MaW’s Blog

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 NaNoWriMo 2006 is complete. Anybody who’s been watching my word count will note that I finished up with a bit over 55,000 words, which is not bad, although a bit short of the 60,000 I was aiming for. The last few days were a writing disaster. My muse fled, my energy levels plummeted and that concert probably didn’t help very much either.

The current state of the story is that it’s extremely incomplete. Asha and Riirsh have Ishin and Orfala respectively living disembodied lives inside their heads until they find out how to reunite them with their bodies (and get Wunor out of Ishin’s and back into his own). They still don’t know who’s been blowing up planets, although they’re starting to home in on it, and there’s a huge big hint that it has something to do with this mysterious evil entity which Orfala and Tiral have been attempting to counter for the last couple of centuries.

Ultimately it’s turning out much more mystical than I was expecting, and as such some of the early parts of the story need to be modified to reflect it. It’s not so much that the story can’t develop mystical elements later on, but that they’re so resolutely not there in the early parts of the story it seems a bit odd when we start transitioning into this mysterious evil force and malevolence.

I also need to go back and insert a few missing scenes — there’s the whole capture of an enemy space station to write about (very mysterious, since they still don’t know who actually built the thing and there’s no crew on board when they get into it) — and then maybe actually finish the narrative.

Next year I need a smaller plot…

My earliest finish ever.

That is all.

I’m approaching the end of November. As people who know me will know, this means that it’s coming up to the end of National Novel Writing Month. As I write this, I’m approaching 50,000 words. I promised 60,000 words this year, so I’ve still got a way to go, but I should get the coveted green bar on the NaNoWriMo forums soon. What I need to stop doing is having days where I don’t write anything at all, but it’s a bit tricky when the other ingredients of the Time Of Panic are also looming. I’m therefore planning some sort of marathon novelling session at the weekend, and will probably write during the meet on Saturday as that usually works out fairly well. The plot’s a little stickier than it used to be. Lots of threads are starting to come together, and I’m rather worried that it’s all going to suddenly get very silly. One particular character’s introduction may have been a mistake at this point, and I’m seriously tempted to eliminate her from the story entirely during editing.

But I’m stuck with her for now, and she does have a habit of being rather wordy, so that’s something good at least.

Now for the other ingredients of the Time Of Panic: obviously I still have to work on PhD things. I won’t go into that, because people’s eyes tend to glaze over when I start talking about it — either that or I get into arguments about the necessity for correct-by-construction programming and dependent types. The other big panic-inducing thing is the concert on Tuesday, in which I’m playing bass recorder. Since I’ve not been playing it very long, this is a problem — not because of the fingering, as it’s the same as the treble/alto, just an octave lower. The problem is that the bass recorder parts are written in bass clef an octave lower than they sound, and I’ve never had to read bass clef before. This has made initial rehearsal of pieces quite tricky, because my bass clef sight reading is very, very slow.

But after Tuesday that will all be over, and I think we’re going to be okay. Whew.

So the next panic is the following week, as I’ve got my ABRSM Grade 5 Treble Recorder exam. The pieces might be okay — with the possible exception of the rather hideous List B piece (I do not like modern recorder music, or at least I don’t like what I’ve encountered of it so far — I’m quite sure that modern composers don’t set out with the idea of making a nice piece of music, but instead prefer to see how they can torture the musicians while pleasing the apparently deaf critics). The scales, though… that could be a different matter.

Add to that the difficulties of sight reading from treble clef onto a treble recorder when your primary sight reading practice has been from bass cleff onto a bass recorder, or from treble clef onto a tenor recorder (which is what I’ve mostly been doing in groups lately) and you have a recipe for more panic.

So got to squeeze some sight reading practice in somewhere after the concert, and not play any other kinds of recorder until the exam.

But on the bright side, my oven is now fixed, and a few other things here should get sorted tomorrow and maybe next week.