11/02/2015 7:15 - 8:15 pm

I had plenty of time to write today! With the weather the way it is (it rained all last night, all day today... so much precipitation, it must be [insert ludicrously small volume here, as ill-advised humor about living in desert and consideration of "a lot" of rain]!),  there wasn't much to do at work and I want sent home early. Plenty of time to write, plenty of time to do additional research as well. Not much writing, mostly researching... figured I had an extra day for that before the 28 scenes-in-a-row, getting down one scene / the gist of one scene a day (depending on writing time available) before the end of the month.

I did research today. I guess my post will be about that. Mostly trying to figure out the opening scene, which introduces the world and conflict (which is, after all, the first scene that I'm writing and honestly had no idea before today where to go with it.) Spy stuff, right? I'm so glad that I put in the minimum 5 seconds that I did doing research on it, because there's so much you'd never guess (as well as a bunch that you would, but, seriously-- did you know that "Agent" Moone isn't even technically an agent?)...

11/1/2015 8:15 - 9:30 pm

November 1- here it is, the first day of NaNoWriMo! I spent the last couple of weeks preparing for this moment, and, though it feels like I could spent a couple weeks more doing that, I'm jumping into this. It's a lot easier to be lazy and put it off, but no more of that, now. I suppose I should use this time to explain what I expect this blog to turn into this month...

I say expect because I'm not sure what things will be looking like. I'd been meaning to take this month off from work, but, well, have you ever made money? It's totally far out. I still plan on writing every day this month, ideally for 6-8 hours, but with a job and things to do... No excuses. I'll do my best. It looks like I've got a project to work on, for however long it lasts, at least, and then we'll see what kinds of things will need to be done from there, and if I can get work off then...

10/25/2015 8:15 - 9:45 pm

I spent not-as-much-time-as-I'd-meant-to but still a massive load of time this week (note to self: find some cleverer way to phrase that) figuring out and implementing the plot outline for, honest-to-goodness no kippering you the FIRST Finn Moone book, and not the third like it had turned out I'd been planning all along up to this point.

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.

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.