Well,

It looks like I didn’t break it, so the blog is wholly back online! YAY!

This post definitely doesn’t fit the Technical Tuesday thing properly, but I’m going to send it live on a Tuesday anyway. Updates ahoy!

With any luck, I’ll get back on schedule with the Muse Monday, Technical Tuesdays, Whimsy Wednesdays, Truthful Thursdays, Fandom Fridays, and Caturdays.

As it’s been mentioned in the past: Muses, Technical things and Truthful things are all blog exclusive (though they may have bits and pieces show up on Twitter and/or Instagram as well). Fandom Fridays will probably be on Twitter, as will Caturdays (though Caturday can also appear on Instagram), and Whimsy will be wherever I choose to put it.

Now, If you’ve been here before, you’ve already noticed the first of a few major differences. The theme is a new one, and I actually really really like it. Eventually it’ll have a slide show on it making it a little less text, but that looks like it might be at least a year or so out.

Right now, I’m heading up NaNoWriMo 2016 in Memphis, with a Co-ML. We’re hoping to make this the best year yet, and have a lot of enjoyment of the season. Stay tuned for the NANO2016 updates. This year, the NaNoWriMo theme is SPACE, and let me tell you, I am way excited. In case you have not been here long, or don’t actually know who I am in the real world, SPACE is probably my favorite thing ever. (It shares the favorite things box with Coffee, Coca-Cola and winter.)

I’m also attempting to write a novella for Tor-dot-com Publishing. They’re opening up for unsolicited submissions for three months starting on October 12th and I have an idea that;s actually workable. My word count goal for it is something like 25,000 words. I’m allowed to have up to 40,000 words, but I know myself well – I’m going to overshoot. I’m also allowing for editing, and the notion that I may need to seriously rewrite bits and pieces. I’m going for romantic fantasy, with magic and rice and kimonos, and a driving need for revenge that someone has been working on for 20 years. I’m only half way hoping now, to get it into Tor. On one hand, that would be fantastic. On the other, I could turn it into it’s own world and make more stories out of this world. Tor wants stand-alone stories, and while at this time this is, I wouldn’t mind being able to expand it.

A side effect of the Tor project, as it’s currently called (I haven’t come up with even a working title for it yet, yikes), is that I’m doing a lot of research into Asian cultures. This is helping the Revanta project something fantastic as one of the major cultures in the Revanta Universe has always been more Asian than anything else. I use Asian here in the sense that this particular culture has Samurai like warriors as major players, as well as the more structured courts with royal concubines that are seen elsewhere. I’ve always wanted to get deeper and deeper into this court, but seeing as most of the work I needed to do was for elsewhere, since the story only really spends maybe 12 to 16 hours in the edge of that court – I didn’t really get to. Now I can, and it’s giving me a lot of creative go power for doing work on almost all of my various works in progress.

Before I make this monster post any longer, I’m going to sign off. With some luck, I’ll be back to posting at least once a week, but until then, enjoy October!

Website Update!

First: I fell off the earth again. I know. I’ve been trying to get some medical things taken care of and it means I’m having to be a bit more careful with my sleeping windows and they got really buggered for a while. I’m hoping to get back to more routine updates here in the next couple of weeks or so, but:

Second: Oh boy! A website update! And long post ahead, fyi.

Read more “Website Update!”

Delay!

Hey! I know I promised a Technical Tuesday” post this week, but like the airhead I am occasionally, I forgot. Additionally, where I work has this thing where, when it storms, the downtime basically vanishes, and I spend a good 40% of my shift telling people the power is out, and that it’s nothing to be worried about. And it has stormed enough that I could hear the thunder through my noise cancelling headphones and a boat might be a good idea for my yard.

So, the delay:

Obviously, there’s going to be one. I’ve got nothing on hand except for the bones of what was supposed to be this week’s Technical Tuesday. And I’m currently looking around for blog themes. It’s been 3 years with this theme, and while I rather like most of it, it’s gotten to the point that I’m also not very fond of it anymore.

I’m also writing up a *big* thing about how authors make money and how to judge when it is a good time to consider cutting loose from the normal mundane world and becoming a self employed author. In my personal opinion, I know when *I* would do it, but when I would make the jump might not be right for everyone. But, this is a good way to judge what your expectations ought to look like. I need to figure out how to upload files for download, because I think this might outgrow the size most people would want to read in even one or two blog posts. (NOTE: the big money post has been brought to you by the fact I got a royalty deposit for $0.35. Wheeeeee!/sarcasm)

Technical Tuesday 0002

So yesterday I talked about doing things with loads of brightly colored pens. Things like storyboarding and plot outlining. And these are things that each person does differently.

Personally, I start with which ever thing comes to my mind first. Sometimes this is a character, sometimes it’s a scene idea, in one story’s case, it was a line of internal monologue from the main character. Generally, depending on which one comes to mind first tells me where to start.

Over on the Facebook and the Instagram from 9pm to 11pm CST I’ll be sharing images of various WIP projects that utilize each of the main forms of Story Planning that I’ll be discussing below.

These types include:
-story boarding (which I do incredibly rarely)
-something I call ‘discovery writing’
-something I think of as story bubbles but I swear has a different name with every person I’ve ever shown them to, but are useful for thinking out things
-plot lines, which in my actions are less than story boarding but more than general outlining.
-and of course, outlining, which is something that I both do well and don’t do well.

The order in which they go is usually something a bit like this:
1. Discovery writing
2. Story Bubbles
3. Plot Lines
4. Outlining
5. Storyboarding (if I do it at all until the second draft)

This week, I’ll discuss numbers 1 and 2.

First up: DISCOVERY WRITING.

What the hell is discovery writing? For me, this is where I sit down with the idea and just start writing everything that comes to mind on an idea. These thoughts are generally not in any kind of order, they’re the most rough form of writing I do. It’s simply getting as much of the rough idea down that I can. The first sample (from a series of WIPs referred to as Trio) I’ll be showing and discussing tonight has gone through a couple of rewrites and is a little more organized than they usually are. The second sample is still a bare bones discovery write and actually covers two story ideas (cheerfully known as faries and aether academy).

 

Now: STORY BUBBLES.

I *love* story bubbles. Story bubbles are absolutely fantastic fun. Some people refer to them as thought bubbles, some call them thought maps, but when you see them, you’ll remember them from school. I personally love them. They’re a slightly more interesting way to work out all the pieces of a world, and are quite excellent for world building. This is where I’m sitting at a table with a massive sheet of paper and an army of markers. Some of what ends up in bubbles are plot points, character development, language bits, historical distribution of information. Sometimes it’s a breakdown of departments and what they do in the case of my science fiction universe (known as the Aurora Universe). This will be, providing I remembered to bring it with me today, the samples I use for this later this evening.

 

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Next week on Technical Tuesday, I’ll discuss numbers 3 and 4.