7/29/2015 8:45 - 10:30 pm

Drilling further into research on therians, otherkin, and the difference between them, I've finally seemingly come up with some answers regarding definition, and what those are and aren't. I think.*

Whether on a spiritual, or metaphorical, or whatever kind of plain, both regard their souls as being... different, from normal people's. Like being transgendered, only this is more transspecies -- though those who believe that their souls literally aren't human are few and far between, and who knows, maybe even those guys are just, starved for attention, or something. (Maybe not, but, maybe. Lots of people believe lots of things.) So, really, no, I guess it's nothing like being transgendered. But, yeah, exactly like that.

What we're talking about are therianthropes and otherkin. I've mentioned how interchanged the terms are, and how I don't believe they refer to precisely technically the same thing, and how I'm probably right because they're really not precisely technically the same thing. There are some great resources to look into this kind of thing, though, and how it looks so far: therians are more, souls-of-animals, people, while otherkin are souls-of-mythical-and-legendary-races-and-stuff kind of people. Blurry lines still, especially when dealing with dragons, and you do see a lot of intercourse between the (fandoms? subcultures? countercultures?)... but it's all wholly distinct from space aliens. Which is good to know.

7/22/2015 9:45 - 11:15 pm

Here she blows, that second post of this evening. And, dang, there's still stuff that I'd meant to write about but couldn't fit in. I'll go over it briefly here: more Dreamtime stuff, some other realm that leaks out into reality and causes creatures to become their legendary/mythological equivalents? Such as, foxes become genuine kitsune, tapirs become baku (the difference of which I discussed here,) that kind of thing and heck, people become Windigo. Yaay windigo. (or their Australian wild dog equivalent, win-dingo. Which I'm seriously considering being a genuine thing in this universe.)

Also, this being the 1990s and all, data mining Usenet for heat on supernatural activity. Which has been a plan all along as a major plot point, but hasn't needed to be brought up till now.

I think that's all the backstory needed in order to set up this post.

7/22/2015 2:00 - 3:00 pm

I've got a lot to say this week (apparently this blog is weekly now! it's settled), though I don't feel like doing a megapost, or a postapalooza. My observations are split into two distinct categories, though, of things I have to say, so here's part one, and I'll have another post later on this evening as well. Sounds good to me.

7/11/2015 8:00 - 9:00 pm; 7/12/2015 9:00 - 10:00 am

The more I think about it, the less satisfied I am with the proposed outline I've got being the first in the series. I really like the beginning, how perfectly it sets the mood for the book (and by extension the series, if it were book one,) but from then on, the plot that collecting the Asset naturally leads to, it's just unfit unsatisfying as the first book of the series.

As time-tested a plot as "the molehunt" is, and the main character being the primary suspect as a matter of course, it creates too strong a promise for following books, drives too deep a wedge in between characters we've only just met. It just doesn't work, in other words. Not as a first book. But I think I've figured out, at least vague ready-to-be-fleshed-in versions for preceding books. It starts with the timeline for this one...

5/28/2015 9:45 am - 2:00 pm (mythapalooza)

I noticed something on my mission, researching mythology, which, since I was on my mission and thus consecrating my time, I couldn't delve too deeply into and thus just had to make note of and puzzle out later. I've been puzzling it out ever since- not the implications of what I discovered, but what it was that I had discovered in the first place. Because, apparently, I didn't notate my discovery as much as I should have; I copy/pasted what I'd found into a separate file and moved on, never actually stopping to notate, what it was, that I'd found...

And it's been a while, but I've finally figured it out. Turns out that I HAD notated my discovery sufficiently. I just wasn't reading the copy/pasted material carefully enough to catch it, overlooking what I'd always taken for granted. You see, it all has to do with Ancient Roman practices of eating pork n' beans.

Yes, really.

5/8/2015 9:50 - 11:20 am

Brandon Sanderson, aside from the excellent award-winning Writing Excuses podcast, also teaches creative-writing-type classes as BYU. Which are recorded, and available on YouTube.
BYU Lecture - Brandon Sanderson’s ENGL 321 Class (playlist.)

If you've got 18 hours of your life you can devote to learning not only how to write a book, but how to market it, find an agent, and hopefully get it published, then, this, you know, is, one way you can do that, I suppose.

I'd be remiss, watching these, if I didn't post anything on my writing blog today, so here we go. I actually think we've got a good one on our hands today...

