MaW’s Blog

National Novel Writing Month 2007 is underway. As of this morning I’m on 1,711 words. My novel is loaded onto my N800 for writing during my lunch break at work, and things are generally going well.

However, in that small number of words I’ve already managed to introduce a new main character, a Princess who’s about to start training as a magician with the magician who’s due to be a mentor to the primary protagonist. I guess there might be some romance and/or bickering in the air when they finally meet.

It also seems the story’s starting earlier on in the plot than I was expecting it to, but it seems to be working out at the moment and sort of reflects one possibility for starting it off that I discussed with Alan at the kick-off party.

Good luck to everybody for the next thirty days of writing!

This is not a question about the nature of the Earth, it’s a question about the world where my NaNoWriMo novel for 2007 is currently slated to take place.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the idea is that it’s a fantasy-ish world (probably with a higher level of technology than the normal mediaeval setting) where the major Gods have all recently died of some sort of divine measles (the actual cause of that is to be left for the writer to discover later, but it’s probably got something to do with power-hungry wizards and some serious genetic engineering).

I was considering what’s going to happen when the major Gods all die, and why the minor Gods are going to have to get a move on to start taking over some of the essential world-maintenance tasks which keep everything going and everybody alive. The first thing of course is the sun. Obviously in this fantasy universe, the sun orbits the world and needs a God (or perhaps a suitably powerful wizard) to push it. It also needs refuelling from time to time. Fail to push, and it eventually succumbs to gravity and crashes into the world, burning it to a cinder. Fail to refuel, and it goes out, plunging the world into freezing darkness, where people had better discover huge-scale nuclear heating before the atmosphere freezes out.

So if I’m having a world that really does have a sun that goes around it - and not thanks to Newtonian physics either - why have a world that’s spherical? A spherical (or nearly-spherical-ish) world gives you polar ice caps, tropics and so forth. Why not have a cylinder? The sun and moon(s) can still go around it, you still have different climatic zones, but you don’t have those round bits at the top. What do you have instead? Perhaps some forbidding mountains, but the protagonists know that beyond them lies adventure, and indeed it does, because they can then climb carefully inside the hollow core of their cylindrical world and find a whole extra world on the inside surface, lit by glowing birds and magic, and subject to an inverted variant of the gravity spell which stops people flying off the outside surface into space.

The nature of the inside world? Well, I’m not sure about that yet, but I might be predictable and populate it with grumpy dwarves.

This year I think I might actually use a proper novel outlining method. Why? Well, largely because I’ve never seriously attempted it before, and it would be useful to figure out how well such things work for me.

I’ve got a couple of concepts floating around at the moment, but the one I think I’m going to go with for now is a very non-serious fantasy. The basic idea is that for some reason (divine measles probably), all the major Gods have died. This is a problem, because this world pretty much requires Gods to run its affairs or things start breaking. Without the God of the Sea, the currents and tides and storms change utterly and the world would face economic disaster (not to mention a lot of hungry people on the coast) because everything built up around how the Gods organised things, not how the world might naturally be.

It is not, as it turns out, a world which is naturally tenable, but nobody ever thought the Gods would ever go away (least of all the Gods).

The minor Gods - previously enjoying themselves governing such relatively insignificant things as repressed sneezes, dust which accumulates under beds and the kind of intestinal parasite people can catch from eating undercooked pork - are forced to step in, and have to work with their own priesthoods and the former priesthoods of the deceased Gods to try and get things back under control.

In the mean time, the wizards - representing secular magical power on a very significant scale - have seen their opportunity and are also attempting to move in on formerly divine territory before the minor Gods gain the kind of power which kept the wizards in check for centuries.

Obviously I need more details, but it’s something to think about, and I definitely need to try outlining it.

Or at least coming up with some characters.

In my last post I lamented that not much was happening on the music front.

That’s changed.

I’m now playing in two recorder groups, the SRP, a viol group, the University early music group (who’re short on members) and the office band. Yes, the office band - there is a band, and they seem to think a recorder player is a useful asset. I’ve been figuring out some parts for the office party at the end of November, and I’m gradually getting there. A completely different style of music, so it’s extremely interesting. The most important thing is that everybody seems to be having a lot of fun with it.

Work itself is generally going well, but I’m not going to write about it because it’s not going to win any awards for interestingness.

National Novel Writing Month is approaching once again. This year Hannah and I are the only MLs for our region, so we’ve got a bit more work to do. We need to sort out what’s going in the survival kits this year. The rest will probably organise itself - people have got into the habit of coming to meets now. We realised yesterday that we may be a fairly unique region in that we’ve been having monthly meets for two years now without missing a single one. What’s more, we have an extra meet at the end of October, weekly meets through November, and also weekly meets through June for Script Frenzy (not that Script Frenzy was at all popular with our Wrimos) and other June-time events like NaNoManGo and our own mini-Nano. Our Wrimos really are a fantastic group of people, and I’m honoured to be involved.

Unfortunately with NaNoWriMo looming I’m thinking up plots but also wondering when I’m going to find the time to write anything. Three performances in November and one in December mean a lot of rehearsal time, as well as the usual recorder and viol lessons and groups. I’m going to have to stop reading and just write write write write write I think.

So I’ve not blogged for ages. Nothing new there, I hear the masses cry - at least, I would, if the total audience of this blog was large enough to be described by the term ‘the masses’.

Why the silence? Well, it’s largely because things of great interest have been happening. I know that’s not the traditional reason not to blog, but when searching for a job one doesn’t really wish to shout about it too much on the Internet in a form which will be easy for one’s prospective employers to find - not that I have a moment’s doubt that there’s already a whole pile of incriminating information out there about me. Evidently none of it was really serious, because I got a job and have been working full time for three weeks now. It’s not my dream job, I shall be honest, but it’s a job and it’s a pretty good one really. The pay’s entirely reasonable, the office environment is fantastic, and the people are also nice. The commute could only be better if it was a short walk down the road (rather than a short walk, a reasonable tram ride and another short walk after that).

The major problem is that, as with all software development which takes place against a background of established code, there’s established code. A lot of it. Ten years and more of it. Much of it is poorly documented (by which I mean not documented in any way whatsoever). Quite a bit of it is poorly written, having suffered from the many demons associated with haste, neglect and modification by other people (hint: documentation helps with that). It seems intentions are changing. My team have generally agreed that code should be documented and so forth. Unfortunately we’re now arguing about how it should be documented, but at least it’s a start.

Music things have been on a bit of a hiatus. As it’s the summer, many groups and lessons have been disrupted. I’ve not had any viol or recorder lessons for ages, and my only outlet is playing Telemann sonatas all afternoon at the weekend (I’m sure my neighbours are simply delighted…) and going to SRP once a month, which is an absolute lifesaver. I can’t wait for the start of the school year to return groups and lessons to normality, although I will miss playing with the University early music group.

Still, you can’t have everything.