Things I overheard while talking to myself

Well besides the phone flaking out on me again I did not in fact kill myself yesterday at the gym, though my arms are a bit sore. It's better than last time when I could barely sit up for a while.

And as my slightly unhinged post from around three in the morning shows I did make some progress on Project Samurai at the cost of some sleep, in fact it's the most progress I've made for a while. Basically I finished a scene that I knew would be one of the hardest to write and took a draft version from a few years ago into the current version with some major revisions (basically cutting down stuff I'd already said or that didn't' need to be said). It's getting there, it's been about 6 years now and I can't even look at the original version without dope slapping myself, but hey, I was 14 when I started it and I know I didn't know shit back then.

I love it when I use literary devices without meaning. I also keep quoting Sara about what she said about writing:

"Being a writer is accepting that you have voices in your head."

Yeah. Pretty much. But this particular device that I didn't realize I was using is the old echo effect of an event. Er, sort of. The thing it's echoing hasn't been seen yet by us, so technically the event that took place first is echoing the event that took place later, we just see them in opposite order.

...

Damn my propensity for non-linear storytelling. I swear it makes sense in context. The idea is supposed to be that you read the thing that comes first in the story, and then when you get to the event it's echoing you have an "Oh..." moment. We'll see how that works in practice.

Something I've noticed about character writing: If one follows the "show, don't tell" school of exposition, it should then make sense that when you're trying to get across emotion it's much more effective to show a person experiencing a certain thing through their body language than just having them say "I feel this." The best scenes in almost anything are the ones where a character doesn't say anything, but just by picturing them you can tell what's going on in their head.

I have learned that the hard way, and given that Project Samurai shifts between first and third person the trick seems to be to make the really emotional scenes 3rd person, or else it gets bogged down in too many "I feels" and it starts to get boring. I also have to balance out of the 1st person because otherwise just hearing a guy talk about himself gets boring, and he's not as three dimensional if it's all him talking about himself and what happens to him, there's no other viewpoint. When trying to get his perspective on certain things (especially in contrast to the views being expressed in the 3rd person about him) it works, but just him narrating the entire time is boring. On the other hand, getting into his head and having him talk to the "audience" in a way helps establish him in ways that a 3rd person POV couldn't, and show his thought process.

In short: Balancing Act. And of course you fall off a few times before you get it right. It's actually now shifted from being mostly 1st person to mostly 3rd person, and the 1st person ones only show up when they're needed or when you haven't heard from him for a while.

I realized the other night that I've neglected to actually describe what the leads of Project Samurai look like in much detail. Have to remember that though I know what they look like in my head, other people don't. D'oh! I fixed that and moved one part of the first chapter to make it flow better, though I'm likely going to go back and tweak it even more.

That probably is one of my Achilles Heels, since I tend to feel like doing too much description is bad, but I go too far in the other direction. I've seen some authors be minimal in descriptions and do a good job at it (Robert B. Parker's a good example), but on the flipside, use too much and you start to sound like you're writing a Mary Sue. I tend to go for more intangible aspects like the way people hold themselves and what their eyes seem to say, since that's what I tend to notice about people.

Maybe the reason I'm not as good at writing physical descriptions is because I'm used to doing fanfiction, and when you do that you assume that people already know what the people look like. It's a lot different when you're using original characters, so that's something I have to work on.

There goes my precious 12,000 word count on Project Samurai. After some thought I decided to cull one chapter and rewrite it to Show rather than Tell, since as it stands one section was basically a giant dump of exposition that I was told was almost a bit too subtle in places. The plan to redo it no only makes it fit in better with the story as less of a sledgehammer to the knee but manages to knock out another bit of exposition I needed while I'm at it, since I wasn't sure where to put something before.

There's a rather ugly placeholder on the FictionPress page for that chapter now, but I don't think it'll take too long. I scribbled down some notes about the replacement the other day, now I just have to put them in the word processor. I've also now designated a little notebook to notes for this project, since I've filled up a good part of my school notebook with stuff about this and pretty soon I'll start running out of paper. I'm figuring it out, slowly.

Also, realizing that you've been inserting a running theme without realizing it = weird but appropriate. Also known as foreshadowing without knowing you're doing it. Interesting.

