And the winner is....

Me.

But you deserve more than that dear reader.

So since I last posted, there's been some ups and downs. Last Thursday I only got about 1,000 words written. Yeah, it was a holiday, but I had intended to go to the Turkeyday dinner, and come back early enough to crunch out another thousand or so words.

That so didn't happen. Not that I'm complaining. There was a lot of wine, a lot of good conversation and a cute 1 year old, so I obviously don't regret it.

Then Friday I managed to get about 2,500 words done. So, that was good.

Writing wise, Saturday was amazing. A friend and I staged our own write in. We put in Game of Thrones and just wrote, occasionally reading small pieces we thought came out well. Yeah, I know I said I wasn't letting anyone read what I was writing until I'd finished and gave it a second pass.... but I only read small snippets, so it doesn't count.

Anyway, that put me within 4k of the finish line. 

Sunday I had wanted to bang out all four thousand word. However, I got into holiday shopping and it just didn't happen. I got about 1,500 words done. Monday I ended up having more holiday shopping issues and so only got about a thousand done.

That left me to finish it today.

Which I did.

That's it for the numbers.....

The fact of the matter is that I sort of ran out of plot last week. As I've mentioned earlier, I had made up an outline for the first chunk of the book, but I wrote to the end of that last week, which just kind of left me spinning my wheels. I wrote a lot of character scenes and just kept going... which means there's a good chance that what I wrote in the last few days will never see the light of day.

The important thing is... I got 50k.

Back from the pseudo-dead

No, I didn't die.

No, get kidnapped.

No I (sadly) didn't get abducted by mercurial aliens from beyond the fifth dimension.

I knew when I started this blog that it was gonna be a challenge to update it every day. It's been a but more of a challenge than I thought. During the first week of so of NaNoWriMo, I'd finish my wordcount by something like 10pm, and be able to pop in and tell you how everything went.

During week two, it pushed later, and the updates became more sparingly spaced. things got harder. The story looked at my outline and said "to hell with you, I'll do what I want".

Week three has been the story rebelling against the author, so to speak. Characters decide to do things I hadn't intended, people who I thought were a dirty shade of white became steel gray. Characters who were initially supposed to dominate the story are now sitting on deaths door step, having been pulled back before they could walk through.

They always say that the second week in the hardest, but I disagree, I think the third week is the hardest. I find myself still plunking the keys during Jon Stewart, which I haven't had to do up unto this point. I'm ahead of my wordcount, but I want to stay there. I want to be able to finish early and take a day off on my birthday (since I'm not doing anything else on it, just taking a day off of NaNo would be nice).

I have that chance this coming week with Thursday and Friday available for me to to do double sessions or sessions and a half. Plunk down a thousand words in the morning, then another thousand and a half at night. Saturday I could do this too... that's a potential 7500 words in 3 days. Dump that on top of my current 33405 (probably closer to 37000 by the time thursday hits) and I'm within 5k of my goal. I dump another one of those on Sunday and I've got almost 47k by the end of the weekend.

My problem is now that I've just ended the big opening sequence. I'm 80 pages in and I've just completed the first sequence and inciting incident. This piece is a god damned monster. Bigger than I intended. I'm not even out of Act I yet. If this were an Indiana Jones movie, Marcus would have just now told him about the Ark of the Covenant.

So much to go, and I just kind of want a day to step back and reassess. I need a game plan because I'm swiftly running out of outline, and what I do have doesn't quite fit anymore.

Current word count: 33,405
Days left: 10

Hemingway had the right idea.

The two week mark!

So, yesterday was the two week mark.

I'm currently on Chapter 3, after finishing Chapter 2 on Monday. Things are currently building to my inciting incidents nicely, but not easily.

Tuesday I didn't get to 1,667, petering out at around 1,500 words. The scene was just spinning in circles, and it hit a couple of points I needed it to, but it just wasn't working. So, I called it a night and decided to let the little bits of extra from preceeding days soak it up.

I was content to let the bad scene alone until, laying in bed, I realized I had missed a major event that needed to happen in that scene. A character who needed to be instructed to do something wasn't even present.

So yesterday I went back and tweeked the scene, adding the missing character and making it work more toward what it needed to do. It gained words instead of losing them, so it's a win in my book.

Then I had a nice scene with one of the protagonists stuck in a car with the antagonist. Ended up being pretty interesting, and hints of crossing backstory reared their head.

Total word count: 24,202
Suggested word count for 14 days: 23,338

Today is the middle of the road. 25k by the end of the night or bust. Realistically, hopefully we can be at 26k.

How about a little intimidation this time:

A Message from Neil Gaiman

Taken from NaNoWriMo.org

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That’s how novels get written.

