November ’06 was the month of the 50,000 word novel project. The month that forcibly rammed a wake up call down my throat and made me realize the power of focused thought and action with a deadline. Of how breaking a huge task into a thousand mini-bites of an elephant can make things doable (not easy, it’s still a struggle, but it’s doable.) And how announcing one’s plans to yourself and to the public at large makes the deadline more meaningful.
December ‘06 was the month of deserved relaxation and reward, of cleaning up the mess left behind going full steam ahead in November, and working on a number of ‘C’ items from computer to Charmed to cooking and even an itty bitty bit of cleaning. But mainly it was the ‘computer’ project. And that’s done.
In January ’07, I want to keep at this because having a month-long ‘main’ project and goal appears to be appropriately sized and works pretty well for me.
I was re-reading all my old stories and surprisingly, even though maybe 50% of them are really unreadable drivel (and ironically my Nanowrimo ’06 in print just flew into that category a couple days ago when I was in a terribly low mood, hoping it’ll fly out again in the March editing month), a number of them have actually a bunch of potential and they’re unfinished.
I even went over to the old RoD logs and started reading a bunch of my RP-based writings, and that’s how it all started. This huge sense of nostalgia for the –emotion- and –immersion- of RoD.
Not the Everquest style gameplay. I could live with never experiencing that again. Sure, it’s fun to study the social phenomenon of how corpse retrievals and the wait time involved in big run/raid mobs in a small community of 300 individuals ties one more closely than in the days of the big MMOs with PUGs… But from afar. No need to get so emotionally entrapped by that again. (Almost a cult in a way, wouldn’t we say?)
But the potential of RoD as a fantasy world. The Old RoD. Not post-Shattering when suddenly you had these huge barren geos with not much in ‘em, players included. The world of Juliana and Kharis and Faya and Aelrynn when we were just discovering them for the first time. When Ocean Keep was in the west, as it should always have been.
Sure, there are a couple of bits of potential with the new RoD. Some of the geo names are pretty good, if you don’t assume they are so freaking big, and don’t take the spatial layout to heart. Most of the deities in the new pantheon kicked more ass than the old one. (Though I’m still partial to Scryn being a god of winter for Juliana story reasons.)
I dug up the introduction to a murder mystery with Lilah as the sleuth and old Juliana as the crabby comedic foil. I dug up an incomplete manifesto on a Shadowport Seven campaign that never got anywhere, but in which I did an awful lot of work explaining about a kind of mood and atmosphere I was excited about, and reconciling most of the RoD races and classes to fit that particular world.
I recalled, even if I didn’t find it then, storystuff about the symbiote (wasn’t it titled the Dreaming or Symbiosis or something?), background on the Five Kingdoms – Obsidian being my baby, a bunch of Juliana history and background, unsoweiter.
(Also discovered a bunch of nonfiction stuff on area building, RoD101 and the infamous kingdoms article all for RoD and CoD.)
I was pretty impressed by it all. And here I thought I didn’t do any writing in 2001, having had my time sucked up by playing a MUD.
And so, this is my project for January.
My personal JanNoWriMo mechanical goal is to get myself back into the saddle and the habit of sitting down to answer the call of writing daily. It brings me back into a more ‘able-to-immerse’ into a character’s POV frame of mind, which I really really enjoy and get kicks out of.
Here’s the simple task breakdown. My goal is to write an average of 1600 words a day. Taking 31 days in January, that’ll bring me to wordage of 49,600. Which is good enough for me.
I suspect it’ll be anywhere from 800-1000 on weekdays and a mad 3100-3600 wordage rush on weekends.
I’m also going to make it a pre-writing ritual to freaking –exercise- before sitting down to write. Since I know I have a driving motivation to sit down and write, I need to burn into my brain that sense of urgency into exercising too. :)
50k is not a requirement this time around for me, though I suspect if I get that far, I’ll just cram in another 400 words easily. I’m also not going to worry about having a /novel/ or a plot at the end of January. That was for Nanowrimo and I did that already and will prolly try for it again next November. I’m not worrying about publishing or anything of that sort. This writing is more for me.
As such, I’m going to be more relaxed and less focused on scenestuff (ie. readable scenes) as a writing criteria this time around. Gonna be freewriting and worldbuilding a little more loosely, but the overall aim is for scenes that not so much capture a story at various points on a timeline (as I did for Nano) but scenes that capture a mood, an atmosphere, the nostalgia of RoD, the ‘realness’ of the world and its characters.
I’ll let the story form as it wants to. Hopefully out of character motivations, but I won’t sweat it.
---
So that’s the general focus for me this time around. My own interpretation and amalgamation of RoD into a fantasy world that isn’t just D&D.
It ties in an old wish to do a ‘different’ kind of fantasy world that is more… ‘elemental.’ Not sure how else to describe it.
‘Dark’ doesn’t quite cover it. Nor ‘realistic.’ I think of Glen Cook’s Black Company, or mercenary-style stories in the vein of Elizabeth Moon’s Oath of Gold when I hear ‘dark’ or ‘realistic.’ That’s not the mood I want to go for.
It’s not quite post-apocalyptic elemental in the sense of Dark Sun either. That’s more like a bleached, ‘harsh’ kind of world mood.
It’s not high fantasy + magic as in the Forgotten Realms, and it’s not going to be as blatantly derived and boring femi-sexist fluffy comedic extreme as the EarthRealms. (Making the Northerners ‘typical’ lawful goody-goody homophobic xenophobic fantasy types was probably the dumbest thing I ever did. Easy way out gave rise to cliches aplenty. Oh well, we learn through making mistakes.)
I haven’t quite decided if I want to blend this into my other ‘realistic’ but unnamed and barely built fantasy world based on elements (Acheron - Port of a Million Souls, the Sea of Glass, Rhynn, bladesingers and loremasters). That world’s tropes were more about using the unusual bits of fantasy and steering away from typical fantasy, along with being just a bit surreal (telepathic penguins? Hem.) and dystopian (live or die by your own effort, heroes mostly lose and die, people tend to be flawed anti-heroes to survive.)
Hmm, come to think of it, I won’t. Mostly because an elemental magic system will not reconcile with a RoD-style mana system without serious jigsawing, there aren’t any divinities that I know of in this world (being godless is part of the deadness of soul), and I had been steering away from basic D&D classes to replace them with more funky ‘prestige’-like classes as the standard classes.
Right, so this will be a RoD world that’s built specially to encapsulate what I loved about the potential of the world. It has D&D roots, but has evolved to be its own thing. Rather Everquest-y, in a way, or Everquest is like RoD. Very cosmopolitan choice of races and class combinations…
I’m still groping for the correct ‘mood’ word. Like the world of Ares was ‘red.’ Red-tinged, black silhouetted. Demon/occult mixed with megacorp cyberpunk, not too far future sci-fi military and black ops, and a dose of genetic engineering and biometric systems.
The world I’m envisioning is a toss up between the words more/intense/deep colours/vivid/ensouled/embodiment/elemental but not quite spiritual or harsh. Like certain styles of fantasy art – almost like oils, but using acrylic, not quite cartoonish, but very vivid and more realistic than real. LOTR-like, almost.
The forests are greener. The seas are a deep turquoise. The mountains are a grandiose grey with white clouds and snowcaps. There’s life everywhere. There are gods in the background breathing soul and power into everything. Everyone can devote to one.
Multiple races, multiple niches. Cosmopolitan in an odd sort of way.
Darkhaven at its center (wonder if I should make it a larger city or a small pioneer town?), Shadowport as its southward underground twin, Ocean Keep to the west that links the Five Kingdoms of the Sea-Elves, and to the east, over the immense mountain ranges where the dwarves make their home, the desert sultanates of New Thalos and Thul Ab’hara (snuck that in cos it’s such a kewl area).
Yea, I have an old mental map I once drew up of the old RoD. It will be nice to go over and make a new ‘world’ map to consolidate old and the bits of new RoD I like into a better laid out world. (The current geos are stacked like a godawful club sandwich of land geos, surrounded by two sides of water *sighs*) This weekend, I guess.
It’ll probably still be very sea-elf focused, though the guild of clerics and Shadowport will likely have a nice role to play. Not sure how much I want to focus on the other areas, but it’ll be nice to travel through some of them (though the whole fantasy quest trope is quite old and tired.)
Poo, I still don’t have the exact word to encapsulate the mood yet, but all in good time, I guess. Write and (re)map and discover.
---
I’ve signed up on the JanNoWriMo forums. Wasn’t planning too, but since you’re there, you’ve shamed me into joining up also, and it’s probably a good thing.
One thing that kept me going through Nanowrimo was the addictive quality of being able to change your word count daily and see it reflected there. Online. Not just on a personal desktop document, but out there, for the world to see. Made it uncomfortable when your word count –hadn’t- changed for a while.
We don’t have that level of cool toys to play with in JanNo, but anything helps. Including updating a number in one’s sig, for example… And I might go and rustle up an Excel file for tracking word count and seeing it in graph form or something… Being able to calculate how much wordage one had written was also cool.
Friday, December 29, 2006
December Recap
Wow, January is creeping up faster than I thought.
Been busy wrapping up work for one department and making preparations for getting back into the other department’s swing of things as the new year comes around. (The former is done, finally, and the latter is ongoing.)
Couple that with the construction of a computer and Charmed and cooking, and I not only have an alliteration but a full schedule.
On the bright side, the new computer set up is done (and dual screen capability is freaking cool), even if I now have a legacy hard disk filled with goodies and redundant stuff that I –intend- to clean up some day so I can reformat it and use it for storing reference material…
I’m still miffed that I can’t locate the first CD of my WH40K - Dawn of War series. It’s kinda crucial for re- installation so that the system actually realizes I own the darn game. It’s lost somewhere in the crap that I should sort out, but haven’t got around to. Hopefully anyway, otherwise it’s permanently gone.
The good news is that I apparently do -not- require it in order to play the single-player campaign of WH40K – Dark Crusade. It is only needed to play the starting four races in multiplayer. Not that much of a biggie, since the amount of opportunity, time and people I have to play multiplayer with can be painlessly tattooed on my lil’est fingernail.
I’m getting seriously trounced by the difficulty level though. Teaches me to pick “Normal” instead of “Easy.” This campaign game style adds a whole new level of consideration. Gonna have to read up a few guides to see what other people have come up with.
Second ‘C’ Item: I’ve finished Charmed – Season 6 through a Christmas weekend marathon, and gotten some emotional ideas for JanNoWriMo. Piper’s grown up son, the Whitelighter Chris who comes back from the future (played by Drew Fuller) gives me a huge emotional resonance with (of all people) Jherenais.
More on this in a separate JanNoWriMo post.
Last ‘C’ is that I’ve been in a mad crazy mood for home-cooked Western-style food. An entire freaking month of my mom buying back Chinese food from the local hawker centre’s ‘zhi cha’ has seriously made me sick of:
a) bee hoon – meehoon goreng, beef mee hoon (black bean or just egg gravy), fish soup bee hoon (my parents eat this nearly every night, god, the non-variety is almost as disgusting as my mom being able to survive on fishball noodles and nothing else), yang zhou mee fen (S’pore beehoon?), yadda yadda.
b) rice – yang zhou fried rice, beef fried rice, steamed rice with some variant of chicken/pork/beef (ginger, black bean, or kung pao - spring onions included) on top.
c) tofu – egg tofu in various incarnations, but usually with brown gravy and minced pork on top.
d) chicken – fried chicken, usually shrimp pasted.
e) pork – in cutlet form, with some kind of sweet and sour variation thereof.
Well, all of this is perfectly nice food that I like to eat, but not repetitively every freaking night. What’s even more scary is that I’ve added on two kilograms from eating this boring oily food. (I suppose a fortnightly desperate gasp for variety by ordering Sarpino’s pizza didn’t help on the calorie count – but I must say Sarpino’s is GREAT and totally pwns Pizza Hut on price, and California Pizza (and prolly Pizza Hut too) on quality.)
Long story short, I am now even more desperately overweight than before and have laid desperate plans to link an exercise habit to JanNoWriMo.
And also have developed an overwhelming desire to have some American-style food for a change (though hopefully not in American-sized portions.)
But I’m picky. Outside restaurants generally can’t cook to the quality or to the taste that I’ve acquired in the goddamn US of A. (The West End restaurant down the road is a nice exception, and not too pricey - $15-20 – though not something one can spend every day.)
And I’ve suddenly got a hankering for…meat. (Urgh, there goes the diet.)
I’m dreaming about beef stew. About Hungarian goulash. About nice thick gumbo soup with okra and rice in it. About chili (con carne.) About a well-grilled hot dog (sausage and bread both.) About a juicy slab of hamburger (Not even Carl Jr’s fits the standards of quality, and certainly not the pathetic excuse of Burger King’s or horrors, McDs.) Or a Salisbury steak. Or a yummy meatloaf.
So I finally found the time to wrangle my way to Cold Storage yesterday night after work, and bought a buncha ingredients. I cooked up a nice batch of chili. Took 3 hours from start to cleanup (inclusive of eating time.) Put it on top of a Johnson’s bratwurst and it was good. The only mild letdown was I just used a slice of Sunshine bread rather than a real hot dog bun, but oh well.
Two cravings satisfied, and I’m out of minced beef. So the latter three have to wait until much later. I’ve got a bunch of beef for stewing in the chiller, and I’ve been trying to decide between goulash and gumbo. I suspect I’m gonna end up making both this weekend. Gumbo will be more soupy and vegetably, and the goulash can be this pressure cooked deal with potatoes.
If we don’t end up going out tonight, I’m thinking of a couple of things with the remnants of the chili. Betty Crocker’s cornbread muffins from a mix. Or making a corn tortilla with masa harina, and then rolling it in the chili and trying to make a tostada out of it. Or baked potatoes with a itty bitty of butter and chili on top. *swoons*
(Irony: I missed American preservative-filled food so badly that some time ago, I was browsing in the local 7-11 and saw these Tacquitoes (chicken + jalapeno cheese, prolly from frozen) grilling on those hot dog roller contraptions, and plopped down $1.50 to get one as a snack. I enjoyed it like all heck. Yay for Tex-Mex. Talk about a sinful craving. :P)
All in all though, things are good, and I’m crawling out of a depressive, moody, probable-hormonal induced slump with constructive activities.
Been busy wrapping up work for one department and making preparations for getting back into the other department’s swing of things as the new year comes around. (The former is done, finally, and the latter is ongoing.)
Couple that with the construction of a computer and Charmed and cooking, and I not only have an alliteration but a full schedule.
On the bright side, the new computer set up is done (and dual screen capability is freaking cool), even if I now have a legacy hard disk filled with goodies and redundant stuff that I –intend- to clean up some day so I can reformat it and use it for storing reference material…
I’m still miffed that I can’t locate the first CD of my WH40K - Dawn of War series. It’s kinda crucial for re- installation so that the system actually realizes I own the darn game. It’s lost somewhere in the crap that I should sort out, but haven’t got around to. Hopefully anyway, otherwise it’s permanently gone.
The good news is that I apparently do -not- require it in order to play the single-player campaign of WH40K – Dark Crusade. It is only needed to play the starting four races in multiplayer. Not that much of a biggie, since the amount of opportunity, time and people I have to play multiplayer with can be painlessly tattooed on my lil’est fingernail.
I’m getting seriously trounced by the difficulty level though. Teaches me to pick “Normal” instead of “Easy.” This campaign game style adds a whole new level of consideration. Gonna have to read up a few guides to see what other people have come up with.
Second ‘C’ Item: I’ve finished Charmed – Season 6 through a Christmas weekend marathon, and gotten some emotional ideas for JanNoWriMo. Piper’s grown up son, the Whitelighter Chris who comes back from the future (played by Drew Fuller) gives me a huge emotional resonance with (of all people) Jherenais.
More on this in a separate JanNoWriMo post.
Last ‘C’ is that I’ve been in a mad crazy mood for home-cooked Western-style food. An entire freaking month of my mom buying back Chinese food from the local hawker centre’s ‘zhi cha’ has seriously made me sick of:
a) bee hoon – meehoon goreng, beef mee hoon (black bean or just egg gravy), fish soup bee hoon (my parents eat this nearly every night, god, the non-variety is almost as disgusting as my mom being able to survive on fishball noodles and nothing else), yang zhou mee fen (S’pore beehoon?), yadda yadda.
b) rice – yang zhou fried rice, beef fried rice, steamed rice with some variant of chicken/pork/beef (ginger, black bean, or kung pao - spring onions included) on top.
c) tofu – egg tofu in various incarnations, but usually with brown gravy and minced pork on top.
d) chicken – fried chicken, usually shrimp pasted.
e) pork – in cutlet form, with some kind of sweet and sour variation thereof.
Well, all of this is perfectly nice food that I like to eat, but not repetitively every freaking night. What’s even more scary is that I’ve added on two kilograms from eating this boring oily food. (I suppose a fortnightly desperate gasp for variety by ordering Sarpino’s pizza didn’t help on the calorie count – but I must say Sarpino’s is GREAT and totally pwns Pizza Hut on price, and California Pizza (and prolly Pizza Hut too) on quality.)
Long story short, I am now even more desperately overweight than before and have laid desperate plans to link an exercise habit to JanNoWriMo.
And also have developed an overwhelming desire to have some American-style food for a change (though hopefully not in American-sized portions.)
But I’m picky. Outside restaurants generally can’t cook to the quality or to the taste that I’ve acquired in the goddamn US of A. (The West End restaurant down the road is a nice exception, and not too pricey - $15-20 – though not something one can spend every day.)
And I’ve suddenly got a hankering for…meat. (Urgh, there goes the diet.)
I’m dreaming about beef stew. About Hungarian goulash. About nice thick gumbo soup with okra and rice in it. About chili (con carne.) About a well-grilled hot dog (sausage and bread both.) About a juicy slab of hamburger (Not even Carl Jr’s fits the standards of quality, and certainly not the pathetic excuse of Burger King’s or horrors, McDs.) Or a Salisbury steak. Or a yummy meatloaf.
So I finally found the time to wrangle my way to Cold Storage yesterday night after work, and bought a buncha ingredients. I cooked up a nice batch of chili. Took 3 hours from start to cleanup (inclusive of eating time.) Put it on top of a Johnson’s bratwurst and it was good. The only mild letdown was I just used a slice of Sunshine bread rather than a real hot dog bun, but oh well.
