Inkhaven

Archive for 2008

NaNoWriMo, Day 20, and lots of bad news

I should check in over here.  Sorry, I've been neglectful.  Not only of my blog, either; It is Day 20, and I just wrote my 14,001st word. 

I am going to take Chris Baty's advice at this point, and change my goal to 25k.  I will not make it to 50k, I'm very sure of that.  But I've come much further than I have for the past two years.  Beyond that, even, I have a story I like and am excited about, and I've found a way to write it that is working. 

I am jumping all over the place in this story.  I have always tried to write linearly before — this time I just couldn't, because I got to a place where I simply didn't know what happened next, and no matter how hard I beat on it, I couldn't crack it.  So I just moved on to a part that I *did* know about, somewhere in the future.  I kept moving that way.  I've gone back and filled in some things in the past, and leaped way ahead — years, in the novel's time line — and written scenes that are unconnected to any others.  It is all filling in, slowly. 

I'm excited about writing again.  A short story I've been working on has taken off in a cool direction, and I'm eager to finish the first draft of the NaNovel and get back to editing the old one. 

Anyway, that's the update. 

In news that actually matters:

Tobias Buckell experienced A Health Event which seems to not be nearly as serious as feared, but has spent a miserable few days in the hospital finding that out.  He is due to go home tomorrow, after being poked and prodded and bored out of his mind for the better part of a week.

The campus of Westmont College, former home of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, was partially destroyed during this week's fires.  The fires were devastating to property, but with very few injuries. 

Of the three severe injuries, one of the victims was a very cool woman who worked at Santa Barbara's Metro Comics.  Carla was my daughter's ambassador in the comics world, always ready with a new recommendation and robust conversation.  She is by all accounts an excellent human.  She and her husband are both in critical condition.  It is times like this when I wish there really were Mind Magic that could contribute to the recovery of Carla and her new husband.  At the link above I learned that donations can be made at Santa Barbara Bank & Trust.  I've sent an email to the bank to find out if donations can be made online; it looks like right now it's at the Montecito branch only.

Best wishes and condolences to all of those affected.

NaNoWriMo Day 7

NaNoWriMo 2008: Day 1

As I write this, it is 1:54 a.m. and I am at 1433 words.  Cigar smoke is wafting through the screen door, the A Team is on the t.v., and I am trying to figure out what those last 200 words of the day are going to be. 

The west coast can be kind of lonely at times, but I am finding fabulous, equally insane participants on Twitter, which helps. 

The Book Cover feature on the NaNoWriMo site has got me thinking.  I might actually do that, as a non-writing creative outlet/break. 

With that, I think another splash of viognier is in order.  I shall employ Zette's 100-word Leap to get through this, and then crash. 

Keep writing!

Gestation period, and 24 Hour Comics Day

I am waaaay behind on my posting on both blogs. 

So, hi there.  How's the writing going?

What, mine?  Not so much.  I'm still researching.  I have immersed myself in a world that I find totally weird, creepy, and fascinating, and am hoping to have acheived a reasonable saturation point by October 31.  I have my protagonist pretty well formed already, which is kind of exciting, because I rarely have much in the way of depth for my characters until I'm half-way done with a story.  Antagonist is still a bit up in the air, though.  I think it'll come.

I'm getting excited about NaNoWriMo.  I stopped by the site the other night to find that my registration from October 1 had disappeared completely — anyone else have that problem?  But no big deal, I just reregistered, set up my region, and customized my forums, (I'm writing sci-fi this year, so I'll be sticking with that one and the general forums.) So far it looks like I'm the only person in my town participating — not surprising, really, since in the past I've done a lot of cheerleading to get people involved and this year I haven't done that.  I probably won't drive south to the next nearest registered region to attend any write-ins.  So it'll just be me and my lappy, doing our best to bang out a novel. 

I've been watching some of the writers I follow on Twitter as they finish stories or outlines or push through tough scenes.  It's a good reminder, something to have in my face daily, that people are out there producing words and finishing things.  I am not right now, still, and I'm feeling pretty okay about that.  Have you ever felt like you were incubating a story?  That's how I feel right now.  And it's just the *one* story — well, that's not totally true, I've had ideas for a lot of related off-shoots of the central novel idea, but I don't feel like pursuing them right now would serve the novel. 

The website is coming along.  I'm happy with what I've got done so far, and I think it'll go live in time. 

