NaNoWriMo starts next week, this coming Monday, to be exact, and I'm terrified. I want to do this, I really do, but how will my five day a week, eight hour a day job and my GED work suffer? I have to write five pages a day through November, and yes, even if I don't make it, I'll keep writing the story, but I would still like to finish actually writing it in November.
The summery of my story can be seen here: http://levithorarts.blogspot.com/2010/10/pink-lemon-hell-or-horror-of-nanowrimo.html
What's my progress on the story? Well, I'm finalizing the notes to follow, so that I can nip writers block in the bud, I outright eliminated a mouse, I pushed some dialogue where I wanted it to go to flesh out the story, and, well, I combined a few PL stories in a runaway attempt to make nine small books into a trilogy. I have ideas, yes, but we'll see how the PL stories take off first. I need to make this one more self contained.
That's about it, I should have the notes done by Monday, and I'll update this next Wednesday when I have some pages written out.
Mur Lafferty's podcasts guilt tripped me into thinking that I should be writing (A good thing, mind. ;)), so I'm going to do that. See you on the weekend with another essay, hopefully more well written.
Showing posts with label podcast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label podcast. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Pink Lemon Hell (Or: The Horror of NaNoWriMo) Part 1
(AN: This is NOT the topic that I was alluding to at the end of How To Play Video Games. This is a secondary weekly update pertaining to a 50,000 word novel that I plan to finish by November of 2010's end.)
God bless this craft that I have allowed myself to be wedged in to. I enjoy writing, I enjoy reading, I enjoy getting inspired by how perfect and clever the work of other people came out to be after reading that I just lean back in quiet awe with a grin and say: "Wow..." It makes me optimistic to see that the human race can create something so wonderful despite horrible shortcomings.
God damn this craft that I have allowed myself to be wedged in to. Yes, the above is true, but those aforementioned shortcomings? Yeah. Those get in the way. Bad. Especially if you lack the discipline to see that you have time to write, but you putz around on the Internet instead (like I am as I write this; damn you Doug Walker!).
It is here where I decided that I need to do something about it, and that something is this: I need to force myself to sit down and write. Every day. No video games, no Twitter, no podcasts (unless I'm out and about), and ...decrease novel reading time, but not too much.
So, to help with that, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. What is this (literally) alien sounding name? Here's an exert from Wikipedia: National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo) is an annual creative writing project coordinated by the non-profit organization The Office of Letters and Light. Spanning the month of November, the project challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel in one month.
(Mur Lafferty introduced me to it by her podcasts!
)
The novel that I chose is a rewrite of the first story in a (below eight but above five part story arc) superhero concept of mine called: Pink Lemon. What is it? It's a story about a bubbly young woman named Lora Summers and her sardonic fraternal twin sister, Sarra, both gaining some gauntlets that grant them superpowers; the gauntlets themselves having formed several pairs of superheroes on Earth for many years, so it's like the Green Lantern Rings; they have mentors.
Lora and Sarra find out what it's like to be sudden top notch super heroes with a reputation to keep, in a world where about sixty percent of the population has some sort of meta ability already, while dealing with a crazy witch named Morgan who seeks revenge on a supposedly nefarious warlock named Leon Donaldson and will do anything she can to achieve her goal, Morgan taking an interest in Lora's best friend and superhero in training, Cindy Richards to help complete her goal complicates the issues.
Along the way, the world that they live in suffers from people not caring for the heroes anymore, since there is an over saturation of metas anyway, and the people in charge, those top notch heroes, face a crisis of having thier interest lost, and thus loose funding to help support the metas that can do inhuman acts, but not enough to be real heroes, and help them cope with their powers and nip supervillians in the bud.
This summery will be at the start of every blog regarding Pink Lemon Hell since my readership on blogger is growing ever more. Don't worry though, the content will be different after the summery each time.
What is this PLH blogger series about? I wanted to keep a public journal (thus, a blog?) documenting my progress to keep this goal up and actually sit down and write the story with a frightening deadline standing outside the window and approaching ever closer with a knife in it's hand. Whew!This is because, if I don't project expectations for myself and others around me, than I might as well never finish the book and keep watching The Nostalgia Critic and call it research (and I thought that video games inhibited my writing!).
So, how's the PL story going right now? Well, I'm planning it out, making a summery and sweating bullets to find ways of legitimately padding it out to 50,000 words without looking gimmicky (roughly 245 pages on a 4 x 6 inch book at a 12 PT. font). This fucking terrifies me since previous drafts of the same story hit around 70 to 110 pages using the measurements in the lines above. God damn man's shortcomings!
