Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Movie with the Boyfriend

we got Shutter Island from netflix a while back and it has take us many days to find time to watch it together. we get 2 discs at once and a lot of times its one for me and one for him and we don't even really need to watch them together. but we did get to it, after i made pasta salad. we didn't watch it too late so that i got tired, but we did wait until after dark so we could turn the lights down and be stunned by our big (though he wishes it was bigger) widescreen tv.

so we watched it. and i liked it. i heart Leo and Ben Kingsley is one of my new favorite actors. when we got to the end the boyfriend said 'that's kind of what i figured was going on' and i realized that I had watched the entire movie without a single hunch about what was coming next. I feel that sometimes i dont need to read anymore books or watch any more tv just because i know how to build stories.

it was sort of nice to just watch the whole movie with my brain turned off. get to the end of it and be mildly surprised and pleased with the effect. woot.

now i'm going to go start to sort through to store my writing. the only way i can rationalize doing this before cleaning my craft room is that doing so will free up a shelf in the closet.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Meandering Thoughts

The other night I was laying in bed waiting to fall asleep and thinking about the great Stories because they are never far from thought, no matter where i am. I was thinking about how much yet needs to be done and going over and over the things i want to change not only in the prequel, my main focus right now, but on EVERYTHING. I thought to myself, 'maybe i should just scrap the whole thing. yeah, that sounds good.'

i then fell promptly and completely asleep.

that, of course, was a psychotic half asleep decision and i of course am not going to scrap the whole thing. but i could. oh i could. instead I have been attempting to become more organized. I added tags to my posts, though i haven't gotten through all of the old ones yet. I want to be able to find easily all the posts for each story. I am also going to sort through the piles of first and second drafts and filled notebooks and label and put in envelopes and box up what i don't exactly need, but cant exactly throw away. Of course i have to clean the craft room first. damn my lazyness...

You know what I learned in a meeting at work?? Apparently there was a study done that showed that the color purple is the color that is least offensive to people receiving critiques. Green is the second least offensive. Purple is more expensive to produce, and my work doesn't care about us THAT much, so all of the supervisors, leads, and captioning coaches (me!) got a green pen to do such critiques with.

When i pulled the green pen out to go do some coaching yesterday i noticed that there are none of my favoite opaque white bics in my bag. Those are my writing pens. I have editing pens and doodling pens in my bag, but no writing pens. And i've wondered why I haven't felt like writing at work lately. So yesterday i did write at work.

the monstroscity has been big on my mind for a long time and the one main part that has always bothered me, even when i had considered the thing "finished", was the reunion between Anka and Edonith. My first vision of that had been filled with an angry mood. I felt like they should come back together in a fight. that's how the first and second drafts came out, but even then i didn't like it.

in my editing i had noted to myself that it wasn't quite right. that i needed it to be more 'magical' was the word i used. So i re did it. and i liked it, but it wasn't yet right.

i have realized since writing the prequel that my problem was in the fact that i didn't truly understand why they had seperated. now i know and i can bring them back together in the exact way i wanted. Neither of them has given an inch in the feelings they had when they parted, but they had missed each other completely while they were seperated.

and writing my new perfect vision of this one scene has anchored me once again to the fact that i can't just scrap the whole thing. that would be absurd. i only wish i had a printer on my head and a button on my belly. i could push the button and out would come the whole story, complete and perfect, because editing sucks!!

and finally, speaking of editing, i finished chapter 6. i made sense of the crazy tri color highlighting fiasco and wrote a post it about how i need to rewrite that section. rewrites are not what the coffee shop is for so that will come later when i go through after i'm done editing and start to tackle those big spots of red text i have highlighted throughout all the chapters.

see what i mean? so much to do.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

i can't even title blog posts...

today was just another coffee shop day. i decided to do 3 pages but instead i did 5. i had to stop at 5 because i saw 6 which has 3 different shades of highlighter on it and, of course, no notations about what any of those colors mean to me. screw you past sara, screw you.

that will have to be an enigma for another day, another cookie. cuz this one's gone.

