Day 23: Ducks and Illuminati Splinter Groups

MAN my writing today was weird. It's very me, though. I'm still learning my style, discovering it, chipping at the core of my own voice and trying to find the way to say what I want to say the clearest. What I want to say is apparently very odd (though why shouldn't it be.) I swing between political commentary, historical analysis, dead serious insight into human nature, make a joke, compound that joke, then swing that joke around into dead serious insight into human nature again. Or that's how I hope it comes across at least. I make a lot of jokes in this, and I don't really like "making" jokes because they just seem so obvious and unfunny to me, and also there's the part where they jar with the rest of the voice that I'd been working in but like I said maybe that is part of my style and there are no bugs, only features.

Being forced to write so quickly really helps. With the style thing. Though I did frequently pause for research and everything as well of course. Is it enjoyable? I don't know if today's stuff is any good or not.

ps I wanted to say something about Magic in the Mirror, but that movie won't come out until 1996, so. also I wanted to make a joke about spell check, which isn't anachronistic or anything (that poem about eye have a spelling chequer dates from around this time,) but I couldn't find a place for it. But that poem is from around this time! 91 or 92, first published in 96ish. So yeah.

day 22- demon attack WIP

Looking at the mobile version of the site, it's quite good. Absolutely nothing like the desktop version. The background is white!, and the typeface is not courier!!. 

Anyway I only had like a half hour today to write, but luckily action scenes come very, very easily to me to freewrite. I'm not a freewriter, but if there's one thing that I can free write, it's action scenes. I'm not sure if they're interesting for anyone else to read, but they're a great way for me to get in loads of word count in a very short amount of time, and it's so awesome that most of the writing I need to do this next week till the end of the month, is action scene writing.

This is a little over 1,000 words, room for more and I'll take that, but this just all came so easily to me, and I can only hope/pray that the rest of it comes out this smoothly in the days upcoming.

day 20: an encounter and a contract

My ostensibly 20 minute sessions are each lasting me like an hour and a half, as I keep on having to pause and look things up. At least I only need two sessions a day instead of three, as revising and clarifying my 1,000 words gives me average of 500 words onto that at least.

The first section here was exactly 200 words in the first draft- do I subtract 200 from my total in the revision? This is a genuine question. That 200 is part of my word count already, of last year. Those words already were part of my 50,000. Revising them, having 200 different words from the original ones, this year, and having 50,000 here, would 200 of those still be "last year's words" because they're interpolated into this year's words? Or would they be this year's words because as long as I have 50,000 this year it doesn't matter whether I have 100,000 between the two years combined?

day 19- woo 3,017+ words!

Doing research on the music charts for 1992, to see what's topping during any given day during the events of the book just for a little atmosphere, I discovered that '92 had terrible taste in music. I mean, I'll give them some credit: Friday I'm in Love by the Cure; One by U2; there's some Mix-a-Lot and Hammer in there if you're willing to admit guilty pleasures... oh and fun fact!: did you know that Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody got back onto the charts again after getting featured in Wayne's World? It made it all the way up to number two; but why not number one, you ask? Well, let me tell you: it was prevented from the number one position by, wait for it, friggin' Jump by Kris Kross! That's the state of music we're talking about in 1992. Just atrocious.

Anyway I really think I'm getting the hang of how the humor in the book is going to be? A lot of it is still way off of course, but I'm getting there.

NaNoWriMo d'18: I actually get the minimum word count in today

Okay so it turns out that the default typeface for the blog hadn't been Courier at all, but a web font called Cousine, which is similarly named enough that I guess I wasn't paying attention when I selected it? It's fixed now, and I am liking this a lot better. Cousine is, fine, as a thing, but it's definitely more a display font than a body font. THIS IS WAY MORE LEGIBLE, EVEN AT THE TINY SIZE OF "NORMAL." Also, the default alignment isn't justified here, but left-aligned, but sometimes the text is just justified for no reason? I thought, maybe it's the write or die html or something, but I just pasted some text from my latest write or die writing session, and it's left aligned! Which is fine, separates this blog visually from Disney Villain Death; just, it's bugging me to have those random paragraphs in justified, in previous posts.

And it's freaking me out a little because the Cousine official website uses the font (as a default display, default paired with the much more legible-as-a-body-font Open Sans) to talk about, in its John Munro-penned sample text, the exact same high-atmospheric conditions that I wrote about in yesterday's entry.

