I think I wrote maybe a handful of words yesterday, hence the non-progress. The story is very slow to form, and I've been rather tired lately and having difficulty concentrating. I might try revising my Inca myth story rather than work on this story, for I still have no clue what it's about.

For those who don't normally follow the blog of the slushmaster, he's posted an entry on the process of fishing my story out of the slush (and it was rather unusual process for him this time from what I gather). It's had me thinking a bit about derivation, imitation, and influence as well as the idea of readers wanting the "familiar" or things similar to their favorite authors (when I worked at the bookstore, we had lists of "if you like this author, you'll probably like this one" to help out the customers.). What we read obviously influences us whether we're conscious of it or not, and hell, weren't the greats of the Canon influenced by the works that came before them? I mean, would there have been a Ulysses without The Odyssey? And how many authors pillage the Bible for material? Seeings how I'm always worried about originality in my work, I'm always wondering where the line is between inspiration and imitation. Any thoughts?

Made a tad bit of progress on a new One World story yesterday, only about 250 words, but a start. I've had the story in mind for a while now but still don't really know what it's about (hence my failure to have started it sooner), but maybe I can muddle my way through it. Today I'm going to work on it some more, but first will go over "The Place That Makes You Happiest" one last time then get it printed up and into an envelope and ready to go (though I won't mail it for another two weeks).

Finished up the rewrite of "The Hearts of Men" today and employed my new editing technique, and found it very useful for finding typos and making final changes, so I think I'll add that to my checklist of stuff to do prior to submittal. I'm a little too high-strung right now to work on anything so I think I'll treat myself to some Age of Empires 2 for the rest of the day.

And big congrats to aliettedb, who just sold a story to Realms of Fantasy!

Made it up to page 12 yesterday, so not a very good production day. I spent time doing some reading up on the Mexican-American war and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I also got back the final edits on the rewrite for Paradox from aliettedb and all looks good on that front. I'll wait to print it out until the end of the month, so I can go over it one last time after having had some time away from it. I've already made a start on today's work, so I'm late posting progress (almost forgot to do it!:)).

Retyped about 7 pages yesterday. I should have a better day today since both kids will be at school. Not much else to report.

Finally did the bits of the rewrite I was putting off doing in "The Place That Makes You Happiest" and sent it off for an opinion. Today I'll be working on another rewrite, which will involve retyping it (I think I skipped this step of my editing process with this story so I'm going to do it now) then have some minor points to think about and address. This will take a couple days.

Took the kids out to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner last night since Jeff had a business dinner to attend, and we had lots of fun. It's definitely not the cool experience I remember from my own childhood, but then we always went to Showbiz, which had better games and animatronics. And skiball used to give you the best number of tickets, but now it just sucks. Next time I'll unload ten bucks worth of tokens into the dumb bouncy ball game that seems to give the most tickets of any game (sometimes as much as 50 a ball) then maybe the kids can get better stuff than awful fake jewelry and  plastic trinkets that fall apart as soon as you play with them for the first time. But yeah, we still had fun.

Morning Star Rising

4,124 / 150,000 (2.7%)

Making my way back through again, adapting chapter 2 to be chapter 1. It's proving a bit tedious, but then I was feeling quite tired yesterday and had difficulty concentrating for long stretches. The nights have been so warm here that I've had trouble getting to sleep and it's showing coming morning time. I'm going to need to lay down again before I can start working today.

No excerpts until I get back to where I was before, so it will be a couple days at least.

I spent the weekend letting my changes sink in mentally and playing video games, so today it's back to work, which involves starting over with the first two chapters (I think I'm going to outline the action first, just to make sure I get things straight before starting on the actual writing).

On the book-buying front, I got two new ones this weekend: Letters from Mexico and The Nahualli Animal Oracle. The later comes with a deck of divining cards, and apparently my nahualli is a coyote (perhaps the 3-legged one that I sometimes see in the field behind my house? Having a disable leg certainly hasn't slowed it down.).

