Tephie's Personal Bombshelter MarkII

It has been a slog. I spent more days behind the quota than ahead of it. The first fifteen thousand words or more could be cut off and nothing of substance would be lost. The story has no end because the plot barely started to congeal before it fell apart. But I'm okay with all that because I kept writing anyway. And I do love Apollonia, Marcus, Abraham, Ersilia, and Muriel and I think they could get together into something with a real plot at some point. Maybe next year even. :D

Well I haven't updated in a while so here we go.

NaNo: Last Sunday and Monday (the 8th and 9th) I didn't write at all so the whole week has been a slog of trying not to fall any further behind. I had a good day today and finally, finally hit a spot where the words didn't require concentrating until I sweated blood to get the out. I'm still behind but I wrote 3k today and if I can manage that again tomorrow I will be caught up.

Knitting: I've got eight inches done on the vest for my Mom for Christmas. That's about 40% complete since Mom is shorter than I am.



I'm a bit farther along that this now, but I haven't taken a new photo and probably won't until I'm ready to divide for the arm holes in about five inches. ( Older stuff under the cut. )

Still no plot really, but there are a few more characters, which will help. Of course two of them were mostly filler, though I don't think Muriel is inclined to stay that way. Other than that there was also some world building today, or rather, world enhancing since I think I'm writing what amounts to "this world plus supernatural beings".

But I'm feeling around the edges of one, maybe. At least I'm getting words down which makes this much better than this time last year.

One thing I have noticed in my various NaNo stories is that when I'm stumped for what to write and it's logical for my characters to eat, or I'm getting hungry myself, they eat and I tend to describe the food. These are the sorts of things that would be cut, logically, but sometimes I think these would also be great places for endnotes and a recipe section at the end of the novel. :D

This is mostly so when I'm freaking out next year I will have proof that in 2009, as in 2007, I didn't have anything until a character showed up on the 29th.

I don't know what Apollonia does but she's making herself comfortable.

Now I need at least a genre and maybe a second character, based on past NaNo novels I can get something if I have that much.

Yes, I intend to write another partial novel this year. I have no idea what I am going to write but the odds are it will be something in the science fiction and fantasy continuum as usual.

Also as usual, I've been getting pings off my older NaNo attempts. Last year's story was really hard to write, I spent the first half of the month whining (sorry Kris!) and writing was about as easy and pleasant as pulling teeth. Once I moved the story from England to New England it started rolling for me and ended up picking up things I hadn't expected, like alchemy and alchemists that aren't what they seems and occult books that manipulate events and people around them... and Lovecraft's cousin. Needless to say that story is a bit of a mess. The last few days have found my brain turning that tangled knot in all directions and tugging on things that look like they might lead to loose ends. I think I might know how to untangle it now.

And that is how I know that NaNo is coming, because my brain never gets enchanted with the older stories until it knows it has to start coming up with a new one.

First, as of 10:32pm EST yesterday:



50,041 words in one scrambled mess that might be salvageable if I work on it some more. I need a break first though, the characters were getting whiny in that last 2000 words or so.

The same night I finished this:



Yes, it's the wombat from Ursula Vernon's (ursulav @ LJ) "Red Wombat Tea Co." labels.

My tension was all over the place because I'm practicing knitting continental style in order to have one yarn in each hand. Toward the end I was getting the hang of it. It may even out some in the wash, but the green yarn had many weak spots so I'm a bit afraid of tossing it in the washer.

I don't think I'll ever convert to continental knitting entirely, it makes my left hand hurt something awful, but for double knitting and stranded colorwork it's an handy skill.

For my next trick I shall learn to knit backwards so that I don't have to turn my work for things like bobbles (which I don't like and therefore don't anticipate knitting many of) and entrelac (which I do like the look of).

And my Thanksgiving day knitting:



It's four inches long now so I added two and a half to three inches in about four hours of knitting. Just eleven more inches to go.... (I think this might cure me of my vague urges to knit a skirt and jacket with this stitch pattern.)

I want to knit today but none of the projects on my needles appeal. Ultimately that's probably good since I've resorted to medication because my hands and wrists hurt too much today. Right now they're just mildly sore but I know that's just because I took the painkillers.

