...or whatever other holiday(s) you may celebrate! (I know, I'm early for Christmas, late for Hanukkah and Yule, and have no idea when Kwanzaa happens to be...)

I recently saw the following MEME displayed on zeenell's LJ:

Hang your holiday stocking below by leaving a request for something: your favorite pairing, your favorite person, your favorite group, your favorite tour, etc. I'll fill them up with something that I hope will match your request. It might be a fic rec, a photo, a song, a link to a youtube clip...anything. You can also fill other people's stockings if you see something that strikes the right chord.


Which gave me the idea for my own MEME. Post a request for something - a story, a poem, a parody of a song, an icon... it can be from any of the fandoms listed on my interests page, or any of the NaNo or other ideas I happen to have posted on this journal, or anything generically, or if you want to know if I'm familiar enough with another fandom just ask. I'll do my best to give you something, possibly something short and drabble-like, or possibly something longer if I happen to get a bit carried away ;-)

Feel free to request something even if we haven't really talked a lot on LJ, and don't feel that you need to post this MEME on your own LJ even if you do request something (though if you want to steal it, that's also fine with me).

I should really take a picture of the icicles forming outside and use them in some sort of icon, because they really are kind of pretty, and I've got no icons on this account yet besides NaNo icons.

We've got our first real snow of the season. It started yesterday, and is somewhere between one and two feet now that it seems to have finally tapered off. Luckily it's dry and powdery snow, which makes shoveling somewhat easier, not that I have the necessary ranks in snow shoveling to be effective. My mom took the precaution of parking the van at the very end of our longish driveway so we could escape with somewhat less effort, thereby enabling us to get to church on time. Of course, such forethought did little good, as church ended up being canceled. Apparently to the north people are used to dealing with snow and a mere couple feet would mean nothing to them, but here in New Jersey it has the ability to shut things down for a couple days.

The snow did not stop us from going on a drive by the church, where we discovered the parking lot to be better plowed than the streets leading to it, and the sidewalks to be nicely shoveled. Still, both normal services as well as our special Advent Lessons and Carols service were canceled.

I probably should get back to working on my NaNo project, especially now that I'm starting to get over the annoying cold that's been poking at me for the last week or so. But maybe first I'll go out and see what progress I can make getting some of the other cars freer of the snow. Luckily, my parents have said that one of them will drive me to the school where I'm subbing tomorrow if schools are open... my car still needs its tires changed, and I'm no good at driving on snow and ice anyway (as can be witnessed in the two different styles of side mirror and the remaining dents on the passenger side of the car).

Of course, before I do that, I have to pull myself away from the warm and cuddly greyhound who decided it would be fun to share my chair :-)

I visited the sprint chatroom just in time for the 30 minute long sprint. On the plus side, I found that if I really put aside caring about what stuff says even more than usual, I can do most of a day's word count (around 16K) in the space of half an hour. On the other hand, the place in which I did this was a letter written to my main character from her great-uncle, who is a scholar and tends to take his time thinking about things to get them down right - so now he's turned a bit babbly. I'm mentally marking it as something to edit in December, because the particular sort of rushed babbling that the sprint encouraged might work for her but seems a bit OOC for him, especially in a letter to her where he's trying to reassure her and give advice. But it is a bit amusing at the same time, so even when I edit it I think I'm going to save a copy of the babbling sort of version for posterity (and possibly an example that it's okay to have a not-top-notch rough draft, and oh yeah, here's how you can edit...)

Anyway, I'm off to bed now, because I probably shouldn't even be up at the moment... work tomorrow and all that....

Our choir was kidding around about getting rid of "r"s at the ends of words and the fact that we weren't doing a pirate Evensong, which compelled me to re-write a couple of piratical tunes to be theoretical pirate Evensong hymns - or songs. Well, that got the tune of the songs into my head, and between that, playing around with the words, and the general craziness of NaNoWriMo, I came up with a version of lyrics for NaNoWriMo.

So without further ado, let the silliness commence:

When It's NaNoWriMo...

(tune: What Do We Do With a Drunken Sailor)

( Lyrics themselves are behind the cut because they get a bit long )

Feel free to share if this amuses you, and to add your own verses/play around with it/whatever!

And my u key is randomly squeaky. It just started and this is a brand new (refurbished) netbook...

Last night was pretty amazing; we held a write-in at the bookstore nearest my house, and it was a ton of fun. And I'm way too into NaNo mode because I just automatically hit Ctrl+S when I paused at the end of the sentence there - which is something of a useful reflex anyhow.

