eddyfate

It's finally live. Sekrit Project Digital Dirge is my first SAS, Criminal Intent. It's on sale now. I'm amazed at how awesome Jessica (my production partner) made this look. And it's got a Russian Invictus in it!

After finishing up Digital Dirge (which I've heard is now on the appropriate person's desk), I had plans for Wednesday (a monthly dinner with some of my friends) and Thursday (an appointment with my hair stylist), so I figured I would have Friday to work on the player's guide for the LARP, and the weekend to hammer out just about everything else I needed to do so I could use all next week to focus on making sure the characters all flowed well. Turns out that I need to do a quick last-minute revision on MET Awakening; White Wolf changed their process of layout since I started the manuscript, so I need to update my material accordingly. So tonight, I have to focus on that, which pushes things back a little bit. Further, one of my support people for the LARP who was helping with characters is having nasty internet problems, so next week will be interesting.

On "The Bureau," I've got the six characters in the Bureau detailed, the first novel/story arc roughly planned out, and a few ideas for future stories. It might be a week or so before I start actually writing the first story out. Odds are pretty good that I'll be sharing this stuff on the internet in some way, and I'm vaguely curious how my loyal audience would like to receive such content (note that you can select more than one option):

Poll #1008298 How do you want to get your fiction?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

What methods would you like to get original fiction in?

After a lot of hard work, Sekrit Project Digital Dirge (yes, it's still a secret) is off to the publisher. It came in at a scrappy 16,101 words, but really it's all solid material -- for every part I fleshed out, another part had some fat to lose. If I need to come up with more, I will, but I think the material as is will work well.

There's always pleasure in officially finishing a project. While this manuscript was painful for me in some ways, now that it's done I'm pleased with how it turned out, and I'm glad I did it. I grew in some new ways as a writer and built back up some old writing muscles. I tend to go through a cycle of excitement, frustration, avoidance, perseverance and completion in my writing, and more and more I'm recognizing the cycle and able to keep it from stopping me cold.

What's next? Well, from now until July 8th I'm pretty much devoted to Origins. After that... I don't know yet. Since Origins is a working con for me, I plan to ask White Wolf and then some other contacts to see if they have any freelance gigs that will work for me. If not, then I'll probably focus on my fiction for a while. I think I'll play around with "The Bureau" just to get a couple of fiction projects done, something for me to dig my teeth into and play around with as I find my voice as a fiction writer.

This Friday I spent taking some good advice into consideration and hammering out the final changes to the skeleton of the Origins LARP plot. I gave myself the weekend to let some farmed-out pieces of the game filter back in (and devoted some glorious time finally working on my World of Warcraft character for the first time in weeks). Today I took the pieces I had, put them all together, and farmed them back out while I focus on the main introductory game/rule/plot book for players. I also bought my plane ticket for Origins, hammered out some travel arrangements, found the movie theater website STILL doesn't have showtimes for the Transformers movie yet, and generally spent all evening working on Origins. I plan to spend the next day or two working on the new player's book and final revisions to Digital Dirge, and then see what work needs to be done over the rest of the week.

I've been slacking on "The Bureau" a bit, but not a whole lot. I hammered out the six core characters, and I've spent the weekend fleshing them out to be something more than "middle-aged priest." I have a general social dynamic in mind, so I want to put the pieces down so that I can get the basics of that dynamic down, while still leaving a lot unwritten for future ideas and so I can explore the characters as I write. I'm also kicking around what the first plot will be, and in what format I'll be sharing it with the world. There are some weird rights issues if I just put them up here in my LiveJournal, so I have to decide what I plan to do with this in future before I share it out. I'm actually considering podcasting them in audiobook format, and/or a blog with the idea of eventually self-publishing them. Since I haven't actually, you know, written anything yet, these are more vague ideas than anything resembling a plan.

And now, an hour of relaxation before bed.

So this email subject line showed up in my work email (for white-wolf.com):

"It would have been hell for the players to even begin to consider such sophisticated metaphysical issues."

Intrigued, I clicked on it, assuming it was something for my MET Mage work.

AND IT WAS FUCKING SPAM.

Seems the infinite monkey with infinite email accounts finally hit on something that got my attention. Fucking monkeys.

In other news, I have been hit with a weird bout of insomnia. I have been utterly exhausted yesterday and today, and yet still slept only ten hours between both days. I haven't even been productive both days -- just a sort of mental fog shrouded over me (although I did get a chance to do some redlines for draft two of Digital Dirge). I'm not stressed or anxious, and I've been working out around 6pm most nights to try to wear me out. I'm just... not sleeping.

On the other hand, I did get to hang out with bloody_ace and delwin in two surprise visits last night, along with mrogre and banzaigrrl. There was much, much geeking about Requiem and Mage, and con stories are always entertaining, even if you weren't there. I tried to go to bed early, failed to sleep, ended up watching Raw on our TiVo, and genuinely enjoyed the show.

