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| Just because it's canon doesn't mean you need to publish it. Fortunately it's an epilogue for a minor villain. I need to chase it down and learn what they need to learn, but I'm not at all confident that it's a story that I can tell. (It might read exactly the opposite of what is true.) Then again, I haven't seen the ending. It might land right--for those sharp enough to read it. As mother always said Just because it's true is not adequate justification for saying it. |
| Brannon is meeting his soul mate, due to time travel days before they first met in this life. And they both have other people right now, who are important. Project people--more for the other person's benefit than their own. And they talk about the terrible things they're going through. Specifically about losing their special person. And how it's never happened, well only this once but it was different. It was like what's happening to Brannon now. And she has this special thing where you can read her feelings in her eyes and she cant fake it. Purple for love, joy, etc. White or blue for pain. And green for neither. Usually green is flat, but this time it is resonant. She could have hated his problem or loved his essence. Often had. But she chose to look unflinchingly at him where he is, what he is doing and reflect back that solid grouund of OK. A look that could stabilize the galaxy. If you aren't crying I haven't told it right. |
| Going slow really does have advantages though. My Protagonist, Brannon, is feeling like a cad. It's normal for a married spy to have to do things that make him feel like a dirtbag, but this time it's not his husband he is cheating on. (In fact he even refuses advances *from his acutal soulmate* when having forgotten he is married.) It's the onboard computer he has used his entire life. She's government property and, though he has been with her since first drawing breath, he can't trust her. So he's programming the rebellion from a borrowed computer. Unfortunately the trojan in his own brain. |
| Hey Besties (and Worsties and everybody in between) I've been doing a November writing sprint at a crawl, taking hours to do a thousand words per day average. I've been double checking every paragraph. It's like checking your phone. Which isn't about dopamine but cortisol: it's not about boredom but anxiety. The key is that I don't expect uncertainty, I expect to know what I'm doing. That's literally the only thing that has kept me from an explosion in word count. And And AND a corresponding increase in quality, the way that a toddler who walks gets better and faster, but one who doesn't never gets there. When I was doing daily writing rushes--just writing whatever word came to mind--after a few weeks it started to become coherent. Paragraphs formed, and then essays. Now they weren't deep but they were entirely off the cuff. Then I started to get too excited and put too much prssure on it--went from what worked to what didn't. So go in expecting it to be uneven, like a samurai who considers himself dead before battle, and anything good is a surprise. And with time you'll learn how to get the good stuff faster. |
I've added a new entry to my book, "Thoughts of a Mad Man"  : "Love letter to an irredeemable lost cause" |
| Trying to set up for a Novemer Drafting Sprint I wrote a bumch of cryptic chapter titles. Sod all if I know what he was going to do in the chapter "Setting the loom." There's no way I'm reaching word count at this rate--or how much of this will be stanadalone. BUT I'll have a lot of content in my world, so there's that. |
| Good news bad news The bad and the Ugly Constantly analyzing every paragraph is not producing two thousand words per day. Good news: I just realized that the silly little bootstrap/predestination paradox that I inserted--where Brannon provides the daggers for the women he thought needed saving in book one--neatly fits his arc. (Actually he buys them from a guy who promises to deliver them.) The dude has to go from the idea that people need rescuing to the idea that if they have the tools they can take care of themselves in order to teach that to his Big Bad Evil Government. It's the perfect moment of subtle growth for an interstellar cold war spy. Set the disenfrancised population up with someone whose explotation is gonna be an upgrade. The dagger seller obviously intends to take over this dude's harem, but how abuse can you be if your plan to seduce them is to supply them snazzy weapons? |
| This is too big for me. Not for me but for this... too precious witing technique. This get -the-paragraph -right path. I am editing each paragraph a few at a time and this is great stuff and fun but it's taking too long to switch into the idea mode. I love things like how I'm doing callbacks. Two different ones in as many as four paragraphs. How my hero sees herself as an antihero and looking at the way the villains abuse the idea of absolution to drive their villainy. There is some really smart psychology that Kissla would (much as myself) just barely 'get'. BUTin such rapid succession? But mostly the problem is that at this rate I'll be 94 and 30 years dead by the time I get this done. So the story is that I'll have to write badly to get there at all. Editing bad things will be much faster than editing something that isn't written there. |