You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.

That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Pretty soon you’ll be on the downward slide, and it’s not impossible that soon you’ll be at the end. Good luck…

Neil Gaiman

And thats why Neil Gaiman is awesome.... well, that and Sandman, and Coraline, and Good Omens, and American Gods, and that guest appearance on the Simpsons, and his Doctor Who episode, and...

Twelfth Night

So, yesterday started out rough.

Remember the scene from Friday that I realized was now outlined to come to a head with an event that no longer fit the world? Remember how I just kind of rewrote a few lines and then worked to put a button on the scene?

Yeah, last night I had to work on the scene that followed.

The problem now is that, without the strong motivating force of the original version of the preceding scene, the character no longer had a strong motivation for being in that scene. She just kind of sits at the place she's supposed to be waiting to see something.

Then the scene the way it was intended kind kicks in and everything is okay. Once the actual problem enters the scene, people start functioning properly. In fact, in this scene the two characters who jumped out the window (who meet up with the character from the outlined scene) suddenly become stronger in terms of saying and doing what they should.

There's a bit of fire in them that everyone was lacking in the two prior scenes.

I'm hoping that the fire carries though, and everyone feels urgent. I already know that it's something I need to go back and fix in what I've got so far. In fact, chances are very good that the scenes involving all three of these character up until this scene will need to be completely rewritten.

The stakes for the window pair have technically been high, but I feel like there's been no real danger and tension there. Things have happened, and one of them is on the road to death... but nothing feels like it's got weight.

The other character... yeah she needs a real purpose in the scenes before this one. She needs something that matters to actually do. She's setting up an important group of plot points, but that's not enough. There have to be stakes in her scenes.

Anyway, enough prattling on.

Daily count: 1,710
Total words: 20,848

And remember, the great words of Richard Castle...

Teeth pulling, followed by candy

So, friday was a mess in terms of writing.

Saturday wasn't much better. As I know I've mentioned before, two of my main characters jumped out a seventh story window. This led me to the unavoidable question of "Okay, so how do they not die?" Funny thing that I learned in highschool physics.... people who fall out seventh story windows tend to die. Yeah, there are the weird exceptions that you hear about (a toddler falling 7 floors and only getting a couple scrapes, a window washer falling 50 floors and getting some cracked ribs) but by and large... when you swan dive seven stories, you become the the consistency of chili.

So Saturday morning I was stuck trying to determine how in the name of god these people were going to survive. Guess I should have thought of that earlier. I posted on facebook and got a ton of joke answers, but a couple of people offered some valid suggestions. Theres one I'm genuinely thinking about, but it requires some revisions, which I can't do at this point, because the scene before it needs a different tone or what could be a grim savior might seem like a joke.

Anyway, I spent all morning on it, and still had to come home and crank out 300 words after the rest of my day happened.

Sunday was easier. Thank god.

Sunday was easy because I found myself rewriting a scene I'd written back in like February. I absolutely loved the scene, so it proved exceedingly easy to just kind of look over the original draft of it once and then pound out a new version that hit on most of the same points, but also expanded into some others. I really needed the easiness of yesterday.

Anyway, here's the tally:
Word Count between Saturday and Sunday: 3,447
Total Word Count: 19,138

Thank god that's over...

I'm not much of an outliner.

As I've said before, I prefer to be what Brandon Sanderson, and probably many others, call a discovery writer. I like to sort the story out as I go along. I have a beginning, I have an end, and I have some loose plot points in the middle that I know I want to get through. In the past I've occasionally used things like the Heroes Journey to give myself a bit of structure, but I never felt like I was locked into it. Heck, on the first piece I really tried to use the structure on, I killed a main character off quite a bit earlier than anticipated, just because it felt right in the moment.

For Eastgate, since I've been trying to figure it out for so long, I took to outlining. I figured it would help me work out the knots in the story as NaNoWriMo approached. It seemed like a wonderful idea, especially since I was dealing with so many characters.

Well, tonight I realized a solid reason why I've never felt right outlining before now.

Amber is a critical element to this story. It's a symbol of the old religions before the reign of the Dark Lord, and the people of Eastgate esteem it a great deal because of that.

Now, I had already sort of worked out exactly how things had to play out with amber. Who was obtaining it, why they wanted it, and how they got it.

Tonight I sit down to continue the scene I worked on last night, and I realize that there's a huge plot problem with this scene.

Initially the scene called for one of the Dark Lords orc marshals to enter the scene looking for amber, and already having some with him that a character would attempt to steal. Except, in the restructured way of the world, figured out after I'd outlined this scene, marshals would never been out looking for amber. The Dark Lord still wants it.... but he's not being obvious about it.

