Tuesday, February 23, 2016

In Lieu of an Actual Entry.

Here's the thing: my plotting work lately can basically be summed up like this:
So instead of yet another entry detailing my frustration, here's a collection of random thoughts I've collected while attempting to make things work.

  • Across everything I've been looking at lately, I have at least four plots-in-progress that deal with gods as a significant part of the plot.  I have at least two, probably more buried somewhere, that take place at a college.  Yet I do not have anything that deals with gods at college.
  • Prehensile hair is going to be really hard to write.
  • In regards to the story wherein I swapped two characters' genders: the main cast (and, literally, the crew) of this thing includes two people dating within their gender but outside their species, one asexual, two characters whose sexuality I haven't bothered to define because it's not important to the story, and one character who has a gender identity but considers sexuality something only fleshy beings have to deal with.  And then there's the side character who needed a whole new set of pronouns.  Yes, I'm looking forward to writing this.
  • I get the weirdest ideas when I work out.  Some are useful.  Others are more like "I should have this otherworldly being quote Ozzy Osbourne lyrics."
  • It's weird to think how long I've been working on some of this stuff, or how far back it goes.  Some of these stories are the results of me refusing to give up on an idea, no matter how many times it didn't work out.  My second-latest idea started as me wanting to tell a story with a character I came up with in 1998.
  • I'm still trying to figure out what the opposite of time is.
  • My latest idea might or might not work out depending on if I can make a story's Act 1 feel like Act 3 of a much larger tale.  Of course, by the time I develop it enough to become a real story, it'll probably be something completely different.
  • I still have to stop myself from giving someone The Power of Rock.  Being able to solve everything with a song is a problem, it would never work well enough in print, and the copyright issues would be a nightmare.  But it's so damn fun to visualize.
  • Too often, I write up two to three pages' worth of notes for a new story, get really excited, and then never feel like looking at the thing again.  It's really frustrating, because I can't help thinking, how many good ideas am I just shrugging off?
  • I now have an idea for something involving gods at college.
That's enough for now.  Next week: IWSG, wherein I hope I'll be able to write something encouraging and not just go on about how much of a hard time I'm having of things.  And now, back to work.

14 comments:

  1. You're not alone! Sometimes I write pages of notes on a story and then go back to it and just roll my eyes. I have many novels that I've started and abandoned and even worse, I seem to only write the novels that I think I'll never be able to pull off. Why do we torture ourselves???

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    1. I do think there's something for trying to write something that you can't pull off - it's always better to try, and who knows? It might work.

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  2. My story graveyard is not a small place, and it usually takes at least 2 years before a story idea even gets halfway through a first draft. I call it 'story stewing'. Now, the trick is to get it from stewing to done.

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    1. I'm starting to learn that - I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how long it took them to go from idea to even first draft. It's almost always been a shorter time for me, so I'm starting to see things working better when I let them sit for a while. No idea how it'll turn out, though.

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  3. I think the opposite of time is no time. Eternal minutes that can't be measured because they're infinite. (Wrap your head around that one, eh?)

    I was just chatting with an author today whose third book has been signed. She spent ages getting everything together, and suddenly she has had 3 books purchased by publishers in a year. I think that's how it works with writing. In phases. This one will end too.

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    1. If they're eternal, how are they minutes, and how do we even know if there's more than one? :P

      And thanks. I think I'm slowly working my way out of this phase, the way things have been going recently. Time will tell.

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  4. Opposite of time? Space. The final frontier...

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    1. Nope, because the movement of objects through space means they require time to exist, thus does space itself. (There's a reason I don't have an answer for this one yet.)

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  5. I love that gif, that's my whole week so far hahahaha

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    1. That was my entire first half of February, only with more putting my head through solid objects. >_<

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  6. I never thought about it before, but Mt. Olympus does have a sort of frat house vibe sometimes.

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    1. That would explain Zeus's behavior. And the Greek letters on frats.

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  7. Ha, ha, ha, ha! I love how you bullet pointed your way in a full circle. Hurray for gods at college!

    The opposite of time? How about the first dimension. Can a single point experience time?

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    1. For the record, I don't actually have an idea for gods at college, I just couldn't resist the joke. ^_^ Though that might change, now that I've got the idea.

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