6 posts tagged “ogf”
My final count:
(80.2%)
While I couldn't hit 50k because of my cold, at least I managed to make my lowered target of 40k. It's still a greater rate of productivity than I've shown all year. And what I've written during November has been of surprisingly high quality - not perfect, for sure, but not dire either.
What have I written? I had a plan for what I would write. Naturally, I didn't entirely stick to it:
- Painted Angels = 6,078 words
- Our Green Fairies = no words
- D'sil short story = 7,498 words
And then...
- Bunia's Journal = 17,811 words
- Other short stories and edits = 8,613 words
I think my biggest regret is that I didn't write more PA, but I am glad I wrote what I did for it. The book is very close to the end now - I think there are only a handful of chapters until it's done - and I need more time to plot out exactly how the final fight is going to go down.
Bunia has been an... interesting... muse. I really enjoyed writing her journal, and now it's sort-of done (I haven't posted the final entry yet because I don't like it all, so sorting that out is one of the first things I'll do when I next write) I can start planning out her novel. I never do deep plans, but I want a little bit of planning on this one because it's a quest-of-sorts (she goes questing for an interesting piece of furniture, but the collapsing Serrian Empire gets in her way) so I need to make sure it doesn't get all rambly and long and crap. I need to know when and how she goes from A to B, and I need to keep my narration succint and interesting. Plus, I need to figure out what exactly D'sil is doing - okay, so I know he'll be working for conflicting people, as always, but I need to be a bit more specific than that. So I intend to do a sort-of outline - which, probably, will get hacked to pieces in the process of writing the book, but heh. At least I have a tentative title for the book: The Ephrebet Bed, which is the piece of furniture she goes questing for.
I do intend to work on Our Green Fairies, I just realised it's not suitable Nano-fodder after all. The descriptive narrative style demands time and thought, rather than blindly punching out words, as walking the fine line between descriptiveness and purple-ness is tough. I also think I need to leave it a while longer to let the characters crystallise a little more in my head.
My vague plan is to get PA done, and in the process of doing it maybe work on TEB's outline and perhaps a handful more short stories. Then I'll need to edit PA, and once it's all shiny and shipped away to publishers I can work on the book that comes five years after it, Renegade Star, and also TEB and OGF. I'm sure I'll start working on those while I'm editing PA, just for a change of pace, but heh.
However, I suspect I won't get much writing done til the end of term, in two weeks' time. That's because I have my floor manager exam next Friday, and I need to start hard-core revising for that today. I also have two essays to do, and I need to apply for a job. *shakes fist at reality* Also, to be honest, I want to give writing a brief respite after the pressures of Nano.
All in all, Nano has been a productive and good venture, and I'm glad I did it. And now, back to reality...
This November I will be participating in the wondrous Nanowrimo, the aim of which is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. I'm going to bend that slightly. Instead, I am going to write a total of 50,000 words in November, with those words falling into any of the following projects:
- Painted Angels. I would like to have a complete first draft by the end of 2006, after which I can spend a few months polishing it off before submitting it to publishers.
- Our Green Fairies. This was originally going to be my Nano project but I realised I didn't want to limit myself to only one story. However, I would still like to write something for this novel, so it remains in the Nano ranks.
- The short stories featuring D'sil. They have deadlines of 15 and 31 January, meaning that I would like at least one polished and sent by the end of 2006. I hate rushing, so they're Nano projects too.
Now that I have said in writing that I will do this, I will, or I'll kill my vague attempt at a social life trying. *grins* I'm like that. Earlier this year I said I'd give up chocolate for lent, not to please the god I don't believe in but to make my ex give up alcohol for lent, and even when he utterly failed to keep his side of the bargain I kept mind. And a couple years back I said I'd eat only fruit for 5 days to support a friend who was going to do the same to lose a bit of weight, and even when she gave up after a day I still did it (well, except for the part where I figured going on a CCF overnight exercise and eating only fruit would probably kill me, so I ate the army ratpack on that). If I say I'm going to do something, especially if it's something mildly stupid, I do it.
