Sometimes I feel I could talk all day about something I've written, other days I want it to be a secret. Dunno why, really.

I'm just excited about my latest project, I suppose. It's fun; the characters are presenting me with all sorts of possibilities and the world is still holds so much promise.

Somehow I find that I need certain music for writing this story. Each character has theme songs that help me with the feeling that I want them to generate. Or something like that.

I'm loving this storyline, too. I don't suppose it's anything original, but it's *mine*. I've been working on this series, on and off, for four years(?). It's finally time to write it and it feels so wonderful to finally set it free.

(reading requests welcome *g*)

Music is oGd.

I can't talk about stories I'm writing because 1) I'm not writing anything, and 2) Whenever I do write something and talk about it, the magic is lost and I lose all motivation.

So whether I'm writing anything or not shall forever remain unknown to all until it is published or never ever spoken of. How mysterious... Maybe I should write a... nevermind.

Then what the heck is wrong with me!? I could discuss my stories day in and day out, whether I've begun them or not! ;)

Like Little Death. I haven't even finished the first chapter, but already it's spinning circles in my head. A young girl - introduces her when she's maybe 12, picks up when she's 16 - is crazily gifted as an assassin, not only due to her uncanny knack for stealth, but because she can ... haven't really picked a word for it yet ... shift her reality, slip into the world of the dead temporarily, then slip back. (And the possibility of getting stuck for a time goes without saying. High jinks ensue.)

(The world of the dead precisely mirrors the world of the living - with one obvious difference. She first discovers the ability while hiding in a graveyard. Oh, the horror!)

And, see? I've dropped the ball! The cat's out of the bag! I've just given this story idea tangible substance for the first time ever. I think it's going to be the one I use for NaNo.

Huzzah!

As for music painting characters or a story in general ... I honestly can't say that's happened for me before. Whenever I need a moment's inspiration for a character, I close my eyes (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) and try to roll through the scene as if it were a scene in a movie. An instantaneous rewind button is of course a must.

That pretty much goes for all of my writing, though, even silly stuff like - as I was slaving away on this afternoon - combat, i.e. swordplay. It makes for some interesting results.

(See? All ruddy day!)

[ September 22, 2004: Message edited by: Quailish no-Firefox ]

I have 38 manuscript pages. I can't remember my word count, but it didn't go up much today, because it was a thinking day. Why did that make me feel like Winnie-The-Pooh?

Most of my days are Eeyore days, so don't feel bad.

I'm the same as you in that, Jen: I can't talk about the story, but I can talk about writing it.

I have trouble keeping a lot of my characters alive, too. I mean, you have to kill some, and the "romance" (<---badly chosen word) behind killing off a major character is just so intense. But then what do you do after you kill them? "Oh crap, I still needed her to [insert important mission here]." So what I would do, on days when I foudn myself stuck on soemthing or just unable to write, I would go back and write all kinds of horribly depressing death scenes for all my characters just to get the whole urge to kill them off out of the way. I figure, even if it doesn't contribute to the story in any palpable way, at least I get to practice my pathetic-uber-tragedy voice that I like to try to keep out of my actual writing. It helps to unwind at the very least, and if I'm PMSing it's also nice to have that cry ;)

So I've written...

*checks*

870 words in about 20+ minutes of a short story which is to be 17,000 or less. It's for a scholarship. I'm taking the approach of writing it for myself. I won't talk about any of the content, but it's kind of cathartic for me. When I feel like whining, putting characters into an allegorical context and writing about how they're feeling makes me feel like I'm writing a journal entry while killing a second bird with the same stone, which is the meeting of criteria for any decent piece of literature: commenting on the human condition.

So yeah, I'm writing something. It's crap, but it's something.

[ September 22, 2004: Message edited by: Max listens to Bjork to get high ]

I'm working on my novel, which now looks like it will go beyond one book. I originally envisioned it as one, but as I come up with new plot threads and flesh out the characters and situations, I find that it's already getting pretty long and I think it may be two at least. I want to avoid a trilogy because it's not really that kind of thing.

I'm getting a little worried, though, because I don't outline and I'm trying to carefully manage the plot threads as I write them. I can always go back later and tweak things, but it's definitely more difficult than other stories I've done.

The other challenge for me is that after working almost exclusively on short stories for several years, I'm used to dealing with small numbers of characters, while now I'm dealing with many more. Thankfully I'm keeping a pretty tight POV which helps focus things.

I'm currently at about 57K words and I'd say about halfway through. That, however, might change as I go back and revise the first few chapters (which desperately need changing).

I don't know if there's any point to this post, but that's where I'm at.

I seem to have lost the motivation for short stories at this point...

It's good to hear you're working on a novel, Raj. I was wondering if you were doing something like that. :)

I've never been much of a short story person. Not that I don't write them--I do, fairly often, actually--but I don't have an affinity for them. They seem to require more art than I'm capable of dredging up.

I'll stick to novels. Much easier.

Quailish no-Firefox wrote:

But what you're supposed to say is, "Ferdinand was being borne down upon by scythe-wielding maniacs on mechanized roosters with no chance of escape ... but two chapters on, Ferdy still had all of his limbs attached! Something had to give."

Y'know!?

Dare you to write THAT for NaNo. *g*

I'm chewing on NaNo ideas; there are one or two that have sort of percolated to the fore, as it were. I'm hoping I have the energy for it this year. I started it last year just as my life got down to the business of well and truly falling apart to be put back together again in not-entirely-wholly-different shapes.

Things seem at least marginally more stable this time around. We shall see, I suppose.

What I need is someone to throw ideas at and talk them over to really get things rolling- what I've got are just little proto-ideas; suggestions of could-be-stories. I need to make them more concrete.

Raj wrote:

I seem to have lost the motivation for short stories at this point...

Anytime I try to write a short story, I wind up going WAY over anything that could be defined as "short". I've a fanfiction (don't shoot me!!) about halfway finished right now at not-quite-30k.

Conceivably, that 'halfway' is quite a bit short of that mark, as well.

Sigh.

I tried writing a 100 word drabble as a challenge, about two months ago. The first draft of it was not quite 400 words. I really thought I'd kept it to about a hundred. Heh. Boy was I suprised. :D

I've one short story on the back-burner right now. It's a sci-fi piece about a guy who crashes his ship into a Dyson sphere, busts his FTL drive, and spends a few thousand words trying to get it fixed, but nobody seems to know how the bloody thing operated in the first place...

The working title is "Tachyon 251." ;)

(No, it's not tongue-in-cheek! No, sirree! Not a chance!)