It Came From Outer Space…

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 was thinking this morning about the irony of the last doctor’s appointment that I went to. I was all ready to ask him what he thought was the best weight loss supplement so I could get him to prescribe it to me, because I was at the desperate point of wanting to lose weight; and it turns out that my thyroid level is out of whack and so he prescribed me synthroid to fix that so that I would be able to right my metabolism and since then I’ve lost about four pounds and my energy level is returning which is going to be able to work in tandem to keep that going.

It’s gotten me thinking about weight issues and appetites of certain characters. The two stories that I’m working on right now feature very different takes on food. Sam, from “Too Deep” is liable to eat anything that’s not nailed down and hoard what he can because he’s so used to not having enough to eat, whereas Jay from the werewolf story hardly eats at all, which is a big issue with him and his family; and I still haven’t quite nailed down why this is on his part. He has plenty of food. He can eat. You’d figure werewolves have a really high metabolism and need to eat A LOT.

That’s web work NOT wet work. I’ve taken a few days off from work on stories because I’ve been sorting out some online things. I had a bit of an alternate muse takeover, in the sense that I was doing a redesign of a website just for fun, which, to be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve done that; not only did that happen but I also taught myself how to make css stylesheets and how to use them, and did an entire CSS site from scratch based on a layout I’d already done and was using iframes for but now functions through image maps.

I’ve been trying for months to grasp css and php but it just won’t stick. However this past week I was able to do a fairly complex image map within two hours. I’m very pleased with myself and my clarity of thinking this is a good amount of progress. However, there are still a few things that I can’t do without a builder of some sort, such as slide shows. One of these days I’ll get it; but I’m going to practice with stylesheets and things a bit more; then see if I can actually make a wordpress theme from scratch and then we’ll move on to something else.

I’m at the point where I’m actually loathe to put vampires into the werewolf story. There are so many vampires in modern culture at the moment. Between “Twilight”, “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries” and various other shows like “The Gates” coming up then I’m worried that the market is getting over-saturated.

Granted I haven’t seen much with werewolves. Werewolves pop up periodically in the vampire stories. I’ve seen the most recent episodes of “True Blood” actually have some werewolves in them but so far I haven’t seen them in “The Vampire Diaries”. It’s just…all these ‘creatures of the night’ hiding out in the day time in their walled up windowed rooms with the Quoizel lighting on to protect themselves from natural daylight.

They can be creepy but they can also be cliche. On the upside at least they don’t sparkle when I write about them.

I some times have problems with these. I don’t want the characters to all wind up being carbon copies of each other like my Sims often wind up being. I have a ton of goth style sims with multi-colored hair and very unisexual in looks a lot of the time. It’s hard for me to sort out how someone who wears hip hop clothing would look as I don’t, and most people I know don’t either. So, while I might be able to look at TV shows and see people in those clothes I have no idea what is actually “in”. It makes me feel old, but there you are. My co-worker’s niece not knowing that Beyonce was in Destiny’s Child also made me feel old.

On the one hand it’s safe to stick with ways of describing people that you like, but other people aren’t necessarily going to like or be able to relate to that, and also if all the characters are the same in look you may as well be writing horrendous fan-fiction.

I *love* my muse some times /sarc. I was up until about 11 p.m. last night hoping for the writing bean to strike, but it didn’t. I would flux between playing DOA and watching the season finale of Dr. Who, and nothing would come. Any time I got a niggling of an idea and I put whatever I was doing on pause to follow it up then thread would snap and I’d be left zoning out to a blinking cursor.

So, I finally decide about 11 p.m. that I’m going to go to bed early so I can get up first thing in the morning and perhaps exercise outside before it gets too hot. I spend about a half hour talking over something with my room mate and go to the bedroom to sleep. Then I wind up scribbling away in a notebook until 12:30 a.m.

Thank you muse! It better be good is all I can say because it meant that I didn’t wake up until almost 9 a.m. by which point it’s already too hot to be outside for more than a few minutes :p Florida while I’m at it!

The vignette writing is going well. I’ve done four small blurbs centered around roofs and Jay’s habit of hiding out on them to chill. The instances are at four different times, one early teens in Virginia then a few years later in Scotland talking with his cousin Cora, and then a year or so later talking to his other cousin Clair and then a year or so after that talking to someone else on the roof who he hasn’t seen in some time.

I find them interesting for the little snippets of ideas that come out, such as that he had a school appointed counselor who he went and saw but didn’t particularly like or really talk to. I have a feeling it’ll work out to be one of those “you will do this or you will get kicked out,” sort of things. I imagine the family had this whole “he’s gone through such a trauma, the death of everyone in his family, we’re trying to connect with him, we need help,” bit. I have a lot of images of their mother, his aunt, acting quite a bit like Molly Weasley.

Some times my characters surprise me. I was absolutely sure for quite some time that Cora, one of the characters in the werewolf story was going to get a minor scholarship to go to medical assistant school and that’s what she would be doing. However, I realized that really wouldn’t be a reason to go all the way to London for school she could easily do something like that in Edinburgh.

However if she got a scholarship specifically for the University of London then that would definitely be a reason why she would go there. However the more her character presents — while she likes helping out with the “vet” and the hospital she also is interested in legal matters, so it makes much more sense that she would be studying legal matters and working in that capacity while in college.

Now I just have to work out what the main character is doing in college. In an alternate rendition of the story he was studying astronomy, but that was also a version where he had essentially been given away by the family who were a lot darker than they are in this version; basically a pack of feral wolves. In this version the family is a lot closer, nicer and more inter-supporting. However, he doesn’t have that much interest in the school aspect of things. He barely attends school and hardly studies using some of his abilities to retain good grades. Why would he go to college? On the one hand there’s the wish to experience the world and get away from the clan home itself for a while; but at the same time I’m not sure what his program of study would have been; and in college it’s a lot more difficult to get away with not going to class. The teachers don’t crack down on you as much about it because you’re paying for the courses and they get paid whether you go or not but at the same time they don’t go on your grades and actually doing the tests in order to keep your grade, you don’t attend and you lose points overall on your grade and so twelve absences and you’re failed and kicked out of school if you do that in enough classes.

I need to explore his motivations a lot more on that regard. I know what sort of things he’s doing socially. The people he hangs out with. The girlfriend that he has. I know he lives on campus; but I just can’t work out what exactly he’s studying. I suppose initially it would just be general education, at least if he were in the states, but I was not in England for college so I’m not sure how those programs work. If I’m remembering what I was going through I’d had specific areas of focus I’d studied in high school with the intent of concentrating on some of those in college; but I never got to college because we emigrated. So, with some research into the way college programs work perhaps something will click with me as to what he would be doing. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not music.

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.

I’m running World of Darkness games again, which is helping me sort out my werewolf story more. I’m having a hard time translating certain ideas into game terms. It’s a bit like trying to use an insurance blog to buy insurance. You have to go through the proper channels, there are good ideas but they don’t necessarily translate properly.

The game, for example, I mix-up small technical details which isn’t so bad, tribal colors, tribal names, but translating powers and abilities can become a bit tricky; and that’s where things become problematic as far as the game is concerned, because I’ll think some thing should operate some way but the game mechanics don’t allow for that.

I prefer for games to be focused more on story but there still needs to be some conflict and combat and uncertainty otherwise what’s the point?