project: destiny

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Two books, one year

I was able to get about half of a chapter done last week. I set myself up in a Second Cup downtown, ordered a small chai latte, and plunked down in a chair near a fireplace display. This was another of those writing sessions where I discovered things as I went along, reasons why things work, explanations, etc. I also wrote a major contradiction, but staying true to NaNo rules, I ignored it and told myself it will get fixed in editing. Also, I didn’t want to cross out a whole paragraph of text. On a computer, it’s nice to pretend it never existed, it stays pretty. Here, every mistake shows up as a bar of black ink, or a furious scrawl.

I really enjoyed the latest NaNo mail I got. The beginning of it reads:

I recently met a woman named Ruth who approached me with her head hung low. “I’m sorry, but I failed NaNoWriMo,” she plaintively said. “I only wrote 10,000 words.”

I hate to hear such words. They disturb me like few others.

“You didn’t only do anything,” I replied. “You bravely signed up to make creativity a priority for a month in a busy life. You dreamed up a fantastic novel idea. You wrote thousands of words. You established creative momentum in your life. That’s huge!”

– Grant Faulkner, executive director

I wasn’t beating myself up over not having reached my goal of 50,000 words in one month, but it’s always nice to have reassurance. NaNoWriMo is such a supportive group and I don’t know that I would be working so hard to finish another book right now if I hadn’t participated last year and then again last month. Before NaNo, I was under the illusion that writer’s block was real, that the best time to write was when inspiration struck, that somehow I would find myself flooded with ideas and thousands of words would come pouring out in an afternoon.

Also, their attitude of plunging ahead and never looking back helped me realize that the elements of a rough draft do not have to be perfect. They have to lead from one scene to the next until the end of the story is found. Then the heavy machinery can be brought in to polish and clean and reshape until a scattered mess of points resembles a journey, until the characters are consistent and defined, until a pile of words resembles a book.

By the time this post goes live, I should be applying these lessons over another chai latte, continuing the journey of my characters. As I write this, I’m just shy of 20,000 words. If I continue at this pace, I’ll hit 100,000 by the end of August. I’ll have two rough drafts, or perhaps one rough draft and one second draft, all in the space of one year. It’s hard to believe I could go from having so many unfinished drafts to two complete rough drafts in such short time. All because I decided to try something different and challenge myself. (Okay, because my husband got tired of my whining and told me to do something. Thanks, dear. I really appreciate it.)

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A change of scenery

I meant to post last weekend, then I felt bad for not having much of anything to say and for thinking of taking time away from my NaNo project. I am so far behind on my goal. I’m trying to berate myself just enough to light a fire under my ass, but also be realistic enough to accept that I may not get to 50k this time around. The main reason for this would be the switch from typing up my first draft to scribbling it down by hand. Typing is easier and quicker. I am infinitely more pleased with looking at nearly 70 pages of handwritten words, though.

I frequently have to remind myself to resist the temptation of spending time typing up what I’ve written so far in Scrivener. I want to save that step for when the first draft is complete, so I can give myself license to make edits as I go, to add in things that I meant to write the first time around but didn’t get to. I don’t want to do any editing at all until the first draft is done. I feel that’s a trap I’ve fallen into too many times; I get carried away with ideas I have for making the story better, and it never gets finished because I end up in an endless cycle of revising as I go. Even if I don’t meet my goal with Camp NaNo, I have to carry the lessons I learned from NaNo last autumn if I expect to get this all out.

Last week, I took a day to leave work early and set myself up in a café across the street from my apartment to write. I ordered a chai latte, streamed Songza over their free Wi-Fi, and wrote for nearly two hours. I responded to a few text messages from my husband, but other than that I didn’t touch my phone. When I began, I noticed people coming in and ordering and sitting down. By the end of it, I was so engrossed in writing that when I stopped, I wondered how the place had filled up without my noticing it. It felt good to set aside all the distractions and focus on getting the story out. I plan to make this a weekly thing, but I haven’t been back yet.

I liked being out in public and having fewer opportunities for distraction. No cats, no kitchen cupboard, no piles of DVDs/blu-rays/what-have-you. Sure, my phone could have offered up a number of diversions, but it’s surprisingly easy to ignore. I was there on a mission. Ideally, I would have written at least enough words to meet my NaNo goal for one day; I stopped just shy of 1,500. Handwriting really is so much slower for me. I’m glad I learned how nice it feels to put myself in a different setting and get to work, though.

As it’s looking more and more like I will be unable to meet the goal I set for myself, the thought I’m repeating is, “It’s okay if I don’t make 50,000 words as long as I write every day.” I am not writing everyday, though. Mostly, but there are days here and there that I skip. It seems like it’s a difficult line; I want to write often, to feel like I’m progressing in my story. I don’t want writing to feel arduous. I want it to stay fun. I want to give myself permission to read or listen to an audiobook or play a game if I don’t feel like writing any particular afternoon.