November promises to be a productive month. Only 2.5 days to go.
Sidenote: Taking into
account the clocks changing, I got 11 hours' sleep last night. What the
hell? I do not need that much sleep! Wasted time, wasted
time. Grr.
Sidenote 2: Vox is playing silly buggers. I posted this earlier, then edited it to correct a spelling mistake, after which it refused to appear on my blog page despite appearing on Rhi's neighbourhood page and the number of my October posts clarifying its existence. Vox has also started not letting my type in the compose box unless I refresh the page.
I'm stuck on PA again, though I'm not entirely sure why. I'm getting to some good stuff now - finding out something very important, and then Trifmara's reaction to that. And, soon, a big battle near Katina which will be followed by the final battle at Krak'vi.
I think maybe I'm worried it's starting to drag a bit, that I should wrap it up faster, even though the sensible part of my mind says to just write the damn chapters and then go back and make changes. Blegh. It's probably just the same "getting towards the end" mental block I get when I approach the end of anything long - happened with my finished piece of mystery crap that will one day be totally reworked, and also with Statues.
In the meantime, I've been working on short stories:
Statues - Still waiting for a response from Writers of the
Future. I reckon I'll hear from them January-ish, maybe
later. If they don't like it, I'll send it to Fantasy and Science
Fiction magazine.
A Shade of Yellow - Still waiting to hear back from Sybil's
Garage. No news is, I hope, good news; a suggestion that they're
having to think about what to do with my story. If they reject
it, I'll send to Apex Digest.
Tansu - This is finished and ready for submission, but I'm waiting for Sybil's Garage to respond because if they don't want aSoY then I'll send them this. If not, I intend to send this to Shimmer.
Snowdrop - A flash fiction of 99 words, submitted to Flash Shot. Still waiting for a response.
The Beautiful Collection - A fantasy short, just over 1,000 words, that I began in the summer and finished the other day. I'm not completely happy with it yet, but when it's done I think I'll submit it to Midnight Street first.
I'm also working on two pirate stories, one for Shimmer and one for Sails and Sorcery. Both feature my latest muse, D'sil, a mercenary-pirate type. He's certainly an interesting man to have around. And my cross-dressing muse will have a short story of his own, but I can't figure out quite how to start it.
My ambition is to have found a home for all of these stories by the time I submit PA to publishers.
In the immediate future, November is nearly upon us, which means that Nanowrimo approaches... I've pretty much decided to write a first draft of Our Green Fairies for this, simply because I feel that if I can get a first draft of it done, no matter how crappy it'll be, at least I'm one step closer to having another finished novel.
I am writing. Just slowly at the moment.
While some people over on lkh_lashouts might be rather surprised to learn that LKH actually appears to do decent research, owing to her prediliction for researching leopards by using calendars and sex scenes by using her husband, the back of her book Seduced by Moonlight suggests that she does (or did) venture beyond her little bubble.
For my story Our Green Fairies I may or may not include some or more aspects of the world of fey, and to that end I want to do some research. I always liked the fey aspects of LKH's Merry series - though the gratuitous bad!pr0n and dwindling plot made me give up on it after three books - and, knowing the basic bones of it wasn't her invention, want something similar for my book. Hurrah and huzzah, as I remember someone on lkh_lashouts mentioning a biblio in the back of one of her books. And it yielded some possibilities:
An Encyclopedia of Faeries by Katherine Briggs
Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee
Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend by Miranda J Green
Fairy Tradition in Britain by Anne Ross
I shall have to see which of these, if any, my university library contains. Handy I'm going up to London for the next couple days. And I remember Rhi mentioned some books on this post so that's something else to check out.
Have no idea how much, if any, research I'll be able to fit in before I attempt a first draft of this story for Nano, but as they say at Tesco supermarket - every little helps!
