2008-10-02

Planus interruptus

Filed under: Family,Games,Programming,Writing — Tags: , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 16:09

I am not working on Baby Squid God.

At least that is what it looks like until November 1st. Due to communications, half the people thought “for Halloween” though it meant it ended on Halloween and the other half thought took it to start on Halloween. Since there is no formal announcement by now, I’m going to say “for Halloween” means “starting on Halloween”. I’m disappointed, but there really isn’t any reason to pout about it.

So, changing gears. I’m good at that. Naturally, I really won’t work much on the game itself, I haven’t done what I wanted to in September to prepare for it, so I probably won’t take October to prepare for it. I can, on the other hand, finish up the commissions, work on Scroll of the Lands, and maybe get a bit of writing done. And finish my website migration to http://d.moonfire.us/ and do the Moonfire Portal site. Good thing I wasn’t doing NaNoWriMo, otherwise I’d be really frustrated (the same thing happened last year with a game contest and November).

One of my kitties, Paksenarrion (Paks for short), is moving in with me. Of the three, she is having the worst trouble with the in-laws basement and is tearing out large hunks of her fur. Most of her neck and shoulders are bloody from her scratching which is only getting worse as time goes on. Poor stressed kitty. After talking to my landlady, I’m allowed exactly one cat in my studio. Given that, on Friday, I get that roommate–a high maintenance, adorable little roommate who Fluffy won’t mind me sleeping with. On Saturday, I start trying to train said roommate on how to use the toilet. Maybe this time it will work. And if I can get one to use the toilet, then maybe the others will start doing the same.

2008-03-26

Reaching Your Goals

Filed under: Writing — Tags: , , — D. Moonfire @ 14:50

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a new WIP (DL) for the last month or two. Well, more obsessed than working since I’m still dreaming about it. But, its going a lot smoother than Case of the Morning Zombies. I think a lot of it has to do with Case was about finishing 50k words, which I did in 16 days. But, I didn’t have the same drive to finish it as I do for DL. Like my first novel, the goal is more important to keep you going. For example, for MG, it was to be published. And I got published without resorting to a vanity press or POD. A real-life publishing company who never heard of me before I submitted.

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2008-01-16

Brick Walls

Filed under: Family,Games,Programming,Writing — Tags: , , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 17:04

Schoolwork night last night, plus Evyl came in and we talked about future plans. Mostly about her moving in to help save up money to buy our house and to let us save up money to buy a new house. I’m looking forward to it, we just have to iron out those little wrinkles that need to be said ahead of time and get everything on paper. I’m big on paper agreements, mainly because I’ve been burned more than a few times by friends and family. And I worry about things not working out, either we find something we can’t agree on or something we didn’t think about. Not that I think any are really big ones, but I still worry.

I have 85 days left for 4E6. I have 15 days until Kitteh Braik goes into contingency plan. I am hitting a wall right now. I hate that wall of these large projects, when you stare up at them and find anything else in the world to do besides that. There are a bunch of them, right now, some that really scare me and others that I just don’t want to do. Right now, I’m trying to find a polygon library so I can merge some polygons to get the physics shape. If I can’t figure it out by Sunday, I’ll go to plan three. I also need to get the graphics in and get a damn figure to stand up instead of having his body parts explode in all directions.

One person formally withdrew from 4E6 that I was looking forward to seeing their game. But, the reasons were echoed in myself, and that is the annoying part. I want to succeed at this. I gave up 4E5 because I had to make a choice between Wind, Bear, and Moon and the game. I ended up picking WBM, but I wanted so badly to do this. Part of me wants to burn myself out to finish it, to stay up long hours and work until I figure it out, another part wants to just curl up in the blankets and surrender.

I read a pretty good blog post about writing a novel in two months. Some of the points they made were the reasons I feel that I failed Case of the Morning Zombies. Another project, but long after 4E6. :)

Kitteh Braik (12%)
Scroll of Lands update (35%)

2007-12-29

Looking Back and Forward from 2007 to 2008

Filed under: Education,Family,Games,Graphics,Writing — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 19:15

Hard to believe I’ve been blogging for two years now. I started this journal about a month after my other, in-character one. Originally, it was just there to comment on friends, but I started posting one or two things on occasion. Now, as my brother said, “I’m a pretty good blogger.” Or at least I do it fairly consistently and I’ve gotten a few compliments on letting everyone in on the trials and joys of my life.