I brought little prizes for word wars, and a bag full of random stuff to use for prompts (including a dragon, who rapidly became our mascot, because our regional challenge is to include a dragon somewhere in our novel - more on that in a bit), and a timer, and cards with random prompts (some of which I wrote, and some of which I took/adapted from my many writing books that have exercises in them). I probably should have stuck to just one peppermint mocha Javakula, but I had two, so by the time I got home I was nowhere near ready to just go to bed. The people there were an amazing bunch, and we had so much fun that we're probably going to do it again next week, and we're all kind of disappointed there's only one more Tuesday in November.

I have one character in my novel who's basically an answer to a bunch of challenge-type stuff. Her name is Marin Woon (anagram of NaNoWriMo; apparently Mr. Ian Woon is a NaNo trope, but since I'm not sure what in my world is abbreviated Mr., I gave a first name instead), and she is an Imperial Dragon Mage (the title sounds more impressive than her power, for the most part; here's the dragon challenge popping in again) who specializes in designing siege weapons (particularly trebuchets).

Between subbing and cooing over my new netbook (which doesn't have yWriter installed yet, because antivirus comes before internet, and Dad's doing the antivirus thing now) I haven't actually done too much writing today. I think another part of that is I'm afraid I'll start writing and just keep going, and I'll end up finishing before I get to go to all the write-ins, and I want to have a reason to go to write-ins. I'll have to figure out how to keep the story going until the end of November even if I reach the word count before then; maybe I'll add another place and person or two to visit.

At about 17,000 words, Melanna is finally about to actually open the book and take a look inside, thereby starting off the original idea for the plot. Part of having it formatted as her journal means giving over a bit more of the telling of things to her, and she doesn't have the "What is important in the context of the story" filter as much as I do, because she's more trying to get down a bunch of random information and tidbits for fellow scholars who may some day look at her journal as an artifact of her culture, while at the same time being sixteen and in a sort of uncertain situation and also using the journal partly in figuring out what's going on and where she fits in.

Saturday I went to a really cool retreat. Not that I want to get all preachy on anyone, but I'll try and keep it short, and you can always skip over this paragraph. There was a lot of really cool stuff we learned, but one of the things that really stayed with me was when I was reflecting during one of the quiet times and wondering how God could love such flawed and imperfect creatures as humanity, and why God would have made us so flawed and imperfect, and then I suddenly thought of how much we seem to love characters who struggle with flaws, and how boring "perfect" characters are. It kind of makes me want to try writing an essay or sermon or something about God, human imperfection, and Mary Sueism, but I'm not quite sure who would read something like that other than me.

Also, one of the women I sometimes work with mentioned her disappointment that the skill and talent of people who could write really catchy commercials was being used to propagate the patriarchy rather than to promote the environment (okay, so she's just a little political and opinionated....), which made me wonder whether it would be possible to write a fantasy novel that highlights environmental issues and the delicacy of an ecosystem and all that without turning it into the didactic and rather cliched "Technology bad, nature good." A question perhaps to explore another time, either outside NaNo or in next year's novel, because I'm not really sure there's any kind of place to fit something like that into this year's NaNo (although I will be amused if and when it pops up. Maybe one of the ghost people happens to be an environmentalist or something.)

So how are your novels going? Have any of you had other ideas pop into your mind and suggest that maybe they would be fun to write, whether or not they tried to actually lure you away from your current novel?

( Cut for length of rambling: one paragraph of word count discussion, two paragraphs about my novel, one paragraph of the attempt of shiny new story's attempt at distraction )

Wow, that's a lot of words for just an LJ entry. I should probably be typing at my novel with such fervor, but my bed is calling, so perhaps I shall simply endeavor to make suggested minimum word count so I can avoid having another red day on the little spreadsheet.

So I got up early and was able to get out the first couple scenes of my novel before going to the first church service of the day, which ended up being about 2,000 words, thereby putting me in good shape as far as the official needed word count. And I totally wasn't writing notes about my novel during the church service, uh uh, not me, never, would I do such a thing? And does that make a church service the craziest place I've written so far this NaNo, or do I have to actually write what's going to be going word-for-word into my novel rather than sketching out scenes for it to count?