I shouldn’t ever forget that I’m the one who makes the rules here. I’ve got almost seventy pages more than I had at the beginning of the month. My book seems about a quarter full. These are positive things. I just need to keep going.

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Black and white

I have not gotten off to the greatest start with Camp NaNoWriMo, though I have been able to up my writing frequency from semi-daily to daily. I think the main trouble is that where I could spend an hour to an hour and a half during NaNoWriMo typing to get my 1,667 words a day, writing longhand for that amount of time just doesn’t get me that kind of wordage. I have to step it up and devote some evening, at-home time to my writing.

This is infinitely more agreeable because I can write on a nice surface like a desk or a table instead of on my bag on my lap on the train. Also, my apartment tends not to move or curve from left to right like the train does. Big pluses, those.

I started writing Project: Destiny in a spiral-bound notebook and soon rediscovered how annoying it is having those metal wires under my hand. I wanted to buy a nice journal to write in, but didn’t want to commit to copying down what I had already written into it. Then I decided that the prologue could be in the spiral notebook (it takes several years before the story so I won’t likely reference it often) and I could continue with chapter one in a nicer book.

destiny journal

I picked this up at a bookstore downtown. The text on it reads, “Brighten up… life does not always have to be black and white.” The text repeates in French and German. I don’t know that the words are necessarily relevant to the story, though I do like the mention of “black and white” since those are two of the colors of shadecraft. The pages are lined and the spine is bound with two bookmarking ribbons, though they’re joined at the bottom for now.

As of now, I have finished chapter one at an unimpressive 1,993 words. I am getting through this draft by telling myself that things can be cleaned up and expanded upon later. NaNo last year helped me to realize that a large part of my problem with writing is my insistence on getting every little detail right the first time around. That’s what the revision process is for, though. Until the thing is bound and printed and on bookstore shelves, I have the power to change and improve it.

I’m not going to sweat it, I’m going to write a messy first draft and try to turn it into something better once the whole story is out. In this way, I’ll finally finish this project that I’ve been working on (in one form or another) for almost fourteen years.

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Camping and deadlines

I have seriously got to get on the ball with this blog.

I have gotten back into the swing of things with reading. I’ve started Life After Life, a book detailing the adventures of Ursula Todd as each time she dies, the clock winds back and gives her a chance to do things differently. She is spurred to action by curious sensations of dread that lead her away from her previous deaths. I’ll wait until I’ve finished the book to say more, but I’m heartily enjoying it.

Not much has been happening on the writing front, which is a large part of why I have decided to devote April to Camp NaNoWriMo. I’m hoping to recreate the experience I had last November with a different story. To that end, I have been reworking my outline for Project: Destiny, bringing my characters to places they’ve never been before, exploring other parts of the world. The journeys in stories are rarely ever straight lines, right?

And the outlines authors lay out are always always strictly adhered to…

I made no such announcement here, but I had made a plan to post once a week. I didn’t do that last week. Maybe it would be easier to stick to this goal if I had a set time. Deadlines have amazing power, don’t they?

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Where ideas come from

Returning to work after some time off always sees a drop in my productivity on the writing front. The waking up early, the commute, the hours spent doing mundane tasks… all of these take away from time I could spend dreaming up new worlds.

Let’s be honest. I barely wrote during my time off. That changes now.

My reading has seriously slowed since I finished We Need to Talk About Kevin, though I did manage to finish the first book of A Series of Unfortunate Events (more on that later). I watched the film with my husband, who said it seemed designed to be deliberately uncomfortable. I enjoyed his perspective on Eva Khatchadourian, he felt that the flashbacks interrupting her life gave good insight into the mind of a woman trying to move on after tragedy, yet constantly being held back by her own thoughts.

Instead of reading, I have been indulging my desire to watch old anime and play a new Square Enix game.

I have been watching Cardcaptor Sakura, then making animated GIFs from my favorite magical scenes. For those unfamiliar with the magical girl classic, it tells the story of young Kinomoto Sakura, who inadvertently scatters a set of magical cards when she opens a mysterious book in the basement of her house. She is tasked with recovering them and given a magical key that can unlock the power of the cards and seal them away to prevent the mischief they are so keen to cause in her town.

Naturally, when I was younger and first fell in love with the series, I wanted nothing more than to find and loose a deck of cards and then hunt them down, acquiring their powers as I captured them and made them my own. I enjoy her can-do attitude, the support of her friends and family, and her increasing self-assurance as she gathers together the 52 cards.