Now I go back to work, and try not to think of zombie whales.

16,445 / 16,445 (100.0%)

The first draft is done. I'm under, but the 20,000 word limit was an approximate target. Still, that means that when I go through to revise, I can comfortably expand on areas that might need it (since I went back and did a lot of rewriting while in the process of writing, I might have inadvertently skimped). I'm planning to let it sit for a day or two, then revise, then send out to a couple of first readers for their input, then revise again and send off for editing.

Digital Dirge Wordcount: More tinkering around the last couple of days, but I think I'm going to be a bit under count. I still have two more major sections to do, but I'm estimating that'll still put me at 2,000 - 2,500 words under for the first draft. I'll just have to go back through in my revision and see if there are areas that I was conservative and could detail more.

16,086 / 20,000 (80.4%)

The Bureau: I've also been poking at one of my fiction ideas called "The Bureau." It was a working title, just a placeholder until I found a better name, but I spent 20 minutes trying to think of a new organization name, and "The Bureau" actually seems to work pretty well. I have most of the main characters roughed out (except, paradoxically, for the main protagonist), and I've determined that I'll be setting it in Cincinnati. There are lots of reasons for that, but it's basically because I know the city, and Ohio has a lot of supernatural ooginess going for it.

Lost Utopia: I've also jotted a couple a few notes down for a second fiction idea. That title is much more likely to change. It's basically a detective noir story set in a dystopian future shortly after the second American Civil War. I'm actually thinking of setting this one in Cincinnati as well, but for completely different reasons; the Ohio/Kentucky border was between Union and Confederate forces during the original American Civil War, and I like the parallel of making Cincinnati a future border town between the United States and the Republic of American States. I think I'll be bouncing back and forth between these two ideas in my 15-minute bursts, as both excite my imagination in different ways.

Digital Dirge: Rewrote a section, added some new material, and generally tweaked the hell out of some stuff.

14,423 / 20,000 (72.1%)

Origins LARP: Got the ball rolling last week, and generally played with the next stage of planning before the grunt work of character creation and handouts.

Fiction For Me: Ideas are flowing fast and heavy, and I've decided to lump past and current ideas into four rough worlds to play in. It'll be just a rough set of notes in a few Word documents, something to give me some structure when inspiration strikes or I need a writing exercise.

13,436 / 20,000 (67.2%)

Another ~1,000 words. While it still took me an act of will to sit down and write, this set went a little easier this time. Once again, I have to remind myself that writing every day is easier than writing every now and then.

Most of the past few days have been working on the Origins LARP: skeleton, giving assignments to people, fleshing out I need and what I'd like in my head, and putting some stakes in the ground. it really helped to just sit down and put all of the things splashing around in my head for the past couple of months into motion. I've already got a pretty good idea of what I need and by when, although there's a few parts I'm still a little fuzzy on. That's why I have a group of good people to help me out, and I'm damned thankful for them.

Since today I had some time and I'm feeling a bit better, I juggled a bit more LARP work with some actual wordcount on Digital Dirge. It's only a thousand words, but once again it's a case of building the car as I'm driving it; I had to reread some previous work and tweak it to match what I had in mind for the next section, as well as refresh my memory on where I was planning to go. I'm envisioning six more major chunks (each at about a thousand words) before I do my second draft, so I'm hoping to have the first draft done by the end of this week. Barring catastrophe or further illness, that should be a plausible deadline.

12,535 / 20,000 (62.7%)

For the past few days, I've had a case of mild death. I managed to struggle through a couple of days of work, but on Wednesday the crud I had contracted moved to lodge in my ear, and the exhaustion, dizziness and nausea prompted me to stay home. I spent the entire day doing nothing more productive than watching the first season of Torchwood. I drug my carcass into work today because I had to help finish up a grant, and tomorrow I have some support work for the Associate Dean I have to do, but after that I can spend the entire three-day weekend being miserable. However, I did get my second monitor for my work station, so now I'm getting to play a bit with dual-monitor support and seeing how I like it. Somewhere in there I have to catch up on Digital Dirge (which is quite firmly behind schedule) and the Origins LARP (which isn't quite behind schedule, but I certainly need to get moving on it).

10,732 / 20,000 (53.7%)

It feels like for every thousand words I put down, I end up cutting 500 back out. Today, after some solid progress in the past couple of days, I ended up cutting one chunk out entirely because I realized that it just wasn't necessary to what I was trying to do. I do feel like everytime I do this the whole manuscript takes more focus and comes to life for me, but this is the first time I've really developed something as I was writing it. It's a new experience, and as a result the whole thing is just taking more time than usual.

8,276 / 20,000 (41.4%)

Ended up going back and trimming down a section that was repetitive. Normally I try to avoid that kind of in-draft editing, but in this case it was blocking me from finishing up a different section. Not entirely sure I'll hit 20,000 words, but since that's more of a guideline than a benchmark, I'm not terribly worried -- it just provides a nice goal.