Morning Star Rising

20,079 / 150,000 (13.4%)

A bit of progress yesterday. I'm feeling cranky today because I've just gotten to the big catalyst and I'm at page 93 in my manuscript (53 according to my MM template--which, for those that are curious, is based on my copy of the Summers at Castle Auburn in mass market, for it looks rather typical, the font not too small or too big, and no crowded margins), well outside the 30-50 pages I mentioned earlier. But I'm inclined to think that I'm laying too much importance in that. This is epic fantasy after all, and it was pointed out by one commenter that for most epic fantasies, the catalyst comes around page 100 rather than within the first fifty pages. That's not to say that I couldn't cut back, though probably not enough to get it down to the first 50 pages of manuscript. Yep, I'm stressing unnecessarily and should probably get off this kick and just get this draft done.

So, here's today's excerpt:

 

Morning Star Rising

16,709 / 150,000 (11.1%)

Good progress yesterday, and I even got to spend a couple hours playing the Playstation. I'm starting on chapter 4 today, which is actually chapter 6 in the old draft (minus the first half of chapter 6, which I'm cutting). I've got some new stuff to add before getting to the big scene, but the plot's moving along nicely. Here's today's excerpt:

 

 

Morning Star Rising

14,730 / 150,000 (9.8%)

A poor showing yesterday, so no excerpt today. I spent most of the day playing the new Grand Theft Auto game, but now that I've got the initial excitement of it out of the way, I can get back to writing.

Morning Star Rising

14,237 / 150,000 (9.5%)

Had a pretty decent day yesterday, finished chapter 2 and am halfway through chapter 3. I'm having some difficulty figuring out what exactly is the catalyst for my story, for there's quite a few "catalysts" that happen at the begin that get the story rolling for certain characters. One happens before the story actually starts, though the protag finds out about it within the first couple of pages (its the thing that spurs the elusive big bad to formulate his nasty plans), then there's a catalyst in chapter 3, which pushes villain into acting ahead of time, then there's the thing I think is the catalyst for the protag, the nail in the coffin of her childhood so speak but it's brought about by catalyst #2. I think the talk of catalysts over at Pubrants is just confusing me (because this is a very multi-layered story and there's a ton of important stuff going on that the protag will not know about until much later) and I should just stop looking at it and stop worrying about it. Not that my worrying has caused me to change my plans of how I was going to rewrite the beginning; I am still following my original plans for it, but I'm worrying far too much about whether that thing that I think is the actual catalyst will fall outside the first fifty pages of the book (not first 50 of manuscript. We're already well past that point). Anyway, I am enjoying the rewrite. And so today's excerpt:

 

 

Morning Star Rising

9,236 / 150,000 (6.2%)

So I actually got quite a bit done yesterday, for it wasn't quite as warm out as I thought it would be (and once it did get really warm, everybody was too busy doing other things to go on a walk, so I settled for working). And so, today's excerpt:

 

 

I converted my old draft of MSR to published-book format. I actually started out doing this little exercise for a good reason (I've been following the pitch lessons over at Pubrants and I've been trying to figure out exactly how many manuscript pages equates to 30-50 pages of a typical paperback, since the pitch lessons say that the story catalyst should happen within that range in a book, and I think mine might happen a little later than 50 pages). But now I'm just fascinated by how cool it looks. I converted what I have of my rewrite into it as well, to see where I stand page-wise (17 pages at the moment, though when comparing page to page, I think the format I have is closer to trade paperback size rather than mass market. My second draft: 408 pages, which is indeed steep for a TPB). Anyway, I wasted a good deal of time oogling at this today and also decided that it might actually be a good format for proofing my novel when I get it done, for just a casual perusal of the first 6 pages in this format uncovered quite a few typos that I undoubtedly would have missed by trying to read in manuscript format.

