aleathiel | Nano 2007

I'm leaving a note... :)

So glad to see you again! xoxo

Hey lady! Good to hear from you. Will of course friend you over there if you aren't already.

hi! i'd like to read please! ^^

Okay sure.

yo

Hiya. How are you? I'm so sorry I haven't been around. I feel like I abandoned you (and everyone else, but you especially) and I'm terribly sorry.

Are you doing Nano? I seem to remember you thought about it last year. I'm sure you are already friended on the nano journal, but will check just in case.

It'll be great being NaNo buddies again this year. :) I actually have some time [glance at calendar] to figure out what I'm doing before I start this year, as opposed to last year when....

OK, this just occurred to me as I type this and I'm trying not to laugh. :P Last year I had no time to prep for NaNo because I was frantically trying to finish my final obligation for the LOTRiPS FQF (which has gone to fic-fest heaven, sadly) which turned out to be "Spirit of Vengeance." I finished it barely in time, got it posted, and the next day I opened up my first Word file for NaNo and had to think of a name for the protag.

This year, I don't have anything I'm actually writing, or at least nothing that has a deadline attached, but I submitted "Spirit of Vengeance" (with the fanfic labels scrubbed off) to Torquere and it was accepted, yay! Right now I'm in the middle of going over the edits on it, though, and so as we approach NaNo07, I am once again working on "Spirit of Vengeance," and the deadline for finishing the edits and sending them back is... October 31. [giggling facepalm] OK, this is too funny! :D

Anyway, working off edits isn't much fun, but it's a lot easier than actual writing is, so I should be done with it in plenty of time to maybe actually jot down a few notes about whatever I end up doing for NaNo. And naming my characters before I sit down and stare at a blank word processor file, too. [wry smile]

Any idea what you're going to do? I remember you being far more organized than I was last year. :)

Angie

Angie

Congrats on "Spirit of Vengeance" - that's great! I hope the edits are going well. I find them both easier and harder than writing the original text - yes you have something to work from, but I find myself difficult to please.

I have ideas, but that's about it. I want to write something about colonial contact and I have a motley collection of bits and pieces that interested me while I was studying. So I'm going to throw them all together to make a world, rather than try and set my story at a real point and location in history (also, I figured that it being Nano I wouldn't have the time to do thorough enough research and would get myself tangled. This way I can just used the bits I like). I have three characters: two male and one female. Two of them have backgrounds and the third doesn't yet although I suspect he might end up being the most important. Currently they are called Linus, Jared and Martha, but that might change. I have random scraps of scenes, but no plot and no idea how they meet or what they are doing or where they are going - but I do have a landscape for them to do whatever it is in.

So I need a general plot direction and a first step, then I'll start writing and see what happens.

How about you? Any plans?

I'm about halfway through the edits. It's mostly little crap, and gritting my teeth and hitting "accept" over and over because man, Torquere loves them some commas. :/ I keep telling myself everyone has a house style and it's not a huge deal, and really it isn't. I'd have rejected about 95% of the suggestions if they'd been given to me by a beta in a fanfic environment, but this is a professional editor and they're going to be handing me money, so I can deal with it. At any rate, I'm saving up my squawking credit for the really important things, where I was trying to do something specific and she doesn't seem to have gotten it and her suggested changes would've messed things up more than I'm willing to shrug off. There really aren't very many of those, so over all it's going well.

