"Befoe the story, there was what happened...before the story."

Nanowrimo is drawing to a close and I’ve got about 3k left to go. Not too much to worry about, especially with a relatively empty night before me. However, it is a bit daunting to see so many of my nano buddies crossing the line now…of course I would like to blame getting sick TWICE this month (first with a kidney infection, then a cold, of all things) for not being done by now, but there you have it. I am confident I will finish, but it’s just a matter of doing it within the next 24 hours.

Of course, something rather silly happened over Thanksgiving break that is writing related, and I thought this would be a good chance to share it.

While watching a movie with my family I suddenly came up with a great idea for a possible prologue in CROSS//Rebirth, and also the very first thing meant to be read in the series by any reader. (The prequel novel does not count, as it’s meant to be read at least halfway through the series). I then proceeded to write it in a little less than two hours. I find it hilarious that this inspiration comes to me when the first draft itself is almost complete…considering I always write chronologically. And yet prologues are almost always an exception, usually because they take place so much earlier than the rest of my story, so it’s like writing an entirely different short story altogether. I’ve noticed this trend especially in the modern novels I write…it seems that I can’t come up with an actual prologue for first novels in a series until about at least halfway through that draft. Maybe it’s because until then I haven’t come up with the entire feel of the story. Maybe it’s because I’m just mentally and creatively lazy like that.

So to those of you who were/are doing nano…did you finish? If you did, was it your first time or just one of many in an awesome streak? If you didn’t, are you sad or did you expect to not finish? I’m curious, so share. <3

"Who's the puppet, who's the master?"

First of all, I feel that I should comment on NaNoWriMo thus far. Currently I am a couple thousand words ahead and expect to finish with some time to spare. Getting sick for a weak though put me a little behind, but don’t fear, I shall prevail! =)

With that, moving on.

In said novel I have a character who does some pretty heinous things, even if you have a pretty loose definition of morality. Stealing, killing, raping, torturing, doing drugs, blowing up planets…pretty much nothing is sacred to her. Naturally I wouldn’t condone most of these actions in the real world and am not exactly proud of this character for having the actions she does…but I have run into the notion a couple of times that, as the author, I should be able to control this character. To not make her do these things. To make her hold back, to make her not have the thoughts and desires to do those things at all.

Here’s a hint: it doesn’t work that way.

Not to say that I, as an author, don’t have any control at all. After all, I did create the little hellion. Technically. Actually, said character never even existed in the original outline drafts. It wasn’t until I started writing the first draft that she just appeared and asserted herself as one of the main antagonists. Oh joy. Who was this person? And what did she want with my novel? I went with it. She ended up coloring things for sure, but to what extent? She was doing things I never originally planned, things I never originally saw occurring in this novel. And yet there she was, raping and pillaging like it was in the script all along.

This opens the can of worms of how much responsibility we authors have over our characters. We like to think we know them. Everything. We make huge profiles of our characters and write extensive biographical histories for them. And then they pull some crazy stunt that leaves you sitting there at your keyboard going “OH HELL WHAT?!”. And yet it works, and it fits them perfectly in some weird and perverted way.

I somewhat akin it to like raising a child. We want our characters to do the right thing, the grow and become their own unique people. But they rarely turn out the way we expect them to, and even rarely parrot back our own opinions and moralities we instilled into them. And yet we have to love them, because they are ours. We may not be proud of them, we may not agree with what they do, but we see what their necessity is to these worlds and are thankful that they are there.

On one hand I can say I do not totally control my characters, but on the other, they certainly do not necessarily control me. At the end of the day I can edit some acts I deem unneeded out. They still did them, they’re still there, but I can ultimately silence them. Like putting them in time-out.

I just hope that when retirement comes they put me in a nice home.

Countodown to Chaos.

Hey kids, guess what…only one more week before NaNoWriMo ’09 begins!

Now I’m not exactly the most…level person when it comes to NaNoWriMo. In fact, I unsympathetically joined the ranks of the rebels long ago when I first started participating in NaNoWriMo in 2007. The rules stipulate something about starting a story from scratch or some nonsense. Hogwash. I do Works in Progress and I happily proclaim so!

