So, good news: plot outline, totally in place-ish in time for NaNoWriMo.
Also good news: the lesson we're learning about in class this week deals with procrastination, and how to put off doing it. New life goal: no more procrastination, ever. With a 20-30% margin of error, of course. Figure that would be, acceptable. Not procrastinating is all (POSITIVE ADJECTIVE) and (SECOND POSITIVE ADJECTIVE), but lack of procrastination means nothing if you don't have things to do with your time, and that means setting goals and having priorities.
Great news, though: exactly the kind of thing we went over in class, last week.
But, the plot outline for book one, enough in place that I can finalize it this week, and have it by November, anyway.
so about that outline
I... I'm not actually posting it up here. Avoiding spoilers for the book writing and upload? Well, maybe, but no, not primarily. See, after finishing the outline, but before polishing it, I read the outline out loud as an exercise to see how much made sense-- if I had to explain motivations, if I paused to make fun of the lack of motivations, if there were any characters who seemed fun at the time but turn out to contribute nothing to the plot... Leaving in a ton of artifacts, from earlier drafts/inspiration, which began to make less and less sense as the story fleshed itself out. Reading along aloud. And... and it made me...
I'm pretty sure the original draft of book one is some kind of brown note, guys.
It's not a tone generated that makes you mess your pants, right, but it's pretty close. Concepts strung together into something that resembles some kind of plot, but in a nonsensical manner that if you pay close enough attention you'll realize isn't. None of it was-- it was all a jumble. It was a confusing random collection of ideas that would probably act as neurolinguistic programming to drop anyone within earshot. I knew what was coming, I knew why I wrote what I did and why everything was a better idea than it sounded, and I still felt dizzy reading it. And the after effects... I had to spent the whole next day prone. It seriously made me that nauseous.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm not risking that. Only releasing polished drafts here, a'ight?
exploring the dreamspace
I had an epiphany about the dreamspace at church today. Two epiphanies, even. Which were the neighbors of a third epiphany that has nothing to do with writing or Finn Moone (though does deal soooper tangentially with the classes that I mentioned,) and so church today was a massive tumbling swumble of left fielders to the face, stumbling around with such clarity as I've seldom felt before.
And that third epiphany, I'm not even sure if it's right, but anyway.
The dreamspace: Book 3, the ghost of the asset contacts Finn in his dreams and everything, remember. Finn's own dreams are being bugged, all that. You know the dreamspace. Has practically nothing to do with the dreamtime, and it'd be a terrible groaner if you somehow conflated the twain. Sometime by this book, though, there is a dreamspace now. My outline for book 1 mentions nothing about it, and having two outlines down now I can easily tell that each book in the series (at least for the '90s trilogy) is its own animal, exploring its own wacky part of Finn's universe. I don't even mention vampires at all in book 1, for example. Each book is going to be its own thing.
Though intertwined, of course. Complexly. (Everything's got to set up to the big gambit Finn plays, looking directly into SMITH's face and getting erased from the timeline but still surviving, remember.) Sometime between book 1 and book 3, the dreamspace becomes enough of a thing that I'd need to set it up earlier to justify spending so much time in it in book 3. The epiphany deals with the very thing abovementioned. How Finn can survive, weaving through time and space so complexly as to nullify the nullification of his own existence.
The dreamspace is real.
epiphany one
Looking into the incomprehensibility of the face of SMITH, you'd go so mad that your timeline erases itself, right? Your tide, even. You simply never were, if you ever do this. Emerging from the dreamtime, however, you step out from mythology in a quite literal manner, after doing some history rewriting of your own. When Finn looks into the face of SMITH, he's erased, to create a parallel timeline in which Finn's emergence from the dreamtime is Finn's first foray into existence.
The dreamspace is that existence.
Epiphany one.
Since Finn emerges from the dreamtime (as he does at the end of book 1), he has flashes of this parallel reality, which are created in the future because of Finn's time gambit. The parallel life is accessed through dreams. His asset comes to him as a ghost? Maybe it's because that asset never died in the alternate timestream. He's got bugs in his dreams? Every time his mind is read, or a psychic infiltrates his thoughts, it's actually an entire parallel existence they're entering, unawares. This psychic link is actually a portal to another world.
When Finn is erased from having ever existed in World One, his reality becomes the alternate timestream. The alternate timestream, is his reality.
epiphany two
I always figured that Finn's googoo-eyes-at-SMITH ploy was some part of extremely complex time travel going on after Hlidskjalf causes some FTL paradoxes, (Hlidskjalf being the name of Odin's surveillance seat, and thus here the name of the pocket universe from which all space and time in our universe can be scried and accessed,) but
- it turns out that the time travel storyline in Schlock Mercenary (which I finally got to! (...hey, there's a lot of archive to slosh through, alright?)) wasn't actually caused by teraports somehow creating paradox, like I had thought (and which I had based the concept around), but instead was due to dark matter entities destroying the core of the galaxy (an honest mistake, really) and
- Finn wakes up into what he previously thought was a dream, now thinking that his prior reality was a dream-- I've got a way better place to stick that particularly juicy plot point.
Epiphany two is that Finn makes that ploy at the end of book 3, at the end of the first trilogy, rather than later. I always have some trouble untangling the endings of these things, turns out now that I've outlined two of them, and I had no clue how this thing ended what with Finn scrying and being the golem and honestly being a double agent the whole time, and, why, and where do we go from that? He looks at SMITH's true form, clearly, and gets erased from having been, but thus fixing all the plot problems that had been caused up to that point, in one fell swoop... somehow. And then his new world is one without all that.
You know how Finn's so deep undercover at the start of the second trilogy that he begins to doubt that he was ever a supernatural spy? This gives him jolly reason to think that. Maybe even in this reality, Finn was never even a spy to begin with, and only thinks that he's undercover. But of course that's just more paranoia and turns out to be untrue, because that raises too many questions and doesn't even make sense in the first place. But it doesn't hurt to have the audience questioning right along.
additional tidbits in this new reality
This reality is "our" reality. It's this reality in which, Finn popping into existence sometime around or in midNovember 1992, werewolves never existed but he's pulled in traces of dreamtime along with him and so awaken something. I'd been having trouble with book 1's ending (see above), and now that we can have the original Lycaon myth in the original timeline, motivations for even attempting to change the myth and timeline are becoming clearer (because, you don't just accidentally feed yourself to the gods and get your father turned into a wolf. Just doesn't happen.)
This... this is why we plan ahead. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, they say, but they also say don't save your awesome ideas for some later book in the series, lest there be no later book in the series. Still a load of great ideas, here, not skimping out or anything, but there is still room to have some ideas tidied away for future installments...
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