So, the question is, if the story is worked out, sorta, how do I complicate matters to make life hell for Lora and Sarra while making a good springboard into their new lives as heroes and at the same time, keeping story ideas separate from each other?
Not to mention getting a 250ish page story done within a month while having a full time job with children that are not my own running around at home too. How to I do that?!
...Those are very two good questions...
I'll conclude for now, and write a new entry on this topic next Wednesday. Over the weekend, I should have an entry about music in general and how it affects me and my writing as a whole.
See you soon.
"You put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart."
--JOHN McPHEE
God bless this craft that I have allowed myself to be wedged in to. I enjoy writing, I enjoy reading, I enjoy getting inspired by how perfect and clever the work of other people came out to be after reading that I just lean back in quiet awe with a grin and say: "Wow..." It makes me optimistic to see that the human race can create something so wonderful despite horrible shortcomings.
God damn this craft that I have allowed myself to be wedged in to. Yes, the above is true, but those aforementioned shortcomings? Yeah. Those get in the way. Bad. Especially if you lack the discipline to see that you have time to write, but you putz around on the Internet instead (like I am as I write this; damn you Doug Walker!).
It is here where I decided that I need to do something about it, and that something is this: I need to force myself to sit down and write. Every day. No video games, no Twitter, no podcasts (unless I'm out and about), and ...decrease novel reading time, but not too much.
So, to help with that, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. What is this (literally) alien sounding name? Here's an exert from Wikipedia: National Novel Writing Month (also known as NaNoWriMo) is an annual creative writing project coordinated by the non-profit organization The Office of Letters and Light. Spanning the month of November, the project challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel in one month.
(Mur Lafferty introduced me to it by her podcasts!
)The novel that I chose is a rewrite of the first story in a (below eight but above five part story arc) superhero concept of mine called: Pink Lemon. What is it? It's a story about a bubbly young woman named Lora Summers and her sardonic fraternal twin sister, Sarra, both gaining some gauntlets that grant them superpowers; the gauntlets themselves having formed several pairs of superheroes on Earth for many years, so it's like the Green Lantern Rings; they have mentors.
Lora and Sarra find out what it's like to be sudden top notch super heroes with a reputation to keep, in a world where about sixty percent of the population has some sort of meta ability already, while dealing with a crazy witch named Morgan who seeks revenge on a supposedly nefarious warlock named Leon Donaldson and will do anything she can to achieve her goal, Morgan taking an interest in Lora's best friend and superhero in training, Cindy Richards to help complete her goal complicates the issues.
Along the way, the world that they live in suffers from people not caring for the heroes anymore, since there is an over saturation of metas anyway, and the people in charge, those top notch heroes, face a crisis of having thier interest lost, and thus loose funding to help support the metas that can do inhuman acts, but not enough to be real heroes, and help them cope with their powers and nip supervillians in the bud.
This summery will be at the start of every blog regarding Pink Lemon Hell since my readership on blogger is growing ever more. Don't worry though, the content will be different after the summery each time.
What is this PLH blogger series about? I wanted to keep a public journal (thus, a blog?) documenting my progress to keep this goal up and actually sit down and write the story with a frightening deadline standing outside the window and approaching ever closer with a knife in it's hand. Whew!This is because, if I don't project expectations for myself and others around me, than I might as well never finish the book and keep watching The Nostalgia Critic and call it research (and I thought that video games inhibited my writing!).
So, how's the PL story going right now? Well, I'm planning it out, making a summery and sweating bullets to find ways of legitimately padding it out to 50,000 words without looking gimmicky (roughly 245 pages on a 4 x 6 inch book at a 12 PT. font). This fucking terrifies me since previous drafts of the same story hit around 70 to 110 pages using the measurements in the lines above. God damn man's shortcomings!
So, the question is, if the story is worked out, sorta, how do I complicate matters to make life hell for Lora and Sarra while making a good springboard into their new lives as heroes and at the same time, keeping story ideas separate from each other?
Not to mention getting a 250ish page story done within a month while having a full time job with children that are not my own running around at home too. How to I do that?!
...Those are very two good questions...
I'll conclude for now, and write a new entry on this topic next Wednesday. Over the weekend, I should have an entry about music in general and how it affects me and my writing as a whole.
See you soon.
"You put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart."
--JOHN McPHEE
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
The Work of Mur Lafferty
While living with my (stupid, technophobic, loving) aunt, I roamed across Lake Forest, Laguna Hills and Mission Viejo, most times walking for an hour or more from point A to point B. In that time, my library of about 1,400 songs on my Sansa could not hold me, so I turned to the concept of Podcasts, starting with those on Screwattack.com.