This year is probably the year I started to really blogging on two of my major themes of life: writing and programming. I will, of course, blame the the other Dylan for getting me into writing about writing. After meeting with him at GenCon 2006, it really pushed me to finally take that step toward trying to be a “real” writer again instead of just hanging my hat on my one relatively minor success. I’ve been a lot of really cool writers in this last year and I’m pretty thankful for making that step. Now, I just have to follow their footsteps and get published again. On the programming/gaming side, I haven’t really done much with networking, but I blog about it almost as much as my writing. Even if I occasionally give “too technical” details as more than one said. Oh well, just who I am.

The end of the year is the time when I look at my major projects for the year. I plan them ahead of time, sometimes even figure out when I’ll work on it, but mainly it is a framework for my personal projects throughout the year. I also like to remember what I have succeeded at.

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2007-11-24

16 days, 37 chapters, and 55,108 words

Filed under: Writing — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 01:27

I started on November 7th and I finished on November 23rd. 16 days of writing to get the first draft of Case of the Morning Zombies finished. It comes out to an average of 3,444 words per day. When you take into account just the 26 hours I spent writing, I averaged 2,120 words per hour or 35.3 words per minute. But, I finished.

It isn’t the same as my normal writing. My normal time to write a novel is three months (92 days with a standard deviation of 3 actually) but the draft comes out much smoother. That is me going back, rewriting a chapter and going into the next. Then editing the prior chapter and working on the next, overlapping my writing almost constantly to come up with a well-crafted first draft. Morning Zombies is not polished. It has all the important parts of a novel, a story, a plot, hopefully interesting characters, and not nearly enough descriptions. It isn’t read for the Wizards call for submissions by a long shot, but I still think it is a viable story. It just means that December will have some interesting editing rounds as I try to clean up the story, fix the plot holes, and flesh out some of the sections that I rushed through.

I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I could sit down and come up with a novel in almost half a month. It is an accomplishment I didn’t think I could really do. Will I do it next year? Probably not. But, you never know. A lot can happen in a year.

My mother said an interesting thing today. She mentioned that I have a gift, the gift of creating stories. But, I’m focusing on specific accomplishments, like speed-writing a novel or trying to get published. But, it all comes down to I create stories. I create stories that make people cry and think, I make them feel good and loved or even see the world in a different way. As one friend said, I can make even the disgusting interesting. I’m sure she’s bias, but maybe I needed to be reminded that I’m a writer. Pure and simple. It doesn’t matter that I keep track of how many hours I write or how many words per hour I do. Tricks like NaNoWriMo won’t really change the fact I love to write and I will succeed, its just a matter of time and effort. But, just like NaNoWriMo and just like Shane (the zombie in my novel), I won’t give up.

Hey, thanks for reading and for the encouragements.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 55,108 of 50,000 words)
Case of the Morning Zombies (37 of 37 chapters)

2007-11-23

2,611 words and 9 chapters to go

Filed under: Games,Graphics,Writing — Tags: , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 04:48

I had a great writing day today. The chapters I worked on flowed like honey and the descriptions came out with a wonderful clarity that I was just happy about it. Of course, I highly suspect writing a sex scene (which I feel I am *very* good at) didn’t really hurt with getting the words out. Well, it was part of the story and had a reason, honest. :)

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2007-11-21

14k to go

Filed under: Games,Graphics,Writing — Tags: , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 16:10

Ah, vacations. Two weeks off to do everything that’s been building up. Lots of time to finish up Case of the Morning Zombies, get another round of CuteGod, and get ready to start work on Ponies Among Us. I’m in day three of my vacation and let me check my list…

Nothing.

I’ve managed to play twelve game demos, listen to a bunch of soundtracks, think about a game system I killed a long time ago, and slept an average of twelve hours a day for the last five days. I’ve run one Changeling game and get ready for my Sepia Throne. I’ve also played in Fightertype’s Exalted game.

I’m struggling, as I always do, with too many projects at the end of the year. Too many things I want to get done verses too many things I committed myself to getting done. Right now, I give it a 0.4 chance that I’ll get Case of the Morning Zombies ready for submission by the end of December, but I’m still going to try for it. I also really, really want to get Ponies started, even if I break it up into multiple sub projects.