You see, this is my life: writing is pretty much the only medium I’ve clung to throughout my years, even when I was barely bigger than a toddler. I’m always working on something, not just in November. For me NaNoWriMo is about the personal challenge of forcing yourself to exude 50,000 words in the span of 30 days. And if I do it (which I have every year) then I validate. Some people who also work on WiP don’t like to validate, but whatever. I wrote 50k words in the span of 30 days, give me my damn certificate! I don’t see how I’m too much different than from those who start from “scratch”, when that means they spent all of October creating the most detailed outline on earth that can simply be strung together with connecting words, and voila, writer has 15k already the first day. Bwahaha.

But all charades aside, I am mostly prepared for this year’s NaNo, school time permitting. I’ve compiled what I have so far of Rebirth (what I’ve worked on during NaNo the past two years) into one document, and it currently stands at 304 pages and 183,446 words. That’s like…almost 4 NaNos right there. Hoping beyond hope that this will be the last NaNo for Rebirth since I would quite like to finish it this year.

So, now to pass it onto you, dear reader…what are you plans for this year’s NaNoWriMo, if you are doing anything at all? Are you a rebel or straight edge? Go ahead, surprise me, you’re not going to get any criticism from this corner of the internet. =)

"I saw it in a dream."

So it’s no secret that I have crazy, wild, and totally inappropriate dreams. These dreams in themselves are amazing story fodder: I know, when I was in fifth grade I wrote a compilation of all the interesting dreams I had up until that time. I even had sex dreams starting back when I was eleven or so. (Such an early bloomer I was.) However, my dreams never quite impacted my writing life so much as they did back in spring 2007 when I went to sleep and dreamed what would become the entire plot outline for the first CROSS// installment. The dream itself wasn’t so engrossing: I dreamed that I was watching it like a movie that my family rented. However, I was entirely unable to get the dream out of my head for a whole day, like it was haunting me, and finally I ended up drawing out a book outline and, after testing out a first scene, put it on the backburner until that following November when I decided to use CROSS// as my first NaNoWriMo experiment. It worked, and now I have a series I am very proud of.

…And now here comes the segue.

I had another dream last night. Particularly about one of my novels, that takes place where I am writing it right now. I really liked what the dream insinuated…basically a very bashful first kiss between two prominent characters. IT was very lovely and I could very well find a way to fit it into the story, but the problem is…would it really be necessary? Without giving too much away, having those characters kiss NOW would be detrimental to their relationship in subsequent plots. This is where I have to make a decision: either use it as is, or get SUPER CREATIVE and find a way to make it work with an insignificant kiss.

Dreams do that to you, though. While one may argue that dreams are a reflection of your subconscious, I would also argue that dreaming is a creative outlet. How many stories would not exist today without dreams? I’ve even had people come up to me and share their dreams with me because they think it would make an interesting story and they don’t want to write it…not that I have yet to do anything like that, but I always find it interesting that other people have dreams too that they absolutely feel need to be told to everyone as a novel. Maybe it’s our mind telling us “Here, you have this amazing idea, but you’re too daft to see it yourself: now get it on it.”

And with that, I’m off to use the remainder of my evening trying to fit and impromptu “first kiss” into my novel. Wish me luck?

Technology still hates me.

Since being back at school, I’ve had to take extreme measures to make sure I’m still writing. Well, not completely extreme, but you must get what I mean. I’m trying at the very least to chug through at least one page a day on Nagnomei, and two on CROSS// (or however much I can do since the latter is an easier writing style and is first draft). Of course, the usual rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t FORCE yourself to write anything. And that’s pretty good advice. However, it’s not that I have to FORCE things to come out of my head and through my fingers…it’s purely a time issue. My homework load this semester is already obscene and I barely have time to sleep and not go insane. In fact, me updating this writing blog is me taking a break from reading homework before I lose my mind.

Perhaps you may also remember a post I made a while ago about my challenges with getting files off old floppy drives. Today I decided to take advantage of the free computer lab on campus since I heard tales that they had floppy drives.

The first issue was getting out the floppies in question from my cupboard. When I pulled out the last of them, something quite curious was on board with them.

A magnet. Hitching a ride.

Now I have no idea if any damage has been done, but after detaching the lovebirds I walked across campus to scope things out.

Nope. No floppy drives, and nobody was in at the help desk (Labor Day and all) to see if they had any to check out. Oh well, for another day I suppose. It’s not like those files are OMG MUST GET NOW but some of the I would surely like to have. I have lots of old song lyrics on there I would like to rework as well. Oh well.

