Accommodating My Muse

“Within a hundred yards Valeria was panting and reeling in her gait, and behind them the crashing gave way to a rolling thunder as the monster broke out of the thickets and into the more open ground.  Conan’s iron arm about the woman’s waist half lifted her; her feet scarcely touched the earth as she was borne along at a speed she could never have attained herself.  If he could keep out of the beast’s way for a bit, perhaps that betraying wind would shift — but the wind held, and a quick glance over his shoulder showed Conan that the monster was almost upon them, coming like a war-galley in front of a hurricane.  He thrust Valeria from him with a force that sent her reeling a dozen feet to fall in a crumbled heap at the foot of the nearest tree, and the Cimmerian wheeled in the path of the thundering titan.”
(excerpt from Red Nails, by Robert E. Howard)


Accommodating My Muse
One thing I've discovered about my Muse is that sometimes she can be unpredictable, fickle, and erratic.  She loves to focus on stories that are unrelated to what I think I should be working on.  If I need to write a serious scene, she resists by giving me light-hearted, playful visions.  Conversely, her tones can be dark and ominous when I need her to help me write an uplifting, joyful scene.  Swimming against her currents would only frustrate us both, so now I just go with her flow.  Happy Muse, Happy Life (or something like that).  To accommodate her capriciousness, I always have several different stories going at once.  Working within her mood spectrum, I can now apply her stories into one of the following fantasy sub-categories; classically-styled heroic fantasy, action-adventure fantasy, or "fantaisie-noir".  Her mercurial whims were one of the main reasons that I wanted to create three separate continents for my story-world (one "civilized", one "mystical", and one "wild") so that she can explore each of these realms independently, depending on her mood.  Essentially, I have given her three different "sandboxes" to play in, each with its own set of "toys" (characters, etc.).  So far, this flexible method makes her happy, which allows us to focus on at least one of my stories.  Each story seems to take longer to complete, but in the end, I'll have three stories to show for our effort instead of just one. 

Updated Goals for ROW80 (Round 2)
My goal for the “Spring Round” of ROW80 is to write three novellas (approximately 20,000 words apiece), for a total word-count of 60,000 words (or more).  All three novellas will be written simultaneously (again, alternating back-and-forth to accommodate my Muse), and each will vary in tone and style.  I have three story-candidates in mind, but I am still outlining and plotting these ideas, working on old ideas even as my Muse gives me new ones.  The story ideas are constantly changing right now, so until my Muse and I settle on what we want to write, I can’t really go into much details just yet.  I’ll elaborate more in a future post as I know more.  I know for sure that all three novellas will fall under the fantasy-genre of “sword & sorcery” (I know, shocking huh? — bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?).  During the first month of my 80-day writing challenge, I will be writing a thousand words a day (totaling 30,000 words) at Camp NaNoWriMo.  Here is My Camper Profile if you want to follow my progress during the month of April.  I hope to have three first-draft novellas started during that month, which I will further develop and refine during the remainder of ROW80 (Round 2).  That's the plan, anyway.  This is going to be one crazy adventure, I assure you!

Please visit the other writers in the ROW80 Community.

Spring Fever

“Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: ‘Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance — the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!’  And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death.  Her white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her.”
(excerpt from, Queen of the Black Coast, by Robert E. Howard)


My First Month’s Assessment
Spring is here and I am excited about the next round of ROW80.  As many of you know, I came late to the current 80-day round and have been using this preliminary time to prepare for the next round in April.  So far this month my preparation has gone decently well, although I always feel like I can never get all the things I want to accomplish in a day done.  My goal for the month of March was to take my previous NaNoWriMo world-building project and to extract all of the “good stuff” out of it so that it can be organized in a new world-building project.  This part of the preliminary preparation took a little longer than I had anticipated because my NaNoWriMo manuscript was choke-full of nonsensical “word-sprints” and rambling “stream-of-consciousness” diatribes.  Fortunately now, my new world-building project is far more organized and succinct.  My story-world is still very raw and vague, but I figure that if I work on it on a consistent basis, characters and places and possible stories will all become more specific.  Like a painter, I’m just making broad-strokes right now so that I can come back later to add the fine details. 

The Dreaded World-Builder’s Disease
One of the joys of being a writer in the fantasy (and science fiction) genre is that we get to create a unique fantastical world as a backdrop for our stories, allowing the reader to escape into his imagination and imagine places and civilizations never before seen.  This joy of world-building, however, can also be a burden if the writer isn’t careful.  Many of the world-building articles that I have been reading have warned against (the dreaded) world-builder’s disease, in which the author spends too much time on the world-building process and not enough time on actually writing stories from that world.  J.R.R Tolkien was a notorious sufferer of world-builder's disease, taking over twelve years to establish Middle-Earth.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he took the time to develop such a wonderful fantasy-world, with all it’s rich history and languages and such, but he only wrote a few books using that world and I wonder if he could have written more stories if he hadn’t been struck with world-builder’s disease.  For me, I am trying to find that balance.  I can’t lose sight of the fact that I am creating the world so that I can write stories within that world, not just to create the world.  Creating the world and writing from that world have to be done in tandem. 