Two cravings satisfied, and I’m out of minced beef. So the latter three have to wait until much later. I’ve got a bunch of beef for stewing in the chiller, and I’ve been trying to decide between goulash and gumbo. I suspect I’m gonna end up making both this weekend. Gumbo will be more soupy and vegetably, and the goulash can be this pressure cooked deal with potatoes.
If we don’t end up going out tonight, I’m thinking of a couple of things with the remnants of the chili. Betty Crocker’s cornbread muffins from a mix. Or making a corn tortilla with masa harina, and then rolling it in the chili and trying to make a tostada out of it. Or baked potatoes with a itty bitty of butter and chili on top. *swoons*
(Irony: I missed American preservative-filled food so badly that some time ago, I was browsing in the local 7-11 and saw these Tacquitoes (chicken + jalapeno cheese, prolly from frozen) grilling on those hot dog roller contraptions, and plopped down $1.50 to get one as a snack. I enjoyed it like all heck. Yay for Tex-Mex. Talk about a sinful craving. :P)
All in all though, things are good, and I’m crawling out of a depressive, moody, probable-hormonal induced slump with constructive activities.
Countdown to JanNoWriMo!
I just signed up at the JanNoWriMo forums under "WordBaker". (There are two, one is the livejournal one that looks a bit deserted, the other is the website-based one that looks more active.) Three days more!
I was kind of suprised how quickly I put together half a plot out of ideas floating around in my imagination. To an extent, it feels like a patchwork of plagarized ideas from the different novels I've read recently. However, as they say, there's no new idea under the sun. Presentation, i.e. how you write it, is everything.
Before that, I have to write my college application essays and do related paperwork. It could be counted as a warm-up though. I'm itching to start writing with some scenes already tickling my imagination. The only problem is in the details, the little bits needed so the plot makes sense and ties together. That is what one month is for though.
Here is to...JanNoWriMo! :)
I was kind of suprised how quickly I put together half a plot out of ideas floating around in my imagination. To an extent, it feels like a patchwork of plagarized ideas from the different novels I've read recently. However, as they say, there's no new idea under the sun. Presentation, i.e. how you write it, is everything.
Before that, I have to write my college application essays and do related paperwork. It could be counted as a warm-up though. I'm itching to start writing with some scenes already tickling my imagination. The only problem is in the details, the little bits needed so the plot makes sense and ties together. That is what one month is for though.
Here is to...JanNoWriMo! :)
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Newfangled Computing, Oldschool Gaming
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
That's the only thing I can think to say, because Murphy's Law hit me just as I thought I would be clever and rip off a quick blog post while my new game was installing.
Except, due to a tussle with the dumbass wireless router, and necessitating full dad call-up and router resetting resuscitation, my game has long finished installation before I even got wireless internet access up.
Pah.
Well, here's the ideal. I was -supposed- to be sitting at my dining room table, with my laptop open (biometric password!), installing my new game DarkStar One, and I was going to be this high-tech geek, typing out a speedy blog post while waiting.
(By the by, my desktop computer is doing a 150 gig backup transfer to my newly procured external HDD (300gb! expansion room! muhahaha!) in preparation for an eventual sometime-this-month (yay, civil servant xmas bonus) comp upgrade. Hence, this banishment to the dining room.)
Of course, this pretty vision got ruined because of a cheapass router (my dad bought it) who couldn't figure out to give my laptop wireless access with the ease we're SUPPOSED to have, living in such a high-tech century. Ok, on to the real blog post:
I also got myself a 1gb SD card for my PDA, so that I could install Palm games with real oomph (60mb or more). And it was while fiddling with one of those games - an oldschool arcade beat 'em up called Beats of Rage (Streets of Rage was the arcade version, I believe) and running a Castlevania variant that I suddenly received a dose of enlightenment.
My lil avatar was this vampire hunter called Alucard, and he was running around bashing up umpteen zombies, bats, and other monsters with one single repeated button press. That's it. No squishiness. No turn-taking. No need to aim, headshot or otherwise. Just serious butt-kicking with three lives and a hp bar. No classes. No spells. No leveling up. No statistics.
No worries about balance. No sweat about min-maxing or being the most efficient you can be. You already are.
The joys of single player. And the joys of arcade gaming.
A FPS complicates matters by making you have to aim.
An RPG complicates matters by giving you classes, stats and levels.
An RTS complicates matters by providing you a heap of sprites, with classes, stats and sometimes even levels.
An MMORPG? Hah. Add multiplayer and worries about "He's STRONGER than me. *WHINE*" into the mix.
Little confession. I went to Tec-Drome (can't go to Sim Lim and NOT go to Tec-Drome, I don't have that kind of willpower) and saw Guild Wars: Factions and Nightfall. I got offered both for $120. I said, "Nah. Another time." and picked up three singleplayer games instead for the same price. :P
I think it has to do with the way I get bored. Like when I got bored with RoD, I couldn't play another SMAUG MUD because the underlying game system was the same. Couldn't understand how come others HAD to keep playing SMAUG only. I'm mildly bored with CoX, and still super-tired of the whole MMO loot machine idea, so alas, GW must wait for another time.
(I'm also eyeing Neverwinter Nights 2 and the Battle for Middle Earth 2, but I kept them for later. My comp needs upgrading first, then these games will be better with more eye candy. Oh, and Company of Heroes, but I didn't see that there today. Maybe not out yet.)
I'm getting nostalgic for other games. Singleplayer ones.
Games I haven't played yet. Games I'm halfway through. Games that I've played before but feel like replaying.
I also finally forced myself to get off my ass and open a million and one boxes looking for my USB gamepad so that I could plug it in and play through some games that work better with one.
I have this wild and crazy idea. Instead of obsessing about writing, maybe I should make December the month to try and complete as many singleplayer games as possible. (And clean up my HD at the same time.)
I might just do that. :)
Anyhow, I've been putting off my pretty space adventure/sim/trader game. Gonna end off here and try it out. *boing*
That's the only thing I can think to say, because Murphy's Law hit me just as I thought I would be clever and rip off a quick blog post while my new game was installing.
Except, due to a tussle with the dumbass wireless router, and necessitating full dad call-up and router resetting resuscitation, my game has long finished installation before I even got wireless internet access up.
Pah.
Well, here's the ideal. I was -supposed- to be sitting at my dining room table, with my laptop open (biometric password!), installing my new game DarkStar One, and I was going to be this high-tech geek, typing out a speedy blog post while waiting.
(By the by, my desktop computer is doing a 150 gig backup transfer to my newly procured external HDD (300gb! expansion room! muhahaha!) in preparation for an eventual sometime-this-month (yay, civil servant xmas bonus) comp upgrade. Hence, this banishment to the dining room.)
Of course, this pretty vision got ruined because of a cheapass router (my dad bought it) who couldn't figure out to give my laptop wireless access with the ease we're SUPPOSED to have, living in such a high-tech century. Ok, on to the real blog post:
I also got myself a 1gb SD card for my PDA, so that I could install Palm games with real oomph (60mb or more). And it was while fiddling with one of those games - an oldschool arcade beat 'em up called Beats of Rage (Streets of Rage was the arcade version, I believe) and running a Castlevania variant that I suddenly received a dose of enlightenment.
My lil avatar was this vampire hunter called Alucard, and he was running around bashing up umpteen zombies, bats, and other monsters with one single repeated button press. That's it. No squishiness. No turn-taking. No need to aim, headshot or otherwise. Just serious butt-kicking with three lives and a hp bar. No classes. No spells. No leveling up. No statistics.
No worries about balance. No sweat about min-maxing or being the most efficient you can be. You already are.
The joys of single player. And the joys of arcade gaming.
A FPS complicates matters by making you have to aim.
An RPG complicates matters by giving you classes, stats and levels.
An RTS complicates matters by providing you a heap of sprites, with classes, stats and sometimes even levels.
An MMORPG? Hah. Add multiplayer and worries about "He's STRONGER than me. *WHINE*" into the mix.
Little confession. I went to Tec-Drome (can't go to Sim Lim and NOT go to Tec-Drome, I don't have that kind of willpower) and saw Guild Wars: Factions and Nightfall. I got offered both for $120. I said, "Nah. Another time." and picked up three singleplayer games instead for the same price. :P
I think it has to do with the way I get bored. Like when I got bored with RoD, I couldn't play another SMAUG MUD because the underlying game system was the same. Couldn't understand how come others HAD to keep playing SMAUG only. I'm mildly bored with CoX, and still super-tired of the whole MMO loot machine idea, so alas, GW must wait for another time.
(I'm also eyeing Neverwinter Nights 2 and the Battle for Middle Earth 2, but I kept them for later. My comp needs upgrading first, then these games will be better with more eye candy. Oh, and Company of Heroes, but I didn't see that there today. Maybe not out yet.)
I'm getting nostalgic for other games. Singleplayer ones.
Games I haven't played yet. Games I'm halfway through. Games that I've played before but feel like replaying.
I also finally forced myself to get off my ass and open a million and one boxes looking for my USB gamepad so that I could plug it in and play through some games that work better with one.
I have this wild and crazy idea. Instead of obsessing about writing, maybe I should make December the month to try and complete as many singleplayer games as possible. (And clean up my HD at the same time.)
I might just do that. :)
Anyhow, I've been putting off my pretty space adventure/sim/trader game. Gonna end off here and try it out. *boing*
Friday, December 08, 2006
Something happened on the way to guild wars...
There I was, working on the Factions storyline when I got one of those sideline quests:
No kidding!
Incidentally, I'm playing trick bar that someone more versed than me in Guild Wars: The Gathering created. Despite my many self-created different bars, I find this one most useful in generic purpose PvE. Why? Damage speaks, and this bar basically pumps out AoE damage by the truckloads.
It's certainly a one-trick pony (break the trick and the build falls apart), but freakishly effective. I was asked to clone the bar off someone in an entire team of such builds. None of the mobs we encountered survived past 10 seconds... until we got careless, stole aggro from the A/Me and wiped that is :)
No kidding!
Incidentally, I'm playing trick bar that someone more versed than me in Guild Wars: The Gathering created. Despite my many self-created different bars, I find this one most useful in generic purpose PvE. Why? Damage speaks, and this bar basically pumps out AoE damage by the truckloads.
It's certainly a one-trick pony (break the trick and the build falls apart), but freakishly effective. I was asked to clone the bar off someone in an entire team of such builds. None of the mobs we encountered survived past 10 seconds... until we got careless, stole aggro from the A/Me and wiped that is :)
Monday, December 04, 2006
Least It Wasn't Nov...
Urgh. Feeling uber miserable today. A serious case of flu and fatigue has knocked me over hard. Started Sunday night with my throat itching a bit.
Throat is sore now, trying not to cough for fear of never being able to stop, I think I'm supporting a regular ecosystem of opportunistic bacteria, my body can't seem to decide if it's feeling hot or cold - and the kicker is that the thermometer thinks my temperature is still within normal ranges...
Tired. Yet tired of sleeping. Eyes don't wanna shut nor stay open.
Apparently my immune system just collapsed shortly after November. Grrrr. This is a very sucky flu. Least I hope it's a flu and not something more nasty. My lungs feel like they are taking the brunt of the attack, very achey and refusing to inflate properly. *sighs*
I had a goddamn flu jab in June. This isn't supposed to be happening, grumble. Must be the new winter season of flu. Cruddy. Well timed with my monthly low depressive mood too. *kicks imaginary soft drink can and watches it bounce against a wall*
Feeling sick sucks. Big time.
Throat is sore now, trying not to cough for fear of never being able to stop, I think I'm supporting a regular ecosystem of opportunistic bacteria, my body can't seem to decide if it's feeling hot or cold - and the kicker is that the thermometer thinks my temperature is still within normal ranges...
Tired. Yet tired of sleeping. Eyes don't wanna shut nor stay open.
Apparently my immune system just collapsed shortly after November. Grrrr. This is a very sucky flu. Least I hope it's a flu and not something more nasty. My lungs feel like they are taking the brunt of the attack, very achey and refusing to inflate properly. *sighs*
I had a goddamn flu jab in June. This isn't supposed to be happening, grumble. Must be the new winter season of flu. Cruddy. Well timed with my monthly low depressive mood too. *kicks imaginary soft drink can and watches it bounce against a wall*
Feeling sick sucks. Big time.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Long Awaited Change
Heh. I might wait to play CoX until the new change rolls out onto Live. They finally are starting to tweak the balance of power. The new FOTM controllers are weeping, but probably the old school are relieved.
I found it ironic that the same people weeping and wailing over this are the identical people weeping and wailing over dominators being weak and so on and so forth. Just goes to show they are natural weepers and wailers, I guess.
Frankly, I think it's about time. Everyone knows the outlier sets that needed cutting back.
Even my pretty fire imps on the dom-side. Were insane, you know?
I don't think the fire imp nerf is as bad as people make it out to be. I suppose I can go and log on Test and see. A reduction in one level just means their accuracy drops a bit and their damage a little too. So? That's what slotting is for. And the Invention system that will probably come out to help this.
After all, I'm almost positive that I'm not just supposed to flashfire and run through the (relentless) mob and then have my impies go WHEE WHEE gnawgnawgnaw and then all three mobs collapsing in a couple seconds.
I think their function should be to tie up mobs and -contribute- to my damage. Not make me totally uninclined to try and close in for melee damage since I am just falling over the imps and the mob fell over before I could incinerate anyway...
So, GOOD. Much needed balancing changes.
I found it ironic that the same people weeping and wailing over this are the identical people weeping and wailing over dominators being weak and so on and so forth. Just goes to show they are natural weepers and wailers, I guess.
Frankly, I think it's about time. Everyone knows the outlier sets that needed cutting back.
Even my pretty fire imps on the dom-side. Were insane, you know?
I don't think the fire imp nerf is as bad as people make it out to be. I suppose I can go and log on Test and see. A reduction in one level just means their accuracy drops a bit and their damage a little too. So? That's what slotting is for. And the Invention system that will probably come out to help this.
After all, I'm almost positive that I'm not just supposed to flashfire and run through the (relentless) mob and then have my impies go WHEE WHEE gnawgnawgnaw and then all three mobs collapsing in a couple seconds.
I think their function should be to tie up mobs and -contribute- to my damage. Not make me totally uninclined to try and close in for melee damage since I am just falling over the imps and the mob fell over before I could incinerate anyway...
So, GOOD. Much needed balancing changes.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Strange Encounters of the I8 Kind
This is a funny little story, and should be simply taken as a funny little story, with no other purpose.
So I made an Ill/rad on Guardian and started levelling him. Soon it was time to hit the Hollows. Since it was 12am EST, the place was a ghost town.
I started on my kill 10 Outcasts mission, carefully pulling single mobs from a spawn with spectral wounds. Suddenly, an invite pops up. Ahhh...apparently I had been so busy I did not notice one lone defender "CCute but Psycho" watching me. Well, why not team? It's boring.
The next thing I knew, she started blasting the mobs. Uh oh. I blinded and deceived what I could while spamming my heals. We might just win through...maybe.
Suddenly, she said in local "shit. u are a healer?", and quit the team. Ran off.
I decided to run off too. Then I went back, continued pulling and finished the spawn off.
Next mission: kill 10 trolls. I started doing the same as "CCute but Psycho" watched me hovering from high up in the sky. After I aggroed the last four mobs (including two Lts), a blast came from nowhere. CCute had decided to help me out! Since she was so helpful, she could kill everything herself. I ran off, and killed another spawn somewhere else. When I came back, I saw her high in the sky, trying to hover-snipe the two Lts on the ground.
Let's check her powerset...hmmm.... Emp/dark.
It's really a new age when an Emp/dark defender won't team with my Ill/rad controller because I am a healer.
Then my mind did a backflip. Aha, I was using the Sands of Mu power do speed up my kills! She thought I was a scrapper!
Not a bad begeinning for an illusion controller. I managed to fool even human players. :)
So I made an Ill/rad on Guardian and started levelling him. Soon it was time to hit the Hollows. Since it was 12am EST, the place was a ghost town.
I started on my kill 10 Outcasts mission, carefully pulling single mobs from a spawn with spectral wounds. Suddenly, an invite pops up. Ahhh...apparently I had been so busy I did not notice one lone defender "CCute but Psycho" watching me. Well, why not team? It's boring.
The next thing I knew, she started blasting the mobs. Uh oh. I blinded and deceived what I could while spamming my heals. We might just win through...maybe.
Suddenly, she said in local "shit. u are a healer?", and quit the team. Ran off.
I decided to run off too. Then I went back, continued pulling and finished the spawn off.
Next mission: kill 10 trolls. I started doing the same as "CCute but Psycho" watched me hovering from high up in the sky. After I aggroed the last four mobs (including two Lts), a blast came from nowhere. CCute had decided to help me out! Since she was so helpful, she could kill everything herself. I ran off, and killed another spawn somewhere else. When I came back, I saw her high in the sky, trying to hover-snipe the two Lts on the ground.
Let's check her powerset...hmmm.... Emp/dark.
It's really a new age when an Emp/dark defender won't team with my Ill/rad controller because I am a healer.
Then my mind did a backflip. Aha, I was using the Sands of Mu power do speed up my kills! She thought I was a scrapper!
Not a bad begeinning for an illusion controller. I managed to fool even human players. :)
Repeat One...Gloria Estefan...
IT'S PARTY TIME!!!!!!!!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Whee! Whee! Whee!
Scrambled over the finish line at about 11.40pm-ish, one day early. I actually crossed it a bit earlier, but I was trying to compulsively finish the last scene I said I was gonna work on (the car chase). I gave up after running out of steam and just recorded the rest to join up later.
There's only one song that's gonna be repeating for at least a goodly buncha hours before I collapse to sleep. And frankly, seeing that I slept last night, the wee morning hours and the better part of the morning (and the afternoon), and only started seriously writing at 3pm today...
I don't think I'm sleeping for a good while yet.
At least the chronic lower back ache appears to have eased up with the relaxing of tension and the wild jumping around and dancing to the strains of "Party Time."