Also, I just learned two days ago that today is 24 Hour Comics Day, which I had somehow never heard of.  I may have to participate next year, it sounds awesome and it turns out that my tiny town has a comics/game store that is likely to support something like that.  For those of you participating this year, good luck and Make Good Art!

The wisdom of Jonathan Coulton

From his blog:

More soon!

Harbingers of the season

It's that time of year again.  The sun goes down a little earlier, drug store aisles are filled with cheap Halloween costumes and candy, the break room at work is filled with people's surplus tomatoes and zuccini, and the Spiced Pumpkin Latte is back at Starbucks. You know what that means. That's right: it's noveling season. 

Registration for National Novel Writing Month is open. The site looks great, and I didn't notice any lag issues at all when I registered last night. The best news is that October 31 is a Friday this year, so we can start at 12:00:01 on Saturday morning and get a solid head start without worrying about having to get up and go to work. A good sprint early on can make all the difference during the dreaded Week Two Doldrums.

This will be my fifth NaNoWriMo. I mentioned before that I failed miserably the past two years, something I don't intend to repeat this year.  The thing is… I don't have a plan this year.  I have no idea what I'm going to write. My two previous 'wins' were outlined, note-carded, fully populated worlds, and I just don't have a story in my head to do all of that around right now. Since this year I'm all about trying new things to see what works, I'm thinking I might just do a tiny bit of world building, create a couple of characters, completely ignore things like plot in my planning, and see what comes out when I start typing on November 1. 

This gives me a hard date by which to have the new website up.  NaNo will take up all of my spare cycles (I will also still be in school, it's Election season, and we're hosting Thanksgiving for my extended family for the first time in my life) so if the website isn't done by the end of October then it won't be until the end of the year. 

I hit a little snag in the website development, in that I basically had to scrap a very well-formed plan and start over last week — but I got most of it sorted out today and I'm back on track.  I am excited about it. 

The only actual writing I've done recently (apart from blog posts) has been to add a few words to that story on my phone. Strangely, I do not feel like a complete loser for taking this hiatus.  I hope that the end result will be renewed vigor and enthusiasm for storytelling, just in time to crank out a novel. 

Compartmentalizing

I really want to keep this blog focused on writing, even though there's not a lot of it going on right now.  For those of you who blog, though, you know how sometimes there's something you just really want to write about or report on.  So far those things have leaked out through the keyboard into this blog and then been hidden behind a cut.  It's not an ideal solution, and I feel bad every time it happens.

So I set up another blog for those off-topic things that just don't belong here.  If you want to keep up on my dorkier facets, the place to do it is here:  http://chrystaline.vox.com/ 

If my mutterings on the topic of writing haven't driven you off yet and you're willing to tolerate more, stay put.  And thanks.

Works in Progress

I am doing a lot of work, but not a lot of writing.  I refuse to feel guilty about that right now. 

Today I cranked out a reading, three posts, a Unit Quiz, and an essay for school, and then managed to mark off a bunch of little tasks on my plan for the new website.

Apologies

Meant to apologize for the bizarre fontbuggery that happened a couple of nights ago.  I posted two entries using Google Chrome, which in many ways is awesome, but much as I have trouble posting links in LiveJournal with Firefox, for some reason LiveJournal formats things oddly when posting in Chrome.  Should all be fixed now and I will be sticking with IE until…

… I switch to WordPress, when my new site goes live.  Date to be announced.

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame

Over the weekend we fit in a trip to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, which was every bit as cool as I had hoped it would be.  There are pictures of the outside here. I got some of the first exhibit, too, before I was told photography wasn't allowed.  I would love to post them, but since Docent Dude was nice enough to not make me delete them, I think I'd better return the favor by not screwing with people's copyright, even if I think it's silly and wrong to not let people see awesome things that have been seen before in other contexts when nobody is profiting from it (except in terms of cultural enrichment.)

The things I loved most were:

- The Gehry design of the exterior
- Futurama being included in the Science Fiction timeline
- Seeing actual Nebula and Hugo awards up close
- Ray Bradbury and George Lucas in The Hall of Fame
- Neal Stephenson's actual hand-written manuscript for the Baroque Cycle.  It's about as huge as you'd imagine.
- The interactive Spaceships exhibit

If ever you are in Seattle, don't miss it.