So when I sit down at my computer I stare at the blinking cursor for the better part of an hour (well, not really staring at a cursor, more like doing all those things that writers do when they try to put off writing... like facebooking, looking at the news and doing research).

It takes me the better part of an hour and a half to realize that I can salvage what I'm doing by backtracking a handful of lines of dialogue that I wrote last night and eeking the scene in a new direction. It makes for a terribly shaped scene, one that's going to require a buttload of work when I do the first draft (this draft as I've mentioned is Draft Zero), but it's functional and it points the character who needs to be somewhere in that direction. Awkwardly.

Anyway, I don't think that there's any other spots where I will find myself stuck so badly because of the outline. I still face a major hurdle in figuring out how two character can survive a 7 story fall, and then figuring out how those same two character will be able to be healed up and back in the story in some kind of rapid manner.

Regardless...

Todays words: 1,667 (right on target)
Total words: 15,691

Tomorrow is a crowded day, so I need to be back up early to get my words in before my day gets consumed by everything else.

Good night all, and if you're still awake...

Day 8

Got to bring back a character from an earlier attempt that I really liked and was afraid would slip into the void where forgotten characters end up.

Other than that, not much to report on todays writings.

Words today: 1,679
Words total: 14,024

Really going to try to do a real post again this weekend, so bare with me....

Day 6 & 7

Okay, so Chapter 1 is done.

Characters have leapt out a seventh story window and are in free fall. Guess that means i have to figure out how to not kill them.

Moved on to chapter 2, introducing a new character and a couple of new vital plot elements.

Tough writing last night with the election going on, but tonight I barely made my word count by midnight.

Daily count: 1,749
Total count: 1,2345

Guess I just need to try to focus more.
 

Day 5

Well, that was like pulling teeth.

I managed to come to the logical break point of the action scene I was writing yesterday, which brought me back to the "plot set up" scene". That in and of itself should make the scene fairly easy to write; I know where the plot goes, I just push the scene toward that.

The problem comes in the form of me being much more of a discovery writer than an outlining writer, and just watching the scene go where it wants.... which puts the character in a different location than I originally expected. It also has the character sit down.

There's a reason than in theater you never let your scenic designed put a sofa on the stage - it eats the action.

The same thing happened with a building stoop. The character sat down and started going over the things they'd picked up in the prior scene (something that had to do), and the action just sort of petered out like one of those toy cars that you pull back and watch go.

Now, the character was originally going to review these things in the same location that the "plot device" was that propelled them into the next scene. I say plot device, cause it should at first appear like a piece of random chance, but after a couple of other things, the reader should realize that nothing in this story is chance.

Anyway, because the character plopped down in a different spot then I originally thought they would, it created an awkward lull because the "plot device" was nowhere to be seen. It simply couldn't exist where the character sat.

Thankfully a brief chat with a friend opened the door to a couple of possibilities. The resulting prose that got me to the daily word count is awkward, but it gets the job done. More importantly, it can be fixed in rewrites.

Here's the tally boys and girls:

Daily Word Count:1,683
Total Word Count: 8911

Tomorrow, "plot devices" and a seven story fall.

And remember....

Day Four

Words today (so far): 1,931
Words total: 7,112

Wanted to post this now because I'm in the middle of a scene. I tried to walk away from it earlier and it kept playing out in my head.

Characters in peril. Lots of blood. Already a death.

And this is still chapter 1.

Day 2 and Morning 3

As you may have noticed, or... probably hadn't yet...I didn't post my word count last night.

I was distracted as it was last night, and it took me a while to eek out the words I got done, so by the time I got done it was late and I just didn't feel like poking at my keyboard any more.

I didn't hit the 1,667 count last night. I fell short by a couple hundred words. However, the extra that I built up on Thursday kind of made up for it, so I still kept on pace for the larger target.

Got up "early" this morning (read 9:45, which isn't actually early, but since it's 12:15 and Jenna's still asleep, I'll count it as early) and decided to pound out some words while the apartment was quiet. I managed to finish the second scene, one that has given me a lot of problems every time I've tried to write it, and still pounded out more than the daily word requirement.

Word count for the morning: 1,842
Word count total: 5,181

Hoping I can pound out another thousand or so words tonight, but we'll see. If I can't I have an 110% free day tomorrow, so maybe I can do a double session and try to pound out 3-4k.

Until then, May the Coffee be with you!

Art of the infodump

Ever watch a terrible 1950's science fiction film?