Monday, July 19, 2010

I'm behind

totally behind. instead of getting up at 10ish like i planned and getting stuff done quick before heading out to the coffee shop to edit, i slept until 11:15. i got those magnets listed on etsy and sold and shipped and ended up here at the coffee place at nearly 1, which is when i usually leave. its just after 2 now and i'm headed out shortly.

i worked on chapter 5. i decided, being behind and sort of cranky, to only do the first three pages of chapter 5. They were also covered in corrections to the point that i felt a bit overwhelmed. but then when i got to the end of those three pages i was like 'eh, i can finish them'

so i did. rock on. chapter 6 is either wednesday or next monday depending on how my week off goes. we shall see.

Monday, July 12, 2010

The End of Shade and Shadow

I posted the last part of shade and shadow this morning before my two lady friends came to town to take me to my late birthday lunch. Knowing I wouldn't have time to go to the coffee shop today to do the final edit I did the bulk of it a few days ago, though in the shower before I posted I came up with one little thing that I felt needed to be changed - so I ended up going through the whole chapter again just to be sure everything was the way it needed to be.

And then I went to Author's Den and started loading everything into the posting format and I started to get the worst butterflies. It was crazy my gut was just full of nervous flutters. I didn't feel anything like that when I posted the first parts but this is the END. The end is the last part. The end is never the most important part, but it is the last thing you remember. and since this was such a short story and I've been getting good hits on it on the site i certianly didn't want to disappoint.

I didn't want to write a Stephen King ending. (btw, I LOVE the obnoxious King endings - not bashing a thing here!)

What I hope most is that my method, my format is not as visible to readers as it is to me. But that is the same as anything you make yourself and put out into the world. The only thing you see are the bad points because you are so familiar with damned inch of it. But it was my first attempt to write a story to fit a format and I simply do not want the ending to be anti-climatic or just plain stupid.

I don't believe it will be an obvious outcome, but also not unexpected because i do love a good paradox. Good does not win out over evil in the end, no one really wins anything. No one really wins anything ever. the circle just keeps turning...

Saturday, July 3, 2010

The Full View

This post is specifically for any new readers coming from Author's Den. I will be posting a link back here from the last chapter of Shade and Shadow, but in a way I would really like to put a lot of this stuff down too. Rehash it for myself because it always clears out cobwebs, new epiphany sprouts in the idea garden and the like...


Shall we go chronologically? since that is the way we like it best AND it starts with Shade and Shadow which is where new readers are coming from and future me will be promising information!!


A Study of Shade and Shadow


Enna and Eillim are old characters and not so much characters as Alter Egos. If my mother had won my name would have been Millie, and my aunt always wanted to be Anne. One night names were written backwards and suddenly we were different people that we masqueraded as on a writing site where i'm sure everyone who knew us, knew it WAS us, but it was just so fun.

E&E faded into the background for a long time, until i watched Gray Gardens and also probably saw Practical Magic in the same span of time. I am a fan of sci-fi, and that is what i write so i turned these practical real world crazy women based loosely on my aunt and myself with thick influence from all the ladies in the movies mentioned above into witches. I wrote E&E into a story which you will read about later - The Spaceship Story - and they were fabulous. i loved them so much that i edited that one first draft chapter over and over until it was top quality while the rest of it hasn't even been typed up into my cpu yet.

My aunt texted. She said that she had run across the phrase "Analysis of Shade and Shadow" and thought it should be a title for a story i could write since i am notoriously unable to title a damn thing. It instantly inspired me to write a short story... i knew exactly what about. Starting with a title, which i modified so it wouldn't seem so scientific, (btw i love bloggers autosave as i just accidentally closed my window!!) i ended up creating a very specific plot layout, with an entire EFFECT in mind. It was really interesting to build something that way, when i usually just let it flow and see where it takes me.

there's all sorts of fun little anecdotes about the story i could tell you but i just don't have the space, but you can probably find them spread throughout other posts, if you care to read on. But i really did like creating a religon and faith based mostly on cataclysmic events in the land the people lived on.

The Prequel

"Named" as such because i am writing it second, after the Nameless Monstroscity, which comes next. I am currently working through revisions on this story that tells the story of Anka and Loki in their early life, their meeting and Anka's struggles to leave her old scary life behind. it explores all of her early relationships and introduces my oldest favoritest characters to each other. I had originally included much of this story in the Monstroscity but it became exactly what i called it. It got too heavy and i decided to go back in time and tell it in 2 parts instead.