Now we've got a bit of a break between services, during which I can tack on a few words and get even a bit further ahead. I like having a bit of a cushion; it makes the rest of the month easier if you get a decent-sized cushion at the beginning. So when it's close to the beginning of the month, if I have my needed word count done and still have time/energy left, I'll challenge myself with a new word count goal (sure I got 1,667 words done today. How about 2,000? Got that? Okay, let's try for 5,000 now.)

At the moment, yWriter is telling me I have 3,940 words. Of course, if I've got time after posting on here and checking out the regional forums, I'm going to see what I can do about adding some more to that. And I've already got my first guest writer in her journal sort of planned out; she's not going to want to write on the ship when she's seasick and the ship is rocking, thereby making it difficult to write neatly, but the apprentice navigator on the ship knows her from the academy where he learned a lot of the basics of navigation and where she grew up, plus he knows how to take notes on a ship without them getting all smudged and wobbly (because someone has to, otherwise how would the ship's log thing work?) So rather than a week-long interlude during the sea voyage, I'm going to have at least one entry written by him.

So how are your novels coming? Are any of the characters or plot things starting to surprise you already?

It's a good thing for me that we get an extra hour on November 1st, so I might actually be able to get my writing done in the morning. The problem with November 1st falling on a Sunday is that it also happens to be All Saints' Day, so we're having a pretty big service, and then there's actually an adult forum sort of thing after that, and then this year we've also got evensong, and I since I'm in the choir I can't really miss that. So it's going to be a busy day, even before we add the scramble to get in a decent word count (because it's always good to sprint ahead in the first week, as I usually lose at least a couple days to being sick or super-busy in November).

I think my novel is going to start towards the end of the first month in spring. I've been trying to decide whether I want to simply rename the months and use the Julian calendar, or whether to make the months all have the same number of days (probably thirty...), but keep them sort of analogous to our calendar even so (four seasons, three months for each). I'm thinking that the climate might be a bit different, since I believe most of the world is ocean. I've also got tentative names for the months, though I'm still playing with them a bit. Usually I wouldn't worry about a calendar, but since my main character is going to be keeping a journal, I'm going to need to have some idea of the dates and things. I'll also need to work out a dating system... actually, I think there are several in use because of the world being mostly islands and thus home to many distinct cultures and societies, but I think the one she's going to use (for the most part, unless she drags me along on a tangent about other dating systems or whatever) is years since the Alliance of Eldath, also written as A.E.

And that's probably enough rambling for the moment.

So I went to my first NaNoWriMo event last night, and it was (to steal my sister's new catchphrase, which she apparently stole from "Harry Potter: The Musical", which I have yet to see) totally awesome. I think I counted sixteen people there, though I could be off by one or two. And we had fun chatting and getting to know each other a bit, and the coffee house was pretty cool, and the woman even came to the back room to thank our ML for bringing us all in.

Anyway, one of the topics that came up during our discussions was how we got unstuck when we hit the "wall" and couldn't think of what to do next. So I made a post in our region's forum, but thought maybe I should cross-post it here, in case any of you are interested in my usual methods.

( Ideas for Getting Unstuck )
And of course I'm sure I didn't hit all the potential strategies, and there's endless variations on those I touched on... anyway, next on the agena: looking at the possibility of making more NCIS/NaNo type icons, because I posted a batch at the NaNo icons community the other day, and someone else replied with a great link to a collection of the teams' rules, so now I feel the need to play with some more rules....

I believe this is my first year of having my probable main character commenting on possibilities of setting and plot.

My family was playing the "this or that" game last night (verbally, not on the NaNo forums) and my mom gave her preference as urban fantasy over high fantasy, as urban fantasy seems like it could actually happen (not that I'm trying to make it sound like my family has problems distinguishing reality from fantasy, because we're generally pretty well-grounded in that regard). I was thinking that she might have a point, and I guess Melanna was listening in too, because later on she told me, "You know, I could be from the modern world if you wanted."

Which kind of surprised me. I'm used to my characters speaking up when I pull them out for the Characterization Game and such antics, but I'm not as used to plot and setting ideas manifesting themselves as coming directly from a character's mouth. Still, it does help me get a sense of the sort of person Melanna is; when I first created her as a roleplaying character she was a bit more prone to stubbornness about things, as well as having the gimmick of max ranks in every knowledge as well as obscenely high bardic knowledge skills. Now she seems more the sort to absorb everything around her quietly, and to occasionally make a pertinent comment when she feels ready to do so. Although she does tend to get into chatty moods as well, particularly when writing things down (or planning to write things down).