When you say "make a world" do you mean SF or fantasy? However you do it, a colonial setting definitely gives you some interesting story possibilities. [nod]

I have a few possibilities I've been thinking about, but I just read Mark Morford's latest column and got another idea, so who knows what'll have risen to the top of the pile by the time I get going? I did a little research a while back for a pre-Islamic Middle Eastern fantasy story with a djinni, sort of. I want it to reflect as much authentic culture as I can, though, which means I need to research at least things like architecture and art and culture from that period, some landscapes including plants and animals and birds, that sort of thing. It probably won't change the story much -- that's based on a couple of con artists and some mages and the actual lore about djinni (the proper plural of which is "djann," which I didn't know before) -- but I want the feel and the setting to come across right and that'd take more research than I can manage between now and 1 November. I'll have to save that for later, unless I trip over some sort of pre-Islamic cultural Wiki or something. [grin]

Then there's something I came up with as a tongue-in-cheek example in a post I made on my writing blog -- a humorous demon who's desperate to figure out who killed Satan's favorite succubus before the Boss gets back from Tahiti. Someone in comments asked when I was going to write it, LOL! I have to admit, though, it could be a pretty good humorous mystery. :) I don't know that I could do justice to 50K words of both mystery and humor in one month, though. Of course with NaNo it's not supposed to be good....

Let's see, have you ever read the story "The Monkey's Paw?" It's about the downside of a cool magical item that most people think would be wonderful to own, except it always turns around and bites them. I was thinking of something like that, a thing which always grants the owner's every wish, no matter how briefly entertained in the dark solitude of one's own mind. So if the thought, "Oh, drop dead!" passed through your mind in a tenth of a second, the person would. You could make them be alive again, but people would notice. You could make them forget, but what if they noticed that? It'd be a horrific thing to own because it's always on, even when you're asleep and dreaming. And you can't just give it away or throw it away -- it'll come back to you unless you sell it, and you have to explain to the buyer exactly how it works. That could be really icky. I don't know if I could sustain it for 50K words, though. Maybe a novelette?

Redwood seeds have a tough protective coat and won't sprout until they've been through a fire. What if an intelligent alien species has the same sort of thing -- they carry fertilized eggs or whatever in their bodies and they have to be burned before the eggs can develop. And they have to be alive up to the point of being burned because if they just die then the eggs die too -- no easy way out with just cremating the body of someone who died naturally. How would a culture develop in response to this sort of physiological imperative? And what if someone developed a procedure to let eggs be removed alive and then burned in a controlled, artificial environment? Or even transplanted into an animal and then burned? Whoa, conflict!

Or maybe I'll come up with something completely different in the next week....

Angie

I love them all! My two favourites are the Middle Eastern one (no, I didn't know the plural of djinni was djann, that's exactly the sort of thing I like. I just discovered that brightsmith is another name for a silversmith) and the fire eggs one. I can completely see the difficulties in doing the Middle Eastern one for nano, though. It's exactly while I've gone in a fantasy direction instead of setting my story in the Spanish conquest of Peru.

That said, don't put it aside and never write it. I have a book full of bits and pieces on eighteenth dynasty Egypt because I want to write a novel about Tutankhamun's wife (accidentally read something about her - don't even remember where - years ago and have wanted to write about her ever since) but I don't know nearly enough yet.

Both the Satan's succubus and the "Monkey's Paw" sound entertaining, although they grab me less than the other two. I can see how you might have trouble expanding them into 50k, but on the other hand you might have a sudden new idea for a development about a third of the way in and then it will all roll along beautifully.

The final suggestion I like a lot. I like the idea of exploring how a culture would behave in light of this biological oddity, both in how it would develop itself and how its citizens would behave to one another, and what they would believe about their own lives, and also in addressing the conflict if you did bring in the scientific developments. Would there be a "religious" reaction from those to whom dying for their offspring was noble? Or even just normal? Would it be greeted with a sense of awe? A chance to know their own children? Could only the female carry the eggs? Or only the male? Do they even have such a thing as female and male?

You sound like you have some great ideas to explore and I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with them, or with something new!

As to my setting, it's fantasy, but not medieval. I was initially basing it on the conquest of the Americas, so late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. However, the conquerors are not based on a "European" model completely, I've taken a lot of ideas from sixteenth century Chinese culture (think Dream of the Red Chamber).