There's still a bunch more scenes and wordage to go, but what the heck, it can be done another time. NaNoEdMo or something... Today it is going to be party time! And I am free! Free to write OTHER things! Free to stop obsessing over this one story and write all the other scenes and all the other worlds that came to plague me over the course of this one month! Free! Free! Free!
It is hideously addictive, though. I've got a good mind to do something a little less stressful in between the hours of the day, like aim for 25k a normal month or something. One that just requires mad writing on weekends and a bit of habitual scenage on weekdays, instead of about 6 days of begging, borrowing and stealing leave, and every single inch of weekends. :P
But today, today Nov 30, it is celebration day!
Let's hear it for our lil drummer boy, Mick!
Put your hands together for our sexy stage dancer and owner of the Three Monkeys club, Iguana!
Let's all bow down and worship Vitril before she zaps us! And I know I'm embarassing her but so there!
Let's hear it for the girls! Carla, Astral and Flame! You crazy three have kept me going come hell and high water, through sheer literal AGONY trying to work out how in the world you orbit each other! But without you, there wouldn't be no pretty scenes, let alone any chance at story!
Let's hear it for our mysterious plot ninja who turned up out of nowhere around day 14-18 when I was in complete distress and completely saved the day, though I didn't know it yet! Or that he was a plot ninja! Mr.....Arrraaaccckkkkmar Jano!
Let's hear it for the pervert that everyone loves to hate, though you're not really invited to the party for fear of it turning into a bloodbath... You can, um, celebrate elsewhere. I'll get you an Astral blow up doll or something. If she doesn't kill me first. Buh bye Halanil...
Let's hear it for our random unimportant NPCs: Big Al, the strangest amalgam of Alathor and Avamor I've ever seen... Some crazy zebras... (No plains equus were harmed during the production of this NanoNovel.) Some odd Italian-Chinese guy. Jennifer Purdell, though we haven't even seen her yet. Malcolm, Leon and Jake, who are more mentioned than seen. Father Geand, our weird architect of beauty. Tellurian for being more inspiring dead and encased in Ares than he ever was in the Earthrealms as a live Lord of Kellinguard. And our deceased but inspiration/plot-driving individuals, Kerris and Mylaria!
And all the random redshirts whose only job was to die horribly... some poor girls, some poor black ops squad people, some badly disguised CoX Family capos and Freaks.
Let's hear it for the world of Ares aka Redshift and the city of Arach aka Spider City (and I came up with the name FIRST, in 2005, so there!)
50k is achieved! One month! One crazy person! One shitty draft! But 50k story words on electronic paper!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Whee! Whee! Whee!
Scrambled over the finish line at about 11.40pm-ish, one day early. I actually crossed it a bit earlier, but I was trying to compulsively finish the last scene I said I was gonna work on (the car chase). I gave up after running out of steam and just recorded the rest to join up later.
There's only one song that's gonna be repeating for at least a goodly buncha hours before I collapse to sleep. And frankly, seeing that I slept last night, the wee morning hours and the better part of the morning (and the afternoon), and only started seriously writing at 3pm today...
I don't think I'm sleeping for a good while yet.
At least the chronic lower back ache appears to have eased up with the relaxing of tension and the wild jumping around and dancing to the strains of "Party Time."
There's still a bunch more scenes and wordage to go, but what the heck, it can be done another time. NaNoEdMo or something... Today it is going to be party time! And I am free! Free to write OTHER things! Free to stop obsessing over this one story and write all the other scenes and all the other worlds that came to plague me over the course of this one month! Free! Free! Free!
It is hideously addictive, though. I've got a good mind to do something a little less stressful in between the hours of the day, like aim for 25k a normal month or something. One that just requires mad writing on weekends and a bit of habitual scenage on weekdays, instead of about 6 days of begging, borrowing and stealing leave, and every single inch of weekends. :P
But today, today Nov 30, it is celebration day!
Let's hear it for our lil drummer boy, Mick!
Put your hands together for our sexy stage dancer and owner of the Three Monkeys club, Iguana!
Let's all bow down and worship Vitril before she zaps us! And I know I'm embarassing her but so there!
Let's hear it for the girls! Carla, Astral and Flame! You crazy three have kept me going come hell and high water, through sheer literal AGONY trying to work out how in the world you orbit each other! But without you, there wouldn't be no pretty scenes, let alone any chance at story!
Let's hear it for our mysterious plot ninja who turned up out of nowhere around day 14-18 when I was in complete distress and completely saved the day, though I didn't know it yet! Or that he was a plot ninja! Mr.....Arrraaaccckkkkmar Jano!
Let's hear it for the pervert that everyone loves to hate, though you're not really invited to the party for fear of it turning into a bloodbath... You can, um, celebrate elsewhere. I'll get you an Astral blow up doll or something. If she doesn't kill me first. Buh bye Halanil...
Let's hear it for our random unimportant NPCs: Big Al, the strangest amalgam of Alathor and Avamor I've ever seen... Some crazy zebras... (No plains equus were harmed during the production of this NanoNovel.) Some odd Italian-Chinese guy. Jennifer Purdell, though we haven't even seen her yet. Malcolm, Leon and Jake, who are more mentioned than seen. Father Geand, our weird architect of beauty. Tellurian for being more inspiring dead and encased in Ares than he ever was in the Earthrealms as a live Lord of Kellinguard. And our deceased but inspiration/plot-driving individuals, Kerris and Mylaria!
And all the random redshirts whose only job was to die horribly... some poor girls, some poor black ops squad people, some badly disguised CoX Family capos and Freaks.
Let's hear it for the world of Ares aka Redshift and the city of Arach aka Spider City (and I came up with the name FIRST, in 2005, so there!)
50k is achieved! One month! One crazy person! One shitty draft! But 50k story words on electronic paper!
Monday, November 27, 2006
Hmm...45k...
I have this sneaking suspicion that I'm going to end up sleeping 24 hours on Nov 30. Good thing I took the day off.
I put in about 4 hours of sleep and bounced up at 3am and have spent my time scribbling lil itty bitty wordage until now. (7am).
I'm not tired, I'm still going on adrenaline and this little crazy thrill that I did indeed scribble 5000 (FIVE THOUSAND) words in 24 hours.
I am gonna regret it very very badly at 3pm though. I wonder if I can sleep through lunch. Actually I'm starting to feel sleepy now. If only I could call in sick. Bleh.
I'm happy. I think I have caught the second wind. The finish line is in sight. And the compulsive thing about me is that I like to sprint and add extra effort when I'm in that final lap.
I actually spent the last hour or so just rereading bits of my Nano. Some people say that's a bad thing. But I'm actually pretty thrilled. It's pretty good writing. There's a discernable story link of some kind, even if I'm missing plenty of scenes for a continuous plot. (Fixable later, always fixable later.)
I'm finished with the penultimate climax. I like it. I do. I bet you'd love the villain. Halanil has always been my totally apeshit sadist villain.
I somehow stumbled through the climax. I'm sure it needs a rewrite eventually, but for a first draft and trying to feel my way through the envisioning, it's not too shabby.
Now I've got the last bit, the resolution and the aftermath to go...
And the pre-penultimate climax car-chase...
I'm almost positive those will keep me busy and propel me over to 50k.
If not, there are a bunch of empty scene holes I found earlier (I have like two early chapters that are blank and placeholdered) that I'm sure I can grab one and just write...
I'm getting better at this. This "OK, here's a scene. Here are your characters. They need to do this and feel that" and just go with it.
Two more days of working. Gonna try and put in 1200-1500 words each day.
Then on Wednesday, we are writing like the wind to the end.
Thursday is last resort emergency buffer day, just in case...
(If I haven't raced through and completed it somehow because I'm desperate to get my purple bar, and sit back and admire the thing and my achievement and let it rest a while and write about some other ideas that I've been sadly putting aside during Nov, before picking it back up during NaNoEdMo.)
I put in about 4 hours of sleep and bounced up at 3am and have spent my time scribbling lil itty bitty wordage until now. (7am).
I'm not tired, I'm still going on adrenaline and this little crazy thrill that I did indeed scribble 5000 (FIVE THOUSAND) words in 24 hours.
I am gonna regret it very very badly at 3pm though. I wonder if I can sleep through lunch. Actually I'm starting to feel sleepy now. If only I could call in sick. Bleh.
I'm happy. I think I have caught the second wind. The finish line is in sight. And the compulsive thing about me is that I like to sprint and add extra effort when I'm in that final lap.
I actually spent the last hour or so just rereading bits of my Nano. Some people say that's a bad thing. But I'm actually pretty thrilled. It's pretty good writing. There's a discernable story link of some kind, even if I'm missing plenty of scenes for a continuous plot. (Fixable later, always fixable later.)
I'm finished with the penultimate climax. I like it. I do. I bet you'd love the villain. Halanil has always been my totally apeshit sadist villain.
I somehow stumbled through the climax. I'm sure it needs a rewrite eventually, but for a first draft and trying to feel my way through the envisioning, it's not too shabby.
Now I've got the last bit, the resolution and the aftermath to go...
And the pre-penultimate climax car-chase...
I'm almost positive those will keep me busy and propel me over to 50k.
If not, there are a bunch of empty scene holes I found earlier (I have like two early chapters that are blank and placeholdered) that I'm sure I can grab one and just write...
I'm getting better at this. This "OK, here's a scene. Here are your characters. They need to do this and feel that" and just go with it.
Two more days of working. Gonna try and put in 1200-1500 words each day.
Then on Wednesday, we are writing like the wind to the end.
Thursday is last resort emergency buffer day, just in case...
(If I haven't raced through and completed it somehow because I'm desperate to get my purple bar, and sit back and admire the thing and my achievement and let it rest a while and write about some other ideas that I've been sadly putting aside during Nov, before picking it back up during NaNoEdMo.)
Saturday, November 25, 2006
*pant pant*
Good news. Broke 40k today. Like I intended to.
Middling news. Only 2800 words was actually "real" scene stuff.
Bad news. I then wrote 1850 words of porn. Torture n' shtuff.
I appear to be taking the "All My Filler Will Probably Be Porn" thread a little too close to heart. *hem*
Or maybe it's because I just felt the need to hurt my stupid characters some after 25 days of them tormenting me.
Getting sleepy. It's only 11pm. Should I sleep prime writing hours away? *twitch* Mebbe a short nap.
Let's see if I can plow through 5k tomorrow. If I go for the car-chase, the penultimate climax and the climax, I bet I can. And I can always fill the rest of the day's goal with *cough* more angst-ridden backstory "torment."
This is soooo going to be a "For My Eyes Only" NanoNovel. Thank god I didn't say anything to my mom about writing a 50k word novel or she'd want to read it.
Middling news. Only 2800 words was actually "real" scene stuff.
Bad news. I then wrote 1850 words of porn. Torture n' shtuff.
I appear to be taking the "All My Filler Will Probably Be Porn" thread a little too close to heart. *hem*
Or maybe it's because I just felt the need to hurt my stupid characters some after 25 days of them tormenting me.
Getting sleepy. It's only 11pm. Should I sleep prime writing hours away? *twitch* Mebbe a short nap.
Let's see if I can plow through 5k tomorrow. If I go for the car-chase, the penultimate climax and the climax, I bet I can. And I can always fill the rest of the day's goal with *cough* more angst-ridden backstory "torment."
This is soooo going to be a "For My Eyes Only" NanoNovel. Thank god I didn't say anything to my mom about writing a 50k word novel or she'd want to read it.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Nyyaaarguuuh...
I can't believe it. I hate myself. Why do I have a number limit on my creativity here?
When I work, I have the energy for like 600-1200 words at best.
On a day that I wrangled leave, I output 3000+ words and then falter, all my energy having exploded from my head in a ultimate gush of effort. Despite trying, I can't bring myself to write more.
I peck at the keyboard. I end up surfing the internet. I listen to ever mournful songs. I've stopped playing games. I'm not even watching TV or DVDs. I'm just sitting and staring at the computer screen and trying to waste time by poking around with web browsers.
I can't make it like that. The numbers don't lie. If I keep this pace, I'll get 6000 words by week's end, another 1200 on Mon and Tue, and maybe another 6000 Wed and Thurs. That's 13k. I'm at 35k. That's not 50k. I need to RAMP UP. My head is exploding. I CAN'T.
AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH NYAAAAAARRRGGGGGUHHHHHHH.
Soooooo cloooose yet sooooo faaaaarrrr.
Oh, and my stupid ass boss gave me an assignment over the weekend. I wanted to fucking write and think about nothing else. I'll worry about it Sunday. I want to write today and tomorrow.
I think I'm going to open yet another new document and freewrite about crap all.
Sobs.
When I work, I have the energy for like 600-1200 words at best.
On a day that I wrangled leave, I output 3000+ words and then falter, all my energy having exploded from my head in a ultimate gush of effort. Despite trying, I can't bring myself to write more.
I peck at the keyboard. I end up surfing the internet. I listen to ever mournful songs. I've stopped playing games. I'm not even watching TV or DVDs. I'm just sitting and staring at the computer screen and trying to waste time by poking around with web browsers.
I can't make it like that. The numbers don't lie. If I keep this pace, I'll get 6000 words by week's end, another 1200 on Mon and Tue, and maybe another 6000 Wed and Thurs. That's 13k. I'm at 35k. That's not 50k. I need to RAMP UP. My head is exploding. I CAN'T.
AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH NYAAAAAARRRGGGGGUHHHHHHH.
Soooooo cloooose yet sooooo faaaaarrrr.
Oh, and my stupid ass boss gave me an assignment over the weekend. I wanted to fucking write and think about nothing else. I'll worry about it Sunday. I want to write today and tomorrow.
I think I'm going to open yet another new document and freewrite about crap all.
Sobs.
Monday, November 20, 2006
The Oddest Thing
I love and hate Nanowrimo at the same time.
The impetus that drives me to try and finish is like nothing I've experienced before. I've made a million promises to freaking get 50k. Of real word count. It's both exhilarating and headache-making. I'll never have found this desperation of purpose on my own, for sure.
I've only written this much once before. The 36k EarthRealms "quest" story with a totally lame main character, and some fun (but very cariactured) side characters, padded with lots of obscene action sequences (when in doubt, throw in someone to attack them!) and messed around with heaps of horrible cliches before realizing I was getting nowhere and the whole thing was too cartoonish, in a teenager immature sort of way.
The good news is that I just crossed 25k of real wordage. (Even if the damn Nanowrimo word-counter ATE 200 of my words. Open Office counts more generously.)
And there appears to be a seriously intense story buried in there, in between the lame descriptions and flailing exposition. I like most of the dialogue at any rate.
Even if the character I started out with appears to have gotten shunted off to the side in favor of someone else. Oh well. The good thing about playing around with three strong women is that they are all great narrators if I manage to find the right scene to throw them into.
Unfortunately, the part that I hate about Nanowrimo is the despair I'm feeling at seeing sooooo many people rushing ahead of me, and sooooo many people on schedule. Which I'm not. I'm...hey, five days late, exactly.
Crap. Didn't gain any. But bright side, didn't quite lose any either. I don't think. :(
It took me 20 days and about 95% of all my buried creativity to struggle to 25k words. How am I supposed to do it drained of all reserves (including sleep) in half that time to get 50k words?
Gods. I can't. Today I got 800 words after 2 hours of struggle. The good news is that it's a surprisingly meaningful 800 words, that took a turn I hadn't quite envisioned but rolls me back onto some semblance of a plot wagon.
The speed of my writing is dropping. I need free days desperately. I wonder how much leave I can beg off with what remains of November? I'm tempted to say that I need the whole damn week and next. But I don't think they'll let me go. :P
The impetus that drives me to try and finish is like nothing I've experienced before. I've made a million promises to freaking get 50k. Of real word count. It's both exhilarating and headache-making. I'll never have found this desperation of purpose on my own, for sure.
I've only written this much once before. The 36k EarthRealms "quest" story with a totally lame main character, and some fun (but very cariactured) side characters, padded with lots of obscene action sequences (when in doubt, throw in someone to attack them!) and messed around with heaps of horrible cliches before realizing I was getting nowhere and the whole thing was too cartoonish, in a teenager immature sort of way.
The good news is that I just crossed 25k of real wordage. (Even if the damn Nanowrimo word-counter ATE 200 of my words. Open Office counts more generously.)
And there appears to be a seriously intense story buried in there, in between the lame descriptions and flailing exposition. I like most of the dialogue at any rate.
Even if the character I started out with appears to have gotten shunted off to the side in favor of someone else. Oh well. The good thing about playing around with three strong women is that they are all great narrators if I manage to find the right scene to throw them into.
Unfortunately, the part that I hate about Nanowrimo is the despair I'm feeling at seeing sooooo many people rushing ahead of me, and sooooo many people on schedule. Which I'm not. I'm...hey, five days late, exactly.
Crap. Didn't gain any. But bright side, didn't quite lose any either. I don't think. :(
It took me 20 days and about 95% of all my buried creativity to struggle to 25k words. How am I supposed to do it drained of all reserves (including sleep) in half that time to get 50k words?
Gods. I can't. Today I got 800 words after 2 hours of struggle. The good news is that it's a surprisingly meaningful 800 words, that took a turn I hadn't quite envisioned but rolls me back onto some semblance of a plot wagon.
The speed of my writing is dropping. I need free days desperately. I wonder how much leave I can beg off with what remains of November? I'm tempted to say that I need the whole damn week and next. But I don't think they'll let me go. :P
Sunday, November 19, 2006
I Write So Slow...
Hi there, everyone, it's time for another round of Nanowrimo-related bitching again. Just cos I'm hyped up on caffeine (I just drank a cup of tea :( ) and an energy buzz driven my sheer willpower that's keeping me awake at 5am on a Saturday nigh- er, Sunday morning.
On one hand, I'm proud of me. I got up early this morning and spent about 2-3 hours figuring out /any/ potential scenes I could write.
I also hit upon a great way to envision random scenes that works for me.
It's kind of funny, actually, the limitations we put on ourselves.
I just read on the Nano forums that someone considers using name and character generators cheating and a breach of ethics because it's like not really their story after that.
Personally, I have no qualms using ANY generators as a source for random ideas. Probably because I am picky and will let my Inner Editor chow down on the stuff that comes out of the generators. I would never select something that sounds 'wrong' to me, but should the generator somehow produce something golden, that the IE stops suddenly and cocks its head puzzled to regard it, then yea, I'll take that with both hands.
