December 31st, 2005
The Movies Online is the online branch of The Movies game and moviemaking-software I got for Christmas. There are thousands of little movies there. Most of them aren’t very good. Many are in German, Nathan, which you might enjoy, as the game is apparently very popular in Germany.
Anyhow, the image I posted yesterday is a ‘poster’ for my first little movie. It is a direct link to the movie. I will post more at another time about why I like the ideas behind The Movies (though the implementation is very first-generation). But yes, I am still writing. It’s just been slow because of the holidays.
Got the package from my family finally. Lovely sweaters, and a lantern much like the ones at our wedding, which was cool. Flaked out on calling people tonight though. It’s been a weird day.
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December 29th, 2005
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December 27th, 2005
Briefly, very briefly, we considered getting married last Christmas. It had to do with pricing on places to have receptions.
This Christmas, it was just me and Kevin. It’s our first Christmas at home since our first Christmas in Seattle, when we were both getting over a kind of year-long depression.
It’s also been our first time alone in our house for an extended period of time, as a married couple. Ray went to his mom’s for the holiday.
We had a wonderful, joyeous Christmas. We each got ridiculous amounts of, well, loot. Toys. No big presents (we call that the ‘TV’), just lots of fun stuff. I got a PS2 RPG (with kicking!) that I wanted. I got the bongo game I wanted, and Kevin threw in Guitar Hero. I got the first season of Lost, I got some legos, I got some books. I got a computer game/tool called The Movies.
You’ll hear more about The Movies later.
Categories: Updates From the Void |
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December 22nd, 2005
Ray gave me an early Christmas gift, a book on description and setting, a few days ago. I’ve read most of it now. It was interesting but mostly served to tell me that I’ve already got the essentials, I just need to elaborate some.
I’ve been writing slowly. as you can tell from my sidebar count. Still haven’t cracked the ‘write-at-work’ barrier, and my lamp burned out in my office, and other excuses.
Basically, though, I’m reaching the blahs I apparently always reach in the middle of a novel, when I’m ready to be done and, in this case, working on rewrites. Hopefully further polishing of the development process will fix that. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I have at least another 45k words to write.
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December 16th, 2005
I went looking for lessons on description today. I didn’t find very much.
Definitely feeling kind of down. I guess I’ll see how tomorrow goes. I feel like I need maps, really need maps, that I don’t yet have.
Categories: Structure Tutorial |
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December 15th, 2005
New rule though. Two nights of no writing = writing avoidance = the current scene needs to END and I need to spend some time doing detail work on my outline.
So I’m off to do that now.
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December 14th, 2005
That was this evening. Oh, I talked to my brother and I stayed at work late, and I watched a lot of quality comedy, and spent time with my husband, who is going on a business trip for Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
But as for writing… an accidental complete wash. Bleah. Will do better next time.
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December 13th, 2005
Bought Christmas tree this weekend, decorated on Sunday, did web shopping. Played board games on Saturday. Got Costco membership on Friday, very much approve. Had Garlic Jim’s for dinner. Watched up to episode six of Arrested Development.
Tired. Neglected to take my medication all weekend. Bad combination, leads to too much brooding, not enough thought control. Will not brood here and now.
Took the weekend off of writing, hard getting back into swing but I need time to play occasionally. Had to resist lots of editing when I reread the current section I’m in.
Purchased Sims University expansion this weekend, Kevin and I have been playing with it. Fun. Sims: The Best Parts
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December 9th, 2005
Hit 40k words last night. When I did a wordcount on the collected content of Caleb&Indigo it was 64k, so no personal milestones yet. Only significance is that it’s passed the milestone for the Novel category for the SFWA. And that Michelle got her next block of text.
I’m still thinking about all the stuff I’ll need to add on the rewrite. Not just more generic description, but probably whole scenes. There’s a few characters that get mentioned a lot and don’t make an actual appearance until relatively late (or never) in the current draft. I figure I should probably introduce them onscreen before their big scenes, so to speak, since nothing is served by keeping them offscreen (except my own pacing). Oh, and I should add some theater and city stuff. Though this is all harder because I have come to loathe writing scenes that don’t contain at least a moderate amount of conflict or tension. And because I don’t know where to fit them in! Modern fantasy epics are huge sprawling things with lots of mini-quests and sub-stories. But I don’t want the story to lose focus and it starts with a core set of questions: who, why? how?
I also have a number of plot threads that show up and then go away for a long while as other plot threads jostle them out. I’m worried that it looks like I’ve forgotten or dropped them. I haven’t but I think I do need to find some way to integrate them in a bit more.
One of the kind of fun things is feeling like I have so much stuff to fit in. I do think another outline expansion would be useful next time I do this, so maybe I don’t spend so much time figuring out what I need to do on the first draft. But anyhow, so much stuff to fit in! At this point I’m estimating that the revised first draft (second draft?) will be around 105,000 words. And the initial first draft still seems like it might be 90k. And I’m still worried about the pacing since this was designed as the first novel in a trilogy; I’m worried it doesn’t have the proper rise-and-fall of tension.
Another interesting thing is that this never happened working on Caleb&Indigo; I never came up with stuff while writing that I should have inserted previously. Not that I considered seriously, anyhow. What was done, was done.
I hope my characterization is still okay.
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December 7th, 2005
Back. I went to CA for work. It was a single overnight trip. No, I didn’t stop by at home, given that’s a 3 hour drive from work. Sorry. Just wasn’t time. It’s hard to ’stop by’ anyhow, given the distance… maybe when I have a personal jet.
Behind on writing. Exhausted.
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