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 Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2012 1:34 pm
Date: 7/14/2012
Time Logged: ???
WEEKLY TOTAL: ???
GRAND TOTAL: ???
Goal: greater than 1:30 continuous by 3/10
NEW PAGES: 9 + 1 in another notebook
TOTAL PAGES: 112 + 1
Goal:125 by 3/10 and finishing Chapter V
I'm making progress, albeit sloooowly. I've been getting my s**t together more lately, but somehow that translates into less time writing, and a lot less time talking about writing on the internet. The latter is understandable, the former? Not so much. I am getting better about sitting down and writing, rather than sitting down and getting distracted.
I also cleaned up my library record, so I can do actual research! Yay! No one's seemed to have written anything about the circus in victorian London, although there's tons of things on Victorians. Not so much on the circus, however. A lot of fiction. Not so much reference. And I haven't the resources to go tracking down primary sources.
I've also been reading Oscar Wilde's letters, as the next project I want to do is a dialog between him and the Angel of Mercy in Dying Alone. Most of his letters are so... Victorian. And you only realize it once you read De Profundis, which... it's still a product of its time, but it makes the polite and insubstantial nature of all the other letters so apparent. So he earns my respect as a writer, both for working hard and for intellectual rigor.
It's easy to forget when you read about him lecturing about fashion (We should totally wear togas! In England! German underpants make it possible!) or how his books should be bound. (Why is it blue!? Did you forget I have a thing against primary colors? And make there be more foofy flowers!) And his love letters are crap. Pretty crap, but crap none the less. They're so over the top, they can't be sincere, they're overly referential, (I must steal all these lines to describe you!) and they really don't convey any sort of intuition.
So I guess that's the danger of reading the day-to-day nonsense of someone who's actually a good writer. It's easy to forget that this is how they talk when they're not trying to say anything monumental, and start thinking less of them for it. And it's a mistake.
But, it has also been a good study of How Victorians Talked. Which I am trying to semi-emulate. To give the feel of it without making it incomprehensible to modern readers.
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Posted: Sat Aug 04, 2012 1:47 pm
Meant to post this earlier. Here is the additional page from the other notebook, that I'm not exactly sure how/where to fit into the story. It fits the style well enough (especially of this chapter) but I'm not sure about the timing. It might actually end up in a different chapter, because it describes a change in the characters profound enough that I'm not sure Elvira would notice it within, like, five days? I'm gonna need a proper timeline. In a chart. With pretty colors and stuff. Anyways: Quote: Sometimes, at night, as Elvira lay, exhausted, before falling asleep, she would listen to the other girls breathing and it would seem that something hung in the air about them, the echo of an echo of a prayer, or an incantation. I want to become--She remembered the first time the dream had come to her. She had woken to longing, with a cry made all the more piercing for its silence. I want to fly.There was a rope being pulled taught within her, within all of the girls. It changed them: the way they moved, the way they talked, the things they demanded of themselves. It turned the night into a palace of dreams, a place into which one could step and become--Elvira's thoughts always ended there, for she could not think what followed. The obvious answer could not be the right one, or else there was some magnitude to it of which Elvira could not conceive. And yes, that takes up a whole page in a notebook actually somewhat larger than the one I've got The Black Circus in now. So... when I say 112 pages, I mean 112 of those pages. Just, you know, for some perspective on how truly painfully slowly this thing is really coming.
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Distinct Conversationalist
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Distinct Conversationalist
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Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2012 7:14 pm
So, yes, I went AWOL again. I don't have a clear enough memory of when I wrote the last entry to say whether I've written anything more since then on Black Circus. I kind of think I have.
Anyways, all structure I impose on myself breaks down over time, and that whole timesheet thing? Hoo boy. But maybe it's served its purpose. I can sit down and write for long stretches now, no problem. Just so long as I get off the computer and I'm not busy doing other things.
But thinking my fanfic phase was over? Hah! Fanfic will be the ruin of me, some day. I swear.