Not necessarily Ed Wood bad, but something like "The Thing From Another World" or "Invasion of the Saucer People". Those movies were always shot on the cheap, and made with the sole purpose of giving American teenagers the weekly dose of invading aliens that they demanded. The writers weren't skilled, the actors had never even heard of Stanislavski (not that you can blame them, what with Communism and all) and the special effects crew had to make things happen with a lick and a promise. 

I ask because those movies were almost always guilty of obvious infodumps. They frequently had two scientists talking, and then decided that it was a good place to give the audience a bunch of information. What makes these infodumps so bad it that apparently the two people talking both had the information the audience lacked. Because of this the films almost always began their infodumps with a line that went something like "Well, as you know Bob..."

If you write that line today, William Shakespeare will personally rise from the grave and devote his undeath to making you watch a continuous loop of The Room, Zombies vs Vampires, and Are You Scared 2. There is simply no excuse for that kind of a clunker any more. There wasn't an excuse then, either, but really it could be argued that they didn't know any better. 

Last night I wrote the first 1961 words of Eastgate. Story advanced a little bit, but I'm genuinely afraid that I did way too much infodumping. I didn't just insert paragraphs from the Encyclopedia Britanica article on Eastgate (cause I have a TARDIS, and Grant Morrisons penchant for getting pulled into alternate dimensions... and if you don't get those jokes, you have some reading and watching to do), I dribbled here and there during a chase sequence. But in the end, I can't help but wonder if, when someone gets their hands on this manuscript, the reader will go "I don't care... make with the action."

End of Day One

Okay, so just a quick post for now.

Day one word count is 1,961, which is a little shy of my hard goal of 2,000 and a far cry from the optimistic count of 3,000. I got home a little late, and dinner was late... so, as you can guess I got a little bit of a late start. Also had to do a bit of math that I wasn't counting on, so that put me a little behind.

Over all, I'm happy with the word count, but not ecstatic.

Hopefully I can put more ahead tomorrow, or possibly saturday (or both)... and Sunday is a day where I have nothing to do but writing and laundry.

By the way... does anyone actually know if a skull hitting steel makes a distinctive noise?

It begins

You're probably wondering where I was the last 3 days.

No, I wasn't digging out from the rubble. No, I wasn't without phone, light or motor car (any more than I usually am on the last one anyway). I was safe at home, watching terrible horror movies (some of which I couldn't even bother to finish... even if they did have Tom Savini and Tony Todd). I was prepping for NaNoWriMo.

Now, I wasn't prepping like most other people. I didn't sit down and flesh out my outlines like everyone else. No more character sketches. No more brain storming.

No, I prepped for NaNoWriMo by actually doing a little bit of NaNoing.

No, I didn't cheat and start my story. I started a new story, one with absolutely no direction. One without much more than a general concept, and I just started writing.

I haven't done that since I started brainstorming Eastgate. Every ounce of creative writing I've done has been dedicated attempts toward getting this story down and seeing where it goes. A part of me was wondering if that part of me that had written everything before.... the part that doesn't plan... would be able to get back in line and just crunch out words when the time demanded it.

That's the danger, I think, of forcing yourself to outline things. You risk getting out of practice of just writing by the seat of your pants.

Well, write by the seat of my pants I did. It didn't go too badly, if I do say so. The words came, slowly at first, and I just let them guide me the way I've done on just about every other piece I've done. It was like riding a bike- except without the wheels, or the bell, or the peddles.

In any event they both have a seat.

The results aren't finished, and remain something I'd like to come back to. I've been writing in a little journal, as opposed to at a computer, so that if I have some spare time away from a computer this month, I can always continue working on it without breaking the programming of "MS Word = 2k on Eastgate".

If you're wondering, the story is a fan fic. The first I think I've ever really written, save for an X-Files piece I did in the 6th grade. It's not about pre-established character, just a pre-established place - Silent Hill. The story and characters are completely new, but I think that the concept fits well into the tone of the games and the psychological aspects of it's horror.

Anyway, today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. That means tonight is going to be dedicated to the first 2k words. 3k if I can get myself that far (I always like to have a buffer in case I have a bad day, or have to take a day off for some reason).

I'll update tonight with my first word count.

Wish me luck, without saying the words good luck (old theater habits die hard).

Piece of the puzzle

So, I know that I've mentioned before that Eastgate is only the first book in an intended series of 9 books. It probably seems a little insane to be plotting out the greater picture of a book that's not even written yet. Why worry about the puzzle when the first piece isn't even cut out yet.

 There are so many what if's that speak against plotting out a lengthy series as an unpublished author:

What is no one decided to pick up the first book?
What if the first book gets picked up, but it tanks?
What if you somehow get picked up, but are only given a contract for 3 books?