Only fourteen thousand words until I hit my NaNo goal and eleven chapters left until I finish the book. I hate the story and yet I like it, I hate how I seemed to have lost my voice partially from feedback I got and partially because I lost how I write. It seems… flat. I think my writing style is changing recently and Case is really showing it. I don’t want to put in the twelve paragraphs of descriptions, but I still yearn for the flowing descriptions that set up my scene. I hate that somehow I forgot how to type and constantly swap letters I know shouldn’t be swapped. It’s like my fingers forgot how to type and I’ve gone through three keyboards this month trying to find one that is comfortable on my fingertips.

Well, got to finish this story and get Glorious Saber done.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 36,059 of 50,000 words)
Case of the Morning Zombies (36,059 of 75,000 words)

2007-11-16

Love is…

Filed under: Family,Writing — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 17:24

… a new garage door. I finally got a garage door and it is so pretty and clean and the remotes are black and shiny. Yeah, it won’t last a while, but it is really nice being able to park in the garage. What isn’t so nice is the five weeks of garbage that collected inside the city-mandated cans. I’ll have it cleared out in the next three weeks or so, but still, it’s so pretty!

… driving your wife home from work. Fluffy got sick this week. Really sick. Two days ago, she tried to come back to work but ended up going home early. I drove her home, then since I lost some time, worked late. Just because her getting home was more important.

… seeing your name on someone else’s website. Today, Twisted Ink went live and nestled on the stories page is Thomas the Baker written by yours truly.

… convincing your mother that she needs to exercise more to be healthy and, after five years of worrying, have her finally make that first step. My mom has suffered with the same trials I have when a desk job gets too stressful. She considered surgery, but the drawbacks scared her, so she asked me and the rest of her friends to help her get better. It isn’t everything, but it is finally a good step.

… spending two days getting the satellite working again. I wanted to work on NaNo, honest, I did. But, the satellite went out and I spent most of last night and probably a good hunk of tonight tracking down why one cable no longer has a signal, but the other one attacked to the same hardware does.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 26,930 of 75,000 words)

2007-11-12

NaNoWriMo observations

Filed under: Writing — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 22:11

No writing today, but I figured I’d mention some of the struggles and observations I have made with NaNoWriMo. The first is pretty obvious, speed writing 25k words doesn’t mean quality. I’m struggling over the contents of the story, despite getting the broad brush strokes of the story. There isn’t the little refinements I normally add in. It is to be expected, but it becomes painfully obvious when I browse through the older stuff to put in a reference I need in a later chapter.

I have doubts about Case of the Morning Zombies. Doubts about the story working out and how I’m framing it. My novels start slow, one of those things I think cause trouble with my reader. I’m also not sure about the main character. Do I hide the fact he’s the zombie for the first third of the book? Not sure about lying to the reader, if you know what I mean. The 25k word point is the beginning of the meat part of the story. Zombies are shown, people get their brains eaten, and a mystery is afoot. Somehow, I got a mystery into this story and I wasn’t originally planning on that. Telepathy with the eaten brains was also not planned, but it made a slightly better story so far.

Fluffy read it and… didn’t have really positive comments about it. Too many holes, but I needed a bit of a pick-me-up (which I didn’t exactly get). Doesn’t mean I’ll stop, but it makes it harder to keep up a good rate when it isn’t one of those amazing, wonderful, cannot-put-down books.

Speaking of slightly depressing reviews, I got my feedback from scienceprincess. Again, it wasn’t really a positive review. I mean, she had good things to say about it, but “if I bought it, I wouldn’t feel that I wasted my time or money” isn’t exactly the type of review I hoped for. But, it is honest and frankly, I want honesty. I’ve been trying to get Wind, Bear, and Moon published for almost two years now (January). Do I give it more time, or do I self-published and work on another novel? Or do I keep trying and write another novel (one a year) and hope that it pans out? In some ways, self-publishing is an end of life (EOL) thing for me. Once I self publish, I can’t get it really published by another publisher.

Not really sure. Parts of me worry that I’m putting too much effort into WBM and parts of me tell me I have a chance, just as I do with Muddy Reflections.

Thoughts to think about, I guess.

Case of the Morning Zombies (NaNoWriMo, 25,160 of 75,000 words)

Oatmeal

Filed under: Family,Writing — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 03:59

I like oatmeal.

Now, you might be wondering what that has to do with anything. You might even be curious why I’d rather talk about oatmeal instead of the fantastic Exalted game I had on Saturday, or my struggles to install Debian Sid for AMD64 today (didn’t boot, downloading the DVD boot disk for testing now), or even how me and Fluffy seem to both be sick. But, I want to talk about oatmeal.

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