This one is interesting to write because i already have an end point in sight. I have to keep in mind main plot points from the second story so that key things link up, and I also have to keep track of all the things i have decided to change in the future to fit better. Interesting and frustrating. and daunting. I love this story very much because i love meeting younger versions of my characters, as i have just reexperienced with E&E.

The Nameless Monstrocity

which is little by little getting smaller and better. Though i haven't worked much on it except to write countless post-its with ideas of changes and additions and removals.

This story introduces Daniel Mccaffrey who is my show stealer. every time i introduce him into a story he takes it over as his own. i believe he is the reason the monstroscity got so large and i found it so difficult to include Anka's back story. I was too busy with the forward story. The forward story of what actually happened in Anka's past and also setting the stage for Daniel's future. Like Shade and Shadow i think it deals a lot with religion and god and in a lot of ways it is how i view higher powers. I didn't plan it that way when i was writing it, but when i finished it i saw that there WAS something i was actually saying - rather than just making up a story.

The Spaceship Story

cuz it spends much of it's time on space ships. i'm a star trek freak. i love firefly and the bbc show red dwarf and there's a little bit of each of them in my characters - as well as influence from a million other places in other ways. This i started as a short story with the intention of only introducing the crew of the Orbiter so that i could use them later with something i wanted to do with Daniel as he searches for his sister - which is his main goal throughout even the first story.

But then i actually introduced everyone to daniel and suddenly there was more story. Daniel stole the show and I did, in time, realize that this was a good breaking point between the ending of the Monstroscity and the beginning of The Sequel. though he doesnt really need it - egomaniac that he is - it develops his character further and makes him more mature for those later events.

I got stuck halfway through this one - totally didn't know what to do. So i started The Connector for Nanowrimo and the ending for this story developed at the same time. The 'foe' of the two stories are the same and writing the connecter enabled me to figure out how to finish the Spaceship story.

The Connector

Chronologically this one actually begins sometime during the prequel - and it is sort of a stand alone story - taking place in a different part of my universe, under a different government and everything. It involves the story of Carrie Mccaffrey, Daniel's sister, who disappeared when she was 16. she is now going by her middle name - Jo - and has been a captive of the same individuals who appear in the spaceship story as i just mentioned.

In a way i had an end point in this story in mind as well. I had already had little epiphany images of Daniel and Jo's first reunion, as well as some of the things that would happen as he went through his search... but other than that i had no idea what was going to happen. Thought it was a Nanowrimo story i nearly stopped halfway through when i saw where my antagonist was going and i didn't want to finish it. i liked all my characters too much to want to do the things to them that i was about to. It was sort of the hardest story to write, but in the same way Turinax, my bad guy, may be my favorite bad guy of all time. Though that's a tough call. I really love Jubal Early.

The Sequel

i have been planning out this one since i finished the 3rd draft but as you can tell, the sequel is no longer the second story. I can't call it anything else until i name it for real because then i won't know what i'm talking about. This story takes place about 4 years after the monstroscity, perhaps about a year after the spaceship story. It brings Anka and Daniel together for his search for Carrie and this is really the last story i have a solid plan for.

With carrie comes Spencer and i think he may have been what i was working towards all along, which would be coincidental if i could only tell you the story!! for a long time i thought it was Ronan, Anka's son, but i don't think so anymore. Stuff like that happens sometimes. I once wrote a whole piece where Anka dies at the end... it turned out it wasn't anka's scene - i just hadn't met the right character yet...

Artemis & Buddy

Buddy the coffee maker from Coffee Companion es-245 and Artemis from a yet unnamed and unposted story exist in the same post apocalyptic world, though i don't have everything worked out yet about what i want to do with it. I believe i want to write a bunch of disconnected short stories that in the end introduces spencer into the world that he'll save... or not... we'll see

The Spencer Story

All i know is i think i want to tell it in first person - whereas everything else is in 3rd. I've got little idea nuggets but gosh i've got so much to do i should just stop thinking about it.

I should also stop typing cuz this post is crazy long and no one is ever gonna read it anyhow. but if you have gone through my entire epic layout and are still interested - holy crap. also, look around some more, and for god's sake encourage me. I think i'm a bit bogged down!!!