It Begins Monday

I'm grumpy today, I dunno why, for sure. I'll have to just get over it, yeah?

Monday I'm gonna start Crystal Glare. I think typically I start with the start of a month, just for the fun of it, but I looked at the calendar and saw that the first was a Friday, which means only two days before the day off, and it makes unloading it a little awkward. Anyway, Monday. I need to clean my room and organize everything, finish up my plot, things like that, I guess. I have all weekend to do that. Or only the weekend. Something like that.

I need a project again; I feel awkward without it. It'd help if there was sunshine, though. It's been gray lately. Is annoying.

I Wonder If I'll Get It Right This Time?

I'm actually a little nervous about writing Crystal Glare again. This is a bad thing, since being nervous is not something for the drafting stage. Not that being aware of it is ever very helpful for me, that I know. It's like the ACT: I was nervous, knew it was stupid and unhelpful to be nervous, but it hardly helps, it just makes me frustrated at my nervousness. I do wonder if I managed to check it at all, though. Anyway, I guess I just don't want to have to draft this thing again. I don't know for sure why I've kept poking at it for so long. I guess 'cause it's a worthwhile idea, and a chapter of Yavn's history that should be written, but written right. It's a cool plot now. Really! I think. I plotted out the timeline of events, it came to 10 chapters -- which appears to be my new magic number or something. Crystal Science was 10 chapters, too. Well, I suppose it might be ten sections, or something. The definition of chapter is fuzzy for me, just a little.

Anyway! I was just writing out my plot as if I was explaining it to someone -- like I usually do -- and things were looking pretty impressive. I had character backstories, subplots, everyone had something to do, never really just tagging along like those annoying characters can. Then I put it into a timeline, and I wonder if I scared myself with over-simplification or somethin', cause now I feel like my plot stinks. It doesn't stink, dangit! I like this plot! I'll get over it. And I think I'll start writing it in April, so I have a little time yet to think about it and modify the plot -- though I don't think I will, at this point -- and generally prepare for the project. Today I have a cold. I'm not starting today.

The Difficult Questions of Weird Names...

So I was thinking how I hardly ever get last names written into my stories. Do you know why? To be honest it's too much trouble to come up with not one but TWO unique names per person. I mean, come on. But I was thinking that I probably should start having these dang last names or something similar if Yavn is going to progress much father. The question is, how do I make it work?

So last names probably first came from your father's name, or in some cases your profession (like Smith and plenty of others I'm sure). But what do I do with Yavn? I have the possessive prefix vu-, so maybe I can use that, but how is the name determined? Father, mother, some older ancestor? By city, perhaps? By founder of the city? Do last names vary by Element?

Well, probably not the last. I'm thinking most likely some important ancestor or something, much like they're done here on earth. Maybe it only matters if you're of the Nobility. Low Nobles and newer Nobles therefore command less respect, since their last name will be the same as their first, for a generation at least. That's where genealogy tends to matter, anyway. But then how do I identify families? I mean, that kind of thing can matter to people, you know? Ach, such a puzzle. I suppose it could've originally been held by the nobles, but in a hundred years or so it trickled down to the common man or sommat. And now I have to have enough names for everyone -.- great. Nice work, Rena. Give yourself a little more work, why don'tcha?

Oh, and I just got my hours for NaNoEdMo. I call Crystal Frontier about as done as I want it to be, so THERE. I cross it off the list. I move on to my next goal, focusing on Italian, maybe some Ganyi work, things like that. The summer hastens toward me, and then will hasten away.

Plotting!

I decided to bend the rules a little, since I so very much wanted to be done with Crystal Frontier, and I'm waiting for feedback from my readers. I still have five or six hours left, so I'm bending the rules a bit and plotting for Crystal Glare and counting it as editing time. I don't think it's actually breaking them, just bending them. After all, I've written Crystal Glare twice already, and I'm keeping careful track of what I did the last two times in order to fix everything -- or at least most things -- I did wrong. Eh, whatever. I don't care a whole lot.

