recap of the past half year and assorted fandom stuff
So, we're into summer now, and my last real post was, uh, November-ish. Seeing as how it's late at night and there isn't much else to do, I might as well get around to updating. I'm doing this from the DSi, which is limited in the amount of text it can handle at once, so if things run long, this might become multi-part.
Anyway, more or less picking up where I left off back in November, NaNoWriMo kicked my ass. I only managed a bit over 15K, all of it one giant lump of horrible exposition/info-dump which didn't even get to the point where my intended protagonist had been born yet. The whole time that I was writing, I kept thinking about how that entire first section would be completely edited out of the final draft, but I couldn't bring myself to skip ahead to the next part. It didn't help that I was writing it all longhand in an attempt to keep myself from getting distracted by games and the internet. Any time that might have been saved by doing that was instead wasted by having to count every word on every page multiple times to ensure that I was keeping my running total accurate. Not gonna do that again. :p On the plus side, I still think that there were at least parts of the story idea which had merit and might someday (with lots and lots more work/plotting/research, not to mention the actual writing part) be able to be crafted into something worth reading. If I end up attempting NaNoWriMo again this year, I think I need to start planning much further in advance, so that I already have all the rules of my world worked out and a full outline of all the major plot points when Nov. 1st rolls around, instead of just a premise, a few scenes, and the intention to figure out the rest of it as I went along.
After NaNoWriMo, Yuletide very nearly kicked my ass too. Part of the reason was that I couldn't really focus on it until NaNo was over. Part of the reason was that, once I *was* focusing on it, I took far too long to decide what I wanted to write.
Anyway, more or less picking up where I left off back in November, NaNoWriMo kicked my ass. I only managed a bit over 15K, all of it one giant lump of horrible exposition/info-dump which didn't even get to the point where my intended protagonist had been born yet. The whole time that I was writing, I kept thinking about how that entire first section would be completely edited out of the final draft, but I couldn't bring myself to skip ahead to the next part. It didn't help that I was writing it all longhand in an attempt to keep myself from getting distracted by games and the internet. Any time that might have been saved by doing that was instead wasted by having to count every word on every page multiple times to ensure that I was keeping my running total accurate. Not gonna do that again. :p On the plus side, I still think that there were at least parts of the story idea which had merit and might someday (with lots and lots more work/plotting/research, not to mention the actual writing part) be able to be crafted into something worth reading. If I end up attempting NaNoWriMo again this year, I think I need to start planning much further in advance, so that I already have all the rules of my world worked out and a full outline of all the major plot points when Nov. 1st rolls around, instead of just a premise, a few scenes, and the intention to figure out the rest of it as I went along.
After NaNoWriMo, Yuletide very nearly kicked my ass too. Part of the reason was that I couldn't really focus on it until NaNo was over. Part of the reason was that, once I *was* focusing on it, I took far too long to decide what I wanted to write.