Job's Done

If you've played either Warcraft 2 or 3 then you know exactly how that sound in my head. I kinda want to play that game now. I always liked building large armies and just sort of throwing them places. There never really was very much stradigy involved in thous games for me. Just action.

But yeah so I finnished my novel. How about that. Earlyer in the month I was complaining about how this is a terrible month to be doing stuff like this, I mean major family holiday, major shopping day, school midterms, it is just in the middle of everything. Then again though? I think that's all part of it. To me the point of the whole thing is to literally set aside the time and to write. At the end of the day who really gives a fuck if it is easy. It being easy isn't the point. Of course on top of all of that I have had the worst bouts of insomnia that I have had in a very very long time. There were days where I was so tired I could bearly function and I would litterally write, pass out, wake up 45 minuts later and then keep going. This used to happen to me a lot in high school and I must say its return is rather unwelcome. The power nap thing would be accompanied by unable to sleep later, and increadbly lethargic mornings. Still I managed it. I managed it with us being short at work for two fucking weeks and and all the sudden my cut hours turned into very long grueling hours, I also did it despite taking three days off for nerd invasion.

Still with an imuntable schedual of 2000 words a day minimum I manged to finnish the thing by November 28th. I would of been done on the 27th but I wanted to stop and reflect upon the ending to try and make it something very special to me. I did too! With the actual ending that is. The epilouge needs to be rewritten. I might get to it someday. That's the thing though. I have a novel now!

Well kinda. It needs editing. LOTS of editing. There were days where I was bearly consiouse while writting, there were days where I didn't know what was going to happen next so I just had things happen, and there are at least two things that were supposed to happen that didn't. Since it is largely about suicide loose ends are THEMEATIC! not just loose ends, but still both of the missing scenes are really important and should be there because I think they will make the ending make more sense.

One is where Link and the cowboy hang out for a little bit and bond, and the other is where Link goes and comforts bitchface.

About the names, yeah that whole thing totally started as a joke, but then more and more it made sense to me. Everyone from his past gets a name, and no one from the prescent does. It is something I could write a paper on. Which is one of the nicest things I've ever said to myself.

I'm not sure what else to say about it all. It was hard. One of the harder things I've ever done. I don't feel proud of myself very often but this is definatly one of the time where I do. I'm a little sad that I have no one directly to share my triumph with. That is a little bit of a bummer. I was so excited when I finnished it and then I realized that it is three in the morning and no one was around. That kinda crapped on my parade a little bit.

To be fair though I did set out on this thing on my own. By the time Lior tried to give my helpful advice I was to far ahead of what has been posted for him to be of any help. Most of my friends didn't even ask what it was about until it was over halfway finnished. And Sasha's life has been partially upheaved so she's been very busy with that. The silver lining to all of this though is that I did all of this with little support and almost no encouragement what so ever. That's good! I don't take either well but it is one of those things I feared I need other people for. I do need other people for the editing process, but that isn't a bridge I intend on crossing any time soon. As of right now I am taking a couple of weeks off. I'll do a little fun reading, some blogging, play some video games. Then I'll start on the next thing, flush with the knowlage that I can do things like this if I just put my mind to it.

Isn't that something. I kinda want to print the whole thing out and stick it to my wall.

Not My Novel, Also Not What I am Supposed to be Writting

Well so recently I've discovered that there is something wrong inside of me. Mentally/spititually not physically. After trying out the most obviouse and easy answer I realized that it is something bigger than that. Well fuck. I should be trying to figgure out what it is. But I only have 45 minuts before I need to go to work so I'll do it when I have a little more time. I'm not depressed, and I am generally in a really good mood. But it is something that is kinda causing me to go to ground, hence the lack of updates here. Yeah you would think it would be the fucking novel that slows me down. Nope!

So the other day out of curiosity I began going over it trying to figgure out what I would need to do to make it a real book. After poking around I realize that the answer is a-fucking-lot. First of all I tend to write a scene a day. So as a result each scene in the book averages 2000 words and is three pages long. This leads to a highly unatural reading experience. This is a reult of both not wanting to stop writting in the middle of a scene and the need to have a minimum word count to meet. Bleh. So I would need to go around smoothing things out BIG time. In addition, because I am writting so fast, there are certain scenes that need more time spent with them, and quite frankly they just didn't get enough atension. For example, assuming the book ends at 50k words then I have literally spent half the book building up the introduction of this charecter. I know that whatever the hell it is I wrote isn't good enough. The idea behind her introduction is to make her seem like a let down and to make you question the main charecter's sanity even more than you have been. But I think I got a little bit to carried away with the let down part. I am about to unleash her in her full glory...tonight actually so I am pretty excited.