It isn't set right at the point of conquest, but several generations later, so there's a mixing (and clashing) of culture and ways of thinking. The "native" rulers have been courted by the invaders and many allowed to maintain their places - one of the characters comes from a "vassal" culture. The conquerors, of course, think of themselves as being the noble and the right, and they classify everyone in terms of how many generations away they are from having pure invader blood (going to need country names soon) and in ranking the vassal states in order of their compliance and use to the newly set up government.

At the moment I don't even have any of this written down, so it is subject to change based on my mood as well as the strength of my memory!

I love learning little bits of info too, both when I write and when I'm reading. :) That's why I appreciate it when writers do some research, and get annoyed when they don't, at least when their failed guesses happen to coincide with areas where I can tell they're guessing (and failing).

And yeah, the djinni one is definitely on the list, even if I don't do it for NaNo. I have a file full of notes and links and references I copied off the net about djinni. I just need more setting details before I can do anything worthwhile with it.

The sorta-Chinese colonization story sounds interesting. [ponder/nod] I read this one fantasy story back whenever, where this one land was inhabited by a ruling conquerer culture and a subservient native culture. You find out eventually that the whole thing had been caused by this huge cultural misunderstanding. When the people who conquered the land first showed up, the natives met them on the beach and offered them food. To the conquerors, servants and slaves provide food, so they interpreted it to mean that the natives were acknowledging their subordinate status and were freely offering to serve the newcomers. In the native culture, though, those who offer food are the providers and have higher status than the dependents who accept it. So they were offering no such thing, but the newcomers had the weapons technology and aggressive attitude to enforce their misinterpretation. For centuries thereafter, the rulers referred to... "the compact" or something like that, the "promise" the natives made to serve, and whenever they start rumbling with resentment or rebellion, the rulers start snarling about oathbreakers and all. It was a cool situation and when it was finally explained I was all, "Wow, neat!" I love stuff like that, much better than just "They showed up and took over and they're assholes, period." I mean, these particular people probably would've tried to take over anyway [wry smile] but it was neat to see that they actually had something (no matter how flimsy and wrong) on which to base their assumptions of superiority. It gives their culture and their attitudes an interesting twist.

I like the idea of various vassal states, though. That lets the invaders play them off against each other in a psychological divide-and-conquer move. [nod]

I've lost way too many story ideas over the years, so I finally just started my "Ideas" file and I jot down whatever comes to me there. Sometimes it's an actual plot idea and sometimes it's just some cool piece of info I might be able to work into a story somewhere. I have a separate one for fanfic-specific ideas, although a lot of them are interchangeable.

Angie

Hehe, that's clever - the compact story I mean. I suppose it was inspired by claims by stories that the Spanish claimed that the Mexica thought that they were gods and welcomed them and wanted them to rule.

I have an "ideas" notebook, rather than a file. And a mini one in my handbag just in case idea strikes! It's a chaotic jumble of stuff, like you say, some actual story ideas some just interesting things or fragments of ideas that get incorporated into something else later. I also used to have a fanfic separate one, but now they are pretty much all thrown in together.

I hadn't thought about the idea of the invaders playing off the different states against each other. Hmm, that has interesting posibilities. :)

I have no idea where the writer got it, but I love the whole culture clash thing, where misunderstandings come from different peoples having different customs and interpreting things differently, rather than just from one or more parties being unutterably stupid because it's in the script. [wry smile]

I suppose if I went out with any regularity, it might be a good idea for me to have a notebook for my purse. [duck] I really don't, though. Since the slashy retreat at the beginning of August, I've been out... three times, I think. Twice to the movies and once to the symphony. I just don't crave running around like most people do, for whatever reason. When I was a kid, sending me to my room wasn't much of a punishment (yay, time for reading!) and I haven't changed much since then. :) And since my knee is still messed up from said slashy retreat, I have even less desire to go running around. [wry smile]

I hadn't thought about the idea of the invaders playing off the different states against each other. Hmm, that has interesting posibilities. :)

Feel free to pinch the idea, then. [ties it up in a bow and hands it over]

Angie

I like to go other places to think. I'm lucky because I live on the coast between a mountain range and the sea, so I have both beach walks (which are gorgeous at this time of year) and mountain hikes to allow me thinking and planning time.