---------
LATER: My uni library only carried one of these books, and it didn't have anything useful in it. Using the amazon Search Inside feature, I saw some of the others didn't look that great either. Guess I'll just stick to wikipedia.
Finished Book 5 of the Saga two days ago. It was absolutely awesome, especially the big battle at the end (why can't I write space battles like that?), but now I want to read Book 6. Because, naturally, he's left two massive cliffhangers at the end. Though it looks like the major foe is finally defeated, two more threats have popped up - one of them not all that surprising, really, and the other pretty much out of the blue. And I want to know how things turn out for some people, and I particularly want to see what mental thing Basil does next. But as Book 6 is currently being written, I expect it'll be sometime next year before we see it in print. *wills Kevin J Anderson to write faster*
As if desiring to distract me from the Saga's cliffhangers, manga has arrived in the post! Godchild vol 2 by Kaori Yuki and Saiyuki Reload vol 4 by Kazuya Minekura. I've already read Godchild vol 2, and it rocked muchly. Kaori Yuki's artwork is absolutely stunning, so beautiful and fluid, and the story continues to be suitable bizarre. It's about Cain, a young earl in Victorian England, who lives with his half-sister Mary Weather and manservant Riff, and collects poisons. Death seems to follow him wherever he goes, brought on by his not-so-dead father. It's told in a series of short stories, but with the thread of his father running through it.
I started reading xxxHolic vol 1 (by Clamp) today, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I picked up vol 3 a while back, because the cover art drew my eye in Forbidden Planet, and it was pretty good. It's about a high school kid who sees ghosts and spirits, and finds himself drawn to the time-space witch Yuko's house. There, he finds himself bought into her service; once he's worked long enough, he gets his wish to not see spirits. And by 'service', I mean cleaning stuff and cooking, and occasionally helping out with her work, not anything dodgy. I don't really go in for smutty manga, mostly because the artwork is pretty grotesque (over-huge boobs and penises has never really appealed to me; it just looks painful ^.^ ) Mmm, I love my manga. *hugs manga*
More good news: I finally got my butt in gear and sorted out Chapter 11 of Painted Angels, the first chapter of the Peace-Keeping Meetings arc. I cut a scene, went through some lethal surgery with my OTT descriptions, and tacked on what had previously been the next chapter, also cutting out a brief scene that was fun to write but *totally* irrelevant to the story. I found myself chuckling a few times at some of Trifmara's thoughts, particularly when she comments on her lack of cleavage, which I guess is a good thing - means the character is really jumping off the page. Sent the chapter off to Rhi to beta, along with Chapter 4 of her story speckled with my CC. I totally didn't figure that the title of her book, 'Dancing in Circles', actually had something to do with horses dancing. I thought maybe people, but not horses. So that was a cool surprise, and it looks like things are set to get even more interesting.
I'm currently about 9,500 words into my contest entry, but I didn't feel like working on it today. I need to figure out exactly how the next action scene will unfold, and it wasn't flowing into my head today. Maybe tomorrow. I think I get off work at 3pm, so I should be able to get some writing done. Either my contest entry or PA. My other muses are being remarkably co-operative about letting me focus on those two, which is pretty decent of them. As I might be writing Our Green Fairies for Nanowrimo this year (my word-count estimate for the first draft is in the region of 50k, and I was always planning to write a crappy first draft before perfecting it, which makes it good Nano-fodder), the general muse for that story is laying low. The characters aren't muses, so much as the general idea is a muse. It's odd, but it seems to work. My latest muse, the cross-dressing one, has been damn quiet. Every now and then he floats vague ideas towards me, but there's been no prodding yet. *pets co-operative muses*
Got Chapter 7 of Painted Angels, the space battle one, back from my beta. As I said in earlier posts, I'd been having a fair bit of trouble with this one; no matter how many times I read it and tried to think of how to make it better, it just didn't feel good enough. Well, she's given me LOADS of CC for it (mostly to do with the bit before the space battle rather than the battle itself, which was a bit of a surprise), so I'm happy. Hopefully now it won't make publishers go "eww".
