BORGoooooooosh! Or, A Change of Pace

So, Screnzy is over. The final score? 16 pages / 100 goal.

=/

Whatever.

In any case, my play, which was supposed to be an emotional tense drama, has snowballed into a cheeseball time-traveling comedic farce. I hit my all-time low whenI banged out the last four pages at two in the morning; I named one of the characters Shaneeequa and my bad guy has a creepy teddy bear whose face keeps changing in every scene.

Other than that, summer has started and I am chilling. My break is still ON! No worries or woes or guilt.

So I have decided that as an exercise in writing, I am going to try for conciseness, because my blog posts are rambling picture-less behemoths.

Um, yes. So I guess I've failed at that in this one. :-P

Except for the picture-less bit. Here's a quick sketch I did of Luke, the main character of my Screnzy. I have no idea what Luke looks like, but I know this looks nothing like him.

Er...yes. I know it's the back of his head. It was supposed to go on a banner, where he's gazing off into the distance in a pool of darkness, but I didn't finish it before Screnzy ended.


KTHXBAAII lulz!

This is a new doomed quest.

So, for those of you who don't know, I will be embarking on a new quest in about a week two days ONE DAY -3 days -16 days. (This is evidence of how easily I forget to update my blog.)

[EDIT: This is inexcusable. Started Screnzy and this blog post has been sitting in my drafts for almost a month. My only excuse? Job and Finals. And both of those should mostly within the next week. Yay!]

If you saw me last November, you might remember that there was a certain air of...neurotic manic craziness about me, as I tried to cram writing 50k words of a novel into one month. It was a breath-taking, exhilarating, and utterly terrifying experience, and come December I had a winner's certificate, the germ of an idea, thousands of now-irrelevant words which I pitched into the trash as soon as possible, and also a rekindled desire to inflict the ravings of my mind upon the masses. And those who live in the same house as me were glad to have me back among the ranks of the sociable, who would no longer bite their heads off if they talked to me while I was writing.

Well, the madness and social withdrawal begins again on April 1st.

Event: Script Frenzy
When: April 1st - 30th
Goal: Write 100 pages of a play, screenplay, TV script, or graphic novel.

Insanity? Not quite. But add in the fact that April is my finals month? A resounding YES! I am officially stark raving mad! But it's better that way. :-)

So for my script I am going to do a movie screenplay. I actually had this idea for a novel, but for a prolonged lack of a Screnzy idea, I decided to do a screenplay since I always wonder what the movie versions of my ideas would look like anyway.

It's going to be about a spirit who turns himself human in order to be with the woman he loves. But when she betrays him, he's stuck on Earth

It's about a Time Agent named Luke who gives up his reality-altering powers and becomes fully human in order to stay with the woman he loves. But when she betrays him, he's stuck on Earth, utterly alone and powerless. Add to that the fact that his arch-enemy, a member of a Separatist Cell made up of Time Agents gone rogue, who was supposed to be locked up, is now loose, and is bent on erasing the current reality and replacing it with one where the Agency doesn't exist. Can our beloved main character reconcile himself to a life on Earth, and save the world at the same time?

The Frenzy begins in two days. It began half a month ago.

Current: 6 pages
Should Be: 56 pages

So I have just a little bit of work to do. (^_^)

I am sorry for the rather A.D.D. nature of this post. Things tend to get screwy when you delay so long that the tense of your context changes. =P

Ahh, I can't even read over this again. It's too painful and disjointed. *Post*

:-)

Oh my god. I just found this.

It's the picture I drew of Razzmatazz, the ass-kicking homeless hippie hobo elf!

And now, as he'd say, Catcha later, groovy lady! *wink*

Ambition is a Corpse.

Precisely so.

I haven't really written anything in forever. This is good.

Enough of that. This blog was supposed to be about my whole life, not just about my literary endeavors. So, Life, what's going on with you?


Life *reading off a notepad*: You're about to bake a cake, hopefully, and you haven't practiced guitar in two days, before which you practiced for two days, before which you didn't touch it for a week, before which you were going strong for a month.

(Why does my Life speak with a high-pitched British accent?)

Me: That's it?

Life: Yes.

Me: Screw this. Back to the activities on the writing front!

Writing Front: *cricketcricketcricketcricketcricketcricketcricketcricketcricket*

Oh, bugger.

Magic Babies Are SO Overdone!

This is the blog post that really should have been a comment, but which is long enough that it's too long to be a comment. And I still would have made it a comment, except that when I got to the bit with the title in it, I simply could not resist writing a post with that title.

So.

I see the point a certain plot-ranting reader was trying to make. But regardless of what I write, I still have the problem of ending up with too many words, whether it's a prologue or not because I think of the interesting plot points/character lines/scenes, I write them, and then I dig myself into a hole as I try to fill in the bits in between.