The spectacle was indeed sublime. Apparently we had reached a great height in the atmosphere, for the sky was a dead black, and the stars had ceased to twinkle. By the same illusion which lifts the horizon of the sea to the level of the spectator on a hillside, the sable cloud beneath was dished out, and the car seemed to float in the middle of an immense dark sphere, whose upper half was strewn with silver. Looking down into the dark gulf below, I could see a ruddy light streaming through a rift in the clouds.

-John Munro, A Trip to Venus 

He wrote that in 1897; how the heck did he know what it was like in the mesosphere??

Yeah lowkey freaking me out.

day 16 and 17- a new assassin appears!

Reading Le Carre novels to get a sense of his prose and style. He skips around a lot, uses flashbacks and stuff, which I've already been trying to incorporate into the text, but there are a few things I've been picking up on as well

• I've been keeping things basically tight third-person on Moone? But Le Carre hops into different characters heads a lot. That's another thing I've been trying to do, but now I should do it more deliberately.
• He describes characters' physical appearances. Also a lot of his characters are European. So he describes a lot of them speaking Europeanese.
• People say their inner turmoil out loud, or point out other people's, but it's mostly external. I've got lengthy musings on character motivation and stuff, but it's mostly internal. We can fix that in post if we want.
• Le Carre doesn't have action scenes. He has violence scenes.
• That being said he's still got a good hand for suspense

So there was a probe, in 1992!, the FBI investigating the CIA for the Iran-Contra affair, which is just like perfect for how Moone and Unwin like get together, or get set at each other's throats, or something. Some supernatural equivalent of the Iran-Contra probe. There's this book, Wedge: The Secret war between the FBI and CIA, by Mark Riebling, that has more information specifically on that, and it's all about the history of why the FBI and CIA hate each other even though there's no constitutional basis for their separation of jurisdictions. Need to check that out. It was a coincidence that Moone and Unwin's history is even vaguely mid-80s and Middle-Eastern; I implied that Moone entered the djinn world in Pakistan, but tying it in to Iran-Contra wouldn't be difficult, just move that sucker to Persia instead. Although that does make the Urdu thing a bit of a stretch to talk about.

fay 15: Gef/Moone Reunion & heist planning

 I started filling in the gaps today of the first chapter, finding the ways I wanted to phrase things, that I hadn't managed to find before. It's just scattered words, and wouldn't make much sense to post up here. Getting to the action scene, though, research had revealed that the magic wouldn't work the way I'd set it up, which would mean the whole action scene would need a complete overhaul? I explain more over at my other blog. Instead, I started the bits leading up to the caper. I only had time to do 667 original words, which is 1,000 under on a good day, but I need to do some planning now. Once again, words from last year are italicized, included for context.

NaNoWriMo day 14- Moone flashbacks

13,844, I think, after today's word count. That's almost 9,500 words behind. Which means I need to write about 600 more words a day to make sure I've got a full wordcount by the end (this is rounding up twice, of course.) I actually plan on doing twice that (rounding up yet again); something about the prospect of doing 3,000 words a day is like, yeah okay I can live with that and be rad. I didn't get that many today, of course; I'm 500 under (rounding yadda yadda,) and I'm very very tired after writing all this, but, eh, that's the idea isn't it, to force comfort zones, or whatever.

And besides, if I fail this stretch, I'll still have gotten the actual NaNoWriMo official word count by a long shot.

Day 12- Mostly NOC list stuff

I really need to set this blog in something other than what I've got it. Courier is a great typeface and all, but reading it, at least with this line length and leading, is just a pain. Something needs to change. And this gray background, yeesh! All would be made better larger, I think. Let's try that now and see.

So I'm not sure how cohesive any of the sentences are in today's writing; it's my first day using this tool called Write or Die, and it really does help with word count which is what matters at this stage, but I didn't really edit myself much, so there are a couple of repetitive parts, though I managed to minimize/make non-redundant, most of it.

Nanowrimo day 11 pt 2: The Reynard Cycle

Alright so I've basically figured that Pontifex is Isengrim from the Reynard Cycle, but I'm not sure when to drop that information or just sort of imply it. The Isengrim thing works for two reasons: 1 he's a wolf, 2 he's a priest. And I'd set him up as a trickster type or something, to justify his hot/cold relationship toward Moone and to give him something potentially nasty to do to Moone since he's the only one capable of being pulled in by Moone's tides; Isengrim being the nemesis of a trickster figure kinda deconstructs that in a neat little way and gives the character a lot of crunch.