Then, the game. Bravely Default, which I have seen described as a mix of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics, with a bit of Final Fantasy IX for good measure. The story is secondary and standard (final) fantasy fare: crystals go dark, a group of four must fight their way from one to the next to light them once more, etc. I haven’t gotten too far in the story yet, I’m having too much fun fighting long strings of battles to increase my characters’ proficiency at various jobs. Since it’s for the 3DS, I can play to my heart’s content on the commute to and from work; the time has never flown by so quickly.

What’s great about shows and games and films is that they are all fodder for the imagination. A line in one might inspire a subplot in something I write, or a system of government, or a tragic event. In Bravely Default, there is a clash between two ideologies: the Orthodoxy, which basically believes in worshiping the  Four Crystals; and the Anticrystalist movement which believes these old traditions are holding the world back from progress. There is something similar in Project: Destiny, though there isn’t much conflict between the guild of shadeweavers and the Church of the Sun.

While I’m here… I’ve given some thought to redesigning the headquarters of the Guild of Colors. My latest draft has the guild residing in the Prismatic Tower, but there are an awful lot of towers in fantasy stories. Old ideas are not always the best ones.

My goal is to get another chapter of Destiny drafted by the end of the weekend. I’ll have to see how to squeeze that in with my household project; we’re painting the bedroom.

2 Comments Posted on Fantasy, Novels, Project: Destiny, Writing

Pear productivity

Last month, Alexandra Needham commented on a post of mine suggesting a way to get more productive 25 minutes at a time.

pear timer

 

While shopping at the dollar store yesterday, I snagged this pear-shaped timer. After attempting to scare my cats with it (they were unfazed), I set it on my desk and planned to use it to boost my own productivity. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been productive lately; I got over 4,500 words out over the course of the last week. I also wrote in my personal journal, reminding myself that no matter how much faster I am at the keys, there is something special about seeing a page covered in my hurried scrawl. When I write longhand, I feel like I’m always in a race to get the thoughts out before I forget them.

I would like to try writing daily for 25 uninterrupted minutes as an exercise. If at the end of that time I still feel inspired, I will let that momentum push me forward and write more. While the pear is ticking, I will refrain from looking up definitions or points of research; the details can be sorted out later. I’ve already disabled spellcheck in Scrivener since I can’t force myself to ignore those squiggly red lines as I write. Typos be damned, proofreading is part of the editing process anyway, so I won’t let it interfere with this step.

I am on vacation again, so it seems like the perfect opportunity to form new habits.

Another thing I’d like to do this week is flesh out the page for Project: Destiny, which is currently pretty sad.

Then Bravely Default will come out Friday and my productivity will go down the toilet…

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Religion of Destiny

I’m getting back into the swing of writing on Destiny, which is fun and something like visiting an old friend (albeit a friend whose details I can change if I like). Older drafts have begun with Sehra waiting outside a house on the cliffs, something I’ve needed to change because what mother leaves her eight-year-old daughter to play with the edge of high cliffs nearby? This new draft begins with the death of Sehra’s father, the event that drives her mother to seek the aid of the witch atop the cliffs. This time, Sehra will be invited into the house instead of left to play with seashells.

One thing moving back has afforded me is a chance to introduce the dominant religion of the region in which Destiny mostly takes place. Two fisherman burst into a church, holding a third between them; the third fisherman is unconscious and in grave peril. His comrades bring him to the church to seek the aid of nuns, who are skilled in the healing arts. Also, a church is an apt location to pray for the health of a wounded friend.

I enjoy making up religions, taking elements from this one and that one to create an interesting set of deities and clergymen. There is the Church of the Sun, whose followers worship Destiny and Her Daughters and call themselves Followers of the Path. They believe that those who study and use “magic” are servants of Fate, the Unraveler. Magic-users, on the other hand, believe the universe was created by the Shaper, who bound the Oathbreaker and created six other deities to govern various aspects of reality. However, magic-users do not usually worship the deities of their paradigm.

“Honeycakes!” Sehra gushed, reaching out for one. Her mother pulled them away.

“What do we say before we eat?”

The girl grunted in frustration, then put both hands together and closed her eyes. “Our thanks to you, Destiny, for this bounty. Bless this food and all those who share it. Bless it by sea, sky and stone, as you have blessed me. By the Three, so let it be.”

“So let it be,” Donja repeated, smiling. Sehra grabbed a cake from the top of the pile and bit into its sticky sweetness with relish.

So here we have a bit of prayer, like saying grace before meals, that would be lacking from a magic-user’s routine. The Church of the Sun has ceremony and tradition, while the other has the practice of magic.