And there's always sitting in the waiting room at the dentist and so on.

I just had a sudden unexpected new idea for a completely different story. Not sure whether to leap on board and see what I can do with it, or not. It's taking a legend (the story of Branwen from the Mabinogion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branwen) and playing around with it. I'm not sure how yet, so it might be something to keep for another day, but it just popped into my head.

You could definitely do some things with that story-skeleton. [nodnod] I love this part, though:

On landing in Wales at Aber Alaw in Anglesey Branwen died of grief that so much destruction had been caused on her account, crying "Oh Son of God, woe to me that I was born! Two fair islands have been laid waste because of me!"

Is it typical or what that the central female character is shown expressing such remorse over all this death and devastation, which is clearly her fault [eyeroll] and ends up dying of it, doubtless the only way she could possibly have redeemed herself for this wickedness she'd "done." When in actuality she was just a pawn handed around by a bunch of whack-job men who were the cause of all the violence. [facepalm]

And don't mention dentists. :P I really need to go soon but I hate going.... [hides under the bed]

Angie

*g* Shall we say that she won't be wailing such nonsense in my version? It's a great story. I've always liked the 'evil' brother best. But that probably goes without saying. Not sure if I fancy doing this one for nano - obviously it has a lot more plot already sorted (except anything I do outside that skeleton obviously) but I almost think it requires more work than writing something from scratch! Will ponder it and see. I'm going to visit my sister at university tomorrow and am home on Tuesday, so have lots of car time to think.

How are your thoughts progressing? You picked an idea yet or waiting to see what happens on November 1st?

Actually, I've been chatting with Jack over on IJ and I think we've come pretty close to working out a plot he could use, but nothing really concrete on mine. [bemused smile]

I don't want to just wait and start from ground zero -- I think last year's NaNo was a lot more stressful for me than it needed to be because of that. I need to finish two jobs before I really work on mine, though. I'm working on one of them (the critique/commentary one) around e-mails, and I'm about sixty pages from being done, huzzah. Even a couple of days to just think about what I'm doing and do some keyboard-babbling would help immensely. [crossed fingers]

And yeah, that part of the Branwen story could definitely use a bit of updating. [wry smile] The evil brother is an interesting character, although the whole murdered-his-baby-nephew thing is a bit O_O you know? Very common -- there's crap like that in the Bible, and in a lot of other older literature from various cultures, from when children were considered the property of their parents, especially their fathers, and people seemed to think nothing of killing or maiming a child just to punish the parents. But still. Ick.

And I know what you mean about it possibly requiring more work than making up something from scratch. I think it depends what you're good at, though. I've seen writers opine, in clear type in front of everyone, that they like fantasy "because you can just make it all up." With the implication being that you can just make up each individual chunk as you need it, and that the writer is completely unaware of any necessity for the society they're writing about to actually hold together in a logical way, for the parts to fit and relate logically to one another. Creating a good fantasy (or SF) culture from scratch is hard, and it takes a lot of thought and work. But if you have a good grounding in anthropology and history and a variety of literatures from various cultures, it's easier than if you're starting from scratch intellectually.

At the same time, doing something historical is a lot of work because you need to look everything up. Sources aren't always readily available, and there's a lot of crap out there that's been published with a straight face. (But of course you know that.) And some info just doesn't exist, so you have to absorb what is available well enough to get a decent feel for it, so you can reason or intuit what people would have done to accomplish some task, or how they'd have thought about some issue, in a way which fits with what's known about their society. Here too, it's really hard if you're starting from scratch, especially if you have a lot of garbage (like from movies, for example) to un-learn, before you can start building an accurate picture in your head about what, say, 15th century Florence was like.