That's how I can use things like Mythic. I can make a GM's decision to ignore how the dice fall if I feel like it. If it feels wrong. But when I don't have a care either way as to how things go, when I want the random unpredictability, then yes, dice and generators all the way, please.
But despite it sounding rather corny, I can empathize with this poster's situation, because I found myself in similar straits regarding the "dares" thread.
That's what a bunch of Nanowrimo'ers will say. Oh, stuck for ideas? Go and rummage through the dares thread and pick up a few ideas.
On the one hand, there are a few flecks of gold through a whole bunch of dross. I can see that some of the 'dares' do have value as idea generators. But something in me, that innate Inner Editor, held out and dug in its heels and said NO.
Why? Because, so went my reasoning, any fool can see the valuable dares. The easy generic dares that prompt ideas. But yet, they are recognizable dares, and SHARED with thousands and thousands of Nano participants. Can you imagine the number of 'novels' that will all have a certain phrase in them? Or a certain event happening?
That's not original! That's not a "ME" idea! It's someone else's dream!
Rationally, I know people steal from each other all the time. Writers do that. Irrationally, I refuse to do something that I know a bunch of other people are going to be doing the exact same thing because a forum post dared them to do it.
If I was writing a "novel" for fun, maybe I would. Like a stream of consciousness anything-goes kinda drivel. But the moment I give myself a setting, I give myself limitations to work within that setting, y'see. Some things are acceptable, some things are not.
So, back to my brilliant idea that worked for me, and to record it for posterity. Or maybe next year. Or some month in the future.
I did a random playlist selection of MP3s. I have a fairly eclectic MP3 collection, that's why it works for me. I suppose one could do the same thing with a radio, or with Pandora or something.
Then for every song that played, I imagined the scene and setting that came to mind like a little music video.
As long as I kept focused with the world in mind (different worlds evoke different scenes), I found that I was generating a heap of scene ideas. I churned out about 25 of them.
Here's a little bit of voodoo. The time of day appears to matter. Either that or they were buried in my subconscious waiting for release. The first time I tried it was in the morning (which is a time that I am fairly energetic and creative), and the second time I tried to force it at 2.45pm in the afternoon (which is a time I personally loathe and just feel capable of lying in bed mostly). I got maybe 6 one-liners in the afternoon. Quite different from the morning's burst of creativity.
Second thing I did since I was slowing down from the morning charge was to fiddle around with a generator. I use Inspiration Pad Pro cos it's free and easy to make random tables. And I made a scene generator in the vein of Holly Lisle, in that a scene by her definition, involves a change. Quite possibly of emotion.
I did that. :) In about an hour or so. The emotional changes aren't a huge range atm, though I did find a list that I want to expand the generator with eventually.
I gave it 1-3 characters, since scenes tend to get rapidly confusing beyond that number, and then I typed in all the character names of my novel.
Personalized randomness! And then to top it off, I numbered my random scenes from 1-30 and did a 1d30 roll to figure out which scene to write.
If the emotion change wasn't stated in the original idea, I used the generator to start me thinking.
Was kinda fun. Unfortunately I got all the way to a burst of nil energy before I even started writing a word of 'actual novel.' Sure, I got a bunch of Nanowrimo freewriting style notes down, but again, unlike SOME other people I read about on the forums, I do NOT count them as official novel words.
I have verbal diarrhea when it comes to freewriting. It would be SO cheating for myself personally if I were to include all the words in my notes using the excuse that "every word I write is a step on the path to the novel." It's TRUE. Every word I write in the notes needed to be written so that I could clarify my mind and thoughts.
Every word I write here in these blogs is something that needed to be voiced and vented and ranted away so that I have a mental runway with space clear for the project.
But just because it's a true statement doesn't mean it isn't cheating. :P How can one hope to write a published novel (of maybe 90k words) if one can't even produce a 50k draft of actual story words in a month?
Actual story words in this case meaning an attempt to describe it. He growled angrily. "Go away," punctuating his words with a bunched fist. Stuff like that counts. Even if it's cliche riddled and/or skimpy on the description.
Hmm, I think in this scene, he needs to be angry and chase whoever away and do...oh I dunno what he wants to do next, maybe eat? drink? This Corrs song sounds nice. Maybe he can go to the toilet.
That kind of freewriting does NOT, in my opinion, count as real wordage. Yea, it has to be written so that I can exorcise my thoughts and actually figure out what next and what the character may do, but it's not real novel words!
And cancelling out a whole bunch of stuff by whiting out the words is again, cheating, to me. :P I suppose it depends on what you cancel though. I wouldn't delete an entire scene, I'd leave it in there. So if you wanted to just white it out to see how the story flowed without it, fine.
But if it's something like He thought. No, he felt. No, wrong word. He declared to himself yadda yadda. Then I don't think you should be counting the first 8 words as part of your word count. :P Even if technically, they had to be written to get the correct word.
I mean, if you did that, then by the time you cut and revised...you'd end up with...a short story!
Granted, a short story is a heckuva lot more than not even trying or getting crippled by the Inner Editor, so yea, whatever personally works for people is fine for them.
I'm just sharing what's not fine for me. :)
Let's skip ahead a few hours. I notice I have an awful habit of procrastinating between writing scenes (like now, for instance) because I just feel like I deserve some celebratory time.
It wasn't until the evening proper that I started to really get serious writing. I've churned out 3 scenes in thrice as many hours. The first was pretty good at about 1200 words. The second was forced, 483 words or so. I gave up for a looong while, and then came back and did the third, which was a big cheesy action scene prompted by looping Clay Aiken's Invisible for 893 times (yea, I'm addicted to the song for some reason, it helped me think through the scene and think in general) which managed to top 1900 words or so.
Third scene would normally be a cause for celebration. Yay, it's more than an entire day's worth of 1667 words! But...I'm so behind! I need to be writing like 6000 words these two weekends if I even have the faintest hope of catching up.
The suggestion is to be at 35k by the end of week 3. Well week 3 is like in four days. And from bitter experience, I know just how 'writerly' I feel on weekdays after a hard day's work. aka NOT AT ALL. So that means I need to urgently boost wordcount this weekend.
Aieeeeee. And my most productive time (aka midnight to now) has been used up doing what, 3000-3500 words?
Oh noes. I feel like I'm reaching a limit in productivity when it comes to word output.
And no, there is no plot still. There are vague semblances of continuity in the random scenes, which I am leaving at the back of my mind with the hope that it can be glued together in the revision.
Ok, procrastination over. I stop writing this blog now.
On one hand, I'm proud of me. I got up early this morning and spent about 2-3 hours figuring out /any/ potential scenes I could write.
I also hit upon a great way to envision random scenes that works for me.
It's kind of funny, actually, the limitations we put on ourselves.
I just read on the Nano forums that someone considers using name and character generators cheating and a breach of ethics because it's like not really their story after that.
Personally, I have no qualms using ANY generators as a source for random ideas. Probably because I am picky and will let my Inner Editor chow down on the stuff that comes out of the generators. I would never select something that sounds 'wrong' to me, but should the generator somehow produce something golden, that the IE stops suddenly and cocks its head puzzled to regard it, then yea, I'll take that with both hands.
That's how I can use things like Mythic. I can make a GM's decision to ignore how the dice fall if I feel like it. If it feels wrong. But when I don't have a care either way as to how things go, when I want the random unpredictability, then yes, dice and generators all the way, please.
But despite it sounding rather corny, I can empathize with this poster's situation, because I found myself in similar straits regarding the "dares" thread.
That's what a bunch of Nanowrimo'ers will say. Oh, stuck for ideas? Go and rummage through the dares thread and pick up a few ideas.
On the one hand, there are a few flecks of gold through a whole bunch of dross. I can see that some of the 'dares' do have value as idea generators. But something in me, that innate Inner Editor, held out and dug in its heels and said NO.
Why? Because, so went my reasoning, any fool can see the valuable dares. The easy generic dares that prompt ideas. But yet, they are recognizable dares, and SHARED with thousands and thousands of Nano participants. Can you imagine the number of 'novels' that will all have a certain phrase in them? Or a certain event happening?
That's not original! That's not a "ME" idea! It's someone else's dream!
Rationally, I know people steal from each other all the time. Writers do that. Irrationally, I refuse to do something that I know a bunch of other people are going to be doing the exact same thing because a forum post dared them to do it.
If I was writing a "novel" for fun, maybe I would. Like a stream of consciousness anything-goes kinda drivel. But the moment I give myself a setting, I give myself limitations to work within that setting, y'see. Some things are acceptable, some things are not.
So, back to my brilliant idea that worked for me, and to record it for posterity. Or maybe next year. Or some month in the future.
I did a random playlist selection of MP3s. I have a fairly eclectic MP3 collection, that's why it works for me. I suppose one could do the same thing with a radio, or with Pandora or something.
Then for every song that played, I imagined the scene and setting that came to mind like a little music video.
As long as I kept focused with the world in mind (different worlds evoke different scenes), I found that I was generating a heap of scene ideas. I churned out about 25 of them.
Here's a little bit of voodoo. The time of day appears to matter. Either that or they were buried in my subconscious waiting for release. The first time I tried it was in the morning (which is a time that I am fairly energetic and creative), and the second time I tried to force it at 2.45pm in the afternoon (which is a time I personally loathe and just feel capable of lying in bed mostly). I got maybe 6 one-liners in the afternoon. Quite different from the morning's burst of creativity.
Second thing I did since I was slowing down from the morning charge was to fiddle around with a generator. I use Inspiration Pad Pro cos it's free and easy to make random tables. And I made a scene generator in the vein of Holly Lisle, in that a scene by her definition, involves a change. Quite possibly of emotion.
Write a scene that contains an emotion change from Awe/Reverence to Surprise. 2 character(s) are involved. We understand Big Al and someone else better from this.
I did that. :) In about an hour or so. The emotional changes aren't a huge range atm, though I did find a list that I want to expand the generator with eventually.
I gave it 1-3 characters, since scenes tend to get rapidly confusing beyond that number, and then I typed in all the character names of my novel.
Personalized randomness! And then to top it off, I numbered my random scenes from 1-30 and did a 1d30 roll to figure out which scene to write.
If the emotion change wasn't stated in the original idea, I used the generator to start me thinking.
Was kinda fun. Unfortunately I got all the way to a burst of nil energy before I even started writing a word of 'actual novel.' Sure, I got a bunch of Nanowrimo freewriting style notes down, but again, unlike SOME other people I read about on the forums, I do NOT count them as official novel words.
I have verbal diarrhea when it comes to freewriting. It would be SO cheating for myself personally if I were to include all the words in my notes using the excuse that "every word I write is a step on the path to the novel." It's TRUE. Every word I write in the notes needed to be written so that I could clarify my mind and thoughts.
Every word I write here in these blogs is something that needed to be voiced and vented and ranted away so that I have a mental runway with space clear for the project.
But just because it's a true statement doesn't mean it isn't cheating. :P How can one hope to write a published novel (of maybe 90k words) if one can't even produce a 50k draft of actual story words in a month?
Actual story words in this case meaning an attempt to describe it. He growled angrily. "Go away," punctuating his words with a bunched fist. Stuff like that counts. Even if it's cliche riddled and/or skimpy on the description.
Hmm, I think in this scene, he needs to be angry and chase whoever away and do...oh I dunno what he wants to do next, maybe eat? drink? This Corrs song sounds nice. Maybe he can go to the toilet.
That kind of freewriting does NOT, in my opinion, count as real wordage. Yea, it has to be written so that I can exorcise my thoughts and actually figure out what next and what the character may do, but it's not real novel words!
And cancelling out a whole bunch of stuff by whiting out the words is again, cheating, to me. :P I suppose it depends on what you cancel though. I wouldn't delete an entire scene, I'd leave it in there. So if you wanted to just white it out to see how the story flowed without it, fine.
But if it's something like He thought. No, he felt. No, wrong word. He declared to himself yadda yadda. Then I don't think you should be counting the first 8 words as part of your word count. :P Even if technically, they had to be written to get the correct word.
I mean, if you did that, then by the time you cut and revised...you'd end up with...a short story!
Granted, a short story is a heckuva lot more than not even trying or getting crippled by the Inner Editor, so yea, whatever personally works for people is fine for them.
I'm just sharing what's not fine for me. :)
Let's skip ahead a few hours. I notice I have an awful habit of procrastinating between writing scenes (like now, for instance) because I just feel like I deserve some celebratory time.
It wasn't until the evening proper that I started to really get serious writing. I've churned out 3 scenes in thrice as many hours. The first was pretty good at about 1200 words. The second was forced, 483 words or so. I gave up for a looong while, and then came back and did the third, which was a big cheesy action scene prompted by looping Clay Aiken's Invisible for 893 times (yea, I'm addicted to the song for some reason, it helped me think through the scene and think in general) which managed to top 1900 words or so.
Third scene would normally be a cause for celebration. Yay, it's more than an entire day's worth of 1667 words! But...I'm so behind! I need to be writing like 6000 words these two weekends if I even have the faintest hope of catching up.
The suggestion is to be at 35k by the end of week 3. Well week 3 is like in four days. And from bitter experience, I know just how 'writerly' I feel on weekdays after a hard day's work. aka NOT AT ALL. So that means I need to urgently boost wordcount this weekend.
Aieeeeee. And my most productive time (aka midnight to now) has been used up doing what, 3000-3500 words?
Oh noes. I feel like I'm reaching a limit in productivity when it comes to word output.
And no, there is no plot still. There are vague semblances of continuity in the random scenes, which I am leaving at the back of my mind with the hope that it can be glued together in the revision.
Ok, procrastination over. I stop writing this blog now.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Card's Empire
Found an interesting interview from Orson Scott Card on Wired.com:
I'm rather intrigued by the premise. Not the least because I too, came up a similar concept (that got thrown out the window) during pre-Nanowrimo idea generation frenzy. Well, okay, an underground city divided up between vampires and werewolf factions is only similar to a red-state, blue-state asymmetrical conflict in that there are two sides. :P
Hush. The idea is pretty funky all the same. Red vs Blue has a nice symbolism to it, without any directly applicable real world readings. And a sci-fi future world where one side has humongous war robots and the other side is armed with handguns is rather cool. From Card's description of the game story, it at least -sounds- like it has potential, since it appears to center around two people with stakes in both sides.
It has echoes of JMS' B5 epic, where Earthgov goes into civil war, and "we know every one we kill." Poignant words indeed.
Unfortunately, I was a little less thrilled reading the second page of the interview.
What rubbish. Here is someone who doesn't have a clue about video games, and generalizing them all as something "with levels and bosses." There are two entire genres - single player RPGs and adventure games - that would beg to differ.
I got a sudden urge to replay Planescape: Torment after reading the drivel coming out of Card's mouth. Sure, "kill and don't die" is a valid part of any RPG, but Torment also focused on the discovery of who the protagonist was, and the /choices/ made by the player aka protagonist to determine who the character was. Torment turned the standard tropes of D&D RPGs around, your class was decided by what you chose to learn in-game, you added stat points to your score as you gained levels, and you didn't DIE per se, you came back in an endless karmic cycle of frustration that reflected the story.
There have been many games with multiple protagonists, some with opposed motivations, in fact. Indigo Prophecy comes to mind. First you play the guy who wakes up in a bathroom with a dead body and are desperately trying to hide it before the cops come. Then you ARE the cops, looking for clues to find that guy. Starcraft - 3 sides, 3 motivations. Probably a bunch of Interactive Fiction too.
Grim Fandango. The Longest Journey (so I hear). Fallout. Baldur's Gate 2. Monkey Island. Strong settings, strong story. Few of them are "twitch" games that rely on reflex either.
I declare Orson Scott Card guilty of gross generalization and clueless ignorance.
The comments didn't help either. Now while his political sentiments are his own, despite other people attempting to drag the issue in to smear his name, the link to the tie-in novel's first chapter was what I was more interested in.
URGH. Did he HAVE to start with an Americans vs terrorist scenario? Why?! I didn't even have the patience to analyze whether his writing was good or not. I'm sick of this theme. I'm sick of people heavy-handedly pushing these politics everywhere. And especially onto a perfectly harmless game about red vs blue.
Let the game players come to their own conclusions about what red vs blue symbolizes. We don't need to have our noses rubbed in the dog shit, thank you.
For one fearful moment, I even thought that the beautiful potential of the red vs blue game had been turned into America vs Taliban/Al Qaeda by Card's input.
Luckily, the last part cued me that "it was just a dream" *ahem* I mean, the above was just a wargame scenario. No, really. Seriously. It wasn't the author preaching to you. Really. Truly. Madly. Deeply. Honestly.
Okaaaaay. I'll buy that, but my disbelief had to be hung, drawn and quartered first.
Looks like it'll just be Americans vs Americans if Card has his way. Guess we'll have to check the game preview sites.
Alas for red vs blue.
I'm rather intrigued by the premise. Not the least because I too, came up a similar concept (that got thrown out the window) during pre-Nanowrimo idea generation frenzy. Well, okay, an underground city divided up between vampires and werewolf factions is only similar to a red-state, blue-state asymmetrical conflict in that there are two sides. :P
Hush. The idea is pretty funky all the same. Red vs Blue has a nice symbolism to it, without any directly applicable real world readings. And a sci-fi future world where one side has humongous war robots and the other side is armed with handguns is rather cool. From Card's description of the game story, it at least -sounds- like it has potential, since it appears to center around two people with stakes in both sides.
It has echoes of JMS' B5 epic, where Earthgov goes into civil war, and "we know every one we kill." Poignant words indeed.
Unfortunately, I was a little less thrilled reading the second page of the interview.
WN: As a storyteller, what do you think about the video game medium?
Card: Video games are a viable storytelling medium, but the trouble is that video games always have the same protagonist, which is the player. And he always has the same set of motivations, which is to kill and don't die. That's not conducive to great novels. We have a character with this negative motivation and that character makes a lousy fictional protagonist.
WN: Do you play video games?
Card: I used to. I have a son who's a game designer and I'm very familiar with the medium. But I stopped playing video games because most games are boring, partly because of the protagonist issue and partly because of the predictability of moving from level to level and facing off against bosses.
