Screnzy Check-in

Just a brief check in. Everything's been happening at once at the end of May / beginning of June period. Work. Don't ask about work. Yeesh. Less said the better. Play? That's a little bit better. Just a little.

No impetus for CoX. Just vague stirrings for Urbandead and KoL (NS13 at the end of June apparently, which might or might not be interesting.) Casual plodding with LOTRO - did a round of Agamaur fellowship quests which were fairly fun with a good group. The not-fun part is actually finding the damn group in the first place. The good thing is there's more to amuse oneself with than in DDO, and there's the whole dual screen thing now where I can have a word processor or a browser up on the other screen and idle watching the channels in LOTRO.

And that brings us to Screnzy aka Script Frenzy 2007. It's apparently the first ever. Quite interesting.

A bit disheartening to see that the crazy speedwriters are back. Some are already halfway there already. I just keep telling myself that their stuff is self-evidently of lower quality (prolly freewriting nonsense akin to this blog style), just to comfort myself. :) I should just stop reading the celebratory threads.

On most other normal threads, people are going at a more sedate pace. As in, an actual -pacing- type of pace.

Maybe the speedy ones are those young teenagers. We've been there. Verbal diarrhea on a page, but not exactly high quality stuff... After all, there's something to be said for maturity. I find my older writings infinitely less readable than the recent ones - except for a few gems here and there.

Of course, the problem with maturity is the existence of an even more mature Inner Editor. I forgot to lock it up like I did with Nanowrimo. Not that the locks did much good in the first week or two of November either.

I don't have plans to do -anything- with this script except to read it myself and perhaps share with a few people at most. I'm not posting it online. I'm not submitting it to any real actors, directors or hoping for a real movie to be made of it. Heck, I probably don't even have the energy to do a fan movie out of it. It's just a script with the intent to be read, not acted.

And yet...I find myself obsessing over the proper "format." Oh noes, I have too much action written. I'm only "supposed" to have a few lines of action. I'm "not supposed" to add so many parenticals that tell the actors how to say stuff. (But I don't have any actors in the first place!)

Dumb, dumb, dumb. Stupid Inner Editor.

Has to find -something- to obsess about. Cos the good thing about script scribbling (not calling it scriptwriting cos that implies some semblance of professionalism) is that the words are coming a little easier. One daydreams in visions that are kinda like movies.

And the really good thing is, I love writing dialogue. I love short, curt snappy comebacks and back-and-forths. (Though I sometimes also love the occasional great monologue or debate session.) That's something I found out when doing Nano. I love to have my characters just jibber and jabber and verbally abuse each other.

One thing I'll like to do after June is use the script format for my own daydreams and run a few mad crazy adventures with familiar characters. Solo RP, in a way. I think it's quite freeing if one doesn't obsess about the end product.

The problem with this June is that I set a number of challenges on myself.
1) I'm expecting something readable with some degree of quality.

Not just "let's dance around the banana tree and send plot ninjas to burn the mulberry bush" nonsense. Though admittedly, that kind of thing can be fun. Perhaps I'll do a JulNoWriMo and go for 50k words of humor and nonsense to free myself up for November?

2) All-original characters. (Sorta kinda.)

Yes. No laziness. No pulling out of Flame, Astral, Carla and Jano and other such used Earthrealms and Arthranasian archetypes that I'm totally familiar with. This has been quite taxing since I have been wallowing around comfortably with the bits and pieces of myself turned into characters. Now I've got to cobble together stuff in all kinds of different ways, and think unfamiliar thoughts.

It's sorta kinda only because the main character is a character I was intrigued with when in an 'other world' creation binge.

3) Sorta kinda...all-original world. (No, really, honest!)

Actually, I've borrowed some unexplored elements. There was this stage in our lives when we decided to make some kind of collaborative world to write in and everyone submitted different stuff. That yielded Archeron, the Port of a Million Souls, Ridhara-Shadar, Sly Deep, Carinthia-Breisgau (The Brothers Asunder), the Sea of Glass and sentient penguins (I mean, Gwinarre)...

And I've always loved the idea of the Five Kingdoms of the sea-elves...and a bunch of the RoD area names.

So like any good plagaris-urm, writer, I have "borrowed" a bunch of names and ideas!

Just the ones I like, though. And amalgamated them into my own personal new world.

For example, the superhypenated cities/regions have split up to form four human kingdoms which hopefully bear little resemblance to the original save for the name. Bresgau (I've always pronounced the place with no 'i' anyway. And it's a real world city if I leave it in) is a near-steampunk/renaissance culture with lots of tech-focused guilds of craftsmen and an academy of elemental-magic wielding tattooed loremasters. New Carinthea is a seafaring culture among archipelagos that the sea-elves know as the Sunken/Sundered (prolly the latter name) Continent. They're kinda like the Greeks or Romans or Macedonians - royalty leads them but very metropolitan-sort of conquerers. Just send us tribute, y'all can rule yourselves pretty much.

That kinda thing.

No bloody sentient penguins. Thank god.

Having a lot of fun photoshopping up a map of the world. Lots of detail yet to be thought about and recorded.

But of course, this doesn't help get any words down on the actual script, except in a really roundabout indirect way. And it both limits and tangles up the plotline. I need a world to be able to have a plot and story. Good limits. And the same world also says, hang on, you can't just go jack-assing off like Odeyssus or Belgarion or Rand Al'Thor to visit every continent because that would sound...just like their stories. Lame fantasy quests that scream the author ran outta inspiration and just wanted to show us the world and pulled the "prophecy" card. Homer is excused because he was one of the first. The rest, well, they're copycats. :P

4) I actually expect a plot. And a finished story.

Yea. Nanowrimo was proof of concept. I can write 50,000 words. In a month. Of story material. Scenes. Which are readable. Again. Without too much upchucking.

20,000 words of lax script should be nothing. It's not like I have to obsess about grammar or tense. And besides, I enjoy describing things in the present tense.

So yea, my inner standards-setter now demands a real story. Craft a real plot. Don't just putz about with beginning and end and waffle the stuff in the middle. 20k words is nothing, so you have plenty of time to actually THINK UP the damn story, it says.

*sigh*

Bright side is that I am using Mythic when I run out of ideas. A structured story generator does help jumpstart the idea machine. The bad news is that it takes up an immense amount of time to actually come up with said ideas still. I'm so out of practice, obviously.

And I find that after a certain stage of outlining, the plot hinges on me actually having a clear idea of the world. So I have to try and backtrack and worldbuild. Then the outline won't go ahead again without a clear idea of the characters (which are totally new, remember?) And this sends me on a whole rabbit trail away from actually writing the script. Duh.

All this prepatory work really should have been done beforehand. *grumbles*

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Long story shorter, I'm halfway behind where I should be. 1000 words out of 2000. That's a bit intimidating so early on.

And I miss the bar graph of Nanowrimo where it tracks your daily progress. I might have to dig up some spreadsheet substitute. For now, just so I remember:

219 words on June 1.
1026 words on June 3.

And counting... *gulps*