6.16.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 16

So much for blogging every day. I shall have to try again next Camp. That's right, next Camp. I am throwing in the towel on this one. It is just too much for me to catch up, both on blog posts and word count, considering that I only have a few days out of this month to write everything. I could still have made it if I had time to write every day, and if I had the option to use speech to text. I will still post as and when I can, but that crazy amount of typing required is just not an option.

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 11 (R.I.P.)

I promise you that the Day 11 blog post exists. This is not it. That post was written all properly, on the right date, and, in a rare moment when everyone else was busy, and I got the desktop, it was all ready to post. It died. Whether it was the slow internet connection, or the ancient form of Internet Exploder that was the only browser available, it died, swallowed fully formed into the aether, its very contents forgotten. So, this day, I write not a post, but an obituary. Goodbye, dear blog post.

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 10

Monday, June 11th, 8 AM EST
A few hours late for Day 10, I guess. I know it's actually 5:30 PM here, but I am still sticking to my home time zone, because I won't gain back the hours I lost until July, when I return. At any rate, I won't have internet access for a few days, so this won't be posted until I reach my grandmother's house, which has wifi.
This entry is going to be pretty off-topic, as I haven't had much time to write. You'd think that, being crammed on a plane for sixteen hours, even allowing for stopovers and takeoff/landing overhead, I would have done something. Nope. 1, I felt too lazy, and 2, I didn't want to waste the battery when I didn't know when I would next have a chance to charge my iPad. Would you believe me if I said that the battery life was the majority deciding factor?
Okay. I can mostly predict that for the rest of the month, this blog is largely going to feature reasons why Bobo the Bard/Agent Double Oh Zero is too lazy to write. XD I'm not pressuring myself, though. I am taking it easy this month, and spending time with family.
...Every single one of whom is currently, at 6:00 PM, fast asleep. I don't think jet lag is contagious, but if it is, I seem to be the only one who has escaped the infection. Finally, my predilection for staying up until all hours of the night comes in handy.
Now if only I knew where the food was...
And now, here is my lame attempt to stick with the idea that this is, in fact, a writing blog. I just had an idea for a rather interesting revelation. My antagonist, Khronos, is turning out to be less of a bad guy, and more of a complicated guy with an interesting backstory. That is not the revelation. :-) I am liking where this going, however. If only I knew how to make it work...
I think my problem at this point is that my characters are not fleshed out enough. It's the recent combination of ideas. They were all suddenly shoved into a new house together, and now they have to work out their new roles, and who is going to do what.
On the other hand, though I am doing Dark Arcana, I still keep getting the feeling that I am writing Infinity Cross (aka Amberian). There is one character in particular whose presence I feel, lurking like a ninja at the back of the story. Sometimes something Oscar says reminds me of him, and sometimes something Khronos does seems to relate to events from Infinity Cross. The servants of Khronos remind me a lot of the Nocharen Sideas, the mischievous alien "gods" from Infinity Cross. The Arcana themselves remind me of artifacts found in Infinity Cross. I even think that Oscar might at one point meet the character from Infinity Cross, since this person is a traveler of time and space. Since Dark Arcana and Infinity Cross are set in the same world, except that Dark Arcana takes place a couple of hundred years before Infinity Cross, this is not exactly surprising, I guess. Previously, I was going to set them in the same place, but have them be two completely different stories, with Dark Arcana happening after Infinity Cross.
Well. So much for that.
While the two stories are now more closely related than I had previously anticipated, they will still have different angles. Dark Arcana will focus more on elemental magic and the shades of the mind, and Infinity Cross will focus more on time travel, multiple worlds, and alien political soap opera time travel sex change battles. No, I'm serious, that is the best way to describe it. When one can change shape/species/gender at will, things get hairy. Literally.
And time travel adds a whole new dimension.
(Ba dum tsssh!)
Anyway, that is about it for now. More later.

Word Count: 11328

6.09.2012

Camp NaNowrimo, Day 9

"I spy something green."
"It's a tree, eh?"

Writing this now, because I won't have time later today to do any writing.

This water front hotel has a stunning view of something that is a cross between a swamp and a retention pond. The whole is surrounded by some very frightened looking palm trees.

I don't think that the hotel staff would appreciate it if I built a tent in here. Instead, I am taking one last 'nap' before lunch and heading out to the airport. Read: Lying in bed backwards using the blanket as a pillow and the pillow as a blanket while listening to technical death metal. I have discovered that it is in fact possible to headbang while lying down and almost falling asleep.