I considered the possibility of her from the modern world, and decided it probably wouldn't quite work with her back-story. If her parents were diplomats living today, I don't see them just leaving her with an eccentric professor uncle in an isolated university (not that there seems to be much of the isolated university thing happening any more) – after the illness which messed with her constitution enough to make it a bad idea to have her constantly traveling and exposed to new contagions without a doctor who knows her on hand, they would probably find a boarding school with an excellent medical staff and leave her there instead. And they would probably visit her more, with the option of airplanes and such, though that isn't necessarily a problem. But I think her particular brand of thought comes partially from being raised surrounded by scholar-types all her life, and not having the usual sorts of childhood friendships that seem almost inevitable in a boarding school. Not that I thought all of this out in detail at first, but my instinct was to tell her, “No, you don't belong to the modern world.”

To which she replied, “Perhaps you could have another character from the modern world then. I wouldn't mind being their guide. I think I could be a decent guide, if I tried.”

Usually I stay away from stories which have two distinct worlds colliding (probably a result of too many fan fictions where idealized versions of the author end up playing havoc with the storyline of established works, as well as a bit too much of the “poor put-upon Earth girl gets to go to a magical land and she finds out she's the princess and everything can be right with her on the throne because she's not really her parents' child” sorts of things). I do like the idea of different cultures, though, and having overlapping worlds, so I'm not entirely against the possibility of worlds that end up touching somehow and someone from the modern world getting sucked into the encyclopedia as well. I think it will be less of what I dislike if the book isn't totally focused on the Earth-person, and if the Earth-person really is from Earth and doesn't totally hate our world just because “ZOMG life is unfair.” I'm not sure yet about any of the details of Earth-person, or Earth-people if I decide to go with more than one perspective, or even if I want to include Earth-people. Anyone have any thoughts?

So I'm pretty sure I've decided on my protagonist for the novel, or rather she's decided on me, because she's started telling me about what she's going to put down in the introduction to her journal (which is written not just for her own benefit but also the potential benefit of future scholars who might find it as an artifact of the times in which she lived). Part of her start to the new journal is talking about what she happens to know about her parents, and the gifts they've sent her from on their travels, and now I'm wondering whether the various items she mentions should just happen to tie in somehow with the various haunted places she may be visiting through the story....

It's too soon for me to be able to say for sure, but I believe my NaNo for this year may well be The Encyclopedia of Haunted Pages, set in a pseudo-medieval sort of setting. Originally I was toying with the idea of putting it in a more modern setting and making it the prequel to my NaNo from last year, but the characters from that novel weren't too excited about the prospect of fighting a creepy book. And then one of the characters I was toying with for the possibility of another plot wandered up and said, "Ooooh, let me have a look at that book," and I realized she'd be practically the perfect character to stumble into something like a wizard using a book to trap souls and things. Melanna grew up surrounded by academics and books, and to her books and knowledge are the most important and fascinating things in the universe.

Now (provided I decide to stay with this idea) I just have to decide where this will be set (I'm thinking her parents are going to take her away from the academics because they want to make a young woman of society out of her, being both traveling diplomats themselves) and what kind of voice to use. When I was considering Melanna for a plotline involving slavers on Bedalos I was thinking I might write the novel as her journal, because she is the sort to keep quite a detailed journal. On the other hand, having the whole novel written as her journal doesn't leave as much allowance for other characters to have scenes, and of course one has to be alive and with the journal to be writing in it, so I might opt for third-person instead, or else alternate between the forms.

...and after abandoning this particular LiveJournal for about a year I return to it once more, in preparation for that most anticipated and glorious marathon known to many as NaNoWriMo. Seriously, I'm beginning to suspect that despite the cold and the potential for ice on the roads and all the rest that November just might be my favorite month of all the year, if for no better reason than NaNoWriMo.

( Read more... )

Below is a list of 100 things. Bold the ones you've done.

( Read more... )

I realize I haven't posted in a while. Between school (and a research paper or two coming due) and substituting and having to get dental work done (going into it I'm terrified enough to need anxiety pills, but after the first time I was very mellow, either from the anxiety medication or from the nitrous oxide, or a combination of the two, but either way I didn't get much done after that) I was a bit busy. Still, I managed to sit my butt down this (yesterday?) afternoon, and type right through until just recently, when I broke 50,000 and brought my story to a conclusion, of sorts. If I'm going to submit it I already know there's going to be plenty of areas that need work - such as the beginning - and the end - and all the parts in between - and the parts in between where I tell rather than showing because I wasn't sure what to show exactly and figured I probably should keep telling the story.

