I've been getting writing related things done, and that makes me happy. Whenever the baby is asleep next to me on the couch and i have a free moment i open up the prequel rewrite and add a little to it.
my brother had a dream and told me all about it and it will be the premise of my Nanowrimo 2011 story. he called it a rip off of the movie Limitless with <3Bradley Cooper <3 which i've never seen and decided to not see it until after i've finished my story. There is a similarity and i want to keep my nano story free of any limitless plots.
And this whole week i've had story bits and pieces swirling around in my head at work. i'm gonna take one binder or another with me today and see what i can do about working on something.
I've been reading one of my favorite trilogies and that always gives me a bit of inspiration.
Showing posts with label Running Parallel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Running Parallel. Show all posts
Friday, October 7, 2011
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
sometimes i'm such a tard.
today i realized that since my computer works i can have my dad email me files from it so i can working on writing saved there. DUH!!
but rather than having him email me the prequel i had him email me the first 6 chapters of Running Parallel that i had already typed up and partially revised. i was really not looking forward to retyping all of that, so now i have it and i'm so stoked.
i know that i have been leaving out some of the little revisons i'd put in the first attempt, even though for the most part i am putting back to the way i know it is supposed to be. my first draft is only ever really an outline for myself with dozens of thoughts and other sentences inferred between the period and the capital letter of the next sentence.
I'm going to spend some time tomorrow going through the first three chapters and updating some of the things that i may have left out, or liked the wording better... or whatever...
but not much time, because i got a custom order for a big scarf wrap for some lucky husband in nyc whose wife decided to wait til the last minute. i have to have it done by monday, so if i'm not around its cuz i am working until my hands fall off. but at least i'll have something to do while i'm watching Return of The King tomorrow.
but rather than having him email me the prequel i had him email me the first 6 chapters of Running Parallel that i had already typed up and partially revised. i was really not looking forward to retyping all of that, so now i have it and i'm so stoked.
i know that i have been leaving out some of the little revisons i'd put in the first attempt, even though for the most part i am putting back to the way i know it is supposed to be. my first draft is only ever really an outline for myself with dozens of thoughts and other sentences inferred between the period and the capital letter of the next sentence.
I'm going to spend some time tomorrow going through the first three chapters and updating some of the things that i may have left out, or liked the wording better... or whatever...
but not much time, because i got a custom order for a big scarf wrap for some lucky husband in nyc whose wife decided to wait til the last minute. i have to have it done by monday, so if i'm not around its cuz i am working until my hands fall off. but at least i'll have something to do while i'm watching Return of The King tomorrow.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Chapter Three!!!
yesterday after coming home from work sick i was very very productive and I finally felt like working on chapter three of the rewrite and getting it all nice and polished to get it posted on author's den. The first chapter is still on the most popular list, though the second isn't getting quite as many hits. but there's lesbian action in chapter three! *sigh* i very much love petra. here's a little excerpt:
Jamie and Petra nearly disappeared. We introduced ourselves as Kitty and Buttercup when we could get away with it. Before long we had shortened it to just Kit and B, occasionally Kathryn and Beatrice when we were asked for full names. Whether they believed us we didn’t care. We were wild and uncaring of anyone but each other. You can still read the story of Buttercup and Kitty in the photos and dozens of full sketch pads that still fill the blue-green case.
Petra had a nose for the travel, for the random cross country movement. She knew which motels would ignore our age in the presence of daddy’s shiny credit card. She knew which gas station attendants would sell us cigarettes, which clubs would let us in and which bartenders would serve us. We didn’t drink much, maybe one cocktail at the beginning of the night, but we weren’t there to get drunk. We were there to dance, and dance we did.
We had rules for when we were in the clubs, lots of them. We never went anywhere apart, ever. No one came to our room and we never went anywhere with anyone. We made friends most nights, and kept to ourselves others. We took pictures and heard our favorite songs and still danced to the ones we hated. The clubs themselves fade into a singular blur of music and motion and flashing colored lights. It was the same with the kitchens we washed dishes in and the street corners where we sat and sang.
Sometimes we’d stay in town a couple days and wait tables during the morning rush at the same gross truck stops where we went to get coffee after dancing all night. Occasionally we skipped dancing when Petra would convince me to play open mike nights. I almost always made good tips those nights, playing the music I knew best; music written by my brother, lyrics written by my best friend. People all over the country heard the genius of Eric and Tommy years before their band would become a common name on radio stations in those same towns.
There is a picture I drew of Petra in the suitcase of a day I don’t need a photo to remind me of. It was a nothing special day in some hot and dry state shortly after we’d turned back from the daunting rockies. We’d decided not to cross and head south instead and. She sat with her legs crossed under her on the folding table. She held Mansfield Park open in her hands and a cigarette burned between her fingers. Our clothes rolled and twisted in their washers and driers around us as she read from the book. I had been reading out bits and pieces to her while she drove, but soon she had been engrossed in the story. She now shared reading duty when we stop. She rarely let me drive.