What if... What if... What if

Honestly, I never really intended the story of a couple of rogues who get thrown into opposition with the Dark Lord to ever be a big epic. Frankly, I'm not the kind of guy who wants to draft things into big epics. I tend to like the characters and situations that don't lend themselves to big and sweeping, and when I'm put into a situation where I have to think big and sweeping, my ideas tend to get a little weird (think multiverse collapsing around a single being who is made of the very essence of the universe).

But, brainstorming this story, it just kind of got bigger and bigger as I kept thinking "well, I can't make it too easy for these people" and "if that's going to happen, they have to earn it by going through something like..". Before I knew it, I had a big picture that I knew wouldn't fit easily into a trilogy, especially given what I knew had to happen right in the middle (not like at the end of a second book, which would be the end of Act 2, but dead in the middle to literally change the entire story for it's second half).

Once the notion of how big the story had gotten made itself at home in my mind, then I started fretting over exactly where I should begin. I mean, really the story could have the same long line as Lord of the Rings (Average person comes into an item of power and must go one a physical and person journey to use that item in destroying a great evil). The difference is that I'm not writing an epic quest.

First Lines

So, I read a bunch of writing blogs.

Not like, a thousand of them. I mean, the number of writing blogs I check out with any regularity is somewhere in the low double digits. The number I check in on daily or almost daily is single digits. I know some people are devoted to things like blogs and web comics, but I've never been able to do it.

Anyway, one of the things that always comes up on these blogs is the issue of first sentences.

If you read and believe these blogs, many of which are written by successful authors, then first sentences hold a ton of weight in the world of publishing. Apparently a first sentence is supposed:

• Grab the reader with something that makes them question what comes next in the book. Asking a question in the readers mind that must be answered.
• Present an accurate picture of your entire novel
• Present some form of excitement to pull people into the book and make them not want to put it down
• Be powerful enough that if someone read just that sentence, they would want to buy the book
• Grant 3 wishes, including wishes for more wishes.

Okay, so I made one of those up. The point being that according to all of these people, the first sentence holds the weight of the novel on it's shoulders. 

Gee, as if starting a story wasn't hard enough. 

I've had a bunch of different opening lines for Eastgate in the various false starts I've had with it so far.

So, lets take a chance and look at a few of them and discuss some possibilities for NaNoWriMo.

Character - Seren Galaru

In a hole in the wall bar, there lived an elf.

That's was actually the original opening line to Eastgate on my first attempt. No kidding.

If you're not a Tolkien fan, it's totally aping the opening line of the Hobbit "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit." Anyway, I originally opened the story that way not only to ape Tolkien, but because I thought it was a great way to introduce the one character I originally thought I had a handle on- Seren Galaru.

As one of the first characters created for this story, Seren too had her roots in that Evanescence concert I went to last November 1. Just as Amy Lee was the model on which Eira Wynn was built, Taylor Momson (lead singer for The Pretty Reckless, who opened for Evanescence) is the model on which Seren was built. Their styles and looks conflicted (medium build brunette vs super skinny blonde) as did their dress (goth-ish with fairy skirt vs classic leather jacket and heavy boots), and me those differences worked well together.

The fact that Momson just kind of looks like she's vaguely related to Galadriel made making the second character an elf a give in.

Seren was also instantly conceived as the badass, because it's something that you never see done. Take that in for a second. An elf (not a Drow) is actually the angry one who goes off with fists swinging into any situation. Sure an elf may break out an amazing fight, but they normally are just thought of as sitting around trying to look serene and feminine, even when they're played by a guy. (Hugo Weaving is the exception to this rule, because even in drag, Hugo Weaving could still kick your ass)

Anyway, because it was NaNoWriMo and because I had absolutely zero time to do any sort of character brainstorming before I started writing (I had the idea at like 11pm on November 1st, I was starting late as it was) I just instantly went for the stereotype. If Seren was a badass, and Seren wore a leather jacket, well then Seren must be a hard drinker. Every bar is like Cheers to her, cause everyone knows her name there.

The problem was that the more I thought about that after stepping back from the story, the more that stereotype bothered me. Sure, I was fine with Seren being a drinker, but just to have her act like some badass teenager didn't seem right for someone who was probably like 600 years old.

The fools! I'll show them, I'll show them all! Mwa-hahaha

What makes a good villain? 

Well, that's really debatable. Make a villain too good, and he stops being the villain, and just starts being a sort of Machiavellian hero. Readers/viewers starts to root for the villain. This ultimately makes the story a much more gray area, and weakens the argument of the story (unless your argument is that there's no black or white, only gray).