I still need to write any scenes where Pontifex does anything remotely trickstery

Day 11- "That's Not How Werewolves Work" context

Had this part plotted out since last year, but didn't actually put it up because GAAYYY, only implying subtly that stuff in the first draft. I'm not sure this convo does go during the hurricane, because a lot of the exposition fits better before meeting Unwin. Losing a friend, his powers not having control over that, makes the Unwin threatening Pontifex thing sink in more, and Unwin straight-up calls Pontifex Moone's boyfriend and Moone being rendered uncomfortable by that wouldn't make sense unless those feelings are already there. But this part as initially planned slots quite neatly into day 13 of last year, here. Replacing, "[Moone brings up old werewolf friend, continuing to skirt around the issue, mentions full moon or something.]" I've included a few sentences to sandwich as context nonetheless.

day 9- buncha Unwin stuff

I'm not sure if having a jump even works. It's not getting me any more hits or anything. Also, writing these in Docs and copy-pasting them over to here really jacks up the formatting because it copies over incompatible HTML. On the plus side, the subsection category things I arbitrarily instated really work for this NaNoWriMo because my writing is all over the place, and the category headers just fill in the gaps as to precisely where.

NaNoWriMo Day 7- A few misc Pontifex POVs etc

The Pontifex sat still in the old tarp tent, listening to the rain and wind batter and buffet the frayed fabric outside. He was seated on a rudimentary cloth tarp, a single flickering candle before him. Pontifex could feel the humming of the Night Things around him, the souls and gifts and curses, every thing's attachment to magic, vibrating like a string connecting each particle to higher dimensions. With a stroke of his finger, Pontifex could reach out and pluck the strings, like the strings of a great awful interdimensional harp, and make them sing, or silence them. Intensify the vibration that connected a magic to its source.

Moone was so close to him; Pontifex could practically feel the man's body heat, feel the blood pump through his body. Maybe it was an illusion caused by the steady flicker of the candle, but Pontifex thought that he could see Moone's pulse thump rhythmically in Moone's neck. With the dangers of the world torn away from Moone, Pontifex struggled, desiring strongly to replace those dangers with himself.

Pontifex regarded the sleeping Moone's naked strings before him, and saw a harmony and intensity of them, and something more beyond. The particular vibration, the length and thickness of the string itself, this particular note chord. He stared at it a long time, long into the night, far longer than the night should have lasted, each minute stretching out and out and out until morning. It was a chord that he had only seen once before. In himself.

Pontifex stretched and pondered his fate. Just a few months ago, the thought has occurred to him [flashback??]

Shorts!

Michael J Miracle was used to feeling like an outcast without truly being one. Up through his early years of childhood and to the cusp of adolescence, his parents had been raising a Changeling without knowing it, while Miracle was being raised by fae. The switch back between them, Overneath coming and covertly replacing the changeling with the real Michael, happened overnight, Michael's memories being swapped with that of the changling's, so that he would fit seamlessly into his own life, which he had not been living himself. Nobody on the outside noticed, and it wasn't until around age 19 that Miracle began getting the strange feeling that his memory was not his own, that his life and body had not been his own. There had been some crack in the spell, which Miracle pried at and pried at until he began seeing fragments of his true childhood underneath. The sweet memories of childhood were all hollow. Miracle was truly raised and groomed to be a fairy. Not like a homosexual fairy. I know how that sounds. And stuff about his body not being his own all sounds like, transgender stuff or whatever, but it's actually fairy stuff. As in literal fairies.
Digging through his memory, reconstructing it, he could work out the Old Magic of the Fae, which he had been schooled in. Not that he knew why he of all people had been taken. Nor if being returned was part of the Unseelie Court's black machinations all along. The magic he could reconstruct from his floating scraps of memory was strange, abstract.

Xemf's method of infiltrating an organization was simple: find a position of power, and fill it. This power could be cultural or political or religious or whatever. In the early days of Man, Xemf's people had been gods. (a man is his own ancestor in dreamtime but Xemf is a god, in dreamtime version of reality, status changed with Pontifex taking role of his own ancestor, sacrificing son which was himself [make Christian parallels, God is in Dreaming so He is His own son] With these supernatural structures, coming into power was more difficult to come by. The leader of the company was an entity called SMITH, who would see through Xemf in a moment. Xemf's skin crawled thinking about it, literally warping and shivering like popping bacon frying in a pan. So Xemf had to go lower than that, find someone within the organization, with connections to a powerful place, and make his way up.