| Falling in love with my old unfinished novel. Who am I fooling, leaving it over two decades? I am wedded to this book and there is no going back. My characters are adopting subtle echoes of their parents--following a familial arc. The entire thing is an organic allegory stretching out of dynastic power that like, actually make sense. The war is a perfect analogy to a more personal battle. And each generation of the POV's family is better than the one before it. Her daughter makes the same jokes--but it's genuinely warmer, and even though she's seven, it's better leadership. Who have I been fooling? It's time to stop refusing the call and make it work. I've loved it too long to let it die on the vine. |
| Level up yourself as a writer: I cannot believe the quality of thought I put in this old story I'm working on. The heartbreak of the old bachelor farmer who 'let' the evil sorcerers curse his lands, so now he is starting fights with the daughter of the crime boss (who runs both the police and the criminals) in hopes she'll punish him. I also cannot believe how much better I am at phrasing. SO MANY "I heard" "I smelled" "I saw" in my old draft. Both the fact of how good my old ideas were and the fact of how easy it is now to do better really help me know I am a real writer. The same can happen for you. |
| Always ask, "What obvious thing did I forget to include?" I wrote a story about a D&D rogue playing undercover police officer, stalking these evil sorcerers who never seemed to be DOING anything (but they WERE causing the destruction, just delayed reaction.) And you have a guildmaster theif watching evil sorcerers be monks and you tell me she doesn't scout around the monastery they took over? I'm like what? More recently, I wrote about a duchess who decides that she and her husband are going to publicly marry the woman who gave her husband a love child (It's the same theif above) and I FORGOT to include the kids in the ceremony. And we're not talking about shy kids but a young girl who took the strong characteristics of both her parents (the chutzpah and the political acumen) and a boy who has so much sorcerer blood he can't stop tiny lightning or run slower than a horse. A seven year old that solved his father's political problem (how to get the peasants to believe they needed to evacuate) by burning down his own caslte with his silly 'tiny ligntning.' So these are epic kids that would never be marginalized. So again: what key world points have eluded my ink so I can include them? |
| Same action, opposite results A teaser is fundamentally the same as a spoiler in content but not in effect. Think about how that might work in your magic systems. For example I have two opposite 'magical herbs' the soulmint apple and the fireberry. Fireberry helps wizards fuel their spells by making them feel like they have excess energy and soulmint is used to suppress magic by creating the illusion of scarcity. But one might take soulmint to prepare; and if you keep someone dosed up on fireberry they might never gather enough energy to fuel a powerful spell. This reversal of effect is not entirely obvious (especially when initially working on prescription/diagnosis rather than theory) and that creates a lived in environment. For example if the captor feeds my team's wizard soulmint and he takes it without complaint. He has a knowing smirk and a laissez faire attitude and then blasts them with stuff he normally can't do. Then hastily explains that it doesn't drain him it causes him to hold it in, that's going to make retroactive sense and make him seem smart all at once. |
| Teaser: Twin Eradis, giant silver robots waiting for the command to fire, lorded over the picnic tables, shining the vicious red glare of their coffin sized cannons on the ragamuffin diners. The couple—Obsolete, both of them—ignored them, attending to their plates of slop. Anybody interested will receive 5000 gp (2000 bonus, 3000 in a review request) and the passkey. If I'm right this will be my first professional submission (hence the passkey). It has the heart of a romantasy set in a gritty scifi dystopia. |
| More mashup words that are needed De Ackweirdo From "de acuerdo" Spanish Phrase meaning "I'm in agreement." De Ackweirdo is when the lunatic paranoid guy starts to make so much sense you begin to wonder if you took the wrong meds. So it breaks down into "de" meaning "of" and ack, meaning an interjection of upset, and 'weirdo' being judgmental about the sanity of the people involved. Almost guaranteed nobody will parse out what you mean until you explain it, but it's great for writing down or just general thinking. |
| Words that came from typos Ooptions Options that aren't good. First referenced in a D&D article I had to share it. Give your characters tricky treacherous options. Elationship. I was talking about my seducer girlfriend who never let me see her real self. It was as good as a drug on the highs and probably as bad on the lows. Kind of meaningful these typos. |
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But your observation, yes yes yes! It is so much fun, to know that you've got it.
And let that delusion that there isn't another hill beyond your reach persist till you get to the peak and get your second wind.