The other problem is that your villain has to be be somewhat realistic. Snidley Whiplash twirling his mustache isn't believable because he's so one dimensional. He has no purpose other than to join together with Dick Dasterdly and Old Man Withers (who those meddling kids unmasked as The Creeper) and tie as many damsels to train tracks as possible. We don't believe him because even the villain doesn't spend all his time plotting nefarious deeds. He has to have things he likes (that aren't kicking puppies). People who like him (who aren't scarf wearing dogs that laugh at everything). He has to be multifaceted. 

These problems are doubly compounded when you're dealing with a villain who isn't the Big Bad of the story. 

When you're dealing wish a villain who is under the Big Bad, you have to find some form of justification for him serving the greater evil. You also have to find a valid reason why he doesn't try to usurp the Big Bad. You have to do both of these while making him believable and not just another Nazi soldier from Raiders of the Lost Ark (seriously, did any of them besides Toht have character traits other than "wears a uniform" vs "bald and shirtless"? Belloq doesn't count, he was an opportunistic bastard, not a Nazi). 

I bring all of this up because I'm facing this problem in working out the lead villain of Eastgate - Baron Sotiras Archontas. 

The element of horror

Unless you live under a rock, it's pretty obvious the pictures are above are from a Silent Hill game (they're from Silent Hill: Homecoming to be precise). Now, there are many things that the Silent Hill games get right, and the absolute aesthetic of the world is one of them. The games creators make their "otherworld" a mix of rusted metal and strangely organic that when you're playing a game, you can't help but think "This is what hell has to be like".

Now, I bring this up not just because I'm a Silent Hill fan (which I am), but because the look of Otherworld is very much something I want to incorporate into Eastgate. 

Now, I'm pretty sure that the notion of using the look of a hell dimension in a high fantasy story will probably cause some people to think I'm losing it. I'd argue, however, that Eastgate is a story about a world where the Dark Lord won. It's a story where Tolkiens 'scouring of the Shire' happened to the entire world (or, at least the entire world that anyone will be seeing for a while in this series [oops, was that a spoiler?]).

Anyway, since this is a very Tolkien inspired world, I'd been  wondering (this is months ago mind you) what would a world taken over my Orcs look like? If you think about the world of the Orcs as presented in the Lord of the Rings films, then most environments had a fiery glow to them. Trees are laid to waste in order to stoke the fires. Forges are readily available. Things are dirty. Metal is prominent, and since these are not a people that think much about hygiene or preservation, it's probably all going to rust in short order. 

It's like the basement of any Saw movie. Heck, look at this orc helmet from Moria, and tell me this doesn't look like a Saw prop.

It's horrible to human sensibilities, yet to these Orcs, it probably just seems like normal. 

This is where my mind connected to Silent Hill. 

Time is on my side

One thing that always bothered me in Tolkien was the fact that in this far away world ( yes, I know Middle Earth is the direct translation for Midgard, which was the Old Norse word for the world of men, so it's not like Tattooine or anything) they still somehow used the Gregorian calendar.

And I don't simply mean that Tolkien used a 365 day year. No, he literally used the calendar on his wall. This is why every year on September 22 people celebrate the birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo. Middle Earth runs on a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 12 month a year calendar.

It seemed strange to me that he did this considering that the man made up enough backstory to his works that he knew the names of Bilbo's great grandfather and Pippins fathers uncles best friends former roommate. Why did he leave the calendar completely unaltered from the modern calendar.

So, in building the world of my story, I've been thinking about developing a new calendar. Nothing strange like the nonsensical calendars of the Star Wars Universe that have something like 10 months and then some weird holiday week and so forth. Just a set calendar that isn't the one you'd find in your kitchen.

Now, doing this has presented me with a couple of problems.

Costuming -or- How do I keep my characters from being naked

So, in the post I did about Eira, I mentioned how the setting of the story has sort of shifted since I first had this red-headed-brain-child. When I first envisioned the story, everything was very slick. Visual cues would be thinks like the first Underworld or Dark City. Hell, even parts of the Matrix would fit the visual aesthetic that I initially thought the story would hold. 

That kind of changed thanks, in part I am forced to admit, to the Hunger Games. I watched that film, after trudging through the book (which I wasn't a big fan of, though the second and third books were major improvements in my eyes), and I couldn't help but think that these oppressed people sure looked happy and healthy. Wow, if they're so pretty and well off, why don't they just rise up and fight back. Clearly things aren't as bad as they seemed. (Keep in mind that the entire novel is narrated by Katniss, so it's actually possible that the situation in District 12 isn't that bad and Katniss is an unreliable narrator. If you take the movie as a viable adaptation, it could actually point to this in the book since the film is clearly a third person point of view).