So it depends where a newbie writer is coming from. Depending on the newbie, if they realize how much work a historical is, they might decide to write a fantasy because they think it'll be easier. And if they realize how much work a fantasy is, they might decide to write a historical because it's "easier." (After all, you can just look stuff up -- that's what Wikipedia is for. [facepalm])

Which one is actually easier depends on your background and how much relevant info you have in your head already. Neither way is actually easy, but one might be easiER than the other if you start out with some of the background you need.

None of which is anything you didn't know, of course, but I've been up all night and I'm babbling. [duck] Actually, I could probably get a column out of this.... :)

Angie

I understand completely what you mean. I would say that they are both difficult, but that the balance is different. Depending on how you write, and what challenges you, different people would lean in one direction or the other. There's also always the people who just write the historical stories without research, but that just hurts me so unbelievably much that I can't even count them as real writers (that said, there are of course people who deliberately mess with history, but in order to do that they still need to have done the relevant research).

My thought on Branwen (I've been at work and mulling it over when I should have been concentrating...) are currently that I would write it as a story about telling stories. Parts of it are so fantastical - the scale of her brother Bran, for example - that I wouldn't be happy telling it without some further explanation, which of course currently doesn't exist. So what I'd like to do is explore how a story is formed out of events, how it is related and which bits are remembered. Who are painted as the villains and who are the heroes?

That said, I also had some new ideas for the invader story, so I might do still do that one and retire Branwen until December. We shall see.

I'm going to see my sister tomorrow so probably won't have internet for a couple of days. Will probably kill me :P

There's also always the people who just write the historical stories without research, but that just hurts me so unbelievably much that I can't even count them as real writers

Absolutely. [cringes and reaches for a blunt weapon] I used to OD on historical romances pretty regularly and since I started when I was twelve I didn't always realize when a writer was taking liberties. [cough] Looking back, though, it was pretty grim sometimes. And the ones I read later, after I'd actually started studying history, were pretty bad.

For example, I mean, OK, I see the reason why someone would mess with this particular historical reality, but just once I want to read a medieval where the Lord and Lady of the castle slept in a curtained niche in one wall and everyone else had a pallet on the floor of the great hall. There -- let's see you hide your illicit sex in that environment! :P I mean, you could, but you might actually have to get creative, what a concept. And it's just amazing how many of these fourteenth century castles came complete with a dozen private bedrooms. [facepalm]

there are of course people who deliberately mess with history, but in order to do that they still need to have done the relevant research

Absolutely again. [nodnod] I love alternate history, or even a historical story where the writer changed some particular thing or a few things, deliberately and to support the plot. But to do it well you have to know how things were to start with so you can make intelligent changes. And it's nice when the writer owns up to the changes they made -- Judith Tarr does that in a lot of her books, in the Author's Notes. Too many "historical" writers just change whatever out of apparent ignorance, though, because it's easier to do what five hundred other historical romance or fantasy writers have done than to actually look something up. [sigh]

So what I'd like to do is explore how a story is formed out of events, how it is related and which bits are remembered. Who are painted as the villains and who are the heroes?

That could be a very cool story. [nodnod] Mercedes Lackey did something like that in a short story once. She had this series of short stories about two female adventurers, one a mage and the other a mercenary, and there was this minstrel guy who wrote songs about them but got everything wrong, painting them as impossibly heroic when the actual stories had been very down-to-earth. She did this one story about the first time he actually caught up with them on their travels and was able to observe them in action for himself, rather than relying on travellers' tales. It was hysterical -- she showed what actually happened and then how he wrote the song, and all along the way we were in his POV so we saw how appalled he was about exactly how un-heroic his great bardic heroines really were. It was a great comic treatment of the subject. :)

Doing something serious would be cool as well. It's an important point to make, that stories are told and later written for different reasons. Everyone knows the old "the winner writes the history books" thing, but there are other factors as well. If you're telling a story as a cautionary tale or a moral exhortation or an explanation of some rule or doctrine or principle, then you've got a specific purpose you're trying to achieve in the telling and changing details, even fairly major ones, in service to that purpose probably won't seem like a horrible thing to do. You could make a great story out of how the story of some event changed and why.