So now I'm writing "Gifts of the Mind" in which Nathaniel Rookwood (who is, in some ways, the son of Augustus Rookwood, about whom so little is cannon that any interpretation would essentially be an original character. It's complicated.) writes a semi-memoir-complaint-thing addressed to Harry Potter (it may never be sent: in fact, it might function as a suicide note) about how, in the conflict against Voldy, Nathaniel kind of became Harry's Shadow (i.e: his parent's legacy is the opposite of Harry's, he was supposed to be a Muggle while Harry is the Chosen One, his methods are inclusive while Harry's are exclusive, he suffered from going to Hogwarts while Harry suffered from his time in the Muggle world, he took part in the Hogwarts resistance while Harry escaped from the oppressive system, and ultimately he defeated Voldy with Dark magic while Harry went for a clean kill and failed because of Florence) and resents it. Also, modern first-tier psychology (self-help books, support groups, counseling, and mild therapy) play a large role in Nathaniel's outlook on the world, as he most closely identifies as family a non-magical, (wizards don't have psychology) possibly government-funded support group for kids with parents in prison.
Also, if I could think of a way to make it a Spec Ops: The Line crossover without doing wacky things (Anne Frank escapes with Goku from Super-Saiyen Hitler!) then I might. Because yeah. Very serious descent into madness going on here. Nathaniel goes in fairly well-equipped, psychologically, but he walks away with PTSD at least. It always bothered me that Rowling's characters didn't seem especially bothered by the horrible things they went through and did. Either that or she wasn't very good at portraying their distress.
Crap, I'm going into too much detail on this. But I might finish it, and I might post it, if anyone's interested.
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Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2012 2:57 pm
Okay, just felt like I should do a check in.
"Gifts of the Mind" is now "To Inherit a War," since that ties in more closely with what's actually going on. I want to finish it because it's short (I've got about as much done as a chapter in Black Circus, and we're already about halfway done with year 2/7) and then I can have something to point at if anyone wants to see my work. Also practice editing and stuff.
But rather more importantly than that, writing out Nathaniel's troubled relationships with the various families he has to deal with (his father, his guardians, the support group, Snape) is kind of ending up being really therapeutic in terms of the sorts of things that I go on about in big ranty posts where I go a bit off the deep end. And I must put my house in order.
I'm still on board with Black Circus, and I've gotten to the point where I can sit down an write and words come out and I don't just stare at the page. So I'm not really freaked about not going back to it, this is just something I need to do.
And here's a bonus! The arc phrases of To Inherit a War, as a taste of what all Nathaniel's going on about and why it's kind of important to me:
- All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.
- What's the worst lie a parent can tell their child? I love you.
- The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.
- Are we having an adventure yet?
- Would a gun fire on Hogwarts grounds?
- He/She takes the body who cannot claim the soul.
- You have to be careful what you damn someone for.
They're kind of the mini-theses that Nathaniel elaborates on to create a sort of master thesis about the personal cost of a two-generation war and which trace the path of his fall.
Oh god, this story is the most depressing thing I've ever written. I kind of see why Rowling didn't have the last year take place in the school. It's probably the same reason that she snipes the edges of the cast rather than cutting a swath of death through the main characters and Voldy is kind of dumb. Because otherwise a) the bad guy wins when you kill him and b) IT'S ******** DEPRESSING. I claim no responsibility for the setup.
Also, Nathaniel is Nathaniel Rookwood. I'm not sure I know him well enough to call him by his first name, but if I say Rookwood, that calls to mind his father much more readily. He could be Master Rookwood, but despite his aristocratic heritage, he was raised in a middle-class household, so calling him Master anything doesn't really work.
See, I'm getting this British thing. xd
Now to figure out what he would call Hermione Granger. They were friends for a while, but I think more recent events would prevent that.
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Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 10:06 am
And now I'm on to Year 3 of To Inherit a War, Year 2 having taken far longer than it should have. Nathaniel's gathering a rather interesting collection of character traits (he acts kinda like me in an emergency, his first instinct is to help people, so on and so forth) not all of which I saw coming. It helps that I'm writing him as he comes into these traits, since it doesn't seem too awkward, although I kind of figured them out the first time they came up. So chalk another one up to writing rather than planning.