5/3/2015 11:50 am - 12:50 pm

Hello there. Getting back to writing on the supernatural adventures of Finn Moon(e). And, revisiting some material that, proves that this is all still a work in progress.

The idea about the cost of psychic powers just never sat right with me. The past being switched in your mind with the future somehow, right? It's a neat enough system, but it's also kind of vague and nonsensical, and if you could remember the future then there's the problem of predestination and all that, which would be countered by the memory wipe (which powers the plot point that Finn doesn't know he's the mole,) but the thing is: if there were that memory wipe there, then seeing into the future in the first place would have been absolutely pointless. Unless you could flail around while you're peeping into the future, writing things  or wielding objects and leaving yourself vague clues about what's going to happen... but that's a possibility that I'll touch on a bit. As it stands, anyway, I feel the idea of psychic-ness being a "pendulum" to be unworkable...

2/22/2015 8:00 - 9:00 PM

Missing out on 24 posts, that's a full 24 hours of writing not done. Gosh. That's... gosh. The fact that I'm not doing any actual draft writing, only writing essays about how magic works and character motivations and all that, had kind of jaded me to the project-- but this isn't my early starry-eyed idea that it would be best just to "pants" the story, now, is it, and so there are a lot of ground-level details that still need to be ironed out in, more or less, precisely the way I'd been doing it. I've been intermittent to the point of not posting at all, lately, but... Getting only one post a week in is better than getting in no posts at all, I figure...

Also, there's the reason of, well... after my last post, which I wrote a couple of weeks ago had it almost fully written but didn't put up till now-- you'd know why I've been hesitant to continue if you actually read that.

2/7/2015 7:00 - 8:00 PM

Aand I disappeared for a few more days again-- homework, biggish assignment due on Thursday night. Not enough time to squeeze anything else in, in all that writing... Always so sporadic, even after specifically setting out not to be... I'm a joke... Just accept that and move on... Having a deadline like that really was, good for me, and, it was nice... Started on it early, really intending to get it in before the last minute. And yet the last minute is when I got it in; the paper was due by 11:59 PM, and I got it in at 11:58 PM... which says way too much about me...

2/2/2015 8:30-9:45 am (w/bathroom break)

So I just posted that idea I was telling you about, that idea I said sort of relates to how drastic the adjustment to panopticon technology would be but which I did not have time to share last night... A dream I had, about some guy (psychopath!) existing outside of time and space thanks to some kind of magic technology that allowed him not only to monitor everything but also pop in at any time at any place he wishes. He could be watching you right now. And so anyway.

6/7/2014 7:15 am

Note: the following is an excerpt from my mission journal, entry dated June 7th 2014 and timestamped 7:15 am. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalization and lack of paragraphing are retained.

2/1/2015 8:05-9:05 pm (+ misc notes from last month)

Sorry I dropped off the grid like that, going half a month and then "poof." Remember Kevin's advice on not constraining yourself to a specific time as long as you just write? No one to blame but myself, but my brain just I guess picked up on "don't limit yourself to a specific time" and interpreted that as "don't need to write at all." Oops.*

Valid point, though. I'm (more of?) an ideas writer; ideas are what I write-- piece them together into a coherent narrative, do whatever with them... and writing writing, long form, takes dedication... which is something that you need to force on yourself by definition. Forcing all my ideas though into one hour is unnatural.

1/21/2015 8:30-8:45 AM

After a hiatu-- sabbatical, of, no, that sounds worse; it wasn't deliberate, so, hiatus, yeah, I'm back, for today for an hour at least. Maybe more; need to make up for this somehow-- figure it's better to have maybe not 365 days, an average of an hour a day. And so, over those days, 365 hours, and-- funky winterbean that's a lot of hours, wow, that's more time than I'd thought.

1/14/2015 8:45-9:45 PM

I am so tired right now; let's get through this hour as hourly as possible... I need to get up like, well by tomorrow it's going to be four posts, on my other blog; really have been letting the ball slip there... Did have a post that did go up but it wasn't ready turns out... I do have today's post planned out but turned out to be too lazy to actually write any of it... that's two right there... Focusing, anyway.

Alright, now. Finnegan Moon(e), the master of the tides.

...Actually wouldn't be that poor of a name. Tidesman, or something. No? Too on-the-nose? Alright.