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. :)

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!

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.)

*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.

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.

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

Lol. Sez it all...

A picture is worth 1000 words...

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.


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.

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.


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.

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. :(

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.

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.

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*).


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.)

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.