And now I look at the time and realize that I have more homework to do. I promise to write something more substantial and thought provoking soon enough, but until then, I’m off to try and squeeze in some pages where I can! Wish me luck!

"I'm trading in my novels for textbooks."

Well, not really, but I do have to apologize for being so quiet lately because I moved back to school…twice. Long story. Has nothing to do with writing. Really.

But yes, now I am back at school. Senior year, it be. That means more lovely places to write but hardly the time to do so. Never fear, for I will still attempt my weekly musings here (and other places) for sometimes just simply writing ABOUT writing gets my rear in gear to actually…write. And when I write, I have things to write about here. It’s win/win. No, really!

For now my days are filled with classes, socializing, some homework, and the nights…filled with still unpacking and organizing. Once this mess is over I will get back to writing at nights. I just can’t write in a messy room, you know? It nags at me.

Of course, reading research continues for Nagnomei in particular. I’m always picking up books on religions to read for said series, and it gets the juices flowing, so hopefully I will get added inspiration from that as well.

Until then, I am being heralded, so writing will have to wait for later. Ta-ta!

Yeah, well, you know what? Your face is cliche.

(Note, this entry was originally meant to be longer and slightly more convoluted, but due to time constraints I must cut it short. Feel free to engage me in the comments, though.)

I write fantasy novels. Working on two series right now. One is high fantasy and the other could probably be best explained as urban fantasy.

You know what that means.

I write cliches.

Fantasy gets a lot of bad rap when it comes to cliches, because, you know, we’re all ripping off Tolkien. (Never mind that Tolkien was heavily inspired by works that came before him as well.) And to credit, a lot of fantasy novels do make use of “tired” cliches: group quest, save the world, etc. etc. Hell I freely admit to using cliches in my works, because that’s just how a character’s life plays out Farmboy becomes swordsman: check. Beautiful, powerful sorceress: check. “Feisty” tomboy: check. Intellectual member of a royal family: check. (And to come, race of all female warriors.) Oh my, I do have my work cut out for me when it comes to making my story not so painful to read.

However, I think people put way too much hate into tiresome cliches. And yes, I am biased. I’ve been reading fantasy since I was five years old. I bathe in horrible 80′s fantasy movies. (Krull ftw kthnx). I, as aforementioned, write fantasy. And yes, there are definitely some instances in which cliches are just horrible and need to go find a proverbial fire to die in. It’s always fairly obvious when an author hasn’t taken their given list of cliches to work with and hasn’t done much of anything with them…aside from just using them. What’s great about fantasy is that it lets us take what’s been done before and inject our own personalities and world views into what we think such a fantasy world would be like. When we read fantasy novels, the goal is to walk away knowing how the author made the world their own. If we walk away saying “Huh. That author’s world told me nothing more than other author’s story did”, then, to quote the internet, they did it wrong.

Searching for “fantasy cliches” in Google gets one a lot of results. From humorous lists to serious forum discussions, everyone has an opinion on ye olde cliches. What’s hilarious, though, is how many lists go on for pages and pages (from one person, no less), and implying that any author that utilizes any of them needs to stop writing right now. These lists include all the classics, of course, but then you can’t help but start laughing because they tend to also include things like “slaves”, “character with long hair”, “character with short hair”, “character with two arms”…well, you get the point. Pretty much every type of character and every plot point conceivable these days is considered to be cliche, and heaven forbid if you do use a few cliches and try to imbrue them with your own thoughts.

On that note, you know what? Life is cliche. Seriously. I don’t know how many people around me do the same thing. (Go to school, go to college, get jobs, get married, procreate, die, yadda yadda). It’s tiring and predictable. But you know what else? Most of those people are doing those same things in their own way and style. Sure, some follow the “life script”, but it’s the same way that some authors follow the “fantasy script”. Annoying? Yes. But we move on to more interesting things.

For as many fantasy stories as there are now…it seems nearly impossible to come up with something “original”. But what is original? And what’s more annoying? Somebody writing with cliches or somebody trying to avoid cliches so hard that their story makes no damn sense?

Now excuse me, I’m going to go write about my farmboy and sorceress meeting for the first time. It’s probably cliche.