And here's a link to the authors den page. http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=47352
i would chat about things, but i gotta clean the kitchen before i go to work cuz i left it a mess after i finished dinner last night. and i still have to get dressed, and list auntie annie's wristers... why can't i stay home and write all day???
Jamie and Petra nearly disappeared. We introduced ourselves as Kitty and Buttercup when we could get away with it. Before long we had shortened it to just Kit and B, occasionally Kathryn and Beatrice when we were asked for full names. Whether they believed us we didn’t care. We were wild and uncaring of anyone but each other. You can still read the story of Buttercup and Kitty in the photos and dozens of full sketch pads that still fill the blue-green case.
Petra had a nose for the travel, for the random cross country movement. She knew which motels would ignore our age in the presence of daddy’s shiny credit card. She knew which gas station attendants would sell us cigarettes, which clubs would let us in and which bartenders would serve us. We didn’t drink much, maybe one cocktail at the beginning of the night, but we weren’t there to get drunk. We were there to dance, and dance we did.
We had rules for when we were in the clubs, lots of them. We never went anywhere apart, ever. No one came to our room and we never went anywhere with anyone. We made friends most nights, and kept to ourselves others. We took pictures and heard our favorite songs and still danced to the ones we hated. The clubs themselves fade into a singular blur of music and motion and flashing colored lights. It was the same with the kitchens we washed dishes in and the street corners where we sat and sang.
Sometimes we’d stay in town a couple days and wait tables during the morning rush at the same gross truck stops where we went to get coffee after dancing all night. Occasionally we skipped dancing when Petra would convince me to play open mike nights. I almost always made good tips those nights, playing the music I knew best; music written by my brother, lyrics written by my best friend. People all over the country heard the genius of Eric and Tommy years before their band would become a common name on radio stations in those same towns.
There is a picture I drew of Petra in the suitcase of a day I don’t need a photo to remind me of. It was a nothing special day in some hot and dry state shortly after we’d turned back from the daunting rockies. We’d decided not to cross and head south instead and. She sat with her legs crossed under her on the folding table. She held Mansfield Park open in her hands and a cigarette burned between her fingers. Our clothes rolled and twisted in their washers and driers around us as she read from the book. I had been reading out bits and pieces to her while she drove, but soon she had been engrossed in the story. She now shared reading duty when we stop. She rarely let me drive.
And here's a link to the authors den page. http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewshortstory.asp?id=47352
i would chat about things, but i gotta clean the kitchen before i go to work cuz i left it a mess after i finished dinner last night. and i still have to get dressed, and list auntie annie's wristers... why can't i stay home and write all day???
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Running Parallel to Me
so today in the shower (my best brain-writing location) i suddenly realized that i wanted to redo all of the Rewrite in first person present, rather than first person past tense. which means redoing EVERYTHING i have already done. thousands of words, a hundred or so pages, 12 chapters.
it almost makes me want to cut my hands right off and turn them over to my auntie mommy so she can have ones that don't hurt. and then i would be free of this madness of changing everything all the damn time and giving myself so much more work than i need.
and on the topic of the Rewrite, i have a name for it. I pulled down the binder that i keep the printed out copy of the first draft of. it's a partially done word binder that has one piece of artwork on it. its abstract and a black and white image from a magazine. on the top of the picture i wrote "running parallel to me"
i have no idea if this is the name of the painting, or if it is something that i came up with and wrote on this particular binder while i was working on editing after Nanowrimo2008, thus giving it a name that i promptly forgot about.
whether one or the other (i googled it and didn't get a result of the image, but that doesn't exactly mean much because EVERYthing isn't googleable) i think that's the name i'm going to use. Running Parallel to Me.
except i suddenly realize i don't like the looks of that word parallel. i don't like the way it looks at all...
it almost makes me want to cut my hands right off and turn them over to my auntie mommy so she can have ones that don't hurt. and then i would be free of this madness of changing everything all the damn time and giving myself so much more work than i need.
and on the topic of the Rewrite, i have a name for it. I pulled down the binder that i keep the printed out copy of the first draft of. it's a partially done word binder that has one piece of artwork on it. its abstract and a black and white image from a magazine. on the top of the picture i wrote "running parallel to me"
i have no idea if this is the name of the painting, or if it is something that i came up with and wrote on this particular binder while i was working on editing after Nanowrimo2008, thus giving it a name that i promptly forgot about.
whether one or the other (i googled it and didn't get a result of the image, but that doesn't exactly mean much because EVERYthing isn't googleable) i think that's the name i'm going to use. Running Parallel to Me.
except i suddenly realize i don't like the looks of that word parallel. i don't like the way it looks at all...