What rubbish. Here is someone who doesn't have a clue about video games, and generalizing them all as something "with levels and bosses." There are two entire genres - single player RPGs and adventure games - that would beg to differ.
I got a sudden urge to replay Planescape: Torment after reading the drivel coming out of Card's mouth. Sure, "kill and don't die" is a valid part of any RPG, but Torment also focused on the discovery of who the protagonist was, and the /choices/ made by the player aka protagonist to determine who the character was. Torment turned the standard tropes of D&D RPGs around, your class was decided by what you chose to learn in-game, you added stat points to your score as you gained levels, and you didn't DIE per se, you came back in an endless karmic cycle of frustration that reflected the story.
There have been many games with multiple protagonists, some with opposed motivations, in fact. Indigo Prophecy comes to mind. First you play the guy who wakes up in a bathroom with a dead body and are desperately trying to hide it before the cops come. Then you ARE the cops, looking for clues to find that guy. Starcraft - 3 sides, 3 motivations. Probably a bunch of Interactive Fiction too.
Grim Fandango. The Longest Journey (so I hear). Fallout. Baldur's Gate 2. Monkey Island. Strong settings, strong story. Few of them are "twitch" games that rely on reflex either.
I declare Orson Scott Card guilty of gross generalization and clueless ignorance.
The comments didn't help either. Now while his political sentiments are his own, despite other people attempting to drag the issue in to smear his name, the link to the tie-in novel's first chapter was what I was more interested in.
URGH. Did he HAVE to start with an Americans vs terrorist scenario? Why?! I didn't even have the patience to analyze whether his writing was good or not. I'm sick of this theme. I'm sick of people heavy-handedly pushing these politics everywhere. And especially onto a perfectly harmless game about red vs blue.
Let the game players come to their own conclusions about what red vs blue symbolizes. We don't need to have our noses rubbed in the dog shit, thank you.
For one fearful moment, I even thought that the beautiful potential of the red vs blue game had been turned into America vs Taliban/Al Qaeda by Card's input.
Luckily, the last part cued me that "it was just a dream" *ahem* I mean, the above was just a wargame scenario. No, really. Seriously. It wasn't the author preaching to you. Really. Truly. Madly. Deeply. Honestly.
Okaaaaay. I'll buy that, but my disbelief had to be hung, drawn and quartered first.
Looks like it'll just be Americans vs Americans if Card has his way. Guess we'll have to check the game preview sites.
Alas for red vs blue.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Three Failures to Learn/Teach
Through a vague series of events, I find myself musing rather mournfully about a gaping gap in my education. Geography, the third bane of my schooling existence (after too-complicated-but-unavoidable exam-oriented Further/Additional Mathematics and unspeakably evil Chinese.)
These were all badly badly mistaught subjects. To me, and my personal learning journey through the goddamn education system, at any rate.
Take Chinese. I found myself rather amused by yet another new revamping of the Chinese education system (headlines today.) It’s about time, one part of me says, and the other part says, why the hell did I miss out on this, why was I so misunderstood for what, 15+ years?
It’s known that you pick up languages most easily as an impressionable child. Children have a natural knack for it. Adult learning is harder. Apparently when I was young, I used to gabble to my grandmother in Cantonese fluently. To fix this, my parents spoke to me in English. Always English. To each other, maybe they would use a mix of Cantonese and English. I read English books from the age of 2.
Is it any wonder that I end up totally fluent in English, capable of understanding basic conversational Cantonese (but I get lost trying to follow a HK TV show) and entirely flounderingly helpless in Chinese?
My primary school education consisted of script-writing and studying strokes. (I thought it was pretty cool, actually.) I think I won an award for neatest script somewhen in my Tao Nan years because it was kinda fun to pay a lot of attention to the funky writing/drawing. Basic conversational ability in Chinese was ASSUMED.
Well, duh, I couldn’t say a word in Chinese oral. At least without painful stuttering that would cause the teacher to wince visibly, and flinching every time I mangled a word (did I mention my tone-deaf mom who can’t pronounce tones tried to tutor me in Chinese?)
Coupled with a mom-influenced perfectionistic desire to be ‘leet’ (no mistakes, ever!) and a chronic introverted shyness that took maturity to overcome (‘needs to speak up more in class,’ ‘needs to participate more actively’ showed up on my report card for years :P), this was a fast track to associate Hell and Torment with the Chinese subject.
Oh, and what did we study in the Chinese textbook? Some stuffy fuddy duddy Confucianist moral tales about “long long ago, in a distant village/ancient province of China…”
And it got exponentially worse as the years went by, since the foundations were assumed to have been absorbed. (Mine were always teetering like a house of cards. Best case scenario too.)
*sighs* I dunno that the new modern way of teaching Chinese is the right way to go. I don’t think it would have personally cured my subculture minority problem.
Sidetrek: Funny story, someone used the word “lifestyle venue” recently in a conversation and I had to go try and find out the meaning of the word. It apparently involves things like going clubbing, pubbing, food and drink, shopping, mall-walking, sports and other such mainstream pursuits. *blinks in polite puzzled bemusement, hiding incomprehension*
But hey, it’s gotta be better for the majority since it becomes more relevant… so good on them for revising the Chinese syllabus.
For my weirdass left-handed American-trash cyberculture self, I think the only thing I learned from my torturous Chinese education were things like: how to face being a complete failure, how to realize that different people had strengths/weaknesses in different areas, how to vaguely comprehend audio Chinese for basic survival, how to pretend invisibility and deafness in class, and how patently borked the Singapore education system is where university entrance is predicated on passing the mother tongue language.
Fuck ‘em. Helloooo California.
It’s kinda ironic, but when I was in Berkeley, I admit to peeking at the “Learn Chinese” textbooks and going, wow, I wish I had a course like that. One that actually, you know, used the tongue I understood (ENGLISH) to teach me the other (completely alien) language with a bridging method.
That’s one of the things I still cannot comprehend about the way they teach languages here, it’s a complete immersion style (even in German class). Hello, throwing people into the deep end might maybe help 90% of the population to learn how to swim fast. What about the 10% you just -drowned- from pure panic?
I found a Learn Mandarin podcast recently that was very cool. Learn at your own pace, it used English to teach, structured in bite-sized chunks and so on. If I had the time (it’s November, there is no –time-!), I would be listening to it pretty often. Cos it’s relevant to me. And self-motivation is a far better way to learn.
Mebbe I would have been more inspired by studying the Tao Te Ching. Or ancient Chinese inventions. There were some really interesting bits of Chinese history – wars, the Great Wall, etc. Ironic that I learned most of them from the Discovery Channel and other English media. Ah well.
Mathematics. Another little pet peeve of mine. Taught with no relevancy to real life. I know I stopped listening at about the quadratic equations stage. Let alone sin and cosine. After that it was just Ten-Year-Series focused exam-strategy based on memory work, recognition of the type of problem, equation plugging and calculator punching.
I still don’t think I’m ever going to recognize or understand the complexities of certain abstract graphs, even with physics real-world examples helping me, but I’m willing to try now and then. And ever so often, I tell myself, I really must learn statistics the proper way and understand it. It makes crystal clear sense for the duration of a good lesson with a good teacher, and for the five minutes after, and then it just fogs up again and I go…awww.
And so, in my usual roundabout long-winded story fashion, we finally come to geography.
I especially mourn the failure of geography to inspire me.
I can excuse away Chinese for being a language skill, just like I can excuse away anything musical or artistic as me not being very good at it naturally. (This ‘natural talent’ thing is not really true though. More ‘interest’ and ‘practice’ related. I have a knack for 3D art, and from there I’ve learned color mixing concepts and so on. And in rare spare times, I realize I’m not that cruddy at computer art or even drawn art if I was willing to put in extreme amounts of time into it – like say, the extreme time I am choosing to throw into writing and Nanowrimo instead of art.)
I can excuse away mathematics as being too abstract for my brain to wrap around. Same as certain high level lofty subjects like philosophy. Just no interest in it too. Ditto things like sports, fishing and photography. I can maybe admire bits of it as a spectator, but I don’t have no passion for them.
But geography. Ah, geography. Isn’t it earth sciences? Isn’t it the study of societies? An interesting mix of cultural anthropology and physical science and biology? Of maps? These are all things that do fascinate me.
These are all things that are completely –relevant- to me. If I want to write stories, fantastical ones, especially – I world build, I draw maps, and it would be nice to actually understand the real world concepts behind them.
I never travelled in my youth, but even then, if I had photographs of cool geographical features, it should be marvellous to behold. Awe-inspiring. Fun. Now we even have Google Earth, so that we can stare at anything we wanted in the comfort of our own homes.
But you tell me the word “geography,” and I immediately wince and go “eeew.”
I blame the teacher. I really do. This is a case of not managing to study on despite the teacher.
I used to like social studies as a primary school kid. And isn’t that just a mix of history and human geography?
I have a crystal clear image of secondary school geography. An OHP screen. Black text on yellow background. Textbook diagrams. The world’s most monotonous teacher (I forget her name, for obvious unmemorable reasons) droning on to herself, describing what could be read for ourselves.
I don’t think the geography text helped. I remember falling asleep on the bed with it on my chest. I woke with a crushing pain near my heart. Story of my experience with geography.
I distinctly remember the choice that lead me to choosing history over geog.
1) OMG, I’m going to face Ms. Completely Boring for two more years? And I have a choice to say, NO, THANK YOU?
2) Hang on, I wrote equal page lengths for this history and geog essay questions. And for each point I mentioned, I got one mark in the history paper. This geog paper gave me half mark each point, and expected me to regurgitate the whole textbook process of river formation, inclusive of diagrams (also half-mark each)?
Kinda sad in retrospect, when I look at it now. We were so exam-focused we couldn’t even concentrate on the content properly.
In History, at least the text was readable, and there was an in-built narrative structure in the chronological context. People (or at least, I) need story structures to wrap their minds around something.
And I mourn the loss of such a chance in learning geography. I can envision a beautiful educational structure that I think would have worked on anyone with an interest in writing and/or fantasy stories. (And doesn’t the whole world these days dig the Lord of the Rings?)
Imagine a term-long project. To create your own Lord of the Rings quest across a fantastical landscape. Talk about interdisciplinary.
First, you need to draw the map, of course. Could teach some art (hand-drawn, or computer-based.) Outline some continents. Wouldn’t it be a great time to discuss shorelines and plate tectonics and latitude and longtitude? Then sketch some plates.
Plate tectonics = oh yea, mountains, of course. Draw mountains where they would be.
Discussing world biomes leads you to populate the place with different kinds of vegetation. Rivers and other water bodies is self explanatory too.
One could search the web for pictures of different examples of special landmarks (mountains, waterfalls, cool rivers or forest clearings) and have them as scenes/waystations in your final project – story or presentation. Seeing provokes curiosity, wouldn’t you want to know how the heck the Grand Canyon formed…
Even human populations and social dynamics and towns could be discussed in terms of making little countries / fantasy races / and so on.
I think it would be an incredible adventure. (And Learning Journey ™ too!)
Mumbles, grumbles. Personal DecAdventureWriMo?
*slaps self* Ok, enuff procrastinating and thinking of other projects to start. 8000 words behind still. On the bright side, the news on the nanowrimo website appears to indicate that being 5-days-behind is perfectly normal and average. :(
These were all badly badly mistaught subjects. To me, and my personal learning journey through the goddamn education system, at any rate.
Take Chinese. I found myself rather amused by yet another new revamping of the Chinese education system (headlines today.) It’s about time, one part of me says, and the other part says, why the hell did I miss out on this, why was I so misunderstood for what, 15+ years?
It’s known that you pick up languages most easily as an impressionable child. Children have a natural knack for it. Adult learning is harder. Apparently when I was young, I used to gabble to my grandmother in Cantonese fluently. To fix this, my parents spoke to me in English. Always English. To each other, maybe they would use a mix of Cantonese and English. I read English books from the age of 2.
Is it any wonder that I end up totally fluent in English, capable of understanding basic conversational Cantonese (but I get lost trying to follow a HK TV show) and entirely flounderingly helpless in Chinese?
My primary school education consisted of script-writing and studying strokes. (I thought it was pretty cool, actually.) I think I won an award for neatest script somewhen in my Tao Nan years because it was kinda fun to pay a lot of attention to the funky writing/drawing. Basic conversational ability in Chinese was ASSUMED.
Well, duh, I couldn’t say a word in Chinese oral. At least without painful stuttering that would cause the teacher to wince visibly, and flinching every time I mangled a word (did I mention my tone-deaf mom who can’t pronounce tones tried to tutor me in Chinese?)
Coupled with a mom-influenced perfectionistic desire to be ‘leet’ (no mistakes, ever!) and a chronic introverted shyness that took maturity to overcome (‘needs to speak up more in class,’ ‘needs to participate more actively’ showed up on my report card for years :P), this was a fast track to associate Hell and Torment with the Chinese subject.
Oh, and what did we study in the Chinese textbook? Some stuffy fuddy duddy Confucianist moral tales about “long long ago, in a distant village/ancient province of China…”
And it got exponentially worse as the years went by, since the foundations were assumed to have been absorbed. (Mine were always teetering like a house of cards. Best case scenario too.)
*sighs* I dunno that the new modern way of teaching Chinese is the right way to go. I don’t think it would have personally cured my subculture minority problem.
Sidetrek: Funny story, someone used the word “lifestyle venue” recently in a conversation and I had to go try and find out the meaning of the word. It apparently involves things like going clubbing, pubbing, food and drink, shopping, mall-walking, sports and other such mainstream pursuits. *blinks in polite puzzled bemusement, hiding incomprehension*
But hey, it’s gotta be better for the majority since it becomes more relevant… so good on them for revising the Chinese syllabus.
For my weirdass left-handed American-trash cyberculture self, I think the only thing I learned from my torturous Chinese education were things like: how to face being a complete failure, how to realize that different people had strengths/weaknesses in different areas, how to vaguely comprehend audio Chinese for basic survival, how to pretend invisibility and deafness in class, and how patently borked the Singapore education system is where university entrance is predicated on passing the mother tongue language.
Fuck ‘em. Helloooo California.
It’s kinda ironic, but when I was in Berkeley, I admit to peeking at the “Learn Chinese” textbooks and going, wow, I wish I had a course like that. One that actually, you know, used the tongue I understood (ENGLISH) to teach me the other (completely alien) language with a bridging method.
That’s one of the things I still cannot comprehend about the way they teach languages here, it’s a complete immersion style (even in German class). Hello, throwing people into the deep end might maybe help 90% of the population to learn how to swim fast. What about the 10% you just -drowned- from pure panic?
I found a Learn Mandarin podcast recently that was very cool. Learn at your own pace, it used English to teach, structured in bite-sized chunks and so on. If I had the time (it’s November, there is no –time-!), I would be listening to it pretty often. Cos it’s relevant to me. And self-motivation is a far better way to learn.
Mebbe I would have been more inspired by studying the Tao Te Ching. Or ancient Chinese inventions. There were some really interesting bits of Chinese history – wars, the Great Wall, etc. Ironic that I learned most of them from the Discovery Channel and other English media. Ah well.
Mathematics. Another little pet peeve of mine. Taught with no relevancy to real life. I know I stopped listening at about the quadratic equations stage. Let alone sin and cosine. After that it was just Ten-Year-Series focused exam-strategy based on memory work, recognition of the type of problem, equation plugging and calculator punching.
I still don’t think I’m ever going to recognize or understand the complexities of certain abstract graphs, even with physics real-world examples helping me, but I’m willing to try now and then. And ever so often, I tell myself, I really must learn statistics the proper way and understand it. It makes crystal clear sense for the duration of a good lesson with a good teacher, and for the five minutes after, and then it just fogs up again and I go…awww.
And so, in my usual roundabout long-winded story fashion, we finally come to geography.
I especially mourn the failure of geography to inspire me.
I can excuse away Chinese for being a language skill, just like I can excuse away anything musical or artistic as me not being very good at it naturally. (This ‘natural talent’ thing is not really true though. More ‘interest’ and ‘practice’ related. I have a knack for 3D art, and from there I’ve learned color mixing concepts and so on. And in rare spare times, I realize I’m not that cruddy at computer art or even drawn art if I was willing to put in extreme amounts of time into it – like say, the extreme time I am choosing to throw into writing and Nanowrimo instead of art.)
I can excuse away mathematics as being too abstract for my brain to wrap around. Same as certain high level lofty subjects like philosophy. Just no interest in it too. Ditto things like sports, fishing and photography. I can maybe admire bits of it as a spectator, but I don’t have no passion for them.
But geography. Ah, geography. Isn’t it earth sciences? Isn’t it the study of societies? An interesting mix of cultural anthropology and physical science and biology? Of maps? These are all things that do fascinate me.
These are all things that are completely –relevant- to me. If I want to write stories, fantastical ones, especially – I world build, I draw maps, and it would be nice to actually understand the real world concepts behind them.
I never travelled in my youth, but even then, if I had photographs of cool geographical features, it should be marvellous to behold. Awe-inspiring. Fun. Now we even have Google Earth, so that we can stare at anything we wanted in the comfort of our own homes.
But you tell me the word “geography,” and I immediately wince and go “eeew.”
I blame the teacher. I really do. This is a case of not managing to study on despite the teacher.
I used to like social studies as a primary school kid. And isn’t that just a mix of history and human geography?
I have a crystal clear image of secondary school geography. An OHP screen. Black text on yellow background. Textbook diagrams. The world’s most monotonous teacher (I forget her name, for obvious unmemorable reasons) droning on to herself, describing what could be read for ourselves.
I don’t think the geography text helped. I remember falling asleep on the bed with it on my chest. I woke with a crushing pain near my heart. Story of my experience with geography.
I distinctly remember the choice that lead me to choosing history over geog.
1) OMG, I’m going to face Ms. Completely Boring for two more years? And I have a choice to say, NO, THANK YOU?
2) Hang on, I wrote equal page lengths for this history and geog essay questions. And for each point I mentioned, I got one mark in the history paper. This geog paper gave me half mark each point, and expected me to regurgitate the whole textbook process of
Kinda sad in retrospect, when I look at it now. We were so exam-focused we couldn’t even concentrate on the content properly.
In History, at least the text was readable, and there was an in-built narrative structure in the chronological context. People (or at least, I) need story structures to wrap their minds around something.
