Thuds

[ashnistrike]

Good New Years and surrounding days hanging out with fellow writers. Thank you robling_t and Adam. As a result of which:

Project: In the Sight of Justice
Words this weekend: 724
Words Total: 38,354
Scene Finished: Yes!

Pause while I figure out what happens next. This will involve spending time with the Bad Guys' POV (which won't make it into the book proper) until I no longer think of them as Bad Guys.

Project: Ghosts and Simulations
Words Today: 2417
Words Total: 3527
Scene Finished: Scene finished, and first draft finished!

Once I get this into shape, it's another one that can go to Analog. Which is good, because actually selling stories makes it more noticable that I write like a snail. (Actually, I wrote this story in three days, it's just that two of the days were in August. So I write like a predator that lurks patiently in the grass before striking at lightning speed. That sounds better.)

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Or maybe you could think of it as writing like a komodo dragon, you bite the story and it takes a while for it to die and fall over to be eaten.

I also write in bursts. It is non-ideal, and I wish I didn't, but I have to admit that I do, and to do things to make them more likely.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

By which time it smells really awful?

My major problem is that I have two jobs, and at the moment writing fiction is the one without deadlines. So when I trick myself into writing, I usually have to channel it towards psychology articles. Fiction is most likely to happen either between semesters (like right now), or when I've got a looming deadline on a psych project and really shouldn't be doing anything else.

Ghosts and Simulations, incidentally, is the story that was originally inspired by our discussion of mummy-colored dye. Of course, at this point, it contains neither mummies nor Victorians.

[page-of-swords.livejournal.com]

papers?

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

A book and a short story, respectively. Psych articles don't grow nearly so linearly.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

This will involve spending time with the Bad Guys' POV (which won't make it into the book proper) until I no longer think of them as Bad Guys.


Interesting approach, I'll have to try that. ;)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

How else would I know what they're going to do next?

I got your chapter and will hopefully have a chance to take a look at it this weekend.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

That's the thing with working in first, sometimes the narrator won't let me get very far into the bad guys' heads... :) (Which can be a device in itself, not quite full-on Unreliable Narrator but distinctly limited by what the narrator thinks is going on.)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I do work in first, but I usually work in alternating first. And sometimes, privately, I work in first persons that aren't going to make it into the final work.

So for my first book, there were 3 official points of view. However, hidden in my files is a scene from the POV of the antagonist, in which she explains the actual plot to me. I liked her well enough to give her an official POV in the second book. Of course, now she's in trouble herself, rather than actively causing the trouble.

The sort of limitation you're talking about is one of my favorite things about first person--you can tell a lot about a character by the mistakes they make! I don't understand people who want their protagonist to be right all the time.