Category Archives: Characters

Gold Nuggets Among Dross

I finally figured out how to export my posts from WordPress into Word.  It’s not pretty, it’s certainly not clean, but the words are there, and that’s the important part.  Downloaded them by year.

I noticed that I started 800 Words as my junk drawer for writing.  Now I write for the two people who read it.  I know they like when I use their characters, and I only hope I do them justice.  (I suppose I do, otherwise they wouldn’t keep playing with me, I guess.)  But I opened up the second or third entry into 800 Words and read it.

And I was amazed.  No way; seriously, I wrote this shit?  There must be more nuggets in there somewhere.

The writing that is play seems to be a lot of fun.  I’m using Take Ten for Writers, which gives me ten minutes a day to write – the same amount of time that What’s-Her-Name from Writing Down the Bones wants me to write, minimally, per day.  That’s about a page in my composition book.

Hell, I can do that.

800 Words is just over a page and a half.  I can usually squeeze that out, too, though it takes me an hour.  Not because I type slow, but because I’m often keeping the end in mind and letting myself meander to get there.  Depending, of course, on whether I need to pad to hit my word count.

Stuff I’m working on:

Mal and Knight’s story over in Tumblr, starting from the beginning.  This one’s going to be a novel, though I would love a graphic novel if I could find an artist around here.  Craig’s List gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Daily writing in my composition book, the notebook at work, the notebook downstairs at the kitchen table, the notebook in the bathroom – you laugh.  Oh, shit, I need one in bed.  Taking care of that tonight!

Coming up with ideas for RP in Champions.  

Coming up with storylines for the characters I’m keeping and want to write more about.  Firefighter?  This means you.  Cybermancer?  You got fans because you’re hot so they want to know more about you.

And on it goes.

Reading:

Dead Iron by Davon (something-or-other).  Still following my (alleged) misogynistic tendencies of not reading a fantasy book by a female author because they can’t write male heroes worth a damn, I have found out that some males cannot write female heroines worth a damn, either.  Not sure yet about this guy because his heroine hasn’t been on-screen long enough for me to make a decision.  If the main male protagonist and this girl get together, I’m going to throw the book across the room in disgust.

Priorities

I sat down and figured out how many hours I write a week.

12.

You know how many hours I game?

About 60.

Gaming is mindless.  Writing can be work.  Sometimes it’s fun.  Sometimes, when I sit here thinking, “What character wants to talk today?”,  I have a total mind-blank.  I have about 30 characters that I can pick from.  Thirty distinct, separate characters with great backstory, but no wants.  That’s what drives a character.  As George Carlin says about sinning, “You gotta wanna.”

A few of the characters I have do have wants.  But not 30 of them.

I will have to cut down my gaming and get into the writing a little more.  If I can balance it, then I think I can be productive.  And that’s my resolution: to be productive.

YA trends (so I see)

Benet.  His name is Benet.

That out of the way, I did a little perusal of the YA stacks in my local independent bookstore.

  • Most of the writers seem to be in their 20’s.
  • They’re mostly women.
  • They write about girls being outcasts and their boyfriends being outcasts too.
  • The packaging on these books are beautiful and thoughtful.
  • They’re trade paperback for first novels, hardcover if they’re in a series.

I picked up one book that just looked really good to me, one book that is similar to what I’m writing (by Sherilyn Kenyon, who Jake Logan would be right next to), and another about Grim in his later years.  I also got Writer’s Digest, Poets and Writers.

There was one book there that amazed me.  It was a pink hardcover and had a Satanic symbol on it.  It caught my eye in its simplicity, and though I probably wouldn’t have read the story, I decided I wanted a cover like that – but in purple.  Or rainbow.  (Ha!)

The difference between YA and paranormal adult is the age of the protagonist.  That’s it.  The 16 year olds get into just as much mature trouble as the 30 year olds.

I decided to write Grim in 1997 (He would have been born in 1972 or 3).  As long as I place him in some sort of modern time, I think he will be timeless.

 

Works in Progress

I’ve been patterning my brand on an anti-social, starving writer.  He doesn’t like to do social things, but gets pissed off when he’s not invited to them.

Okay, so he’s like Dan in Dan Vs. (This show, for the first fifteen minutes, is hilarious.  After that, it gets cartoony stupid, but guys would like it.)  My kid turned me onto this show.

I think I’m going to have to change his attitude, especially if he’s going to sell any books.

I finished up Scrivnering (is that a verb?  If “Google” is a verb, then yes it is!) up my novel from 1997 about the Taurin (changed to Torin due to World of Warcraft, thank you).  I’ve also Scrivnered up Grim’s rewrite.  I have ten very painful and concise chapters.  I’m trying to put Grim into one novel instead of three, and I’m almost sure I can do it.  Right now in the rewrite I have him going home, and then he gets chased out of there, goes to Salem, meets Barrett – oh, shit, I forgot his name!  We’ll call him Barrett, screw it.  After he meets Barrett, gathers up his zombie army and attacks the Academy to become (spoiler) the First Archmage in over 200 years.

I’ve only so far written that he meets Barrett … damn, what is his name?  Barrett is the guy from West Wing.  I’m going to have to look it up in my old stories.

I no longer have access to my blog at work, so any updates will be after work or on the weekends.  This puts a big cramp on NaNoWriMo.  I will have to escape my desk during lunch hour in order to write, or bring my iPad and try typing on that – but it’s so slow and I lost my Bluetooth keyboard.

I’m looking at my old novel that I wrote a long time ago that I printed out, and I think I’m going to take some time this weekend and scan it to a flash drive.  I’m not sure what novel it is.  I guess I’ll find out when I do it!  I think it’s Hunter’s Realm‘s second draft, which I Scrivnered.

Now, about NaNoWriMo.  It’s going to be about one of my characters that I play online, Sidewinder.  However, I have to pull him out of the context of the game, and figure out something other than his history.  There has to be a purpose to the story, a mystery maybe.  Finding his parents is old and overused.  That could be a subplot.  It’s through Sidewinder’s POV, and takes place in the early 60’s, during a traveling freak show.  Like Ripley’s Believe It Or Not but much, much smaller and with a few fakes.

As always, the plot needs to be about something the main character wants.  Yes, he wants to find his parents.  But there has to be more.  The story can’t turn on just that.

So, Muses, if you could chew on that and come back to me with something, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Character books

I am a hoarder and a collector.  I have found out that I have way too many composition books (and it takes a lot for me to NOT buy them, especially this time of year when they’re on sale).  I use composition books for my writing journals.  There’s too many pages in them to last one a month, so sometimes I have two months in there.  I try and write my 3 pages in there daily, but sometimes I don’t.

I also now collect small college-ruled comp books – and now small “fat notebooks”.  These are for character explorations.  I always feel guilty using a regular notebook for character stories because I don’t think I have enough information to put in there.  These smaller books don’t make me feel as guilty, and I can carry them around with me.

The problem is, I can’t come up with the questions in the same order all the time.  Like some times I want to write about demographics, other times about their motivations, other times about their relationships.  Rubicon, I’m itching to write out his college years, but I’m still stuck on his “motivations”.

Most of these characters, also, are possible throw-aways – in other words, for work only in game and stories that I write, but nothing major.  Like I haven’t done one for Nybbas yet, and he’s a very important character in Grim’s novel.  Or Pathfinder.  Or Ritter.  Nybbas has a lot of dark secrets that I have in the back of my mind – he and Grim are too much alike.

I’m still trying to make Grim a “pawn” but a pawn that breaks out of the mold.  I know it’s been done, and I don’t plan on being very subtle about it – my character, after all, is not subtle.

This should be for a YA audience.