And I mourn the loss of such a chance in learning geography. I can envision a beautiful educational structure that I think would have worked on anyone with an interest in writing and/or fantasy stories. (And doesn’t the whole world these days dig the Lord of the Rings?)
Imagine a term-long project. To create your own Lord of the Rings quest across a fantastical landscape. Talk about interdisciplinary.
First, you need to draw the map, of course. Could teach some art (hand-drawn, or computer-based.) Outline some continents. Wouldn’t it be a great time to discuss shorelines and plate tectonics and latitude and longtitude? Then sketch some plates.
Plate tectonics = oh yea, mountains, of course. Draw mountains where they would be.
Discussing world biomes leads you to populate the place with different kinds of vegetation. Rivers and other water bodies is self explanatory too.
One could search the web for pictures of different examples of special landmarks (mountains, waterfalls, cool rivers or forest clearings) and have them as scenes/waystations in your final project – story or presentation. Seeing provokes curiosity, wouldn’t you want to know how the heck the Grand Canyon formed…
Even human populations and social dynamics and towns could be discussed in terms of making little countries / fantasy races / and so on.
I think it would be an incredible adventure. (And Learning Journey ™ too!)
Mumbles, grumbles. Personal DecAdventureWriMo?
*slaps self* Ok, enuff procrastinating and thinking of other projects to start. 8000 words behind still. On the bright side, the news on the nanowrimo website appears to indicate that being 5-days-behind is perfectly normal and average. :(
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
8000+ words behind and broody...
Yep, broody. Brooding and moody. :)
So I thought I could catch up by taking two days off and writing like a madman. Um. Not quite.
The good news is that I actually developed considerably more of my world by stomping around at home and having time to let my brain work in a circular fashion around the whole picture. I even *gasp* drew a map and named some territories. I also downloaded everything I could possibly get my hands on to help me write a story.
Zulupad is a sort of simplified hypertext offline wiki and seems to be good for me to dump random worldbuilding thoughts into. I even got my hands on this thing called Writer's Cafe / Storylines which is kinda cool, like a notecard system for scenes on the computer (since I hate messing around with bits of paper and writing anyhow.)
All that is very well and good except...I have no scenes.
The three bitches that are my lame excuse for main characters are waffling around with their motivations and changing lanes so fast I'm starting to consider the wild idea that my Nanowrimo novel should be the first draft for an IF.
Since I appear to be considering multiple branching storylines anyhow. :(
Because of this crippling sense of multiple possibilities, I can't narrow it down to one possibility. And so all possible scenes evaporate on me instead. And my use for the Storylines program flutters off into the distance because I don't have a chronological plot.
Hell, I don't have any plot.
It decided to go drown itself in the toilet instead.
This brings back the crippling Inner Editor, who grabs my wrists, saying, how can you write when you don't even know what you want to write? Or where you are going?
There's a part of me that agrees with the Editor, that says, writing 50,000 words of crap and drivel is exactly that, crap and drivel.
Look, if I add the words that I've been freewriting about my novel, I would probably be 30,000 words and steaming ahead by now. But it's like lying because I know they aren't actually quite part of the story story.
Yet meanwhile while I'm concerned about what is actually story quality, there are these other mutts who are writing rainbow fluff and twinkies about weirdo things with even more horrible grammar and breaking the fourth wall and doing all kinds of strangeass things with their "novel" and having fun and of course, getting to 50,000 really easily.
The Nanoisms thread was a bit of a revelation for me. Suddenly I realized a number of them were essentially freewriting a "novel" (with author commentary thrown in). Kinda like 90% of the awful crap you see on fanfiction.net and hem, certain porn sites.
Well, duh. I can freewrite 50,000 words of stream of consciousness really easily.
And with better grammar and spelling to boot.
I think I can anyway. If my Inner Editor doesn't make me commit suicide first after a reread.
I don't think that's the point of what I want to do with Nanowrimo.
I have this blog for that. Or my freewriting diary files. These are not stories though. They're not narratives. There's no beginning, middle, end. I'm not trying to make them readable. There's no revision needed. I'm not even claiming them to be any useful commentary to anyone but me. These are words meant to help me work stuff out.
For Nano, I kinda want to aim for a somewhat better quality story. Like many of the Xena stories you see on lunacyreviews.com. Even though you still have 50% fluffy fanfic, about 50% of them are really pretty good writing, which is an incredible online ratio when you think about it.
Some people do it for fun, sure. Maybe they're people who don't normally write at all. So writing about fruit and hamsters and my little ponies are okay for them. And so is throwing in real plot ninjas wielding frigid razor-toothed can lid shurikens when they get stuck.
But er, I don't really think I want -that- kind of drivel in my novel. I kinda want a narrative that makes sense, even if it's unreadable drivel like some vaguely-EarthRrealms-based stories hiding in my hard drive. The sleuth story and Knights of Dawnhill solve a murder mystery come to mind rather quickly.
Granted, I like the Sleuth story. I think it's readable, if a little melodramatic in parts, and it makes a twisted kind of fanfic sense.
The Knights of Dawnhill one is really sorta awful in a language sense. A terrible amount of exposition, the absolute lamest plot devices on the planet (a bear claw? Astral hanging out the window in bat shape?) and totally irredeemable in terms of revision potential. But hey, the plot /connected/ (even if it looked like I sewed it together like a Frankenstein's monster) and the parts with Astral were funny, even if the other characters sucked major balls.
But but...they're...complete stories. In and of themselves. With no random fairies dropping into their self-contained universe.
I hate random fairies. So I can't really do "dares" that ask me to throw in a pirate or a ninja or things like that. My setting, unfortunately, does not have room for pirates or ninjas.
(Why the heck I didn't do a sea-elven Five Kingdoms setting where I -could- throw in a logical pirate is beyond me. Sorry, no ninjas. Faux Asian/Azian flavors are in my Magna Carta II list - Things I HATE in stories. Maybe if I wrote a CoX based story I could throw in a ninja without sending alarm bells ringing in my head.)
The good news is that Nanowrimo is being -incredible- motivation for me. I haven't touched CoX in ages. I played a bit over the weekend, but it wasn't very interesting, so I stopped.
I kinda want to do this again in December by myself, maybe a simpler thing just solo RPing, or with another setting and plot. (I watched B5 and got a story idea about telepaths and slavery, I read the Wraith Shadow Player's Guide and got all churned up about World of Darkness story potential.) With a much smaller word count, thank ye.
But I also don't want to quit on -this- Nanowrimo story now. Except...I don't even know where the story has gone. :P
I think...and I'm grappling here, that I have this fear of actually solidifying something. It's so much nicer to leave it as potential. Because you can have multiple branching storylines as potential, but when you write it out, you're narrowing the possibilities.
And for some reason, this scares me.
Which is weird when you think about it, since we all have a gazillion stories we should be writing about.
Very weird. Maybe I should really stop beating around the bush and go and write the freaking ending of the novel. A draft zero version that is subject to change, but at least something that I can see the end of.
Maybe I should just write some scenes AROUND my possibilities and stop worrying about how they all link up. I can fit them together at leisure in the following months, right?
Because Nanowrimo to ME is about actually getting words down on the page, in some semblance of 'readability' and getting practice writing story scenes and having fun doing it.
Now if only I could convince the perfectionistic part of myself of that whole-heartedly. Grrr.
So I thought I could catch up by taking two days off and writing like a madman. Um. Not quite.
The good news is that I actually developed considerably more of my world by stomping around at home and having time to let my brain work in a circular fashion around the whole picture. I even *gasp* drew a map and named some territories. I also downloaded everything I could possibly get my hands on to help me write a story.
Zulupad is a sort of simplified hypertext offline wiki and seems to be good for me to dump random worldbuilding thoughts into. I even got my hands on this thing called Writer's Cafe / Storylines which is kinda cool, like a notecard system for scenes on the computer (since I hate messing around with bits of paper and writing anyhow.)
All that is very well and good except...I have no scenes.
The three bitches that are my lame excuse for main characters are waffling around with their motivations and changing lanes so fast I'm starting to consider the wild idea that my Nanowrimo novel should be the first draft for an IF.
Since I appear to be considering multiple branching storylines anyhow. :(
Because of this crippling sense of multiple possibilities, I can't narrow it down to one possibility. And so all possible scenes evaporate on me instead. And my use for the Storylines program flutters off into the distance because I don't have a chronological plot.
Hell, I don't have any plot.
It decided to go drown itself in the toilet instead.
This brings back the crippling Inner Editor, who grabs my wrists, saying, how can you write when you don't even know what you want to write? Or where you are going?
There's a part of me that agrees with the Editor, that says, writing 50,000 words of crap and drivel is exactly that, crap and drivel.
Look, if I add the words that I've been freewriting about my novel, I would probably be 30,000 words and steaming ahead by now. But it's like lying because I know they aren't actually quite part of the story story.
Yet meanwhile while I'm concerned about what is actually story quality, there are these other mutts who are writing rainbow fluff and twinkies about weirdo things with even more horrible grammar and breaking the fourth wall and doing all kinds of strangeass things with their "novel" and having fun and of course, getting to 50,000 really easily.
The Nanoisms thread was a bit of a revelation for me. Suddenly I realized a number of them were essentially freewriting a "novel" (with author commentary thrown in). Kinda like 90% of the awful crap you see on fanfiction.net and hem, certain porn sites.
Well, duh. I can freewrite 50,000 words of stream of consciousness really easily.
And with better grammar and spelling to boot.
I think I can anyway. If my Inner Editor doesn't make me commit suicide first after a reread.
I don't think that's the point of what I want to do with Nanowrimo.
I have this blog for that. Or my freewriting diary files. These are not stories though. They're not narratives. There's no beginning, middle, end. I'm not trying to make them readable. There's no revision needed. I'm not even claiming them to be any useful commentary to anyone but me. These are words meant to help me work stuff out.
For Nano, I kinda want to aim for a somewhat better quality story. Like many of the Xena stories you see on lunacyreviews.com. Even though you still have 50% fluffy fanfic, about 50% of them are really pretty good writing, which is an incredible online ratio when you think about it.
Some people do it for fun, sure. Maybe they're people who don't normally write at all. So writing about fruit and hamsters and my little ponies are okay for them. And so is throwing in real plot ninjas wielding frigid razor-toothed can lid shurikens when they get stuck.
But er, I don't really think I want -that- kind of drivel in my novel. I kinda want a narrative that makes sense, even if it's unreadable drivel like some vaguely-EarthRrealms-based stories hiding in my hard drive. The sleuth story and Knights of Dawnhill solve a murder mystery come to mind rather quickly.
Granted, I like the Sleuth story. I think it's readable, if a little melodramatic in parts, and it makes a twisted kind of fanfic sense.
The Knights of Dawnhill one is really sorta awful in a language sense. A terrible amount of exposition, the absolute lamest plot devices on the planet (a bear claw? Astral hanging out the window in bat shape?) and totally irredeemable in terms of revision potential. But hey, the plot /connected/ (even if it looked like I sewed it together like a Frankenstein's monster) and the parts with Astral were funny, even if the other characters sucked major balls.
But but...they're...complete stories. In and of themselves. With no random fairies dropping into their self-contained universe.
I hate random fairies. So I can't really do "dares" that ask me to throw in a pirate or a ninja or things like that. My setting, unfortunately, does not have room for pirates or ninjas.
(Why the heck I didn't do a sea-elven Five Kingdoms setting where I -could- throw in a logical pirate is beyond me. Sorry, no ninjas. Faux Asian/Azian flavors are in my Magna Carta II list - Things I HATE in stories. Maybe if I wrote a CoX based story I could throw in a ninja without sending alarm bells ringing in my head.)
The good news is that Nanowrimo is being -incredible- motivation for me. I haven't touched CoX in ages. I played a bit over the weekend, but it wasn't very interesting, so I stopped.
I kinda want to do this again in December by myself, maybe a simpler thing just solo RPing, or with another setting and plot. (I watched B5 and got a story idea about telepaths and slavery, I read the Wraith Shadow Player's Guide and got all churned up about World of Darkness story potential.) With a much smaller word count, thank ye.
But I also don't want to quit on -this- Nanowrimo story now. Except...I don't even know where the story has gone. :P
I think...and I'm grappling here, that I have this fear of actually solidifying something. It's so much nicer to leave it as potential. Because you can have multiple branching storylines as potential, but when you write it out, you're narrowing the possibilities.
And for some reason, this scares me.
Which is weird when you think about it, since we all have a gazillion stories we should be writing about.
Very weird. Maybe I should really stop beating around the bush and go and write the freaking ending of the novel. A draft zero version that is subject to change, but at least something that I can see the end of.
Maybe I should just write some scenes AROUND my possibilities and stop worrying about how they all link up. I can fit them together at leisure in the following months, right?
Because Nanowrimo to ME is about actually getting words down on the page, in some semblance of 'readability' and getting practice writing story scenes and having fun doing it.
Now if only I could convince the perfectionistic part of myself of that whole-heartedly. Grrr.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Nightfall Part I: Lessons Learnt
Guild Wars: Nightfall just launched. Given how much I had enjoyed Prophecies and Factions, I decided to have a go at Nightfall. Nightfall brings to the game two new professions of the Paragon and the Dervish. The second I don't care so much for, but I find the Paragon an interesting addition, although I did have a Dervish along in my henchman party for a while.
I believe Anet is slowly moving away from the "Holy Trinity" model. This I consider a good thing. The most obvious part of where they they are attacking the Trinity is from the "healer" angle. Healing is certainly an art, and there are good and bad healers, just like there are good and bad warriors. But I dislike the Trinity model. It is just what we have to work with, and the alternative is letting people in the group die.
No longer.
I believe Anet designed the ritualist (Factions) and paragon (Nightfall) to break this model. The ritualist uses a mixture of spirits, weapon spells and healing to protect the team, while the Channeling aspect provides good offense. Practically it is hard to invest points in both defense and offense, so there are a lot of Ritual Lord (spirit spammer) builds. Nevertheless, this is an alternative to monks. Ritualists are also very hard to bring down when they have enough spirits up due to the caster-inclusive coverage of spirits. This is quite unlike many of the healer monks out there, who bring a bar-full of healing spells and dress for maximum energy, but can only run away when a mob comes after them. I don't play a monk so I'm not sure why they are so fragile, given that many builds can spike heal up extreme amount of damage.
The Paragon is just as interesting as the Ritualist. Firstly, due to the nature of its shouts, it has to position itself nearer to the battlefront than a traditional monk. Therefore, it is given the ability to wear warrior-class armour. Secondly, its shouts are also caster-inclusive buffs. Lastly, damage comes from its equipped spears with the damage buffed by the caster-inclusive buffs, so even if less points are devoted to Spear Mastery, the Paragon can put out a decent DPS
The Paragon isn't a tank, but it's not a piece of tissue that can be ripped apart by a stray mob. A group consisting of Paragons with stacking buffs would not need a tank, since everyone is a tank!
One other interesting thing about Paragons, Ritualists and of course Monks: they have lots of abilities to remove conditions, that are usable upon themselves. It makes sense that someone that is so good at helping others should be able to help themselves. On the other hand, a warrior is not too good at removing conditions. Hexes and conditions are often the downfall of a warrior without skills from a secondary profession to help with them.
In this aspect, CoX has completely failed. Not only do the tanks and scrappers have the most hitpoints and damage mitigation, they also have damage and the best mez protection available in the game. Consider the defender, which I would call the "Paragon counterpart", which was supposedly designed to be a mixture of buffs/debuffs and ranged damage taking part in the team battle (compare it with the intention of making the Paragon a mixture of buffs/debuffs and ranged damage) -- the defender has low hitpoints (less than controllers), low armour (they cannot self-buff), laughable base damage, and above all, no mez protection.
In actual fact, I don't play a monk. I started out as a Mesmer/Ritualist, and now play a Mesmer/Necromancer. A mesmer has a lot of interrupts and hexes. Conversely, it is actually very hard to interrupt a mesmer due to the profession's attribute of fast-casting, and hard to hex a mesmer -- if he brings his hex removal tools (which I don't, teehee), which "eats" hexes for energy, steals the hexes for personal usage, or what the 2 second hex-removal elite spell that removes not one, but two hexes at once. How do you hex someone who removes hexes faster than you can ever throw them (assuming no tricky Catch-22 setups that PvPers have come up with)? Warriors, on the other hand, don't remove hexes and don't have hex protection.
If you hex people for a living, you have the skills get get rid of hexes from yourself. If you interrupt people for a living, you are hard to interrupt.
In fact, I've given up interrupting due to the my lag these days. Anet has kindly given the mesmer class some AoE damage spells which enables me to set myself up as an armour-ignoring chaos nuker since AoE damage is what is needed in PvE anyway. I don't need an elementalist, although I bring an earth elementalist for the wards (the irony). A mixture of hexes and damage sounds like the CoX dominator, doesn't it?
Both the dominator and the mesmer are fragile. Both are endurance intensive -- but the mesmer has energy management tools while the dominator just sucks wind until stamina and SOs. The mesmer does more damage than the dominator (don't use fire/fire as an example, consider the mean). Outside of 90 seconds of domination, the dominator is complete mez-bait. The mesmer is better designed.
This has to do with the binary nature of controls in CoX too. Either something is controlled, or something is free to rampage around. If a stray warrior mob comes rushing at my mesmer, for example, I can cast empathy on it and put on distortion. Does it die first from empathy, or does distortion run me out of endurance first? Or I can hex it with ethereal burden and just run away while it crawls towards me at snail's pace. The warrior mob cannot dehex itself, and isn't going to hex me. Warriors hit people, they don't hex people.
In CoX, if you can't mez a mob, it just comes at the dominator and kills mister squishy. Anything that you can't mez in one go (fortunatas, bosses without domination), can often kill mister squishy so fast we basically go "huh?". At least in guild wars, the elementalist boss casting meteor on you has a slow windup that can be interrupted. If I got one-shot, it's because I can't interrupt my way out of a wet paper bag. Hexing or interrupting someone does not turn them into a statue, and it doesn't turn a battle into "fighting statues". It is a very dynamic and interesting business.