One podcast lead to another, some were, and still are a lot of fun, but others sounded like someone recorded their monotone voice in a bathroom. One day, I found podiobooks.com. This is a site where authors, or authors to be, can put up their work in an audiobook format, and I'm hoping to contribute my own work for exposure. It was there, were I searched for the best work there, and branch out after I got a taste.
Running through some stories that have received major awards from the site, I found this superhero novel: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/playing-for-keeps
In a small nutshell, it's about a meta hero who has the ability to retain whatever belongs to her; she cannot have her possessions stolen from her. With a small ball that's given to her that both asshole heroes and asshole villains want, she has to decide whether to comply with a party or look out for herself. That's the first part anyway.
I enjoyed this audiobook immensely, pretty much to the point where I'm going to buy a *new* copy off of Amazon to support Mrs. Mighty Mur.
She also has a The Office parody (with zombies), called: The Takeover, I did not think much of that--'cuz I don't know where to watch the show sequentially without buying the DVD's, and a podcast about her experiences writing her novels.
She also has some useless, but damn enjoyable sundries about her observations,which I enjoyed called Geek Fu Action Grip.
The real, real crown jewel of her work is the Bangsian fantasy story, Heaven, part's one through five.
http://murverse.com/podcasts/#heaven
This set of stories is about two dead lovers in the afterlife. They find that heaven is too perfect, and go exploring, finding that all religions are basically true. There is far more to that, and the tone changes quickly though the first part for the better, but I can't reveal anything that would not spoil the stories.
Mur's Heaven in particular strikes a chord in me because it's basically about gods roaming with mortals nonchalantly (later on, anyway), and this is the sort of fiction that I always yearned for as a teenager, but I never found and did not yet have the skills to write properly. A story where Q joins Picard for a beer without any malice intended, so to speak.
I also love it because, well, it's so close to a work that I have written and rewritten before, that her story might as well be it! If that story of mine had kept going, and I did not abandon it, then it may have been very, very similar to Mur's work. (On a rights level, I never, ever let the internet, or anyone outside my immediate family see or learn about my similar story, so it wasn't stolen, this is coincidence)
All of Mur's stories, especially Heaven, quickly became something special to me, and they all have a professional, caring hand behind them that allows excellent readability. I highly recommend her work, and I hope that, like me, you become inspired, and enlightened by her prose as much as I did.
http://murverse.com/
One podcast lead to another, some were, and still are a lot of fun, but others sounded like someone recorded their monotone voice in a bathroom. One day, I found podiobooks.com. This is a site where authors, or authors to be, can put up their work in an audiobook format, and I'm hoping to contribute my own work for exposure. It was there, were I searched for the best work there, and branch out after I got a taste.
Running through some stories that have received major awards from the site, I found this superhero novel: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/playing-for-keeps
In a small nutshell, it's about a meta hero who has the ability to retain whatever belongs to her; she cannot have her possessions stolen from her. With a small ball that's given to her that both asshole heroes and asshole villains want, she has to decide whether to comply with a party or look out for herself. That's the first part anyway.
I enjoyed this audiobook immensely, pretty much to the point where I'm going to buy a *new* copy off of Amazon to support Mrs. Mighty Mur.
She also has a The Office parody (with zombies), called: The Takeover, I did not think much of that--'cuz I don't know where to watch the show sequentially without buying the DVD's, and a podcast about her experiences writing her novels.
She also has some useless, but damn enjoyable sundries about her observations,which I enjoyed called Geek Fu Action Grip.
The real, real crown jewel of her work is the Bangsian fantasy story, Heaven, part's one through five.
http://murverse.com/podcasts/#heaven
This set of stories is about two dead lovers in the afterlife. They find that heaven is too perfect, and go exploring, finding that all religions are basically true. There is far more to that, and the tone changes quickly though the first part for the better, but I can't reveal anything that would not spoil the stories.
Mur's Heaven in particular strikes a chord in me because it's basically about gods roaming with mortals nonchalantly (later on, anyway), and this is the sort of fiction that I always yearned for as a teenager, but I never found and did not yet have the skills to write properly. A story where Q joins Picard for a beer without any malice intended, so to speak.
I also love it because, well, it's so close to a work that I have written and rewritten before, that her story might as well be it! If that story of mine had kept going, and I did not abandon it, then it may have been very, very similar to Mur's work. (On a rights level, I never, ever let the internet, or anyone outside my immediate family see or learn about my similar story, so it wasn't stolen, this is coincidence)
All of Mur's stories, especially Heaven, quickly became something special to me, and they all have a professional, caring hand behind them that allows excellent readability. I highly recommend her work, and I hope that, like me, you become inspired, and enlightened by her prose as much as I did.
http://murverse.com/
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