Dark Arcana wise, I had several ideas for cute sappy scenes between Oscar and Claire. Oscar tends to be able to survive and worm his way into trouble but handle himself wherever he is, but Claire is in way over her head, and doesn't realize it. I have found that Oscar is mostly ambivalent about most things, but not to her. At least, he is not above doing his fair share of backstabbing (and blaming himself afterwards), but he only does it to people who are his equals or greater. Not that Claire isn't an adult -- she is -- but Oscar has been among these forces all his life. He's used to weird shit happening. However, I do know that he feels protective toward her (although this worries him, because he says that everything that he ever took care of dies [pet hamster]), and once he gets to know her a bit, he doesn't like seeing her cry.

It's so sappy I'm gonna die! XD

...And by this time, I am in the car.

All of us are in row 42 on the plane. This is a good thing...

6.08.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 8

This will be a pretty short post. I have been lazy, and have written only 270 words today. Well, I was busy. :-)

Currently in the car. Pretty quiet drive. Currently stocking up on death metal goodness for my vacation playlist!

However, on a plotting note, I had a small victory. I had no clue how my FMC was going to enter the picture, but it kind of took care of itself when I least expected it! Hermeticus Octodyne, the Lord Protector of the Tunnels, meets her at an orphanage, where he goes to look for his nephew Oscar, and notices her power. That sort of catapults her into the adventure.

Badges Earned:

Old Fashioned - For writing 1000+ words using pen/pencil and paper.

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 7

Warning: Depression-fueled, rant filled, and WHINY post up ahead!

I am mentally tired. Today is the first day when I really, really do not feel like blogging. It is only the thought of the Blog Necromancy Challenge that keeps me going.

Mostly what is on my mind is the trip. I leave tomorrow, and will not be back for the rest of June. This is an impediment to my finishing Camp. For the next week or so, I will have very limited time to write...and I am already in deep word debt. After that, I will also be expected to spend time with family, so running away to write might be considered rude.

Normally, I would not sweat this. I would just scribble away on a notebook, or on my phone or laptop, while with family, in the car, and in the plane. However, though I no longer feel pain in my thumbs, they are still not completely healed, and so...I still can't type, or hold a pen/pencil for long. I am still having to make exclusive use of speech to text, and that means...it is a waste of that lovely long car ride I have ahead of me, and that beautifully lengthy plane ride too. On top of that, I can't keep people company while sitting quietly using speech to text, as I did before with my notebook. You can only utter (to others) meaningless sentences in a disjointed monotone robot voice that the AI can recognize while speaking punctuation and new line characters out loud for so long, before people start wanting to throw whatever heavy objects are closest at hand right at your head. I can't exactly run away to a separate room either... I want to be with my family, and not turn into Ebenezer Scrooge, but I also want to win...

o_O SOMEONE forgot her happy pills. Anyway, this was going to be a short entry. I did not mean to rant. I will just hope that I can hold a pen soon! Maybe I am just working myself up too much. I shall quit whining...now! Sometimes, I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too. If I don't win this month, then, well, Camp will come again, then there is NaNo, and Dark Arcana has promised not to run away. (I really am looking forward to this trip. I haven't seen these family members in years! :-D) And all of this will still be here when I get back. (Awww, thanks, bunny! ^.^; I'll miss you! And thank you, Henry, for agreeing to babysit Deathclock!)

I hit awesome word counts today, when I took a break. The first was 8,998. The second was 9,999. I left it at that for a while, and then the urge to get rid of my word debt was just too much. I wrote a bit more, and it ended up, finally, at 10,667. Stopped. Wrote more. Final count for tge day: 11,111. Oh. Hell. Yeah.

Seems to me that I do not lack for topics to blog about. Whether anyone wants to read my crappy, non sequitur-riddled word vomit about anything and everything (God of Ephemera indeed...!) is another matter. Seems to me that the reason I do not post is that I am, frankly, too lazy to write blog posts!

Badges Earned:


Swimming Lessons: 10k words reached!

Late At Night - Write last thing just before sleeping. Sorry if the formatting is a bit funny. Editing this on my phone.

6.07.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 6

I can't believe I forgot to mention this. The title for the first book of Dark Arcana will most likely be Dark Arcana: The Octodyne Inheritance because...that is what the story is about - how Oscar first learns about the power of the strange elemental artifacts called Arcana. Those most skilled at elemental manipulation draw power from the Arcana, and use it to run the Guilds, which are basically a bunch of large corporations/societies, each of which heads a different industry. The Guilds are very prominent on the main planet. However, Erebus (the lair of Khronos) does not have the Guild system, and Hydron (planet of the Water Elementals) doesn't either.

