writingtrinity

( Devan goes to a party )



This wasn't how I expected it to go, but he sort of took over and now I don't know what's going on.

It's probably too early for me to be thinking about NaNoWriMo, but I'm not getting anywhere on anything else so I figured why not?

At this stage I'm not even sure I will do NaNo this year. Based on my writing progress lately it seems doomed to fail, and then it's just a downward spiral. And unfortunately I won't know until I try.

If I do end up doing NaNo, I'll be working on 3P, an idea I got recently while chatting with friends. It has a crazy half-dead god in a priest, a dead demon in a not-a-pirate-honest, and a girl hunting the demon who destroyed her village. Missing elements include an antagonist and something to get the story moving.

“Hey Ryan, wake up.”

Ryan woke up far too quickly, turning to look at his friend and-.

“Oh crap,” he said, pressing his eyes shut.

“Geez, I didn't think I looked that bad,” Tori said. “You could hurt a guy's feelings with a greeting like that.”

“Yeah yeah,” Ryan muttered.

He opened his eyes again and sighed when his vision refused to magically restore itself. Pushing himself up, he reached around until he found the wall, sitting with his back to it. Then he felt something go past his nose.

“Are you waving your hand in front of my face?” he demanded. “You are, aren't you?”

There it was again. Tori choked back a giggle.

“If you keep doing that I will kill you,” he warned, swatting at the offending hand.

“You'd have to find me first,” his friend said, bursting into laughter.

“Kill you with fire,” Ryan growled.

No writing tonight because I just don't care.

224 words last night, and 13 tonight. The two-war idea seems to have potential, but it also appears to increase the flail-factor because I'm going faster. Back to a single war next week.

341 words, and it's possible I'm meandering. This is the problem with going slowly. And with being overly self-critical.

Also, I really do have a life beyond writing. It's just not very interesting. And lately I've been finding that as soon as I get home and start chatting with friends and writing, the whole day just sort of fades into the back of my mind, no matter how good or bad it was. Since my days have been mostly average to bad the last couple of weeks at least, I consider this to be a good thing.

366 for tonight, in two wars. I did consider a third, but I should head to bed with a warm drink and some painkillers.

I'm flailing a bit now, finding myself adding in details I'm not sure about. Do I need them? Will I just end up getting rid of them? What exactly are they anyway? I find I'm tagging a lot of things to be worked out later. District names is the current big thing, but not the only thing. Oh well, there's plenty of time.

And now the pain is back, so off I go.

Cramps have been making me miserable all day, but I managed to write and got 382 words. No fixing though. If I had any sense I'd be heading to bed right now.

Wrote 253 words today, and didn't get the minimum in a word war for the first time. A simple detail insert fixed that so it's alright.

Which puts my story at 1404 words. And here's where my self-congratulating dies out. 1404 is... well it's good, it's words, better than nothing. But it could be better. So while hurray me for getting those words, reaching my goal for a full working week, and so on, part of me thinks it's not enough.

The catch is, some of that "it's not enough" is just my inner critic, who will always say I can do more because obviously I haven't done enough. I need to be careful that I don't change what I'm doing based on that inner critic, or it'll all fall down. At the same time though, it's partly right. I could do more. It's a question of whether I should.

I'll give it a try for a week, with the two word war plan I mentioned a few days ago, and see how that goes.

In the meantime, I have a Necrology free weekend to enjoy.

326 words, and I'm off to bed now. (I know, I'm boring)

Tonight's efforts add 267 words to the count, but a fight with trying to send a friend overseas a gift put me in a bad mood, so the usual edit hasn't happened.

Which isn't so bad, because the only thing I'm particularly unhappy about I don't know how to make better yet. Everything that I think I need is there, just poorly worded. I'll make a few notes for later, but the writing can stay.

And tonight I still have a chance at an early night, so I'm going to attempt to drag myself off for that.

Subject about sums up today's Necrology writing, but I'm happy with it anyway. I'm only writing 250+ words, it's hardly a large chunk of the story. I got in some description, got Sharla to her destination, and discovered a possible extra detail to dump on Kit when they start to realise things aren't quite right - beyond the obvious zombie invasion.

