happens now' point after the initial burst of inspiration. It'll be good to finish something and I think it's doable.

A couple of years ago I had the idea to start a story pendulum: write two, revise the first, write a third, revise the second, etc. At the time, with work etc, I'd thought a month for each swing would be reasonable. I'll start trying to get that but I'd really like to get it down to two weeks, or maybe three for writing and one for revising.

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To do today-ish, in no particular order:

• Write this post WIKTORY
  
• Email: uilos, Karawynn, Sonya, others?
  
• Deal with pile of mail
  
• Call Long & McQuade re viola No sign of it yet. Bah. Should have ordered it myself direct from the manufacturer.
  
• Writing: work out character motivations, which will I hope explicate plot & climax
  
• Viola practice
  
• Box game for shipping, get shipping quote
  
• Sort through receipts from this weekend, wince at exchange rate

Words: 775
Total words: 1675
Neat things: Opening scene now has twice as many snarky characters. Unexpected plot twist is unexpected. Old arguments about ritual ingredients, arguments that are themselves practically ritualized by now.

The real triumph isn't those 700-plus words, it's having sat down and worked through why it is I've been stuck on the plot and fixed at least some of the structural problems so that I'm capable of writing those 700-plus words, and more tonight / tomorrow, and having a better than even chance that they're more or less the right words.

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Three years ago Rainforest got me a couple of good friends and a finished draft of Bookwyrms. At this writing that's still the last first draft I've finished, excluding the spontaneous writing contest at Wiscon. Since then I've revised, mm, call it three things worth the submitting, and come round to the Ideomancer editor's view that Bookwyrms is a cute idea with no plot and hence not really a story.

I have no expectations that I'll meet anyone who clicks as well as Karawynn this year. But if I get unblocked or unstuck or whatever, I'll happily take that.

Awhile ago I was having some problems with Scrivener's RTF output. It would occasionally eat paragraph spacing info, I would fix it in OpenOffice (a free MS-Word clone), and then the next time I opened the file it would be even more broken. I thought those problems had been solved.

(This is what us writer types call foreshadowing.)

For reasons that are still unclear to me but which I'll attack this weekend or early next week, it's turning the last paragraph of the story into single-spaced. No problem, says I, I can fix that in OpenOffice. So I do, and open it again to make sure it hasn't broken anything (looks good), and submit to a market noted for its super-quick turnaround times.

Got a response back last night saying essentially "No, and by the way please use standard manuscript format."

Huh?

Opened it this morning in OpenOffice, and saw pages and pages of whitespace and broken headers.

So *that* was embarrassing.

I think (think) I have fixed the problem by switching to LibreOffice (a slightly different free MS-Word clone). I've heard before that this is something I should have done years ago but I have a great deal of software inertia.

On the bright side, the switch seems to have been painless, and LibreOffice is a touch faster than OpenOffice, too.

Stupid software. I'd go back to just using MS Word but a) while unemployed is not the time to start spending hundreds of dollars on software, b) versions of Word after 2003 have been increasingly less usable, and c) they've moved to a 'subscription' model where I get to pay them every month. As I don't anticipate using the software every month this seems like a terrible deal.

Ack. Sat down at 12:30 to read my book for half an hour, ended up buried under cats until nearly two. My entire schedule for the day has been thrown off.

Anyway.

The thing about learning the viola is that at this point it's all about getting to Carnegie Hall: that is, doing the same damn thing over and over and over again in the hope that eventually the muscle memory will stick. It uses effort and brain but not creative-brain, which is what seems to be more burnt out. So it's easy to put in an hour and a half of viola practice every day, but inordinately difficult to get through even an hour of (fiction) writing or revision.

The other thing about learning the viola is that I don't have to smash any of my awful pots. They come pre-smashed. This is sort of the nature of performative arts: you have to keep doing the same damn thing over and over again, but on the other hand there's (for me anyway) not the pressure to make it Absolutely Perfect In Every Particular.

I am, as it happens, horribly precious about my pots stories. I'm pretty sure that before I can really get anywhere as a writer I need to let go of that. I have little to no idea how to go about it.

("Just do it!" AHAHAHAHA yes. It really is just that easy. And it's just that impossible, too.)

Things what I need to do before Monday:
1) REST API documentation for work
2) Finish packing / deconstructing the office
3) Finish 'Blood on her hands' for writing group

#1 is stupid and I hate it. Okay, so actually it's just boring where it's not incomprehensible, but still. Bleh.

#2 is at the part where the last ten percent of the project takes the other ninety percent of the time.

#3 is ... um. I know how it starts and I know how I expect it to end but there's that whole middle part where it goes from A to C both plot-wise and emotional-arc-wise that I don't know how I'm gonna hack. Story of my life.