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.

1/13/2015 8:15-10:45 PM (somethingapalooza)

Missed a day of post yesterday, for some reason- I feel great lately, actually doing productive things with my day (well, sort of-- I remember why I made no post yesterday, and it's because I spent literally almost the whole day prostrate and watching Leverage. And some other shows I'm obsessed with right now, but mostly that-- how much time the average American spends watching TV, for me you can roughly triple that.) Today I spent doing awesome things! You probably don't want to hear about it, though. That's fair. Moving on.

I spent, turns out, a half hour under my three hour full time on Sunday, and in order to make up for that and the hour not spent writing yesterday, it's going to be another 2 1/2 hours' worth of writing in today's post, the exact length of time I spent Sunday as well. Which is really fun, just, writing, doing nothing else but getting something done that you're resolved to do-- creation is a noble aspiration, and, well, anyway, getting down to it, let's address the concerns we've all got with how to handle this thing, as was addressed by Kevin on Sunday.

1/11/2015 3:45-6:15 PM (weekendapalooza I.)

I figure I can do a big three-hour long post today to make up for my prior laziness- or three one-hour ones, or six half-hour ones, or whatever.

The day before yesterday I spent a lot writing, actually- just, none of it was TTDECBA-related, so I simply had no post for that day. Alright, it's okay, it's not that dire that I didn't get a post up on one day. I figured I could just explain what had happened in the next day's post... And I didn't get around to doing a post yesterday either. (The thing is, I would have, too, if it weren't for that severely poorly timed need for a restroom trip...) You start making excuses, you find reasons to make excuses... Oops.

1/8/2015 8:30-9:35 AM

And trying to check out the sight, my web filter blocks this site as "suspicious." For now. And... I really can't blame them... this is a suspicious site...

Anyway. Woke up this morning all tired after spending till midnightish being stupid and awake instead of sleeping, not really wanting to get out of bed, my mind half-switched off and at least brainstorming a really awesome project for me to prototype immediately after finishing this, but my body still way tired- my subconscious so awake like that, I could think super clearly, and...

"Boon!" I exclaimed, springing out of bed. Still kind of tired, but excited enough to be all, whatever. It wasn't Celtic mythology at all, it must have been Hindu! The word for a blessing/curse I was looking for, it must be "boon," from Hindu mythology! And I looked it up.

And it's not "boon."

1/7/2015 9:30-10:20 PM

Alright, I'm back from my research (which mostly consisted of getting distracted and researching Japanese art movements instead.) I did learn a couple of things.

1. I needn't have been concerned about finding out how gambits work- from what I see on TV Tropes, as long as things turn out well for you, you can just claim that you'd planned it to be that way from the inception. Because, seriously, there are like a grazillion different gambits, and I'm not exaggerating much-- seriously a grazillion gambits. Do me a favor, click on that link and try counting the number it lists yourself.
2. Takashi Murakami is God.

Also, sort of a half-thing that I learned, TV Tropes is not the greatest research tool if you're genuinely trying to be productive. I already knew that, but, it keeps rerevealing itself with a wanion. (First rule of writing a book, all you aspiring novelists: trope responsibly.)

1/7/2015 8:45-9:15 AM

Oh my gosh, you guys hear about the attack on the French satirical newsmagazine? My goodness...

I still haven't researched any gambits- I'd open up TV Tropes right now, but TV Tropes once entered is not a trap that one gets out of anytime soon. It's true. Says so in the Bible. (Because if it's true, it must be in the Bible somewhere.)

I really should get on that, though. I'm afraid even to open it up in a separate tab and try to ignore it...

The purpose of the writing time is to go at it, chug along, just write what you know and fill in all that pesky research later. There may be a lot that I need to look up, but I do have plenty of things that I already know about. How compelling a story I can make out of those things... Well, I'm here for an hour, and I'm here to write- may as well write down a list of things I need to do research on; I'd say that counts for my time quite nicely.