Knitting status report in brief:

( A cut to spare the non-knitting friends list. )

Non-knitterly stuff:

Despite the pseudo-jossing I'm still poking a bit on my last NaNo, mostly fleshing out side characters and trying to make the set of common technologies make sense with each other. If they have the technology available to accomplish some task and don't use it I have to have a logical reason why. Fortunately, things like "it costs too much" and "they find it morally repugnant" are "logical". Of course, for anything that is not used for "moral" reasons there is bound to be some group somewhere doing just that....

In a vague attempt to clean up part of my hard drive (HAH!) I dug around in my old writing files. Some of those ideas and story fragments are from twenty years ago (having moved from notebooks to my first PC and then traveling from PC to PC) and, well, they show it. I may have to find something that can handle Works files from Windows 3.1 days if I want to actually use some of those.

Anyway, I found some old characters that I might revamp for future NaNo attempts. I have a set of nearly seventy original characters from a Fanfic That Will Never Be Written (can we say Mary Sue tendencies?) that could have their fanfic origins removed quite easily, though some may not survive the operation. A slight tweak of the Childhood Trauma and the Morgan family would be good to go. One side character actually has a pretty good universe built around her so just shifting the lead to her rather than the matriarch of the family could even supply some sort of plot starting point... should I decide I want to write a modern/near future werewolf novel.

Alas, I'm still in the fandoms for the other FTWNBW character sets so it makes it hard to pull them out. They're also tied into the original worlds and character sets tighter than the Morgan set so it might not be possible. It's a pity since some of them are pretty interesting, but it's a multi-generational sort of set the grandkids might be salvageable.

I should draw.

*head!desk*

Way too close to my last NaNo for comfort. While the dolls weren't the focus of my novel, they were pretty significant, and while Elyza technically isn't a doll there are too many similarities for comfort. :(

Shit. I liked my novel in progress.

Jossed and I wasn't even writing fanfic. :P

I might not win NaNo this year, but I just went from 23,376 to 30,050 today so maybe I just might make it. I just have to figure out what happens next.

I got through today by having more characters to track, alas, I just killed one off. Though I gave the other some past history with one of my main characters, which might generate some long sections of verbiage. Pity they aren't going to meet soon, since he thinks she's dead and all. I don't think she'd approve of how he's changed over the years, if she remembers him.

Also, I finished knitting Mom's scarf for Christmas. The garter stitch scarf of DOOM, is done, I just need to weave the tails and graft the ends so it's a moebius. I might end up picking out the first row, it depends on if the start and ending points are in the right orientation for grafting. Not a big deal either way.

Woohoo! I broke 30k! Four days left so at least 5k a day will make it (I want to get more than that though because I know the verifier is going to eat at least 1000 words on me). If I can think of things to write I can still win. :D

So here it is, about five and a half hours to NaNo'07 kick off, and Sierna (the main character from NaNo'06) is chattering her little hamsterish head off about how the kinless are treated in her home culture.

WTF hamstergirl? Where was this info this time last year?

Yes, yes, I'll start a TiddlyWiki for you. I promise to stick these little details in there and get back to them later. Maybe I'll be insane enough to do NaNoFiMo with your story, okay? But I swear, if this year's NaNo actually ends at 50k (unlike yours, which is what, half, maybe?) I'm doing NaNoEdMo for it instead and you'll just have to wait since you didn't speak up all year.

And I have no clue what I'm going to write.

I have vague urges toward steampunk or cyberpunk but no real ideas. The occasional flash of a ruined city taken over by jungle isn't really fitting with either genre for me.

I was going to do the 30 Days of World Building thing but it really doesn't fit all that well with the way stories tend to develop for me. To save you a click and perusal of the site the steps there go pretty much like this:

1. Think of climates, figure out what sort of adjectives fit with them and the emotions you attach to them.
2. Learn some geography and climatology. Think of weather related plot devices and what they can do to the story.
3. Decide the mood you want for your story. Pick a matching climate.
4. Large scale land features and how they might be made.
5. Draw a map.
6. Make up races of people that evolved in the various regions of your map.
7. The last 100 years of history, including natural disasters, politics, wars, disease, etc.
8. Refine your economics and politics.
9. Language, what do the languages of each race sound like.
10. Make everything fit your mood.

You get the idea. I'm not a mood writer. Mood is basically the LAST thing I consider. Generally I start from characters. Last NaNo was very atypical of my writing in that I started with a specific setting, made the world in order to make that one place exist, built the culture from that place, and eventually found some people there that were interesting to write about.

I have about 10 days to think of something. I need a different approach to finding a story.