As for the series itself, I do not know how many books there are. It might be a trilogy, or there might be more. I won't know how many until I figure out how much story there is in my story. I must say, though, that the Dark Arcana Quartet sounds better than the Dark Arcana Trilogy.

I made a huge dent in my word debt today. I am still not caught up, and now that the clock has ticked past the midnight line, I have another 1,667 words added. However, I am still only 3k behind, as opposed to 5k.

On a whim, prompted by the dark machinations of my subconscious, based on a suggestion thrown out by a friend, I combined The Fires of Ozan and Dark Arcana. The results were interesting. One was the creation of the water planet Hydron. This was previously just the simple, unnamed world on which TFOO took place. Another is an interesting clash of Asian influences from Avatar: The Last Airbender, the remnants of the now original fiction TFOO, and Western influences from typical traditional fantasy/science fiction archetypes. A third is the aforementioned (in a previous post) clash between Ozan and Oscar.

Any efforts to remove Ozan, both character and story, out of the picture, are met with severe rebellion from the plot bunny. It makes Henry, my Muse, very agitated, and it takes all the greatest arts of The Narrator, to calm her back down. Therefore, it looks like that idea is here to stay...if only because I do not want to put my Narrator, poor guy, through the ordeal of one of Henry's Episodes again. She doesn't deal well with Ruining The Story.

Badges Earned:

Non-stop: Write for an hour without stopping.


Modern: Write at least 1000 words on an electronic device.


6.06.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 5

[Picture removed]
I was procrastinating by searching for inspirational pictures, for Dark Arcana. There are actually several planets in the Elemental Alliance (real name TBD), so the number of scenes I could show would be numerous. As it is, none of the pictures I found were right. This one was the closest, and at that, it is more symbolic than anything else. It sort of looks like a combination of places from the planets Hydron, Erebus, Acheron, Helios, Kairos, and Meervane (names TBD).

In other news, The Fires of Ozan sort of barged into Dark Arcana. I tried splitting them back up again, but it didn't work. It seems that the revolution that was brewing in the Fire Palaces of Hydron was really engineered by Khronos, and that it was all really a front for his invasion... I do believe that the huge project that the scientists on Helios are working on, ostensibly for the Hydronian rebels, is really funded by Khronos... 

Oh, and, unbeknownst to Khronos, the scientists have an insidious little side project going on themselves, which is to upset the balance of the elements, and release the Big Scary Evil Thing that lies at the center of the universe. Of course, like all story scientists, they do it in all ignorance, because they think it is for the good of humanity. Silly scientists! :-) And, of course, Oscar, Hermeticus Octodyne, and the governments of the Alliance hear of it, and of course they think that naturally, Khronos must be behind it too! Little do they know that while Khronos enjoys power, he doesn't want destruction. He's quite an enlightened Darth Vader!

Character-wise, it will be interesting to see Ozan and Oscar butt heads. Ido have to change Ozan's name, however, because it is too similar to Oscar. In terms of cast, I now have a pirate princess out for revenge against Khronos and Hermeticus Octodyne (Claire), Khronos, Ozan, Big Evil Thing, Hermeticus Octodyne, and the demons inside Oscar, who sometimes act as Oscar's multiple personalities. Much stepping on each other's toes should ensue!

A city in either Amberian or Dark Arcana...or both.
I found this picture too. It was on some random site, so I have no idea who made it. That tower looks like a Nocharen Sideas incursion station from the Amberian idea. Okay, so that has nothing whatever to do with Dark Arcana, being a different story altogether. However, Dark Arcana and Amberian are actually set on the same worlds, so it could work. The spaceship and the guy are too futuristic looking for Dark Arcana, since Dark Arcana takes place before the Amberian stories. ...And if you are familiar with Amberian, and especially with my temporal paradoxes from hell, you will know that this is a loaded proposition, since Amberian has a LOT of time travel! 

In terms of the stories themselves, the city looks a lot like Erebus...specifically, it is almost as if Khronos made Erebus by stealing bits from 19th century Engleter (and various other places and times), welding them together, and transplanting them to Erebus...

In fact, I almost feel like Khronos and his works were part of an early effort of some huge project that will be revealed in Amberian...

Khronos...not really.
And this guy seriously reminds me of Khronos....even if he looks nothing like him. Khronos is a giant brass robot. This one is too futuristic, but...I think it is the face, and the theme. Khronos also has no face, and he is one of the most powerful elemental manipulators in the world. Some even say he can spawn new worlds...

Key inspiration words to remember: sacred key, talisman, spirit matrix, Nocharen Sideas Queen/King

6.05.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 4

Again, short entry.

