Pink Lemon Hell (Or: The Horror of NaNoWriMo) Part 2

  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.

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

How To Play Video Games

                I am a casual gamer. I’m not a hardcore gamer, or a pro gamer, or even an MMO freak (I would like a girl-gamer for a good friend though). I play Guitar Hero when I can, listen to Screwattack.com every week, and gleefully fanboy over Sonic 4. No complaining about games, no 24/7 sessions, no overnight campouts for the BIG game of the year, I’m just a normal casual gamer, but I was not always like that.

  I used to be a hardcore gamer; I’ve been gaming since 1992 when I was five years old. I got a Nintendo Entertainment System with a port of Marble Madness, and the very okay Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. This started my problem with this digital crutch. I had all the great NES games, Super Mario 1-3, both Zelda games, Somari, you name it, I had it.

  Over time, the collection got bigger and bigger. I ended up with a Sega Genesis with an impressive library, a Super!! (fanfare) Nintendo Entertainment System, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III, an Atari 2600 with a plethora of games that have not been reissued, a Nintendo 64, a Playstation One and Two with a collection just as huge as the NES assortment, and Game Boys and Pokemon up the wazzoo. Of course, I could get all this stuff because we bought secondhand, and my parents loved my brother and me enough to have spent about five figures on video games throughout my 23 years on Earth, but there in lies the problem.

  First off, I have seriously, seriously calmed down. At my peak, I played Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy VII, and Crash Team Racing, among others, fifteen hours a day for two years straight in a room where a ghetto entertainment center and pair of bunk beds dominated the room with the blinds shut, a mausoleum earning the nickname of “the cave.” I lived video games, I breathed them, and I only ever came out to scavenge for food looking like a young Geico Caveman. I was a teenager.

  One day in 2004, I got the internet. With it, I yearned for something more productive, so I veered away from video games, and decided to follow the culture surrounding them instead. I wanted more to be with other gamers and pal around rather than on my own staring at Tommy Vercetti’s butt all day.

  Why am I talking about this? Well, I’m asking myself why I even mentioned Tommy Vercetti’s butt at all, but that’s not the point. The point is that I literally got nothing done as a teenager except for exercising my thumbs. I can hear my late mother laughing at me. I could have been reading all of the sci fi books that I’m just catching up on now, I could have gotten to be a better writer gradually instead of assimilating it all in four years, I could have watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 in its prime instead of discovering it on Google Video. Dude, even reading some Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers would have been more productive… At least I think that they would have, but that’s a different argument.

  Allow me to explain further, think about this. What if you forwent your workdays just to play in the holodeck, when there was a constant niggling sensation in the back of your mind regarding a burning passion that you want to achieve? Why waste time in the cave when you can feel in your bones that there is something greater in the real world that you know that you can achieve? You have the confidence to work at it, you have the ability, the drive, and the balls to get out there and make it happen… but you don’t. You put it on the backburner because the princess is in another castle, and of course, you need to make sure that she is able to rule her kingdom in between the nanosecond she’s kidnapped again by a turtle. Strong female lead, that Princess Peach.

  That was my life as a teenager. That was how I felt every waking moment, yet I pushed the feelings back, thinking that I would get to them later. Of course, I did eventually, but I know that many people do not. I know what you’re saying though. I was a teenager, and as I put in one of my own stories, the word is a synonym for “insane.” Moreover, why look back on what you should have done and dwell on it Well, that just kills all my defenses, and it makes you just want to tell me to move on and that the past is the past, moving away from my own problems with e-addiction rather than telling others to spend less time gaming.

  That’s not why I wrote this.

  I wrote this for all those people who were in my position; procrastinating to the point where their minds are too flooded with ringworlds to pursue their passion, whatever it may be. What sort of long-term productivity does a massive amount of video game playing bring? Hand-eye coordination increase from Call of Half-Halo? Better reflexes from Dance Dance Guitar Hero? How World of Everquest can increase leadership skills? How Super Portal Galaxy can help put you in the right mindset to understand physics?

  Wait, I’m turning around on myself, aren’t I? I am, yikes! Spend your teenagerdom playing video games and you’ll become a better person. Sounds like a deliberately poorly thought out fantastic aesop.

  Anyway, before this article’s point fully loops itself into a horrible knot, my final words are that I regret wasting my time being Solid Snake and Squall Lionheart because, what good did it do for me outside of being a lot of fun? Well, I played Portal and Mario Galaxy to warrant the effect outlined above later on, but pre December 2004?

  Umm…

  Parody fodder?

  Helping me not to fear computers as a whole? (what are RPGs but menu screens?)

  Not a whole lot else.

  I’m not decrying the video game concept, not in the least. My whole writing career came about because I wanted to make a video game (that’s a different story), I bought Sonic the Hedgehog 4 and a Sega Genesis Collection recently and I love them both dearly. I am condemning over excess of video games when you want to do other better things and you’re just procrastinating.

  Hmm…

  This article is just my ranting about a tirade I have on video games and subtly bragging about my collection and my game knowledge when it boils down to the concept of procrastinating, isn’t it? I don’t think that I’ll retool this, but I’ll throw common sense to the wind and say that Hitler played Grand Theft Auto, and look at what he accomplished.

  Happy (responsible) Gaming.

  P.S.,

  One good thing did come from my experience with a bunch of games, and that was the music. SSX 3, Grand Theft Auto, XGRA… This brings us to our next topic…