And speaking of prologues, they don't always have to be 'mysterious' or 'vague.' Actually, I feel that the point of a prologue is to include a relevant piece of story that is essential for plot/understanding purposes, but which for some reason doesn't fit in with the rest of it, either in terms of point of view, or chronologically, like if it took place in the past or future. And I think that if there's really nothing that fits into that category, then you don't need a prologue. Far too many people put in a vague prologue because they think they should have one, rather than put one in because they have an important bit that doesn't fit.

Magic babies are so overdone!

As for the overly dramatic he just did WHAT!? scenes, they are one of the reasons I end up with too much junk going on in the first place. I know personally (mainly from the lack of suitable reaction evinced by my poor sister upon the perusal of a series of execrably scribed "dramatic" scenes that I inflicted upon her, whihc served to confuse rather than excite) that I, as the author, will see the full shocking implication of what the character just did. But to someone who can't see into their head like I can, things happening out of the blue will tend to annoy rather than intrigue because they don't know why they're supposed to get all . That's why I try to spend some time leading up to the action so it will make sense, rather than just having it come at the reader out of the blue.

Easier said than done.

In fact, what this results in is a series of little scenes where I can see how to let the reader know some of the character's motivations, and their current situation, by blending them with action. Except the tricky bits come in when I try to link them together. That's how I write: I write the good bits that I can think of, then I fill in the gaps between. That's really why one scene ends up so long, because when I try to transition from one thing to another everything just blows up around me. Dialogue gets long-winded, as I try to direct conversation from one topic to another while revealing necessary information. One scene turns into a long string of little confrontations and adventures, as I make references to previous scenes that I then have to explain.

That's what happened with this one character...without revealing any specific details, she's an emotionless b!tch who does something horrible, something that not even she is insensitive to, and she finally has to deal with the full trauma and consequences of her act and has to re-learn how to feel emotion and empathize with the pain of others. I was going to start off with the horrible act, but it wouldn't seem so horrible...rather, it would seem corny...if you didn't know what kind of person she was. And it just went from there. 

'Nuff said. Basically...it's one big tangle. :-D

=( (= (Textual rendition of creepy grinning/weeping masks)

All right bloggie-poo, I realize I have been somewhat neglecting you. I will now minister to your vanity by updating you, although the further inflation of your fatheadedness will be somewhat tempered by the realization that I am only doing this to procrastinate on writing a paper for my music class.

How's that for a sadistic passive-agressive no-more Mr. Nice Guy quarter on a string screw you vending machine blow to the self-esteem?

No, I'm not angry. I'm pretty okay right now...just winding down after a day of work. They finally gave me something to do! This is good. The bad bit is, I am not at all familiar with the development environment, so I don't know how to figure out what I don't know. But I'm getting there, so hopefully that will resolve itself.

Oh, depravity. I have stooped to using Internet Explorer because I have two gmail accounts open at the same time, so if I stick to Firefox I can't edit this blog at the same time as checking my other email address. Ah, peste.

Meanwhile, I am not naming any names, but someone I am thinkig of right now needs to update her blog. You will know who you are, because the minute I write these words you will, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, think of a purple hippo with the word 'DESULTORY' painted in huge pink letters on her stomach. That is my telepathic mind-modifiying awesomeness in effect.

So. Lastly, a quick update on the writing front:

[insert snarky picture of tired animal making sardonic/sarcastic face]

I am on break. That's it. I am clearing my head before I start re-planning the dregs of what was once NaNo10. It has exploded in my face and I feel like I am making no progress even though I suppose I am. Curse my verbosity! That's why it takes me 3000 words (approximately ten pages, for my non-obsessively "page-from-word-count"ing friends) to write what was originally supposed to be a single to two or three page prologue. Now imagine what my pen/fingers do to a whole chapter. Yes. I have a deplorable habit of going off on thought or dialogue tangents, in order to explore an interesting idea.

I lied.

That is technically true, but if it was so easily defined I could just catch it right there, write it down for later, and continue writing. The truth is, I start from a single-sentence outline of a scene, and I start writing it, but then I find out that in order for the reader to understand what just happened, they have to know the context around it. Then I spend time writing the context (not simply exposition, but things that actually happen). Sometimes even the context spawns context. The end result is that I find that my initial scene was really somewhere in the middle. But then the problem is that I now have a whole bunch more of the beginning to write, plus I now have the rest of the original middle, and the end to write, and the new stuff disrupts the flow of the old stuff, because the original inception of the plot, the pivotal beginning event, must wait on some beginning scenes, which completely throws off the flow.

Dilemma: to write relevant beginning scenes, and completely replan the book, or jump right in, but no one understands why this is so important because knows what is going on?


Ugh.

Evil Laugh and General Amusement

Oh, I am good. 

I just realized that Harry Potter resolves the inherent paradox that arises when trying to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. It's called magic. Basically it works by reproducing the crazy junk that goes on at the quantum level on a macroscopic scale, thus successfully using both theories. Further examination of the workings of this phenomenon can provide us with the final theory of everything!

Avada Kedavra.