Working on Muddy Reflections, actually got a short chapter out last night. For a novel I’m suppose to have done on Sunday, I’m not doing that hot. However, I should be at least done with the second arc by Sunday. If all goes well, I’ll get sizable progress into the third one, which I’m not redoing as much.
I’m also resisting playing Oblivion (which I spent WAY too many hours downloading mods for) or FF XII (which is still pretty) until I finish at least a few more chapters.
Honestly, I really meant to work on my novel this week. I mean, I had six days of nearly no distractions and I could have finished it. Except for working Sepia Throne (two days of planning and cleanup, one day of running), getting my new computer working (22″ worth of widescreen joy), getting my old files transferred and also making sure Oblivion worked (5 hours of copying over a 100 MB/s connection) plus I got distracted with Final Fantasy XII (so… pretty…).
So, I didn’t get a single bloody thing done for the entire vacation when it comes to my novel. This means I get the joys of being obsessed this entire week, while Fluffy obsesses about her art show on Saturday (which I have to help with).
While working on Muddy Reflections this weekend, I realized a couple of things. First is that I really, really should have made a map of the city. I get getting confused on relations of everything. Well, that part is easily fixed. I’ll just steal a couple cities, put them together and go back and fix everything.
The other was a bit more complicated. The world I wrote in, both for Muddy Reflections and Wind, Bear, and Moon, is based on world that I helped create with someone else. I decided that I really need to separate the two. It isn’t really a big deal, I’m fairly good at world creation, but it means I’ll be set back a day or two as I just iron out the differences.
Sharing worlds is fun, you have more than one person creating in the same world, which makes it a much richer experience. However, the line of our writings and stuff is going in two different dirctions and… well, easier to say it is time for this.
On the other hand, it will help fix some of the problems I’m having with Muddy Reflections.
Well, its official. I got my second (silent) rejection of Wind, Bear, and Moon. The place I sent it to basically said “if you don’t here from us in four months, we thought it sucked.” Probably not, it was probably more like “my god, look at this huge pile of people who desperately want to be published!” and somewhere in the middle of that was my little contributation to the writing market. So, time to find a third place to send it to.
My current plans are to self publish, probably through lulu.com if I can’t get a publisher by the end of 2007. Of course, by that time, my life should be in complete and utter chaos, so it will seem appropriate. So, sometime in the next month, I need to find a new publisher for my little young adult novel.
It may sound strange, but every time I stop writing for any length of time, it feels like I have to relearn how to write when I get started. This is really obvious when I’m writting Muddy Reflections. The story is slowly moving forward. As a rough progress indicator, I’m using word count of 100k words. As of yesterday, it was at 71k words. Now, I know that pure words isn’t a measure of a story, but it is one of the goals I’m aiming for.
In more generic terms, I’m working on story arc 2 of 3. It is remarkably hard to ties these stories together, but it is slowly getting there. I felt the first couple chapters are flat so I kept on rewriting them until I felt better about it. This is really going to be one of those stories that I need to get an editor, mainly to catch the little things that I know I miss.
But, at least I’m getting more excited about this. Or, at least more into it.