I did a tad bit of writing yesterday, certainly not enough to justify updating the word count, but I wrapped up chapter 1 and started on chapter 2. I'm also contemplating making my protag a year or two older, for I do think her voice isn't quite as young as it's supposed to be, and really there's no reason she can't be a year or two older (this would also allow me to trim more off the front end, since then she wouldn't have to go through the naming ceremony and such, and information about her own experience can come in when her brother sees the soothsayer about his adult name.). I'm not sure I'm going to work on it today; it's nice out and we're probably going to go for a walk rather than hang around the house.

Hope everyone's having a good weekend!

Morning Star Rising

6,496 / 150,000 (4.3%)

I didn't get a whole lot done yesterday, thanks to a hair cut, and I don't anticipate getting much done today, thanks to there being both Avalanche/Red Wings and Nuggets/Lakers to watch this afternoon, but I'm going to make a run at it. And because I got so little done, I'm not posting an excerpt today.

Morning Star Rising

5,943 / 150,000 (4.0%)

Made a decision yesterday that I didn't need the end of chapter 1, or the first half of chapter 2 since it doesn't really push the plot forward, and the bits that worked with character were for characters that I'm not doing anything with in this version. So I decided to just skip on ahead to the first big conflict scene between our hero and the villain (well, one of the villains, but he's the major one) and I'm liking how the character dynamics are shaping up.

Here's today's excerpt:

 

I've decided to experiment a bit with posting small excerpts of what I'm working on, no more than a couple hundred words at a time, along with my daily progress. I've seen other folks do it, and though typically I don't read excerpts, I get that some folks like to and so maybe folks would be interested in seeing bits and pieces of what I'm working on.

My big project at the moment is the second rewrite of my novel Morning Star Rising, and the following is an excerpt from what I wrote yesterday:

 

 

Morning Star Rising

2,938 / 150,000 (2.0%)

Finally decided to start keeping track of the word count. Yes, even though I think the word count will actually increase given my changes, I'm still going to aim for 150k. I figure it's worth a try, at the very least. I didn't get done nearly as much as I wanted to yesterday (spent too much time reading LJ), but today I plan to buckle down and work on it all day.

I have synopsis, though it's kind of cruddy right now and just sort of ends with a whimper (I'm really unsure how to write up what I envision the last chapter being like without reiterating stuff that's already been said, so I decided to not talk about it). I am quite pleased with some character renovations I made and now that I've given my protag things to accomplish along the way, she feels much more motivated and forceful about getting her way. Right now it's 7 1/2 pages, which is much improved over the original 15 pages, but I'd still like to get it down to 6 pages if I can (5 would be ideal, but I'm not going to push it yet). I shall go over it again tomorrow morning and see what tweaking I can do, see if I left anything out, then send it off to a couple of friends for their opinions on the plot changes before I get too far into the actual rewrite.

Off to bed now though. I feel very accomplished.

I was going to rant about someone's post about something that happened at Penguicon which basically amounted to a bunch of objectifying of women and calling it  good thing, but I'm sure everyone on my flist has probably heard of it on their flists, and I expressed my view over on silk_noir's post about it, and well, I've wasted enough time reading and thinking about that guy today when I should be writing. All I will say is that if I'd been there and been asked, I would have told him to get the F away from me and probably would have searched out a security guard or reported him to the hotel manager. One should have a reasonable expectation of attending a convention without having to worry about a.) being approached by horny guys looking for a quick grope and b.) having to watch those same guys groping other women in plain view of everyone walking by. The atmosphere that creates is not the freeing one he so cavalierly touts. But enough about that.

I did some work on the novel yesterday, no outlining, but actual writing (I seem to vacillate back and forth between actual writing and outlining. Today I'm probably going to outline.). I almost made it through the first scene. I'm not rewriting from scratch for I think a good deal of what I have can be reused and there's no point in throwing out what does work just to try something new. There will be parts where I will completely throw stuff out, entire blocks of chapters once I get closer to the end.