Got the minimum in a word sprint again (exactly 250 words, which I proceeded to giggle about for a few minutes) and fixed a couple of awkward wordings/incomplete thoughts to get it to 284.

I'm not sure if I'm going too easy on myself staying so near to the minimum. Now while I'm still in the mostly-familiar and managable part of the story seems like a good time to get some decent word counts. But at the same time I want to build my confidence, which the minimum is doing. I know I can reasonably get it in a 15-minute sprint and then add to it, so later on when I'm struggling I can be confident that the same applies.

Having said that, I might run like this for the first week and try setting myself a two sprint goal for the second week, just to see how it effects things. It might make things easier by putting less pressure on a single sprint, but it might also be harder to do both sprints and fix things afterwards.

Not an issue for tonight however, since I've managed to procrastinate my early bedtime right out the window. (Procrastination being my main obstacle with the two sprint idea. >_>)

Necrology writing got off to a good start. Did a word sprint to get me going, figuring I'd get about half my min goal and do a second one to get to pace. Instead I crept just over my minimum, got distracted by MotoGP and Poker, and then came back to first cut my words under the minimum and then up to 274.

So far I think it's going okay, although I had a bit of flailing about the travel time across Lyralius. I think I've worked it out now, and made notes so hopefully it won't be a problem again.

I've spent the weekend poking at Necrology, and I think I'm ready to start writing tomorrow. Except of course that I won't know until I actually go to write. Logically speaking though, there shouldn't be any trouble.


In other news, I rediscovered why I shouldn't watch Final Fantasy things. Plotbunnies. Happens every time, but I never learn.
This particular plotbunny is connected to Blind Sight, and makes me very woeful. From what I can gather it does fit the story, although since what I can gather is not very much it's hard to tell if I can trust it. Which is only an issue if I actually write any more of the story of course.

Thanks to a friend, starting Monday I'm going to attempt to write with Holly Lisle, using an old WIP, Necrology.

Unfortunately, Necrology started life as a NaNoWriMo story, and despite the wordcounts I got for it, never really progressed beyond that. So I've had to do some serious rethinking and reworking of the plot. Which turned out to work quite well, in theory at least.

The story now contains more zombies, more wars, more workable plotlines, and more rational conflict. I only have it in general terms so far, because I'm pretty sure that's what'll work best, but at least this time I can string all the thoughts together and make sense of it. For the most part.

What I'm hoping is that writing only 250-ish words a day will give me more thinking time between writing sessions to keep the threads orgaised, and more time each day to rework the worst of the obvious errors - or avoid having to making them at all.

Tomorrow I think I'll go over the characters and do a rough cheat sheet for them, and then I'll mostly leave it alone until Monday.

Tonight though, I'm going to stop being chicken and get on with the next scene of Aaron and Dale's story.

I. Hate. My. Brain.

There's me, finally curled up in bed, ready to sleep. What does my brain do?

SEXSCENE!

o_o

No matter how much I try to ignore it, it just keeps bouncing around about this idea. And then I wonder where in the storyline it goes, which confuses the smut away, but leaves me arguing with a different part of my brain. And I'm no closer to getting to sleep. By this stage coherency is vanishing, so there's more of the incident I don't remember, but sleepiness is also vanishing, so here I am, after 11pm, typing this out because otherwise it's going to drive me INSANE! (-er than I already am. >_>)

The annoying part (well, one of them) is that the scene itself does in fact work. It fits the characters, and it gets them together without actually fixing things between them. But if it happens before the next lurker boy encounter then the encounter might not happen, if it happens after then things might be different to what I'm imagining. Which is why I asked in the first place. And I'm no closer to knowing.

So out of all of this I've managed to annoy myself, get my headache back, get a sexscene, confuse the storyline, lose any hope of getting to bed at a reasonable hour and almost all hope of getting to bed this side of midnight, and because of that last one I'm going to be extra miserable in the morning because I have to be out of bed early enough to shower and wash my hair, and I have enough trouble with that anyway.

X_X

I'd just like to say I really, really hate fights.



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