It Came From Outer Space…

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve posted here, while I’ve taken a break from writing on here I’ve still been writing on stories just not the ones that I’ve mentioned. I finally got a good chunk of input on a story I’ve had a vague idea about doing for a while. I’ve tried several attempts at getting these ideas into a more concrete form but the little snippets really haven’t taken form the way I’d like. They’ve always come off corny or cliched. This latest mapping out works a bit better, the snippet that I was writing lost itself a little towards the end as I ran out of inspiration and tried to force things, something I should have known better than to do.

However, I’ve had a few more days to ruminate on things and I have a better idea of how to tackle things now. I know this is all very cryptic but I’m not quite ready to offer snippets of anything until I check and see if this new idea I’ve had actually works. In the mean time I got another fragment of “Too Deep” that I wound up writing out at 2 a.m. it rehashes some things already written and is entirely dialogue between Sam and Brad; but I feel if I continue it on in this way the majority of the dynamic will be written out and then I’ll be able to flesh the descriptions and story around it. I’m feeling that it might be better told from Brad’s point of view, as odd as that might be for me primarily seeing things from Sam’s perspective. I’ve previously been tackling things from third person and I think, even with the majority of the story being Sam’s retelling that it should be as Brad would be transcribing it. He is the interviewer therefore the reader should become him, and while the interactions in third person were leaving the reader more able to see things from Brad’s perspective…I think if it’s going to be an interview it should be done in the Max Brooks vein, where it becomes the reader, as Brad, interviewing Sam rather than the reader as an outsider observing Brad interview Sam.

Even with all these ideas it’ll be a few days before I get any more writing done. I have a lot of things to get cleaned out as I’m going away for part of the weekend. A friend sent me some promotional products about a festival down in Boca which interested me greatly and then said that he and his girlfriend would pay for my tickets and hotel stay as a birthday present if I really wanted to go. So, I’m very excited. It’s a Japanese festival and none of us have been to anything like this before. I’m really looking forward to it but we have to set off early in the morning and so there’s a lot of things I have to do today to get ready. The most urgent of which is clean out the kitchen sink.

I’ve been having a bit of an impasse in the writing. I got myself, not exactly stuck, but just without a way. I know where things are supposed to go but I’ve got too many ideas to really pin things down properly. I really need to just pick one and go with it, but I can’t decide. It’s like being a kid in a candy store.
We haven’t had much peace the past couple of weeks anyway. We have things going on, people coming over, trips that we’ve been going on and it’s been my birthday this past week also which means there have been festivities to do with that also. All things which keep me away from the computer.
I’ve been a bit tired also, which has been causing fogginess and times where I just want to sleep to stave off pain, the problem with having a chronic illness.
I keep feeling that I should move away from the werewolf story for a little while and focus on something else; but I’m torn on that. I’ve had an idea for some time to try and write a story that describes what it’s like living in a dissociative brain; but again, I’m not sure where to start with that.

I’ve been looking for a while at different ways to save money. I’ve had a lot of people suggest coupons to me, but I can never wrap my way around that because I usually can’t find coupons for things that I use, or if I do find coupons it doesn’t seem enough to be worth it.

I’ve heard friends talking about saving over half their grocery bills by using coupons, one friend recently saved at least $35. Of course I’m envious, and I’m sure there are ways that I could do the same thing but I can’t wrap my head around it. I should try to. It’d help us out a lot. Though part of it is that a lot of coupon sites are very confusing, and I’ll admit I get distracted or I forget that I was meaning to look for coupons until we’re halfway around the grocery store. On the upside our local store often has two for one deals which they will double up with in-house coupons and while that means we do save things it doesn’t maximize our saving potential.

I’m thinking of setting up a reward card for when I write, much the same as I used to do with my son when he was potty training. I can set up a little chart for myself and when I write I can get a point. If I write over a certain amount then extra points and things like that.

I’m not entirely sure how it would work. I don’t want to trap myself into deadlines because it can be counter-productive much the same way that some times at Nano there are stalls for a while because of the pressure from the having to get a certain amount done. Hopefully I can do it in a certain way so that there’s no pressure and expectation just bonuses when certain things are done. The thing is with a reward system there has to be a reward of some kind and I’m not sure what I could reward myself with.

I’ve started on a bit of something that’s technically taboo but I figure it’s worth it to continue the werewolf story. My room mate had read some of it for me when I was initially writing and pointed out that the beginning had a drastic amount of over information that would swamp a reader, and that I should probably start the work a bit later on. Up until this last week I’ve been continuing on with it anyway because I had all the input and needed to get it out so that I could not have it in my head. So, rather than pulling my hair out over the issue I moved on this is good for several reasons not least of which that there really isn’t a hair loss treatment for women that will fix it if I pull my own hair out.

So, there I am soldiering along and then I start getting stuck so I start skipping around writing little vignettes that are dotted around in the story’s time line and then this last week I went back and copied what I have from the initial draft into a separate file so that I can start again. It’s not exactly starting over but at the same time I needed to re-write a lot through the first few thousand words because information that is pertinent and not over-loading needs to be in there so that people aren’t lost. There was no explanation of who Cora, Clair, Stu and Jared were as they related to each other because that was all in the first section that I’ve cut out to be interspersed in flashback throughout the story now. So, I have to include those in the descriptions now. So far it’s working pretty well. I’ve pared down a vision scene which starts the book, shortening a lot of text down to sentence fragments to hopefully make it a bit more feral and I’m also working on expanding one of the later pieces that I only have about 500 words on so far.