Edited up Chapter 10 the other day, though I didn't really need to do much - mostly reading it through and tightening it up a bit, and tweaking things my FP reviewers pointed out. I'm sure Rhi will find plenty to comment on, but it usually takes a fresh pair of eyes for that next level of editing-work.
I got stuck on Chapter 11, though. It's the first Peace-Keeping Meetings chapter and it's really shit. There were two scenes originally and I'm cutting one of them; the remaining one needs serious trimming. Basically, there are about four or five paragraphs where I describe each character one after the other. Boring and un-necessary. I need to describe Ben and Wil, as they're main characters, but I need to do it in a less 'and here's my descriptive paragraph on so-and-so' way; the other guys in the room need no description, if I'm going to be completely honest with myself. Also I need to find a way to make Ben sound less like a piece of jewellry: he currently has golden skin and hair and emerald green eyes. In the opening paragraph, he's looking out over a sapphire ocean. It's like going to see the crown jewels without leaving your sofa!
As all this axing would leave me with about 1,000 words of chapter (and almost half of that is an Archive excerpt about the planet Naiad), I'll be tacking it onto the next chapter. Might try to do that tomorrow, or at least sometime this week, but in the meantime...
-
Spent a couple hours today working on my entry for the Writers of the Future contest. It runs every quarter (of the year) and the entry must be no longer than 17,000 words. The deadline for this quarter is 30th September and I'm almost halfway through the first draft. I wrote a fair bit while I was on holiday and finished typing that up yesterday, so today was all new stuff. Not much to say other than it's going well and the action's starting to heat up a bit.
-
Posted up a request on __fantasynovel (an LJ community), asking if people in the community know of any good books or websites where I can research Faerie folklore and medicinal/magical uses of herbs for my planned low-fantasy novel Our Green Fairies. So far I've been told to check out my bookstore and library (which I shall do) and I've been recommended a novel, which I might check out (but I might not, as there seems to be a quest and a strong troo lurve element, and the person who rec'd it said the plot was kinda crap even though the Faerie element was good). I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust, partly because it is about Faerie and also because Gaiman rocks.
Thing is, I kinda want to have the Fearie stuff to be similar to what LKH used in her Merry Gentry series. What ho, I hear you say? (pun intended) There was plot and worldbuilding in there? Well, yeah, but you have to look reeealllly hard and I can't be arsed. I'd ask LKH herself what books she used to research, except (a) she probably used a calendar, and (b) she'd probably accuse me of copying her even though the folklore's not exactly hers. This is the kind of thing this author does (and I'm really not joking about calendar-research. She also admits to researching sex scenes with her hubby. TMI!!!) *sigh* Oh well, maybe someone will rec me good books and I can be lazy, or maybe I'll just have to hunt the info myself.
I think I may post on fpdebate (another LJ community...I've started collecting them) asking for the clichés of yaoi / shounen ai because Our Green Fairies will also feature a m/m relationship. I want to avoid the usual pitfalls. The story's set in 1901 Paris and the romance element is going to be a kind of mix between Lolita and absinthe. The guys in question are aged 37 and 16 - Luc, the 37-yr-old, is an alcoholic whose poison of choice is absinthe; he uses it to seduce Dantie, the 16-yr-old - no troo lurve here, folks, just the beautifully twisted variety. (I'm actually reading Lolita on-and-off as research for how an older person seduces a younger person, owing to my lack of personal experience.) There are other plot-lines besides the romance - the other main one involves Faerie and magic-with-herbs (rather than magic of the fireball variety).
-
So I really should be cramming the QRG and reading for my dissertation, but I wanted a writing day. Which will probably turn into a writing weekend if I'm not careful. Really do need to put in some QRG time tomorrow, though, especially since my boyfriend told me there's other stuff I have to know too. Argghhhhh!!!!