This got me thinking about my own story, and I realized that if I was going to sell that Eastgate was a ghetto, I better damn well amp up the poverty. This led to me going back to the drawing board on how I initially envisioned people. Gone were pretty leather coats and goth high fashion. 

This left me, and still leaves me, a week and a half away from having to type those oh so crucial first words (for those counting, I have a draft of the story that's already several thousand words in, but I'm going to begin at square one again and push forward in the interest of not being able to cheat) and I still don't know what anyone is wearing. 

NaNoWriMo is Coming

So, as you've probably guessed, I've signed on to do NaNoWriMo. If you haven't noticed that, you need to look up at the Title and Description of this blog. Go ahead, take a minute, I want us to all be on the same page. 

All caught up? Good.

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, I had initially concocted this story as my idea for last years NaNoWriMo, and had to call it quits a couple of days in, when I realized the story was just far too big to pound out without a battle plan. Now, while I wasn't surprised that I had to drop out last year, really before I'd even begun, it was a little sad. 

In 2010, I'd jumped head first into NaNoWriMo and managed to complete my 50k words despite all the shit life threw in my way. I felt like a goddamn champ for doing it too. Getting up with the sun and chugging coffee while I pounded out a chapter of pure genius (quiet you!). That story was very different in tone to the project last/this year, and I'll admit I had a better handle on it then I did in my attempt last year.

The fact remains that NaNoWriMo is a bitch. It requires finding time to write on even the busiest days. On the NaNoWriMo site they talk about how little time a day writing the 1,667 words a day to meet the goal actually takes.

Those people are goddamn liars.

Honest to god, working on NaNo in 2010 it required at the very least 2 hours a day, sometimes more. That means basically locking yourself away (figuratively if not literally) every day to get some real writing done. I remember being at my in-laws over Thanksgiving, and everyone else was watching movies... and there I am on the sofa in another room trying my best to punch out 2,000 words because I was already behind. It really sucked. 

Writing is a solitary endeavor, I totally understand that. And I understand that under deadlines, like in any other job, you occasionally have to miss things to get the job done. The thing that sucks about NaNoWriMo is that it takes place around a major holiday that people use to gather. Which means that to continually do NaNoWriMo means to continually miss some of that time. 

The biggest problem with NaNoWriMo is the absolute insecurity that again I will brick wall on this project and won't meet my word goal. Beyond that is the insecurity that once NaNoWriMo ends, that I'll fail to finish the other 50k or so words needed to make a full length novel. Maybe that should be their new slogan:

NaNoWrimo- Be insecure for a month and beyond. 

Then again, NaNoWriMo is great because of that insecurity. You are forced to write crap for NaNoWriMo. Chapters will be terrible, stray plot lines will go everywhere. Yet, in the end, you will have a first, or as Carrie Vaughn has called it (and I think I will too) a "zero draft". Which is miles ahead of not having anything.

That doesn't mean a single soul is ever going to see that zero draft. I've tried showing people my zero drafts and I don't feel I ever got anything useful from the process. It just made me feel awkward and made it weirder for me to alter what I'd written in order to make it fit things that happened later.

Anyway, that's enough of my whining. The only way to push forward is to shut the hell up and just do it, I guess. So.. tally ho, I guess.

Until the next time I need to vent my worries over this project....

Mythology - how much is enough and how much too much

Anyone who has read Tolkien knows that sometimes the background takes over. What is referred to in the Lord of the Rings films as "The Watchtower of Amun Sul" and then never explained, is given paragraphs of back-story in the actual novel Fellowship of the Ring. At the end of Return of the King, Tolkien was forced to add an appendix that was nearly 1/3 the length of the entire book in order to properly flesh out the background of things that had happened in the story. Every person, every town and every tree had a back-story in Tolkiens works. He died still working on his bible to Middle Earth, the Silmarillion.

So the question has to be asked; in writing a fantasy novel, how much mythology and background lore should I create, and how much of that should I include?

When I first started brainstorming this story, I basically wanted to do a "sequel" to Lord of the Rings. I intended to take the whole of both Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers as canon, and then devise a point somewhere in Return of the King where the worlds diverged. Somewhere along the way evil won.

That was all the background I intended to give that wasn't directly tied to the characters.

The problem was that the more I thought about the story, the more unfair to the world it seemed to just rip off Tolkien willy-nilly for my history. One idea lead to another and soon I was working on the ground floor trying to structure my own mythos.

Which presented their own problems.

Awkward Questions

So, filling out a character worksheet that I got online, I have found myself faced with a very awkward question.