Also I tend to repete myself a lot. I don't mean to. What I mean to do is to advance the theme I am trying to in an interesting or clever way. Instead I end up repeating myself. This is ever so slightly embarassing. However, it is also stuff like this that causes me to not finish anything. I get so wrapped up in things I tend to forget to work on them. So far I am really happy that I am participating in NaNo. I am learning a lot of stuff about myself, and it is almost thrilling to watch myself set a goal, and now I am meeting it. All by myself with no real outside encouragement. Hell I haven't even updated my Nano profile and I don't know a single other person who is actually doing it.

Fuck most people haven't even askes what the book is about.

Not the point though. The point is that I am doing it and I am happy!

Soon I am going to get started on the post modern pornography project, or the ppp for short. I think I am going to end up just ordering a copy of ecrits in the mail because it is just something I know I am going to end up needing time and time again. I don't want to use Lacan, every time I use Lacan I develop a rash in my nether regions and a profound sense of guilt every time I use a metaphore. OH FUCK a lacnian reading of furries? That would be BAD ASS! Post modern fetish project coming your way this summer. Or something like that.

I'd be using this. Man that would be cool.

Anyway, the ppp is going to only be half finnished for awhile. Mostly because Sasha's current situation doesn't allow for long periods of sustained writting, and I am not there to "encourage" her to get to work. Still I am going to do my part. I've decided that for my primary texts I am going to use some Jenna Jameson pornos. I'm doing this for three reasons, 1) She is as close to mainstream as a porn star can get, 2) She is in depressingly vanilla pornos, 3) I think she is really funny looking. Most scholarly work I've read that looks at pornography fails to anchor any of its arguments in acutual specific porno movies. This makes sense of course because the vast majority of pornography is interchangable. Still you need a way to achor arguments. By using Jenna, the everywoman of pornography to talk about pornography I hope to sort of level the coversation out and to get some actual real work done with how pornography functions in regards to its viewer.

I also maintain the right to abandon this line of inquery and go hunt down really cool fetish porn. But whatever.

Hey I own an Ink pad I remeber what that was for. I should reactivate that project.

After that I'll be turning my atensions elsewhere. I'm not forgetting about that. Shroddinger's Rapist indeed. Grow. Up.

Meh. Oh hey so tomarrow I am demoing Arcane Legions to a vast majority of my friends. I wish I had some gaming terrian I could use. I could go and buy some but that is really fucking expensive. I think what I am going to end up doing is using deck boxes, and card boxes to represent ruined buildings until I can actually get some built. I also need a tape measure, can't forget that.

I've been wanting to play a mass combat minature game since...fuck I dunno since middle school which is where I first heard of warhammer. The thing about warhammer and its future counter part is that they are both increadbly average games that just aren't very fun. This game seems really neat though, it looks really easy to pick up. The price is right, I've just about assemebled two entire armies for the same price as this:

Granted yeah that thing is cool enough for me to want a tatoo of it. But it is just one part of a much much larger army. So I could get two entire armies for another game, or that. Hrm. So hopefully other people will get into it. There is tons of variety with troop selection and the types of armies you can field which is really important to me. So despite the fact that there are only three factions you can have three people playing the same faction but end up with three very diffrent armies.

Also they don't really do blind buying which is AWESOME.

Aright enough on Arcane Legions I really want to do a blog post on it all by itself after I've played a couple of games with people. I want to do a comparison which shows how this game does a lot of things right in comparison to other companies who end up doing things increadbly wrong.

I'm pretty excited. I also need to go to work. Well fine. Tonight is an exciting part of the story! I am thinking I'm going to end up devoting two nights to it cause it is really important. I'm not so sure. Just about the whole cast is getting brought out and that's going to be neat. Kay late late.

Post werk update! This thing that's bothering me, I don't feel like explaining what it is right now. It totally excists though. I am starting to think that it might be some fancy new coping method for dealing with the holidays. I hate the holiday season, I really fucking do. I always have hated it and I pretty much always will. So this might be a way of dealing with it that isn't depression. If it is that would be AWESOME! We'll see how it goes when the holidays actually get here, and if the problem still percists after they are gone.

The less time I spend uncontrollabley depressed the fucking better. I can't stand that shit and it is such a stupid waste of my valuable time.

Okay that is all I wanted to say really. Carry on.

NaNoWrMo or NaNo for short

All that shit up there stands for, "National Novel Writting Month or National Novel for short". This is something that has been going along for a very long time and I am righteously pissed that I have not been informed about it sooner.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

The idea behind it is to write a 50,000 word novel from november 1st to the 30th. Yeah. You prolly won't be writing a very good novel in that length of time but that is kinda the point. It is 30 days and nights of literary abandon, their words not mine. It is where we leave behind concerns like quality, or process, and focus on the activitiy in of itself. Instead of worrying so much about this or that, it is instead, a gun shot, a race, an endurance test, and something you do for yourself. When I tell people about what I am doing they immeadiatly leap twords the idea of publication. I am considering writting another version of this and just handing out an explanation to people. Publication is for people who don't write 50,000 words in a month. This isn't a drive for ecconomic gain, it is a collective test. For 30 days you join a community of people who are all racing twords the same goal. Not racing against each other, but against themselves, the greatest of all enemies. The forums ring with encouragment and there are dozens of resources available to help people get from plot point to plot point.