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Destiny is begun

I’ve decided to give Destiny a go while I’m working on editing Climbing Yggdrasil. I got over 1,000 words out in the first sitting and am itching to get back to it. I made a realization yesterday, that I am hesitant to do any writing if I’m not sitting in front of my computer. There’s nothing stopping me from writing in a notebook or on the back of an envelope and typing it into Scrivener as soon as I can. I might even do a bit of editing or rearranging as I’m transferring from paper to computer.

I’ve built up all these mental blocks in my head about writing, it seems. “No, I can’t do that.” Why the hell not?

“You would have your husband tainted by the Unraveler’s power? You would make yourself a slave to one of his minions?”

“Anything to keep him with me.”

Brother Horas shook his head. “My child,” he said, “all Paths come to an end. If Destiny wills–”

“Fate is the one who ends the Path,” Donja interjected.

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Realistic fantasy, colors with substance

Having written on duality, especially that of creation and destruction, I’m thinking of elements in my oldest project. If you look at my blog’s header, you’ll notice the following four symbols:

fourprincipals

I have these tattooed on my inner right forearm; they represent four principal deities in Project: Destiny, and also the four domains of magic they govern. The symbols don’t derive any meaning from their shape. They are all manipulations of the orange symbol, the oldest and simplest of them.

Violet represents the duality of creation and destruction. In Project: Destiny, it also is the domain of reality and its boundaries.

Next is black, the color of chaos, secrets and lies. It also represents the future, as entropy dictates that order must descend into chaos; and thus mortality and death.

In opposition, white is the color of order, knowledge and truth; as well as the past. Black and white do not represent good and evil, however. Both lies and truth can be used to either end, as can chaos and order.

Orange is a special color in the world of Destiny. It represents many things, primarily oaths. In the world of Destiny, people are taught to never swear an oath to someone they cannot trust with their lives, as skilled “wizards” can use their power to bind the unwary to fulfill such an oath. Orange also represents language, blood ties, and humanity. This is in opposition to violet, whose power over creation and destruction can be compared to the power of gods.

Four other symbols complete this set, and these are tattooed on my left forearm: one for each of the classical elements of water, fire, earth and air. Together, these make up the eight colors of magic as portrayed in Project: Destiny.

I find it very important that magic have limits. If a character is backed up against the wall only to cast some kind of spell as a last resort, it needs to be realistic enough to be anticipated by the observant reader. If magical folk can spell their way out of any unpleasant circumstance by bending the laws of nature, they quickly become irritating. For this reason, I spend a lot of time on the way magic works in my fantasy projects. What does it cost the user? What can it do? How can it be beaten? When is it not worth the effort?

I feel like a learned a long time ago that for it to be worth the read, fantasy has to be realistic. The best-defined magic system can make all the sense in the world, and no one will give a damn if the characters aren’t interesting or don’t do anything worth reading about. Otherwise it’s all pretty colors without any substance underneath.

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Chapters and scenes

While I was writing Climbing Yggdrasil, I outlined chapters in Scrivener by writing a brief summary and filling in the narrative from that alone. However, the default in Scrivener seems to be filling a chapter with scenes, which I had not considered before.

I finished the broad strokes of the outline for Destiny and thought I could give scenes a shot. It’s sort of like going from mile markers to smaller signs every tenth of a mile. There’s a little voice in my head saying that this will just give me more opportunities to deviate from the outline; I think I get some of my best ideas that way.

For this story, I don’t want to simply outline a sequence of events. I want to write notes about what’s going on inside the characters’ heads, thoughts and feelings that I can allude to through well-placed expressions and subtle behaviors. Yggdrasil was something of a race, with all the pressure of NaNoWriMo, but now I can take the time to get more right on the first attempt. If the characters’ thoughts and desires come through in a suitably subtle way in the first draft, that leaves less for me to polish during the editing process. (By “subtle” here, I mean that I’m not beating the reader over the head with what the character is feeling; some characters, like some people, clearly display every emotion they feel on their face with no subtlety whatsoever.)

I feel like my biggest obstacle with Destiny will be parceling out information properly. I want to tantalize without frustrating the reader. I want to explain without lecturing. Above all, I want to be economic with my explanations. No one wants to read a book where the main character takes up pages and pages of every chapter expounding on the way the world works. It would be far more effective to set up scenarios in which the reader can directly witness forces at work and come up with their own conclusions.

Here’s to hoping that in going deeper and outlining scenes for the story that I discover new ideas and better ways to write it. Something I have to keep reminding myself of is that nothing is set in stone, not even if I stated it in an outline or the rough draft or a later draft. Until a book is published, I can rearrange and change anything that doesn’t work for me. The worst case is that I have to rewrite something and it takes a little more time; a small enough price for getting it right.