City of X needs more non-binary controls. They need to stop having every hobo mob cart mezzes. An armour toggle without mez protection drops away when a mob blows at the squishy. The epic armour available to the squishies are unreliable. "Warriors" should not have mezzes. One just needs to examine dominator total focus versus everyone else total focus to realise a terrible irony. Apparently the control AT is less good at mezzing than everyone else. Therefore they should have subpar hitpoints, damage mitigation and damage dealing capabilities. On the other hand, the ATs with just about every other advantage but having the "disadvantage" of lacking range and therefore supposedly being in a more dangerous situation have epic blasts, epic snipes, epic holds...on top of impale, focus, and other short range "melee" attacks. No wonder people believe defenders should not blast, just stand behind and heal the people "doing the real work". (I won't even comment on the fact that most of dominator damage is in melee.)
CoX can really take a page out of Guild Wars regarding balance issues.
I believe Anet is slowly moving away from the "Holy Trinity" model. This I consider a good thing. The most obvious part of where they they are attacking the Trinity is from the "healer" angle. Healing is certainly an art, and there are good and bad healers, just like there are good and bad warriors. But I dislike the Trinity model. It is just what we have to work with, and the alternative is letting people in the group die.
No longer.
I believe Anet designed the ritualist (Factions) and paragon (Nightfall) to break this model. The ritualist uses a mixture of spirits, weapon spells and healing to protect the team, while the Channeling aspect provides good offense. Practically it is hard to invest points in both defense and offense, so there are a lot of Ritual Lord (spirit spammer) builds. Nevertheless, this is an alternative to monks. Ritualists are also very hard to bring down when they have enough spirits up due to the caster-inclusive coverage of spirits. This is quite unlike many of the healer monks out there, who bring a bar-full of healing spells and dress for maximum energy, but can only run away when a mob comes after them. I don't play a monk so I'm not sure why they are so fragile, given that many builds can spike heal up extreme amount of damage.
The Paragon is just as interesting as the Ritualist. Firstly, due to the nature of its shouts, it has to position itself nearer to the battlefront than a traditional monk. Therefore, it is given the ability to wear warrior-class armour. Secondly, its shouts are also caster-inclusive buffs. Lastly, damage comes from its equipped spears with the damage buffed by the caster-inclusive buffs, so even if less points are devoted to Spear Mastery, the Paragon can put out a decent DPS
The Paragon isn't a tank, but it's not a piece of tissue that can be ripped apart by a stray mob. A group consisting of Paragons with stacking buffs would not need a tank, since everyone is a tank!
One other interesting thing about Paragons, Ritualists and of course Monks: they have lots of abilities to remove conditions, that are usable upon themselves. It makes sense that someone that is so good at helping others should be able to help themselves. On the other hand, a warrior is not too good at removing conditions. Hexes and conditions are often the downfall of a warrior without skills from a secondary profession to help with them.
In this aspect, CoX has completely failed. Not only do the tanks and scrappers have the most hitpoints and damage mitigation, they also have damage and the best mez protection available in the game. Consider the defender, which I would call the "Paragon counterpart", which was supposedly designed to be a mixture of buffs/debuffs and ranged damage taking part in the team battle (compare it with the intention of making the Paragon a mixture of buffs/debuffs and ranged damage) -- the defender has low hitpoints (less than controllers), low armour (they cannot self-buff), laughable base damage, and above all, no mez protection.
In actual fact, I don't play a monk. I started out as a Mesmer/Ritualist, and now play a Mesmer/Necromancer. A mesmer has a lot of interrupts and hexes. Conversely, it is actually very hard to interrupt a mesmer due to the profession's attribute of fast-casting, and hard to hex a mesmer -- if he brings his hex removal tools (which I don't, teehee), which "eats" hexes for energy, steals the hexes for personal usage, or what the 2 second hex-removal elite spell that removes not one, but two hexes at once. How do you hex someone who removes hexes faster than you can ever throw them (assuming no tricky Catch-22 setups that PvPers have come up with)? Warriors, on the other hand, don't remove hexes and don't have hex protection.
If you hex people for a living, you have the skills get get rid of hexes from yourself. If you interrupt people for a living, you are hard to interrupt.
In fact, I've given up interrupting due to the my lag these days. Anet has kindly given the mesmer class some AoE damage spells which enables me to set myself up as an armour-ignoring chaos nuker since AoE damage is what is needed in PvE anyway. I don't need an elementalist, although I bring an earth elementalist for the wards (the irony). A mixture of hexes and damage sounds like the CoX dominator, doesn't it?
Both the dominator and the mesmer are fragile. Both are endurance intensive -- but the mesmer has energy management tools while the dominator just sucks wind until stamina and SOs. The mesmer does more damage than the dominator (don't use fire/fire as an example, consider the mean). Outside of 90 seconds of domination, the dominator is complete mez-bait. The mesmer is better designed.
This has to do with the binary nature of controls in CoX too. Either something is controlled, or something is free to rampage around. If a stray warrior mob comes rushing at my mesmer, for example, I can cast empathy on it and put on distortion. Does it die first from empathy, or does distortion run me out of endurance first? Or I can hex it with ethereal burden and just run away while it crawls towards me at snail's pace. The warrior mob cannot dehex itself, and isn't going to hex me. Warriors hit people, they don't hex people.
In CoX, if you can't mez a mob, it just comes at the dominator and kills mister squishy. Anything that you can't mez in one go (fortunatas, bosses without domination), can often kill mister squishy so fast we basically go "huh?". At least in guild wars, the elementalist boss casting meteor on you has a slow windup that can be interrupted. If I got one-shot, it's because I can't interrupt my way out of a wet paper bag. Hexing or interrupting someone does not turn them into a statue, and it doesn't turn a battle into "fighting statues". It is a very dynamic and interesting business.
City of X needs more non-binary controls. They need to stop having every hobo mob cart mezzes. An armour toggle without mez protection drops away when a mob blows at the squishy. The epic armour available to the squishies are unreliable. "Warriors" should not have mezzes. One just needs to examine dominator total focus versus everyone else total focus to realise a terrible irony. Apparently the control AT is less good at mezzing than everyone else. Therefore they should have subpar hitpoints, damage mitigation and damage dealing capabilities. On the other hand, the ATs with just about every other advantage but having the "disadvantage" of lacking range and therefore supposedly being in a more dangerous situation have epic blasts, epic snipes, epic holds...on top of impale, focus, and other short range "melee" attacks. No wonder people believe defenders should not blast, just stand behind and heal the people "doing the real work". (I won't even comment on the fact that most of dominator damage is in melee.)
CoX can really take a page out of Guild Wars regarding balance issues.
3000 words...
Oh yea, 3000 words behind...
Will to live faltering...
*groans*
I pondered posting on the Nanowrimo Ate My Soul forums, but I decided against it. I need a bigger rant pad than that. Blogger seems to have more space for an essay than a teensy weensy message board.
I'm sure certain people with much lower word counts than me will want to shoot me for whining and groaning and pissing and moaning. (The "I'm So Far Behind But Not Giving Up" thread was actually quite inspirational to me, but I wussed out of posting there for fear of getting rotten fish and tomatos hurled in my direction for having broken 10k words...)
It's odd. I was so happy with myself for actually breaking 10,000 words. But now, when I put pedal to the metal and actually figure out how much I need to write (1667 x 9), I see EEEEEARGH 15,000 words and it seems like an impossible goal.
It doesn't help that I missed writing a single word today (or rather, YESTERDAY, since it's now 12.53am TODAY *freaks*).
At which point, I stir, and begin to twitch. Racing through my head are still the seriously lofty thoughts (about nothing Nanowrimo), and an uncomfortable sense that I'm still sleep deprived. I couldn't have spent more than 4-5 hours asleep. I should be getting more sleep. My computer's still on, humming, thinking that I actually wanted to do some writing tonight (well, yesterday.) I turn it off. I try to go back to sleep. I toss and I turn.
I have way too much self-induced guilt on my mind. I get up. I turn the computer back on. I go get a drink of water. I pace up and down. I surf the Nanowrimo forum. I'm now on Blogger.
Oh gods. Three thousand words. Let's put it this way. I start a timer for 15 minutes to fool myself into getting started. When I can actually find the impetus (through an urge to procrastinate) and uninterrupted time and PEACE AND QUIET (very impt for me) to write. I end up writing for 1-2 hours (as tracked by my timer/stopwatch). I cough out a grand total of 200-300 words on average.
I have to run away, pace around for more, make a drink, then come back and repeat and repeat ad nauseam until I hit my 1667 words, and lately, hitting 1200 and 1300 words seems to be the best I can do.
If I had the whole fucking day to write, I could do this. I was quite happy doing this on Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
I don't understand how people can write around the spaces of a busy day. I seriously CANNOT. I am a one-track mind person. I gotta complete a project and I move on to another. This nibbling at the corners of a day is driving me seriously BATFUCK and APESHIT.
I have this sense of immending doom and getting run over in a collision between a 10-car train and a trailer truck somewhere in the near future. Two big projects, both weighing several tons each.
But I HAVE TO GET THIS NOVEL DONE. I MUST. TOO MUCH IS INVESTED. TOO MUCH IS AT STAKE. COME HELL OR HIGH WATER THIS NOVEL MUST GET DONE.
But I can't even fool myself into saying that I will catch up on the weekend. Why? I don't HAVE an uninterrupted weekend. There's this annual dinner and dance thing on Saturday. That means a night of serious productivity is gone gone gone.
(Oh, did I mention that my best productivity appears to be in the wee early morning hours. Like now, for example?)
And then I can't stay up Sunday because I gotta work Monday, unless I managed to finnagle some leave...(Which is a thought, hrm. Taking leave is troublesome because I now have to check with two departments, methinks. But if I can take Mon and Tue off, that'll make me happier. I can watch NFL football, AND do some Nanowrimo.)
I'm worried about serious sleep deprivation setting in. Like actually, it's now 1.20am. I'm actually feeling 'better' about myself and Nanowrimo. My energy level is now about 9 (from 7 at midnight cos I was still waking up all bleary eyed and freaked out), my creativity level feels about 9 too, and I have this sense that if I go and take the time to make a nice warm cuppa sugared tea and sit and brood and write, I can get some wordage in.
It probably won't be 3000 words, but if I carve 1000 words off, 2000 words may not look so bad in the future.
The only thing is, I KNOW this is gonna take me until oh, maybe 6am if I'm lucky, and 8am if I'm not?
Then I gotta go to work. Like a zombie in the morning. And face near-irresistable narcolepsy in the afternoon.
I KNOW my biorhythms. This makes me the happiest, but I can only kinda keep these hours if I'm self-employed. Nothing makes me happier than sleeping off the 2pm-4/5pm stretch. I HATE the 3-4pm hour. I need a siesta. I'm not sure if I wanna suffer like that.
And there's still Friday to go after Thursday. *faints*
They say week 2's a bummer. Well, week 3's not looking any brighter from where I'm standing right now.
Goddamn.
I think I really am going to sacrifice sleep on the altar of ambition.
It's not as if I can go back to sleep anymore. I've hit like a peak for now (even though there's a mild stress migraine starting to build up), and guilt-induced adrenaline is flooding my system so badly that I'm bound to stay up.
It's all gonna wash out at 3pm, and I am gonna HATE myself then and the job that keeps me up at that kind of ungodly hour though.
(says the person who is thinking of 3am as a productive hour. GO me.)
Will to live faltering...
*groans*
I pondered posting on the Nanowrimo Ate My Soul forums, but I decided against it. I need a bigger rant pad than that. Blogger seems to have more space for an essay than a teensy weensy message board.
I'm sure certain people with much lower word counts than me will want to shoot me for whining and groaning and pissing and moaning. (The "I'm So Far Behind But Not Giving Up" thread was actually quite inspirational to me, but I wussed out of posting there for fear of getting rotten fish and tomatos hurled in my direction for having broken 10k words...)
It's odd. I was so happy with myself for actually breaking 10,000 words. But now, when I put pedal to the metal and actually figure out how much I need to write (1667 x 9), I see EEEEEARGH 15,000 words and it seems like an impossible goal.
It doesn't help that I missed writing a single word today (or rather, YESTERDAY, since it's now 12.53am TODAY *freaks*).
9am-11am Wanted to attend an educational talk. Was fun. One piece of homework yet to be done from that talk.
11am-1pm Set up experiment since my ordered ingredients finally arrived. Find out the experiment is gonna take much longer than expected. Get dreaded phone call to meet new temp 'boss' in new temp two monther job transfer, ie. start real work.
1pm-2pm Lunch
2pm-2.30pm Mourn over not having time to do experiment, feel guilty about creating additional workload for people, delegate and "tai-chi"-style PUSH the experiment to poor lab tech.
2.30pm-3.30pm Meet new temp 'boss', help do some sorting 'grunt' work that needed to get done, while discussing lofty issues, seriously lofty issues.
3.30pm-5.30pm 'Grunt' work over, run up and down to lab to look in on experiment, suggest a stopping point since I didn't want the tech overwhelmed and hating me overmuch, race to cafe area and do more talking about lofty and philosophical issues and generally brood over a huge project that's on the scale of Nanowrimo and also due around the same time. Forsee HUGE crunch time late 3rd/4th week of November, vague sense of unease and panic begins to build up.
5.30pm-6pm Clear up some admin matters, meet lab tech to get a sense of where the experiment is (ie, lots more work needed to get done tomorrow, which I hope I can do, as long as I don't have to keep reacting to the 'interruptions' of new temp boss, since I gotta drop everything and be perky, y'know?) Exhaustion sets in, plus sense of having accomplished something that day.
6pm onwards Go home, eat dinner, collapse on bed and sleep like the dead until 12.30am.
At which point, I stir, and begin to twitch. Racing through my head are still the seriously lofty thoughts (about nothing Nanowrimo), and an uncomfortable sense that I'm still sleep deprived. I couldn't have spent more than 4-5 hours asleep. I should be getting more sleep. My computer's still on, humming, thinking that I actually wanted to do some writing tonight (well, yesterday.) I turn it off. I try to go back to sleep. I toss and I turn.
I have way too much self-induced guilt on my mind. I get up. I turn the computer back on. I go get a drink of water. I pace up and down. I surf the Nanowrimo forum. I'm now on Blogger.
Oh gods. Three thousand words. Let's put it this way. I start a timer for 15 minutes to fool myself into getting started. When I can actually find the impetus (through an urge to procrastinate) and uninterrupted time and PEACE AND QUIET (very impt for me) to write. I end up writing for 1-2 hours (as tracked by my timer/stopwatch). I cough out a grand total of 200-300 words on average.
I have to run away, pace around for more, make a drink, then come back and repeat and repeat ad nauseam until I hit my 1667 words, and lately, hitting 1200 and 1300 words seems to be the best I can do.
If I had the whole fucking day to write, I could do this. I was quite happy doing this on Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
I don't understand how people can write around the spaces of a busy day. I seriously CANNOT. I am a one-track mind person. I gotta complete a project and I move on to another. This nibbling at the corners of a day is driving me seriously BATFUCK and APESHIT.
I have this sense of immending doom and getting run over in a collision between a 10-car train and a trailer truck somewhere in the near future. Two big projects, both weighing several tons each.
But I HAVE TO GET THIS NOVEL DONE. I MUST. TOO MUCH IS INVESTED. TOO MUCH IS AT STAKE. COME HELL OR HIGH WATER THIS NOVEL MUST GET DONE.
But I can't even fool myself into saying that I will catch up on the weekend. Why? I don't HAVE an uninterrupted weekend. There's this annual dinner and dance thing on Saturday. That means a night of serious productivity is gone gone gone.
(Oh, did I mention that my best productivity appears to be in the wee early morning hours. Like now, for example?)
And then I can't stay up Sunday because I gotta work Monday, unless I managed to finnagle some leave...(Which is a thought, hrm. Taking leave is troublesome because I now have to check with two departments, methinks. But if I can take Mon and Tue off, that'll make me happier. I can watch NFL football, AND do some Nanowrimo.)
I'm worried about serious sleep deprivation setting in. Like actually, it's now 1.20am. I'm actually feeling 'better' about myself and Nanowrimo. My energy level is now about 9 (from 7 at midnight cos I was still waking up all bleary eyed and freaked out), my creativity level feels about 9 too, and I have this sense that if I go and take the time to make a nice warm cuppa sugared tea and sit and brood and write, I can get some wordage in.
It probably won't be 3000 words, but if I carve 1000 words off, 2000 words may not look so bad in the future.
The only thing is, I KNOW this is gonna take me until oh, maybe 6am if I'm lucky, and 8am if I'm not?
Then I gotta go to work. Like a zombie in the morning. And face near-irresistable narcolepsy in the afternoon.
I KNOW my biorhythms. This makes me the happiest, but I can only kinda keep these hours if I'm self-employed. Nothing makes me happier than sleeping off the 2pm-4/5pm stretch. I HATE the 3-4pm hour. I need a siesta. I'm not sure if I wanna suffer like that.
And there's still Friday to go after Thursday. *faints*
They say week 2's a bummer. Well, week 3's not looking any brighter from where I'm standing right now.
Goddamn.
I think I really am going to sacrifice sleep on the altar of ambition.
It's not as if I can go back to sleep anymore. I've hit like a peak for now (even though there's a mild stress migraine starting to build up), and guilt-induced adrenaline is flooding my system so badly that I'm bound to stay up.
It's all gonna wash out at 3pm, and I am gonna HATE myself then and the job that keeps me up at that kind of ungodly hour though.
(says the person who is thinking of 3am as a productive hour. GO me.)
Saturday, November 04, 2006
The "Flow" State
Been reading a book on "flow" in writing, in between fervently mad attempts at extending word count for Nanowrimo and feverish laying on bed 'percolating' (but mostly falling asleep.)
It's interesting how other people define their flow states, 'white heat' or something external, of being in the 'zone' or whatever. That it can be addictive, and so on.
I've come to the sudden realization that my desired flow state in writing is that elusive experience I have been chasing for a number of years since I went online. "Immersion." That sense of being someone else. Of channeling someone differently me.
Sure, I've been in flow for other things before. Flow states that seem more like what most of the authors are describing. Being at peace and one with the whole universe, not being aware of time flow, that sort of 'runner's' high except it's a 'creator's' high. Hit an extreme peak of it once while sculpting a castle out of paper mache with my hands, where your ego no longer exists, you're just subsumed into a greater Tao.