7,342 / 20,000 (36.7%)

It's a very strange day when Grand Theft Auto inspires your work.

I just realized that I haven't updated in over a week. Whoops.

Last week at work was a huge site visit that took up much of my time and brainpower. Afterward, my boss suggested I take a day off. I decided to take two instead and make a four-day weekend, in order to focus on catching up on writing stuff that had built up. (This week my boss is at another conference, so I've been catching up at work as well, and thus things are much slower.)

I started by getting some of my technological toys sorted out. I have had my calendar, tasks and email on three separate applications, and they were haphazardly patched to an aging PDA. When garchangel pointed out that my phone could do much of what I was using the PDA for, I migrated everything over to Outlook 2003, set up the appropriate applications on my phone, and got most everything sorted out (I'm still having a weird problem with Plaxo Mobile). Migrating my mail and calendar took a while, but I have everything in one place and was able to phase out an extra bit of technostuff in the process. While it might seem like this has nothing to do with writing, it actually helps me stay on top of my deadlines as well as preparing my portable technology for con season -- it's much easier to look up my schedule and people's contact information in one place instead of trying to juggle two.

I spent most of that four-day weekend cranking out the final bits of MET: Awakening. The actual final draft was done a couple of weeks ago, but I needed to work on how I wanted the character sheet to be laid out, as well as a few other things which I hope will help Storytellers and Narrators out. It ended up taking on a lot more time than I expected, but it was all done before the deadline.

Meanwhile, I spent an entire day focusing on the problems with Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. Thanks to some great feedback, I figured out what was going wrong with it, and got a lot of notes down. Tuesday I was fried from the busy four-day weekend, so it wasn't until last night that I actually got those changes (mostly) into the manuscript. I'm hoping to get the rest of the basic details nailed down tonight, and then spend next week-ish working on the key scenes. I'm at a place where I can start posting wordcounts again.

Also, I'm finally getting my brain wrapped around the Origins LARP. I've been letting it sit in the back of my head while I focused on other projects, but now that Awakening is done on my end (save for the final read-through of the layout, which will happen later) and Digital Dirge doesn't feel like I'm trying to pass a boulder, there's enough brainspace freed up. I'm probably going to bounce some basic ideas off my design team to get the core plot hammered out and figure out minimum character requirements before we go into characters and setting details.

So, my "vacation" was a lot of hard work for me, but I sure feel a lot better.

This week at my day job I am dealing with a major project, a site visit that happens once every six or seven years. As such, the past couple of nights I've come home and just not felt like writing at all. Last night was particularly bad, as I sat at my computer and just poked around with Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. Nothing has been clicking for almost two weeks now, and the whole project felt flat and forced. After an hour of pointlessly pushing around words, greebotrill and garchangel took me out to Chinese buffet for dinner. As soon as the car started moving, something fell into place in my head. As soon as we got to the restaurant I started jotting down ideas. We got back late, so I decided to sleep on the idea and see what happened.

Tonight, though I'm brain-dead, I looked at the new idea, and it still made sense. I rewrote a good third of what I had previously written, and it all seemed to make much more sense now. I had to completely recast one of the characters and revamp the McGuffin for a second, but the basic backbone finally makes sense to me. It's still thin, but I feel like I can put more meat on as I dig further into the plot, instead of looking at it and wondering where the hell it's going.

It's frustrating that I've basically spent two weeks just pushing around the same few thousand words and rewriting them over and over and over, but each time I rewrite it's gotten a little better, so I have to be going in the right direction. I'm hoping that this weekend I can start fleshing out the skeleton, and at least get closer to finishing a shitty first draft. But I'm finally powering through the block I've had for a while now with this project.

(Amusingly, whereas with Awakening I had to constantly worry about where to cut wordcount, Digital Dirge looks like I'll have to go back and add words to make it all flow smoothly.)

I haven't updated on my writing for a bit. I'm going to try to do an update once a week, when I'm not deep into a project that cranks out daily wordcount.

Of course, part of the reason why I haven't updated is that I haven't had much to update with. The day job has been kicking my ass, and I've been pretty blocked on how to proceed with Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. I get home, I'm tired, and the last thing I want to think about is where the hell I'm going with my project. Today, I simply forced myself to sit down, stare at the manuscript, and do something. I slowly got things moving, and although I ended up rewriting a character for the third time, each time I like it a little better. Further, I made strong headway on a second character (I have four I need to detail). I'm forcing myself to work on small targets for a while until I get through my block, and allowing myself to write crap. After all, crap can be improved, but you can't improve empty space.

After the day job calms down next week, I'm planning on taking some vacation and making a four-day weekend. My hope is that I can use that weekend to either put a serious dent in Digital Dirge, or make my usual progress while getting things moving on other things (like the Origins LARP).