I'm not sure yet whether it's a story I want to try to refine and sell. Of course, I'm that shy about submitting all my work. I know I want to keep it stashed on my hard drive, if simply for nostalgia of having older works to look at, or for the belief that there could be bits worth taking out and making into something else.

The other interesting thing is that some of the characters have unexplored back-story that I could develop. I'm not sure I want to write any more modern-ish fantasy, particularly longer things, at least not at the moment. But there's material to suggest at least one prequel, as well as potential sequels (though I'd want to know more about Scotland before writing one of them. Preferably through a field trip, though I've never been outside the US before, and the first thing to do is to find a way to pay for the field trip...)

Anyway, it's got a "The End" stamp on it for now, and I've got a familiar cast of characters to whom I can return if I decide to do anything more with more modern fantasy, so those are both good things. Now it's off to check a couple more things, and then to bed!

I need to go to bed very soon (perhaps a couple of hours ago?), but while I was on my way to bed I got distracted by writing my novel. That's right, I sat at the computer to do a couple other quick things and without intending to do any more work on my novel today, but ended up getting sucked in to writing my novel - which is a change from the past few days of "I really should be writing my novel - oooh, Gilmore Girls. I really should be writing my novel - oooh, old episodes of House. I really should be writing my novel - no wait, got homework. I really should be writing my - no, too tired, beddy-bye time," and having to force myself to actually sit down and write. Hopefully this is a trend that will continue, though I'm worried that I won't have too much time this weekend. Saturday morning class, Saturday afternoon homework, Saturday evening to night birthday party and D&D, Sunday spending the day driving to and from my grandmother's house to visit and pick up a couple things with my dad - hopefully I'll sneak in some noveling, but oddly enough for me, my weekdays are much more productive than weekends, even if I do have work.

I haven't been doing the best job at keeping up with this, have I? Well, between working off and on, schoolwork, and having some kind of cold or something that made my thinking all fuzzy and me unable to concentrate on something for more than a minute or so, I've not been getting as much done with my novel as I'd like, and also had less time to come posting on here. Well, I think I'm mostly over the cold now (knocks on convenient wood, making the dogs bound up and go rushing to the door to see who's there), and since I don't have work today I can work on things.

Part of my difficulty might also be that I'm trying a couple new things with this NaNo. Last year, I jumped around between characters' heads, and sometimes I added in characters who were only around for a paragraph or so just to up the word count and shake things up a bit. This year I'm focusing mostly on a single character, Lina, and alternating between letters she's writing to her aunt who died when Lina was still a child and (more or less) limited third person as she wanders around campus and has conversations and adventures with her friends. Also, I'm not used to writing in a more modern sort of environment, which I think makes it more difficult for me. Last year, I would tend to get absorbed in the unfolding story, almost to be living it through the characters' eyes. This year, it's more like they're telling me about it and I'm watching from another place (which is odd, considering I'm more focused on a single character now), and sometimes they don't quite feel like talking.

However, in the good old Week Two tradition, the plot is beginning to assert itself and creep into the novel, and I'm hoping maybe that will help me be better able to get "into" the story a bit more and be able to type without constantly being tempted to check word count and wonder how much more I need to type to make my goal for the day.

So the site's not working, and I've got a bit of a cold or something, which makes it rather hard to concentrate on my novel for prolonged periods of time (however, I am 5732 words, and this is day three for me, which means I'm still ahead of where I need to be, so I'm not overly concerned). Anyway, since the NaNo site doesn't seem to be working, I thought I'd post on here instead.

First, I want to share fun links with the rest of you. Need motivation for NaNo? Try http://chaoticshiny.com/nanom.php (which generates sentences such as "If you write 1787 more words today your parents will inexplicably send you money" and "If you write 612 words in a row France will surrender." There's also other fun generators on the site, especially if you're doing something high fantasy/D&D oriented. For a more general bunch of generators, try http://www.seventhsanctum.com/index.php


In other news, I also miss the Dares thread of the forums. Luckily, I saved the dares I made (mostly in the fantasy thread) last year, and I made up a few more dares, so I've got a few dares below the cut if anyone's interested.


( I dare you to try one of my dares from last year... )

( ...or one of the ones I just made up now )

I hope everyone's having fun with NaNo so far - and best of luck as the month continues!