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Frustration
So I got all distracted for a little while over a story about two girls falling in love, but i'm so over it now. Not really, but all the new stuff is written and all I need to do is rewrite the old stuff.
all i really wanted to be doing was working on the Prequel but i'm at a roadblock of indecision and frustration. The first four or five chapters are a mess and i don't know what to do with them. At the moment i am Sans Elenore so I can't do much work anyhow. but i'll be getting her back the 23rd with all of my written words (and pictures and music) intact. Fuckin' Woot.
When I started planning the prequel i had a dream of it beginning a little bit in the middle. I wanted everyone's first view of Anka and Loki in that first chapter to be during this one particular instance where Anka falls off a cliff (she's not clumsy like me, though. I envy her grace) and of course Loki saves her. It sets up the relationship between these two characters so well, the whole chapter does in a way that countless chapters of introduction story wont.
But starting in the middle of the story was what got me into trouble in the first place. Because of the length of time i've been working on these two base stories (the prequel and the nameless monstrocity) things have morphed, characters have changed, and when I introduced Daniel into the tapestry late in 2007 he sort of stole the show.
(he's done it more than once now. I brought him into the spaceship story only as a way to connect the spaceship to Anka for future use but Daniel has stolen that story too. He really is full of himself...)
But daniel comes into the lives of my older characters at a mid-point and the past was weak and confusing because i was so busy moving forward. That's why i'm writing the prequel - because i didn't write the story i was working on for all those years once Daniel appeared. i wrote something different, but we still need that old story to truly understand.
i say we, but i mean you. i get it all, but that's cuz it's all in MY head of course...
So, i need all the past introduction getting-to-know-each-other story parts. so my options are to start at the real beginning, and give up my original dream of having Anka fall off a cliff (i may not even keep that peice exactly intact if it's not the beginning part. I don't feel i'd even need it). Or i can start with that chapter and then jump all the way back and catch up. OR... i can do what i sort of intended in the first place was have the first 4 or 5 chapters mirror the past and the present until the reader knows everything.
Option one makes me sad. option two is my newest idea and seems the easiest and least confusing, and option three was the one i was going to go with originally, but seems a little complex.
I guess what i really need is to sit down and just finish getting the revisions into my computer copy, and then i can piece them together in different formations to see which one i like the best. That, of course, means i need my computer back.
so maybe i'm not as anxious as i really think i am about this story, i'm just impatient to get my computer back and start working again.
Monday i wrote 5 pages (composed on the computer too!!) of some of the stuff that i am missing that needs to be added into those first few chapters. I'm very much looking forward to the 23rd.
all i really wanted to be doing was working on the Prequel but i'm at a roadblock of indecision and frustration. The first four or five chapters are a mess and i don't know what to do with them. At the moment i am Sans Elenore so I can't do much work anyhow. but i'll be getting her back the 23rd with all of my written words (and pictures and music) intact. Fuckin' Woot.
When I started planning the prequel i had a dream of it beginning a little bit in the middle. I wanted everyone's first view of Anka and Loki in that first chapter to be during this one particular instance where Anka falls off a cliff (she's not clumsy like me, though. I envy her grace) and of course Loki saves her. It sets up the relationship between these two characters so well, the whole chapter does in a way that countless chapters of introduction story wont.
But starting in the middle of the story was what got me into trouble in the first place. Because of the length of time i've been working on these two base stories (the prequel and the nameless monstrocity) things have morphed, characters have changed, and when I introduced Daniel into the tapestry late in 2007 he sort of stole the show.
(he's done it more than once now. I brought him into the spaceship story only as a way to connect the spaceship to Anka for future use but Daniel has stolen that story too. He really is full of himself...)
But daniel comes into the lives of my older characters at a mid-point and the past was weak and confusing because i was so busy moving forward. That's why i'm writing the prequel - because i didn't write the story i was working on for all those years once Daniel appeared. i wrote something different, but we still need that old story to truly understand.
i say we, but i mean you. i get it all, but that's cuz it's all in MY head of course...
So, i need all the past introduction getting-to-know-each-other story parts. so my options are to start at the real beginning, and give up my original dream of having Anka fall off a cliff (i may not even keep that peice exactly intact if it's not the beginning part. I don't feel i'd even need it). Or i can start with that chapter and then jump all the way back and catch up. OR... i can do what i sort of intended in the first place was have the first 4 or 5 chapters mirror the past and the present until the reader knows everything.
Option one makes me sad. option two is my newest idea and seems the easiest and least confusing, and option three was the one i was going to go with originally, but seems a little complex.
I guess what i really need is to sit down and just finish getting the revisions into my computer copy, and then i can piece them together in different formations to see which one i like the best. That, of course, means i need my computer back.
so maybe i'm not as anxious as i really think i am about this story, i'm just impatient to get my computer back and start working again.
Monday i wrote 5 pages (composed on the computer too!!) of some of the stuff that i am missing that needs to be added into those first few chapters. I'm very much looking forward to the 23rd.
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