In my usual non-linear writing fashion I've now written the preliminary final chapter of Project Samurai. However, I've only just gotten to the bulk of Part II, and bits of Part I still need to be written and revised, though it's close to having all the parts in one place even if they need more work. It's coming along, however slowly, and this seems to be one of my more productive periods on it, as they come and go.

I've actually known what the epilogue and the final line would look like for a while and have had it stored away , but it's entirely different from the last chapter in tone and location (partly due to a timeskip of several years). I also have part of the last chapter that I can ax if it doesn't work in the final product, but I'm a bit ahead of myself on that. I still need to get Part II in one form before I even think about that. It also looks like Part II will be shorter than Part I, which fits with the respective themes. Part I is tentatively called "Rebuild" while Part II is "Let Go". I also drew up the rough outline of the order of chapters, so I have a sense of what else I still need to do and where to fill in.

And speaking of getting ahead of myself, I also have the first bits of the sequel, but that one probably won't see the light of day until(if) the first one gets finished, since the very first part of this sequel is a huge spoiler for the end of the first one, so ideally one should read the first one first and the second one second. On second thought that should be obvious, but my mind does not always work linearly. Must be the right brain at work.

I've been revising parts of Part II and realizing that even though it's only been a year or so since I've written it I've learned a lot. IE I'm now a subscriber of the "show, don't tell" school of exposition, so I've been taking out a lot of things that should be obvious enough in the action of the characters, especially the body language. I keep wincing a bit at the old narration and axing the appropriate parts. Oh well, it's a continually evolving process.

So I realized that in terms of Project Samurai I now have a weird association with one character.

It’s probably because he happens to share his name with another character in something else (and for the record my character existed before the other one by several years) but in order to differentiate the two in my head the one I came up with is known as Steak and Eggs Man.

Why? Because I happened to be eating Steak and Eggs at Friendly’s when I was writing the first scene he appears in. So I may try to worm some reference to steak and eggs into a scene with this guy, strictly for my own amusement. ^_^

I managed to turn out some more material for Project Samurai the other day, and oddly enough the story seems to be gaining a mind of its own.

Case in point: I was looking at the files and noticed that I was missing the #3 chapter. I figured I'd just messed up and renumber them later.

Turns out that I was missing a chapter. Literally. As in, I hadn't written it yet, and it needed to be in there for the rest of the story to make sense, and I hadn't realized that. *facepalm* So I managed to patch that up.

I've also decided to go against the translation convention in one case. I translate terms to reasonable equivalents when I can, but things like samurai and Daimyo I leave as is, especially since "warlord" doesn't really sum up the latter and most people know what a samurai is at this point. The term I decided to leave be recently was tamahagane -- the very pure metal used to forge the best quality swords -- because the literal translation of "jewel steel" just sounds stupid and is probably actually more confusing than the untranslated Japanese word.

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A variety of things. For the most part it's just an extension of how I think, though that's mostly journal entries here. As for my own stories (both fanfiction and independent writing) I do it mostly to get down ideas and play with them, since sometimes things I wasn't expecting happen. I also find it easier to connect with some characters if I write from their POV, and sometimes I can find out things about my original characters that I didn't know by doing that.

As far as the actual inspiration goes, I didn't name by muse Inconstante (literally "fickle") for nothing. I mainly get my inspiration through InspiroBricks™ that usually come out of nowhere, in the form of something such as a song, image, or idea prompting a "write this!" response and a brick to the head from my Muse. In some of the more extreme cases I can't even fall asleep until I've gotten it down.

Well, one good thing that happened yesterday was that we got the scholarship application shipped off to North Carolina. And despite the fact that my English professor has essentially dropped the ball and didn't have my rec letter ready I'm not going to get penalized for it according to an email I got back from one of the people in charge of the scholarship. They must get this type of thing a lot.

So, because I keep insisting that this was a "learning experience", here's what I learned:

( Five Things )

One of the (dare I say it) fun parts of this application was coming up with a 50 word biography, and this was what I came up with, which turned out to be 49 words:

I was raised by journalist parents in a house full of books and cats in the middle of the woods, learned to write in elementary school and have been addicted to it ever since, own way too many books, and spend lots of time up inside my own head.

And apparently that made my Mom laugh, so I think it expresses my personality pretty well.