I’m thinking of writing in vignettes for a while. I had the idea a while ago as a way to work on stories when I’m having a hard time completing the full length novels; but instead to write short stories with the same characters, which essentially will give me the chapters of a novel in a haphazard manner. Then I can rearrange them into the actual story later on, much the way you take snapshots with your Canon camera and the arrange the photos to make the story the way you want it. I know in our wedding album there are a few shots which are “out of chronological order” because they make the story more dynamic; and some times in stories that’s what you have to do, to tell some of the story with flashbacks after the characters are established.

It’s doubly funny because we were over at a friends house over the weekend and Kore and I were both talking about the writing that we do. Kore’s actually taking several writing workshops in summer school, and I was saying that I’m not having much luck with the whole novel thing at the moment, and she said that she had been meaning to suggest writing short stories for a while to me, and that she was going to do some of that herself, because she knows that she doesn’t have enough time to get something done consistently and I have even less time on a day than she tends to.

So, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not sure if I’m going to be working on the werewolf story or “Too Deep” for the time being; but I will be doing the little snippets. Right now it should in theory be a little easier to work on the werewolf story because I’m working on a short game based off that “universe” which has things narrowed down a bit better once more; but at the same time vignettes come more easily to the “Too Deep” story because of the way I’m writing it, as an interview.

Some times it takes me a moment to sit back and realize exactly how often I’m writing what I like. I will put characters in clothing that I would prefer to wear, much like most of my Sims characters wear corsets, or have multi-colored hair.

There are a few times I have to sit back and realize that the character would not wear that sort of thing, just because I prefer blacks, purples and reds, does not mean that they will, so I try to sit down before I write too far and work out more of what the character would wear, do they prefer natural or synthetic fabrics, what are their favorite colors? It all helps to recognize the character as their own entity.

Naturally a lot of the characters are an extension of me and my selves, but at the same time they’re independent from me. They exist within their story. I still write what I like, however, because obviously I’m not going to write something that’s just a fluffy romance for the sake of it, the story has purpose, there may be fluffy romance in there, but at the same time there are going to be werewolves, or aliens in there because that’s what I like, too. So, whether the alien or werewolf has a corset or a baby doll tee (now that’s an image!) they’re still a character that I like even if they’re doing things differently.

I need some kind of eye cream to cover all these dark shadows under my eyes. It’s my own fault. I keep staying up way too late and while some of it is writing, I’d rather more of it be because of that than because I get distracted watching “Glee” or something. I mean, “Glee” is fun, but still, less productive, and seriously with us having On Demand back I can pause it and watch it another time I don’t have to watch it right then.

My muse is a lot harder to pause. I’ve been writing a ton more background for the werewolf story though. I even have a complete make-up of the werewolves of the clan, and also worked out why there aren’t that many between the ages of late 30s to late 40s, and how that ties in with the original Shamanic elder’s mental breakdown. I just need to start writing things out again. I’m trying to pare things down so I’m not giving out too much information at once, start slowly then add other things in. That’s the best way.

…separated by a common language.

I run into little trip-ups some times when writing stories, because it’s been so long since I’ve lived in England I’ve lost some of the slang, and some times I forget that there are things like trash cans over here which are rubbish bins over there, and other little colloquialisms.

It’s something, however, that needs to be remembered. I have to remember that while the character in VA might need rv financing the cairn in Scotland would need it for a caravan should they buy one, and that there really aren’t pick-up trucks in the United Kingdom no matter how useful they might be. We have semi’s they have articulated lorries. We walk on the sidewalk, their streets are roads with pavement for pedestrians.

Fortunately in the story the main perspective is that of an American teenager who is now living in Scotland so trip-ups at least from his dialogue can be covered that way, but not any of his relatives, unless they’re making fun of him for asking where the garbage goes, or giving him fries because he said chips thinking he was asking for potato chips, which are crisps in the U.K. these are often things I’ve had issues in reverse with being a Brit who came to the States. The biggest one has been biscuits, which to me means cookies, but is in fact what I would call scones.

My room mate and I were discussing certain characteristics of gennies the other day. Gennies is short-hand for genetically engineered humans in the game I was running based on ‘Too Deep’ and ‘Too Deep’ itself. He was asking if one of the characters in the story was in fact a genny, and I admitted that they probably were but would not be aware of it throughout most of the story.

He said he had wondered based on certain descriptions of the character, particularly the joke about them not having hair anywhere except their head and the fact that they’d never use prototype 37c on themselves, and the lack of hangovers they experienced despite the amount of drinking that they did.

I said it makes a lot of other things make sense, but that while they had these genny traits they would have experienced them through their bloodline given they weren’t specifically engineered, they were born, but their family would have been gennies, either one or both parents.

These are those things that characters tell you though. I had started out the story, and the various iterations I had no idea that this character was a genny though the traits were there, always, in his character. I was as much a revelation to me as it will be to him in the story.