Good luck with the next couple of days. Hang on, hon -- it's horrible being disconnected but it is survivable! ;)

Angie

Hiya! I am back and I did survive the internet drought :P

I think I'm probably going to run with the invaders story rather than the Branwen one, because I've had some new ideas about the invaders homeland that I'd like to explore (although when and how I have yet to discover!)

I have horrible double shifts tomorrow and Saturday (meaning I'm working 6.30am to 12.30pm, then 6pm to 12am) which seems like a really cruel way to start nano. But I am determined I will get my wordcount done (in between the essential naps!) and then Sunday I will breathe and maybe even plan.

How go your thoughts? Have you narrowed down the plans are are you just going to see what happens when you open up a new word document tomorrow?

Hey, welcome back! [wave]

I still haven't decided. [headdesk] I finished a commentary on a novel manuscript for a friend a few days ago (the thing was thirty pages longer when I sent it back to her -- it took a while to do but she was very happy with the comments so that's good) and then I finished the edits on "Spirit of Vengeance" last night. Or actually this morning, since it was after midnight. Then I waited until Torquere put the Halloween stories up so I could post around with a link to mine. Then the usual BSing around with e-mail and stuff, talking to some of the other writers -- one of whom was also waiting for the stories to go up, and then afterward discovering a continuation to a favorite series and then chatting with that writer about it, which took a while so I was up all night till around 6am. I finally got to bed but couldn't sleep. [headdesk]

I should be fiddling around with NaNo ideas but my head's all buzzy, you know? Like, I'm too tired to do anything useful but I still can't sleep. I'll probably zombie around all day and then just start typing in a blank file tomorrow and see what it turns into. :P

Major suckage on your double shifts. :( Hopefully that's the last of that for a while?

Angie

Also, I completely understand about the editing. I think picking your battles is the right idea. But also remember that since it is a professional editor s/he might actually have some good ideas. I have a tendency to hate other people mucking about with what I've written and I'm working very hard to get over it, because the few times that it has happened and led to any kind of significant change I did have to concede at the end that it was an improvement. I guess if it's mostly for house style then you just have to grit your teeth and do what they want.

I'm trying very hard to keep in mind that this woman's a professional editor and probably does know what she's doing. [wry smile] And she's caught some good stuff, like a few times I used the same word or phrase too close together; I hate doing that and I'm glad she flagged it. Most of it is little stuff, though, like adding commas before every conjunction, or between every pair of clauses. :P I've been trying to cut down on how many commas I use and here she is (and my other Torquere editor too, with the two short stories) putting them all back and adding more. [laugh/headdesk] Stuff like that I can deal with, though; it's part of what comes under "house style." [nod]

Angie

Assuming that it's a Lotrip in some way, shape or form, would you friend me too, please? I really like the fics of yours I've read and I'm still saving a few up for reading on that rainy day.

It's not going to be a Lotrip, it's going to be original fiction. I'm happy to still friend you if you are interested, but it's also fine if you aren't.

If you'll have me, I think I'll give it a try. Just wouldn't have been too keen on, for instance, a Stargate adventure (no offence, just not my thing...). Happy writing!

Okay will do. :)

Cheers!

You are very welcome. Now that you are added on there, feel free to toddle over and have a look at last year's nano.

Mmmmh, had a look at the first two paragraphs and i'm intrigued. Is this going to be there for a while as yet? If so, I might save it and read a little here and there, it's a proper book, after all!

Yes, I'm happy to leave it there while I write this next one. Just to let you know - it is in excess of 50 000 words, but it isn't finished. It will be, but it isn't yet.

(http://pics.livejournal.com/random_fandom/pic/017wgw8t)

Nano 2007

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