The only problem is that I don't like to rush or push myself on plotting. Drafting, yes, get the words written regardless of the quality. But plotting... I have a general idea of what happens, but it needs to ferment. I've only edited for about an hour today, working on character profiles and the like. I just hate to... You know, I don't know what any more. Oh well. If I draw a map of Yavn as of Crystal Frontier, that counts as editing, right? Yeah, I think so.

Can I Be Done Now?

They say works of art (if I may be so presumptuous as to call my story "art") are never completed, only abandoned. Well, I feel about ready to abandon this thing. I finished typing it up, read through it again for flow and such-like, sent it off to a few readers who wanted to read, read through again in order to write chapter summaries (that actually took almost exactly my two hours today), but what next? I don't want to line-edit through it again, that might kill me. But I have to have 6 hours and 51 minutes more before I can win stinking NaNoEdMo. Three or four more days of doing... something. I'll run it through EditMinion, which means reading through it again. Sigh. That might take me a day or two. It's lacking in description, but I don't really want to go through it and put stuff like that in. I probably could line-edit again, but I just really really don't want to. The answer is no, I can't be done now, I have to get my hours. You know, if I had just waited until March to edit the thing at all, I wouldn't be having this problem. I'd probably only be barely done scribbling on it with my red pen, or maybe halfway through typing it at most. I'd not have to worry about this whole time thing.

Tomorrow: EditMinion. After that... hope I got some input back from someone I guess. I'm about to go crazy here.

To Cut, or Not to Cut...

...That is the question.
Whether tis better to labor through the unsavory scene
and make do with what is there,
or to take scissors to the page
and oppose my draft ramblings, to cut...

I ended up cutting it mostly, but not before I wasted most of my editing time reading ahead. That's ok. I needed... uh, a better look at what was coming ahead. Yeah, that's it. And since I cut, I went ahead about 20 pages anyway. I worry my novel isn't exciting enough, but "così è la vita," I suppose.

Yes, I do feel a little bad for doing yet another parody of the most famous Shakespeare lines ever. I couldn't resist. Probably won't happen again... for a while.

Sundays Make Me Lazy

And it loves to bleed into Monday. Anyway, my brother was home for the weekend, so instead of doing much editing I decided to hang around with him instead. As a result, I got an hour and twelve minutes done, which isn't I guess a huge deal, I was plenty ahead -- I'm still ahead, as a matter of fact -- it's just the lapse in routine. I have 28 or so hours, and I only have to be at 22 or so hours today. I'll be ok. I just have to make sure I don't let myself keep slacking off. I'm nearing the end of the manuscript, though I think it may need more editing toward the end. Here I am, with battle looming, and people are just wandering around talking and discovering things. I'm not sure that's appropriate. Well, maybe I just need to tidy things up to make it more succinct and maybe more focused on what's actually coming. I have a few lines of "it wouldn't be long now until they went off to battle" or whatever, but maybe there should be more anxiety, or something. I have great worldbuilding notes in here, but the reader doesn't so much care about all of that, do they? They want to see if the good guys win, not every thought that passes through their little skulls, right? This is supposed to be an adventure novel, I think. I don't know what else I would call it. Fantasy, yes, but that's just my basic term. I could say "Speculative Fiction," which I probably will start saying once my world advances to more mechanical ages, where it may start looking like Sci-fi. Anyway! There are fantasy-romances, fantasy-adventures, fantasy-horror, fantasy-political-thrillers, the list goes on. Fantasy is largely the setting, I hear, and actually agree with. Some themes may come up more often in fantasy and/or sci-fi, but there are all kinds of stories in the genre. Historical fiction is that way too, I think. The story is whatever you like, but the setting turns it into that kind of genre. That's probably why I can be happy reading basically only fantasy and sci-fi. There are a lot of other stories inside those, it's not as if I read only romance or something like that, where there are I'm sure plenty of variations on the theme, but it's still all one theme, or mostly anyway. Not that I usually spend a lot of time reading romances anyway, but you know what I mean, right? Maybe not.

... Dang that's a long paragraph. Sorry about that. With all the thoughts rambling around, I should split that, shouldn't I? I'm not gonna, though. I'll save my editing juice for my novel.

As I predicted, the Italian Pokémon movie didn't get watched. Maybe tomorrow. Not today. Too much going on today.