At about 3k now, and that includes 200 rebel words that I wrote for Amber, another idea I have. Now...need 300 more words to hit Day 2 goals. I am going to have to do some heavy writing tomorrow to catch up! 5.3k behind.

In other news, I combined Dark Arcana and Ozan. Very different stories...should be interesting!

Cold war/revolution on a water planet, new cold fusion technology, plus Dark Lord robot/magical items...and Amber keeps creeping in too, with the aliens as the servants of Khronos (the Nocharen Sideas). I am wondering how these are all intertwined...

6.03.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 3

This will again be a very short entry.

I am pretty sure that the stiffness in my thumbs is due to tendonitis. The symptoms fit. Well, the only thing to do now is to just relax the affected areas, and wait until it goes away.

In other news, life happened, which is why I have, so far, written nothing today. By tomorrow, I will be 5000 words behind. I'm going to have to produce them somehow. Previously, in these situations, I would just have an all day typing marathon, and I would rely on Write or Die to push me along. Currently, neither of these is a feasible option.

It looks like I am going to have to spend a long time talking to myself…

And, possibly, go for the Bronze Fingertips badge…


6.02.2012

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 2

It is getting late. My hands still hurt too much to type, so I am hunched over my phone, whispering into it like a prisoner in a story, trying to write down his memoirs in the dead of night, when the guards are not listening.

This will be a pretty short entry.

Nothing much has happened. I have so far crossed 1700 words, which is on track…for day one. :-) I'm going to have to do some catching up tomorrow.

Plot-wise, I still have no semblance of one. Dark Arcana is an entire trilogy, and I have no idea where one book begins and the other ends. That is not a problem. That is what Camp is for. Therefore, what I have so far is basically a bunch of scenes. The pattern for me is that I keep writing, and I keep writing, and gradually, a plot arc images. That is not to say that I write in any sequential order. I do not. It is almost guaranteed that almost everything I write this month will be thrown out. However, hopefully, at the end, I will have some sort of skeleton for the story.

Badges Earned



Goed Begonnen



I had meant to color these in, so that I would have pretty pictures to post here, but that ended up not working out. I will be posting pictures, as I earn badges. So far, I have earned one badge, for starting.

Camp NaNoWriMo, Day 1

It is Day 1 of Camp NaNoWriMo, and I am already feeling too lazy to write.

This is my list of excuses: I have been writing JavaScript instead of fiction, I need coffee, I can't decide what to write, my hands hurt too much to type, I'm hungry, and I haven't yet built a tent.

All in all, a rather crappy start to the month.

However, since the time I wrote down that sentence and now, at least one of those excuses is no longer applicable. As for what I am going to write, it has come down to two stories:

  • Dark Arcana: This is a trilogy idea. I know it is fantasy, specifically, steampunk. However, other than the fact that my hero is a guy named Oscar, who has multiple personalities, and that my Dylan is a half android half human creature called Khronos (basically, a steampunk Darth Vader), I do not know much else about the story.
  • The Fires of Ozan: Dark Of The Sun: It started off as fanfiction based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, but I found that I liked the direction in which it was going. Also, I found that I was using far less of the original material than I had thought I would. Basically, the only thing which I "borrowed" was the idea of bending, and the names of the Four Nations.  Given that, I decided to just write it as original fiction. However, the result of that is that I know even less about this story than I do about Dark Arcana. Now that I can no longer use bending, and now that I have to remove all references specific to the world of Avatar, it leaves several big huge gaping plot hole- in my story.
… And it seems, based on that, that my decision has already been made for me. Might as well write the story that I know more about, right? Good. So something productive came of this blog post after all. :-)

Of course, knowing myself, it will bother me that I have to Come account, but that I am working when only one story (for one account). I may be working on Dark Arcana in the beginning, but it is almost guaranteed that somewhere along the way, I will be taking a shot at the other one also. :-)

Alright. No more excuses. Time to write!

… Right after I painstakingly create new Scrivener projects, customize them exactly the way I want, eat dinner, clean up the kitchen, find some scarves to build a tent with, finish designing the Winter skin for my plotting forum, do the laundry, put together a playlist for Dark Arcana, and design a new scoring system for determining plotting progress for my plotting forum.


This is a picture that I made in Photoshop a few years ago. I was procrastinating by searching for inspiration came across it today, and realized that it looks almost exactly like Erebus, the planet ruled by Khronos – the steampunk Death Star, as it were!

Total Word Count: <100 (Invoking Luddite Clause–had to hand write because I'm still going easy on the typing–haven't yet made final count).