Moone could half-ass things and be fine, just happen to stumble across the correct solution to a supernatural problem, but he wanted to do as much research as possible, because it was true that he would interact with the real versions of myths, but he needed to know the mythic versions of reality. He had a contact in the mundane world, a college professor of world folklore and mythology. Comparing the mythic versions of creatures and events with the glimpses he saw from his frequent attacks yielded an intriguing parallax view into the true natures of things. [offer example of that.]
In later years, as well, new technological forces offered to Moone high-tech solutions. Through the magic (was it literally magic though? maybe, but Moone was unsure) of the internet, Moone was now able to contact experts from halfway across the globe, querying to them about such minute subjects as [subjects!] Through Professor [name]'s relationship with the college, as well, Moone could access a particular application of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, a technology [name] assured Moone would soon revolutionize not just communications, but culture and the entire world.

[Scene of Pontifex telling Moone truth of a particular human myth to show his connection to world, prior to sexy werewolf scene where the truth about werewolves is revealed]

[flashback to the Dreaded Eye]

[exposition taking place in the past, Moone getting attacked randomly in the middle of it.]

[random time travel



On a twilit plain in another Plain, a one-eyed wizard, resplendent in a glowing robe of a color never seen by human eye, thrust his sword through the skull of the felled wyverncat in front of him, and laughed a rich hearty laugh, one step closer to obtaining the victory that was needfully his.

Wnednysll've the Iris was a powerful mage from the Realm of the Rainbows, who was born and raised on the borders between Indigo and Violet, discovered his propensity for cloth-based magic at a young age, schooled at the Community College of Puce, graduated batchelor middle of his class without really applying himself, discovered out of college the importance of labor and perseverance, went back to school, applied himself this time, graduated Xanthic University class of '76 pretty high in his class, took out a small business loan from Rainbow's First Credit Union, and opened up a haberdashery in Emerald City, where he did well for himself weaving magical laces you can use to strangle your enemies with, paying off his student and business loans within the space of a few short years. And he hated Finnegan Michael Moone's stupid guts.

Which admittedly was a pretty common trait to have, but ask anybody, and they'd tell you, oh that Wnednysll've hates Moone's guts in a particular manner, it's all rather disturbing if you ask me, I mean that Moone guy is kind of a jerk but Wnednysll've over there well he takes it to a new level, a level of obsession.

And it was quite true. Out of his darkest and laciest lace-based magics, he saved the darkest and most terrible for himself, staying up nights laboring and researching deeper and deeper into the Dark Lace Arts toiling and weaving finer and finer laces and selling none of them, though he could have fetched a king's ransom for any, and all for one purpose: to put an end to Moone once and for all. More than a decade of toiling in the dark, feeling Moone's tides on his back as a constant taunt, drove him in this quest, and as Wnednysll've the Iris grew more powerful, he could feel the consummation of the quest grow nearer.

Which was what had brought him here, to this plain, after all these years. Having defeated the final guardian of the final gate, he could now face his true enemy, and destroy him in glorious combat.

Withdrawing his sword from the skull of the felled beast in front of him, Wnednysll've pressed past, to the craggy stone arch before him, the arch that formed a nexus between his plain and the plain of that mortal Moone. Spreading his arms out  wide to the sides, he pressed each hand against either side of the arch, tilting his head back and feeling out Moone's tide. Feeling the force of the nexus tugging him into the void, Wnednysll've latched onto Moone's tide... he let it take him away...

Wnednysll've the Iris found himself floating out in empty space, Moone's Bane inexplicably disappearing and leaving Wnedysll've with no dimensional anchor point to latch onto. Wnednysll've blinked, though his eye couldn't tell the difference. He was trapped in the endless void now. Alone. Forever.

And one thought crossed his mind, before the madness engulfed him. That thought was this: You friggin' serious right now?


encounter Westward, a great golden fish with insect legs, crawling around the wall of its cage with smooth precise movements like a chameleon's. Sidling through to the edge of the cage, stuck its head through the bars.