A little background- I found the sheet while looking for character worksheets. I found this one with it's 100+ questions and decided that, even thought it was actually intended for role players, that the breadth of the questions would make it a great outlining tool for writing a work of fiction.

So I'm filling it out, and in the question about childhood (which I'm hoping their taking as a broad term to define anything that happened to the character before they hit college age) they have the question:

1. Are you a virgin? If not, when and with whom did you lose your virginity?

Well, this isn't an unjustifiable question, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made that this was a question that really does define a lot about the character. If the character isn't a virgin when and how they lost their virginity can have a significant impact on how they interact with people of the opposite sex, and can even play into how people perceive them. If they are a virgin, the grand question of why they are, especially depending on how old they are, is bound to come up... and again plays a vital role in defining the characters social interactions.

So, filling this out for Eira, and suddenly I have to step back and say "Well, is she?"

See this is more complicated than it might seem, because a large part of the Eira's character is that she is both impetuous, but that she's also been shouldered with a ton of familial responsibility since she was a teenager. Earlier in the worksheet, I'd already determined that she didn't have her first real kiss until she was 17. That alone says a lot about her.

The virginity question, however seems so much more awkward.

Can a 32ish year old woman be a virgin without being socially awkward? I mean, I don't perceive Eira as a sexual character, that's Seren (more on her later), but she's also not a shy or awkward character. I just don't think she's someone who's ever really had a chance to date or really become involved with the opposite sex. This actually ties into something I have been kicking around later in the series (well past book one), when the possibility of Eira and another central character (who may or may not be in book one.... I know but I'm not telling) getting together romantically.

The notion that Eira was a virgin never entered into that equation. I didn't think it needed to.

Now, however that question is on the table, and I'm not at all sure how to answer it.

Character - Eira Wynn

Okay, so, let me begin by discussing the character who is, arguably, the protagonist of my little adventure - Eira Wynn.

The origin of Eira is actually pretty halfhearted.

The notion for the plot of the story came first- a Frodo Baggins like character failed in his quest to destroy "The Dark Lord" and now, some 800 years later, a new band of heroes must try to depose the triumphant evil, but they are a group who never wanted to be heroes in the first place. I had been rereading Lord of the Rings at the time, and so the notion of the "what if" seemed pretty logical. At some point in the story something had changed and evil had won. Pretty simple, right?

Except that left me with the question of "Who exactly is going to be the person to defeat the Dark Lord this time around?"

Anyone who knows me know that I'm a fan of rogues. I love characters who live in the grey area of morality. Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, Batman, Robin Hood, Danny Ocean- these types of people were the best characters to me. They had their own moral compass and society be damned what they thought of it. That meant that whoever took the lead in this story was going to have to be morally grey, and preferably badass.

The night I concocted the idea for the story, the first day of NaNoWriMo mind you, I was actually at an Evanescence concert. Wanting my story to have a darker, slightly goth (but not bleeding black or wearing fetish gear goth) tone, I basically just decided to envision the main character as Amy Lee. Not much of a stretch if you think about it. The anime series Ergo Proxy already had a main character who was the spitting image of Amy Lee and it ended up working pretty well.

Why couldn't I do it?

Mission Statement

I've tried to compose blogs in the past and they've never come to more than a post or two before they become forgotten. Largely I think that's because they were, for the most part, aimless.

So, I'm going to try to head that problem off at the pass this time, and set out a goal for this blog.

The intent of this blog is going to be about chronicling the writing of a piece, currently called "Eastgate", for this years NaNoWriMo competition. The piece itself has been slowly building in my head since last years NaNoWriMo, where I initially attempted to write the piece. Things didn't turn out as planned, and I dropped out of the competition because I didn't have enough of the story worked out to actually write it, and I felt it was a piece that demanded to actually have some thought put into it.

So, I've worked for a year, starting and stopping, outlining and brainstorming, all in an attempt to make this story work. It's gone from a story about 2 people to a story about 7 people. It's gone from the intended first book of a trilogy, to the first book of nine. I've gone from directly ripping off Tolkien to using his frame of thought as a spring board for a new world. The Tolkien ideas are still there, but now they're a part of a new tapestry.

Was it worth stalling? I think so. I think that the story now is a much stronger idea that it was this time last year. Then again, this was an idea that I only came up with on November 1 of last year.

Anyway, this blog is to chronicle the things that are going into this story. I will post as I flesh out characters, or see scenarios go in different directions than they had before. I will not post pieces of the story, and I'll try by best to avoid lots of specific story spoilers, because frankly I've found that keeping the story to yourself on the first draft helps you get through it.... it also helps keep the tiny insecure critic in the back of my head from overrunning the story.

So, here we go....