Other than that, Nathaniel is still good for my brain, and his playlist is down to like... 6 hours, I think? It started out at 8. One problem is that it's got so many little bits, and they all get mini-playlists, and I haven't integrated them all properly. Florence could probably loose a song or two, and Finny's section's way too long, especially given that much of it happens so fast. Bleh.
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Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2012 3:30 pm
Typing up To Inherit a War. I might try composing it on the computer, 'cause I'm gonna run out of notebook space, and I'm just now realizing what a pain it is to type it up from said notebook. Not looking forward to that for Black Circus, so depending on how it goes writing this on the computer, I might go that route with Black Circus. It's nice to see a word count at the bottom of my screen, and to know the page count doesn't have to do with how wide I'm spacing the words. I'm trying to keep Nathaniel's voice more consistent, it's stronger at the very beginning and I want to hold on to that, but I'm not entirely sure how bitter he's going to be in the end, and how much he would reveal that bitterness and grief throughout the letter/telling of the story. Blargh. Also he has bad grammar. Anyways, I'm posting it as I get it typed up. here's a link to a link. Or a list of links. I love how Gaia prints the escape character and then the apostrophe. WTF.
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Distinct Conversationalist
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Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2013 12:29 am
So... I dumped a latte on my laptop keyboard. And it killed the computer. I was able to save most of the stuff I really wanted to save, but I didn't get all the way through backing up music and I think I'm missing all of the pictures files. And I don't have a computer. So things getting typed up is not happening. In the interim, I have started about... four more projects, and I'm worried about having completely lost motivation on Black Circus. Also I've kind of joined a writing group called "Writing Shame" that meets once a week at a sort of chocolate cafe. And gotten an awesome job at an after school care/summer program for school aged kids. I have less time now, but... it' not like I was using that time for writing, to be honest. Except when I was, but that writing was s**t. Oh wait, that's another project that I started and I'm not going to finish, but at least I declared that one officially dead, rather than letting it languish in the "oh, yeah, that thing... " state that most of my projects eventually die in. To do:
write up synopses for the various projects that aren't AWOL
get around to designing a budget so I can figure out the financing for a new computer
finish transfering A Shitload of Princes (or whatever I'm calling it) to its new receptacle
Organize my fanfic.net account, and finish posting the written sections of On Unions Civil and Otherwise, skipping anything too shitty rather than waiting to fix it
decide what to do with Black Circus. At the very least, give it a good go. Essaytize about it. Re-read Oscar Wilde's letters to recapture the cadence of the period bullshit. Trudge through the next couple of plot points. And then either keep going or declare it dead.
Well, there's one to-do item that I can accomplish in this very post! And thus, a catalogue of the new projects that I've taken up. Or at least some of them, because there are seriously too damn many, and some of them are probably DOA. First of all, On Unions Civil and Otherwise (the main post here should be visible, it's posted on fanfic.net) is a fanfic for an obscure anime series. Because that is totally a thing that I needed to do. It's kind of a mumblecore melodrama about... I dunno what it's about. It's about everything being horrible all the time, only not quite. Then there's A Shitload of Princes, whose working title is more or less the product of a dare, and which is basically me taking any awesome-sounding fantasy ideas (forests made of glass, cities made of palaces, possessed children selling magical drugs, semi-sentient magical tree mega-structures, a hierarchical state religion that is basically the most crazy-tastic institutionalized Gnosticism I can wrap my head around, whatever comes to mind, really) and throwing them at something of a retelling of Herman Hesse's Demian to see what sticks. And lastly, I'm trying to sort of performance-write something for the kids at my work, which takes place in the same world as the above, but carefully shirks all the not-age-appropriate bits of the world. Very carefully. I have the feeling that a Deus ex Machina is going to have to usher our main characters out of the city of New Corinthia just before a revolution, for example. Here is a brainstorming thread for that.
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