It isn't about quality, and it isn't about quanitiy, it is just about writing, and the sheer joy that comes with it, ESPECIALLY when you stop caring about anyone else except for the arbitrary goal set before you and the looming date. It is truly a beautiful concept and I am more than excited to be taking part in it.

I started to take part in it last year, but the weird palm pilot, keyboard combo thing I was using ate it. Not all of it, but a good 10,000 words vanished in a blink of an eye when the damn thing crashed while transphering the files onto a backup flash drive. To be fair in all the time I've used that things that has only happened twice. Each time though it was paticularly devistating.

It also prompeted me to start looking for a solution which eventually lead to the rise of the baby laptop. Baby laptop attack! NOM!

evan wrote how writing a novel terrifies him. Well it terrifies me too, that is for certain. I've bearly written any fiction for years, I've been unhappy with my practise fiction, I have a begninng a chunk of middle, and one flashback to work with. Nothing else. I am thinking on sand here. Still all that crap aside, I am going to do it anyway.

Ordinarly that paragraph would be much longer and all of it would be devoted to pressuring evan into joining me in doing it, and trying to drag lior along for the ride to. He apparently is in contact with lior and he reminded me the other night just how much I miss him. Fuck. Oh well. Still evan has his own writting projects which are all coming along rather well so asking him to take on another is a bit much. Maybe next year eh? The whole thing excists to fight fear.

Last point. What the fuck teachers? I realize more and more just how utterly useless most of my creative writting teachers have been over the course of my life. They have ranged from extrodinarly detrimental to my writting to actually kinda helpful. The thing is though, this is something that they should of told us about and encouraged us to do. We should of been doing things like this. We should be teaching others to do things like this, and on and on it goes. The point is that creative writting classes really dropped the ball when it came to things like teaching us about getting published, spotting scams, charity events like this one, movements, and all sorts of other things.

We could all be so much more. For one month I will be. You should be to.

The Process: NANO braindump

So I've started my Nano novel, I've regained contact with the web site and all that other good stuff. I realized while doing something else unrelated that I really like writting about the process of things. Not the things themselves but the process of how they come about. Ironically I am uninterested in listening to how processes come about but I do very much love observing them. Like watching Sasha get ready for drag. That is a multi hour process that spans time, locations, sometimes even days. Other times the whole thing becomes super compressed. I still like to watch it happen each and every time, from song selection, to outfit, to putting it together, to stage. It is fascinating.

I miss sasha. I'll prolly bring her up again later.

So the whole Nano thing. I've started a process. First I did an outline. Man am I ever using that term in the roughest sense possible. Basicly, it is just a way to help get me from point A to D without stalling out and if I do stall out then I have a back up list of emergency scenes I can fall back on and use.

I have a weird relationship with outlines though due to my years of GMing. If you were to look at the session notes, then look at what happened, you'd wonder why I wrote the damn notes in the first place. Reason being is that I set up anchor points. Things that must happen. Getting to the thing that must happen is one of those things I can just sort of do on the fly.

For example in my novel part of my outline says introduce hippy. So I mulled about on this problem while writting another scene and all the sudden the wierd vanishing christian girl shows up and all solutions are found. This would make more sense if you read what I've written so far. Otherwise just go with it. More over I noticed the shift in tone that I started using once he put the gun down and started to enjoy himself. It became less dark, and much more playful. This is something I want to start using for the rest of the novel. Not just the tone but style, vernacular, metaphores, I want the whole thing to feel diffrent as diffrent moods and charecters take over.

Link will either be light and airy, or dark, spikey, and morose
Sara will be that smooth cold evil. I will use a lot of the same imagry around her that I will use for the gun. Guns and butterflies.
Hippy will be soft, warm and will have a lot of natural stuff
Cowboy will make everything really weird and out of place like having the spagetti thing happening when he is around.

I could be working on it right now, but I realized that pounding away at it every waking moment is a quick violent way to achieve burn out. I won't be riding the minimum word count the entire way to victory, that is just cutting it to close. At the same time though I don't plan on running myself ragged right out of the gate.

Not so much as slow and stready, but I still have a great deal of brainwork to do.

OH hey yeah before I forget this is how the rest of his summer will go.

-meeting and then getting to know hippy
-talk of the dark side
-befriending squirrles
-meeting the lady in white (she is to cool not to put her in this story locals know who I am talking about)
-The secret sex club, along with the revelation of the dark side
-exit hippy
-Third Orientation. Meet Sara.

Then there is a narrative break where fall begins.

Okay I want to switch gears and write about NaNoWrMo proper so that will get its own post. Then I also wanted to do the month in review but I don't think I will have enough time.