But I rarely get into that kind of state when I'm writing. On a really good day, I -become- the character though, thinking and reacting as he or she would, and flashing into each character as needed, while having an entire scene going on in a cool daydream.
The old childhood play.
Sometimes you can get into those states playing a good computer game. Torment was one that really did it for me. "What is the measure of a man?" still sends thrills up my spine. I got into a bit of flow playing Baldur's Gate II. There were certain times when I RP'ed Juli that I was in that state, when the world was new and we were our characters...before OOC and IC got out of hand. Very rarely, in maybe ten second spurts, CoX can do it for me while I'm soloing special characters - Ravenhill, Autumn Tempest my warshade, Invictus, Lady Sorrow, etc, as I brood on their backstory.
But in the end, the only thing that really does it is writing and the preparation for writing or similar pasttimes thereof (like solo-RPing, which is still a kind of writing if I ever get down to doing it.)
I scored one quick flow state that got me two flashback scenes today. Very cool, considering it wasn't a planned part of my novel at all. It was something that just screamed out, I need to resolve this in my head and play this out NOW, or I'll implode. Trust Astral to demand some attention when I've been writing Flame for too long. And I wasn't even planning to give her any bloody first-person POV at all, just the other two.
On the cruddy side, I'm a little behind on actually continuing the story, but faith manages. We'll get there. Ahead on the word count for now at any rate. Gonna try and pull ahead some more this weekend.
Cos I'm kinda worried that I'm not going to have time next week to get anything much done. My bosses come back from their overseas trip then, and I may suddenly have a lot of prosaic mundane crap to do. Still, I have one more day tomorrow, gonna make the most of it.
It's interesting how other people define their flow states, 'white heat' or something external, of being in the 'zone' or whatever. That it can be addictive, and so on.
I've come to the sudden realization that my desired flow state in writing is that elusive experience I have been chasing for a number of years since I went online. "Immersion." That sense of being someone else. Of channeling someone differently me.
Sure, I've been in flow for other things before. Flow states that seem more like what most of the authors are describing. Being at peace and one with the whole universe, not being aware of time flow, that sort of 'runner's' high except it's a 'creator's' high. Hit an extreme peak of it once while sculpting a castle out of paper mache with my hands, where your ego no longer exists, you're just subsumed into a greater Tao.
But I rarely get into that kind of state when I'm writing. On a really good day, I -become- the character though, thinking and reacting as he or she would, and flashing into each character as needed, while having an entire scene going on in a cool daydream.
The old childhood play.
Sometimes you can get into those states playing a good computer game. Torment was one that really did it for me. "What is the measure of a man?" still sends thrills up my spine. I got into a bit of flow playing Baldur's Gate II. There were certain times when I RP'ed Juli that I was in that state, when the world was new and we were our characters...before OOC and IC got out of hand. Very rarely, in maybe ten second spurts, CoX can do it for me while I'm soloing special characters - Ravenhill, Autumn Tempest my warshade, Invictus, Lady Sorrow, etc, as I brood on their backstory.
But in the end, the only thing that really does it is writing and the preparation for writing or similar pasttimes thereof (like solo-RPing, which is still a kind of writing if I ever get down to doing it.)
I scored one quick flow state that got me two flashback scenes today. Very cool, considering it wasn't a planned part of my novel at all. It was something that just screamed out, I need to resolve this in my head and play this out NOW, or I'll implode. Trust Astral to demand some attention when I've been writing Flame for too long. And I wasn't even planning to give her any bloody first-person POV at all, just the other two.
On the cruddy side, I'm a little behind on actually continuing the story, but faith manages. We'll get there. Ahead on the word count for now at any rate. Gonna try and pull ahead some more this weekend.
Cos I'm kinda worried that I'm not going to have time next week to get anything much done. My bosses come back from their overseas trip then, and I may suddenly have a lot of prosaic mundane crap to do. Still, I have one more day tomorrow, gonna make the most of it.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
The Machinima Bug
I’ve suddenly reawoken a craze for something that is very bad for my hard drive (only 4 GB left). Machinima. Been surfing around and downloading strange movies. Being lazy to link to stuff, I will just leave things in the hands of everyone’s leet Google Skillz.
Red vs Blue is always great, though lately I’m finding it harder and harder to follow as they rattle on in their rapid fire accents and nearly identical voices. Still have some pretty brilliant bits.
I rewatched Roosterteeth’s Panic series (based on FEAR) and it’s a great short. Hilarious, and not as open-ended as RvB, just a nifty tale.
This is a must-watch. The Revenge of Dr. Mechanico. It’s a CoX machinima! It’s short, sweet, and kinda funny. And they weren’t even CoX people, they learned the game from scratch just to make it.
http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=3203
There’s been a bunch of people using Neverwinter Nights to make movies. I took a look at Bloodspell and Consanguinity.
Ehhhh- is about all I can say. I admit it, I’m a graphics snob. Maybe NWN2 will help. NWN 1 just looks very very dated, and ruins my enjoyment of the voice acting and relatively interesting story.
Bloodspell looks pretty good in terms of character-wise, and while some of the initial voice acting is lame, there are a couple of shining stars. I liked the actor playing The Master, he really sounded serious and into what he was saying. The premise is also quite interesting. Alas, the characters and animations are wooden dolls with none of the charm of Final Fantasy 7, so it’s rather difficult to watch.
Consanguinity has very nice camera work and use of music. It takes the lazy way out by using subtitles instead of voice acting, which is both a minus and a plus in my book. Minus because it’s lazy, plus because it makes it more comic book-like where the reader provides their own voice, and minus again because the subtitles flash by so fast it’s impossible to set any mood or pacing, and minus once more because the dialogue is uber-lame in the first degree. Its saving grace is that the camera work and scenes are not too bad, and it gives you the “I can do better” inspiration.
I downloaded this big movie Desolate, that I want to watch but didn’t have time to finish. It looks pretty arty for a Halo flick, really nice landscapes and camera angles. Not much of a riveting story though, which was why I could turn it off after 4 minutes and run for work.
I also want to watch Arachronox the movie, but trying to find a clean download for it is a major pain, it’s so durned big.
Haven’t been brave enough to try any Sims movies yet. They look kinda scary. But I’m just the rare person that just didn’t buy into the Sims craze. What’s so cool about the dang social scene anyhow? I tried the original once (pirated version while they were still around, heh) and went –duh-? This is exciting, how? Some bimbo talking in symbols and funky sounds, and going to the bed, going to cook, going to the toilet, going to work…Zzzzzz. SimAnt was more fun.
One thing I do want to see is (*gulp*) World of Warcraft movies. And possibly screenshots. For some reason, I’m guilty of looking at some of the screenies and starting to admire the art. It’s cartoony, sure, but I’m starting to dig the blend of colour, it’s like a very rich acrylic blend that you find also in typical fantasy art and/or minis.
Since I refuse to lose my soul to this evil phat loot game, and detest the idea of its gameplay (gimme 49 horse tails), actually playing the game is out of the question, unlike Guild Wars wherein the really-nice art is just one impetus to eventually support the very elegant, new and innovative game design.
So I’ve hit upon the idea of admiring the thing from afar, since everyone and his mother is playing the dang WoW anyhow and take millions of screenies and make hundreds of videos.
Problem is, I haven’t been brave enough to download any yet. Not sure which ones are good, and which ones are just meh. Wonder if there’s a review site somewhere?
I’m also starting to get –the- itch. Oh yea, 5 days before Nanowrimo, and I’m starting to consider attempting a machinima. Using CoX would simplify stuff.
As Dr. Mechanico demonstrates, the emote capacity of the game engine is pretty good for expression of emotions. The graphics level is pretty enough that I can stand watching it – though it may melt my card trying to render it. And we even have editable demorecord capability. Not to mention, the costume creator in CoX is the most powerful thing on the market atm, no two ways about it. Heck, with supergroup bases, you might be able to even make your own movie sets.
Only tough bits would be, in no particular order, voice-acting, finding actors to move models around, getting a story, cutting and pasting the bits of audio and video and jiggling them around, and oh, actually the whole process of shooting and producing the whole thing. :P
But it sure is tempting.
Red vs Blue is always great, though lately I’m finding it harder and harder to follow as they rattle on in their rapid fire accents and nearly identical voices. Still have some pretty brilliant bits.
I rewatched Roosterteeth’s Panic series (based on FEAR) and it’s a great short. Hilarious, and not as open-ended as RvB, just a nifty tale.
This is a must-watch. The Revenge of Dr. Mechanico. It’s a CoX machinima! It’s short, sweet, and kinda funny. And they weren’t even CoX people, they learned the game from scratch just to make it.
http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=3203
There’s been a bunch of people using Neverwinter Nights to make movies. I took a look at Bloodspell and Consanguinity.
Ehhhh- is about all I can say. I admit it, I’m a graphics snob. Maybe NWN2 will help. NWN 1 just looks very very dated, and ruins my enjoyment of the voice acting and relatively interesting story.
Bloodspell looks pretty good in terms of character-wise, and while some of the initial voice acting is lame, there are a couple of shining stars. I liked the actor playing The Master, he really sounded serious and into what he was saying. The premise is also quite interesting. Alas, the characters and animations are wooden dolls with none of the charm of Final Fantasy 7, so it’s rather difficult to watch.
Consanguinity has very nice camera work and use of music. It takes the lazy way out by using subtitles instead of voice acting, which is both a minus and a plus in my book. Minus because it’s lazy, plus because it makes it more comic book-like where the reader provides their own voice, and minus again because the subtitles flash by so fast it’s impossible to set any mood or pacing, and minus once more because the dialogue is uber-lame in the first degree. Its saving grace is that the camera work and scenes are not too bad, and it gives you the “I can do better” inspiration.
I downloaded this big movie Desolate, that I want to watch but didn’t have time to finish. It looks pretty arty for a Halo flick, really nice landscapes and camera angles. Not much of a riveting story though, which was why I could turn it off after 4 minutes and run for work.
I also want to watch Arachronox the movie, but trying to find a clean download for it is a major pain, it’s so durned big.
Haven’t been brave enough to try any Sims movies yet. They look kinda scary. But I’m just the rare person that just didn’t buy into the Sims craze. What’s so cool about the dang social scene anyhow? I tried the original once (pirated version while they were still around, heh) and went –duh-? This is exciting, how? Some bimbo talking in symbols and funky sounds, and going to the bed, going to cook, going to the toilet, going to work…Zzzzzz. SimAnt was more fun.
One thing I do want to see is (*gulp*) World of Warcraft movies. And possibly screenshots. For some reason, I’m guilty of looking at some of the screenies and starting to admire the art. It’s cartoony, sure, but I’m starting to dig the blend of colour, it’s like a very rich acrylic blend that you find also in typical fantasy art and/or minis.
Since I refuse to lose my soul to this evil phat loot game, and detest the idea of its gameplay (gimme 49 horse tails), actually playing the game is out of the question, unlike Guild Wars wherein the really-nice art is just one impetus to eventually support the very elegant, new and innovative game design.
So I’ve hit upon the idea of admiring the thing from afar, since everyone and his mother is playing the dang WoW anyhow and take millions of screenies and make hundreds of videos.
Problem is, I haven’t been brave enough to download any yet. Not sure which ones are good, and which ones are just meh. Wonder if there’s a review site somewhere?
I’m also starting to get –the- itch. Oh yea, 5 days before Nanowrimo, and I’m starting to consider attempting a machinima. Using CoX would simplify stuff.
As Dr. Mechanico demonstrates, the emote capacity of the game engine is pretty good for expression of emotions. The graphics level is pretty enough that I can stand watching it – though it may melt my card trying to render it. And we even have editable demorecord capability. Not to mention, the costume creator in CoX is the most powerful thing on the market atm, no two ways about it. Heck, with supergroup bases, you might be able to even make your own movie sets.
Only tough bits would be, in no particular order, voice-acting, finding actors to move models around, getting a story, cutting and pasting the bits of audio and video and jiggling them around, and oh, actually the whole process of shooting and producing the whole thing. :P
But it sure is tempting.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Cien Anos de Soledad
Humans --- an essentially hopeless bunch.
As a conclusion to my little experiment, I changed the search comments on my AR/traps corrupter to "Term contracts negotiable" last night.
Did a mission, started towards the next. Ninja invite. Joined a team of three masterminds, which meant I didn't have to use my secondary at all. Acid mortar came up whenever it recharged to up the total damage, but any other damage dealer (brute, corrupter, stalker) could have fufilled the purpose of bumping up spawn sizes and adding damage. The question in my mind was if I was invited because they just decided to grab anyone in their range, or were they under some delusion that a corrupter could provide some kind of buffing they didn't need in the first place?
This morning, logged on, started towards my mission. Another invite came. Joined a team doing the PTS arc fighting Shivans. This time I had to work my secondary more, but basically I just spammed flamethrower on Shivans flopping on the ice slick (fun!). Shivans were also vulnerable to lethal damage, so it was fun shooting them to pieces. Again, the question was, were they just looking for someone their range, or were they hoping for some kind of buffing (healing)?
It feels like such a strange coincidence, that I have been soloing missions at the same time day after day, but the moment I removed AR/traps from my search comment, I get team invites almost immediately after I log in. Ironically, now that I actually have a nice AoE power (flamethrower), it's not in my comments. But I still got invites!
History repeats itself, the game and the people who play it do not change. Time to make an thugs/dark MM or an ice/rad corrupter!
As a conclusion to my little experiment, I changed the search comments on my AR/traps corrupter to "Term contracts negotiable" last night.
Did a mission, started towards the next. Ninja invite. Joined a team of three masterminds, which meant I didn't have to use my secondary at all. Acid mortar came up whenever it recharged to up the total damage, but any other damage dealer (brute, corrupter, stalker) could have fufilled the purpose of bumping up spawn sizes and adding damage. The question in my mind was if I was invited because they just decided to grab anyone in their range, or were they under some delusion that a corrupter could provide some kind of buffing they didn't need in the first place?
This morning, logged on, started towards my mission. Another invite came. Joined a team doing the PTS arc fighting Shivans. This time I had to work my secondary more, but basically I just spammed flamethrower on Shivans flopping on the ice slick (fun!). Shivans were also vulnerable to lethal damage, so it was fun shooting them to pieces. Again, the question was, were they just looking for someone their range, or were they hoping for some kind of buffing (healing)?
It feels like such a strange coincidence, that I have been soloing missions at the same time day after day, but the moment I removed AR/traps from my search comment, I get team invites almost immediately after I log in. Ironically, now that I actually have a nice AoE power (flamethrower), it's not in my comments. But I still got invites!
History repeats itself, the game and the people who play it do not change. Time to make an thugs/dark MM or an ice/rad corrupter!
Monday, October 16, 2006
CoH Orgy
Phew. Had a weeklong CoH orgy. Had to tell myself to slow down in case I burn myself out again. After all, the game really hasn't changed, and isn't about to change.
My resolution is to take this game in a completely non-serious way. Play it with my SG (a bunch of casuals anyway), no spending of excessive time on the forums, no compulsive powers testing or hero-planner tweaking. In fact, it could really be the compulsive behaviour a certain segment of CoH gamers that is causing the game to evolve the way it is.
Perhaps if enough of the CoH players make it absolutely clear that they just want a jolly good time playing recreationally instead of stick their nose into some peculiar "top-dog" rat-race, the devs might realise that they are alientating their original playerbase. The people who were there from the start, not some Achiever kiddies who will "loot, loot, loot" for all of three months of their gaming attention span.
Recreational playing for me is a bit weird though. Friends going off to other more populated servers -- except all different ones. Victory, Liberty, Virtue and Freedom, plus the ones in Guardian. Thankfully most of those in Justice seem to have quit CoH. This leaves me scratching my head on where to focus my levelling. At least I have toons of each level range sitting in Guardian that I can pull out depending on who I am playing with.
A minor achievement is getting my Fire/cold corrupter to 35. Hurrah for freezing rain rip-off. Together with my nifty new Aid self, life has taken a turn for the better. Now I can shelve him; the gameplay style bores me but I was just stubborn and wanted to get to 35.
Now the goal is to get some fire monkies on my dominator. Then I can shelve her too. With that, I can close down Guardian Alts Inc.
After that, the search for the most interesting CoV combo is on. And for that, I am still waiting for an intuitive flash. Both my old dark/electric main and my current mind/storm main came from intuitive flashes. You kind of get a strong concept, and a combo that you think might be fun... and then you just keep going.
I wonder if CoV is even capable of giving that flash. The gameplay seems kind of uninspirational -- but that's to be expected. Villains aren't inspirational, after all.
My resolution is to take this game in a completely non-serious way. Play it with my SG (a bunch of casuals anyway), no spending of excessive time on the forums, no compulsive powers testing or hero-planner tweaking. In fact, it could really be the compulsive behaviour a certain segment of CoH gamers that is causing the game to evolve the way it is.
Perhaps if enough of the CoH players make it absolutely clear that they just want a jolly good time playing recreationally instead of stick their nose into some peculiar "top-dog" rat-race, the devs might realise that they are alientating their original playerbase. The people who were there from the start, not some Achiever kiddies who will "loot, loot, loot" for all of three months of their gaming attention span.
Recreational playing for me is a bit weird though. Friends going off to other more populated servers -- except all different ones. Victory, Liberty, Virtue and Freedom, plus the ones in Guardian. Thankfully most of those in Justice seem to have quit CoH. This leaves me scratching my head on where to focus my levelling. At least I have toons of each level range sitting in Guardian that I can pull out depending on who I am playing with.
A minor achievement is getting my Fire/cold corrupter to 35. Hurrah for freezing rain rip-off. Together with my nifty new Aid self, life has taken a turn for the better. Now I can shelve him; the gameplay style bores me but I was just stubborn and wanted to get to 35.
Now the goal is to get some fire monkies on my dominator. Then I can shelve her too. With that, I can close down Guardian Alts Inc.
After that, the search for the most interesting CoV combo is on. And for that, I am still waiting for an intuitive flash. Both my old dark/electric main and my current mind/storm main came from intuitive flashes. You kind of get a strong concept, and a combo that you think might be fun... and then you just keep going.
I wonder if CoV is even capable of giving that flash. The gameplay seems kind of uninspirational -- but that's to be expected. Villains aren't inspirational, after all.