Goals for Round 2 of ROW80
With only fifteen days left until the start of the second round, I have decided to write a 60,000 word first-draft novel.  This will be my first attempt at actually writing a complete story from beginning to end (my NaNoWriMo manuscript was a world-building project, not a novel-writing project).  I am both excited and anxious about this challenge.  I have been perusing all my story ideas lately, looking for something that I want to write.  I have a few ideas from which to choose, but these ideas need a lot of work if they are to become a story.  That’s why I have switched my focus away from the world-building for now and have been focusing my energy on studying story structure and plot outlines.  So far, I have narrowed my possible stories down to a few candidates and I will spend the next couple of weeks attempting to outline these potential stories so that I can choose the best one for April.  I will be updating that process here leading up to the second round.  Stay tuned…  

UPDATE: Okay, now I’m just as crazy as the rest of you writing-challenge junkies out there (you know who you are).  I just signed up or Camp NaNoWriMo.
Here’s the link to My Camper Profile if you want to follow my progress there.


Please visit some of the other writers in the ROW80 Community…

The Ides of March

“Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other.  In that utter desolation only they moved.   The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet.  Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world.  In the brooding silence they stood face to face.”

(excerpt from, The Frost Giant’s Daughter, by Robert E. Howard)

The Ides of March

On this date, March 15th, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated, marking the end of the Roman Republic and cascading Rome into civil war and strife.  Months earlier, Julius Caesar had declared himself “Dictator Perpetuo” (dictator in perpetuity) and sought to consolidate all power to himself.  The Roman Senators, fearing that this new tyrannical king of Rome would ultimately overthrow their senate, all conspired in secret to ambush him on the floor of the Roman Senate.  They sent Senator Brutus, friend and confidant of Julius Caesar, to summon him.  Calpurnia, wife of Julius, having had a vision of the ambush in her dreams the night before, begged him not to go.   Brutus scoffed at Calpurnia’s warning, convincing the Caesar that he should ignore his wife’s silly dreams and attend the awaiting Senate.   Upon his arrival, all the Senators surrounded Julius Caesar and stabbed him to death with their daggers.

Why am I telling you this history here in my blog today?   Well, for one, it has many of the elements that make for a great story; corruption, the lust for power, conspiracy, betrayal, and murder.  Mix these story elements into your own novels and you have the potential for an intriguing thriller.   But mostly, I bring up this history because of the research I have been doing for my world-building project.

Nation Building

I am at a point in my world-building where I need to establish the major nations, empires and cultures first before I can develop the world any further.  These nations will have the most affect on the rest of the world due to their size, power and influence.  How do I go about creating these nations and cultures?  Well, first I need to study the empires of the past (which I’m currently doing now), mash-up and change these empires to fit my story-world, and then set these empires at odds with each other.  In the end, I want to create six or seven major nations, each with vastly different cultures, philosophies, and governmental systems, all vying for control over disputed lands, trade routes, and natural resources.   In other words, if I want to write stories about espionage, usurpation, and global warfare in my fantasy story-world, I need to seed in all that potential for chaos and conflict into my world now.

Which brings me full circle to ancient Rome.  Over the past few days, I’ve been studying the history of the Roman Empire, hoping to emulate its political and military structure into one of my nation-states.  The goal is to find the most intriguing elements of that empire and to combine them with other fantasy elements to create a completely unique, believable civilization.  Hopefully, if done right, it won’t be obvious to the reader that this nation originated from the concepts of ancient Rome, just like most people don’t recognize that the conceptual origins of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars was Nazi Germany.   I plan on doing the same for other historical empires as well.  At this point, I envision a colonial nation, a conquering nation, several tyrannical nations, an enlightened-yet-corrupt nation, and a zealot-controlled slave-nation.  I envision all sorts of governmental and political systems ruled by monarchs, corrupt politicians, tribal warlords, feudal landholders, and a self-professed god-king.   All of these ideas (and research) are in their infancy right now and need a lot of work and development.  Yet, once established, I believe that this portion of my world-building process will produce many characters and plots for my future story-world.

That's all for now.  Please visit some of the other writers in the ROW80 Community…

Maintaining Momentum

“She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.  She came close to him, heedless of his great blade, dripping with blood of her warriors.  Her supple thigh brushed against it, so close she came to the tall warrior.  Her red lips parted as she stared up into his somber menacing eyes.”

(excerpt from, Queen of the Black Coast, by Robert E. Howard)

Circadian Rhythms

Is it Wednesday already?   This week’s been a blur so far.  I don’t know about y’all, but my circadian rhythms have been all out-of-whack ever since the “Spring Forward” time-change (I’ll spare you my rant on that topic).   My sleep schedule is all over the map now.   Monday had me cat-napping after work, then staying up ‘til early Tuesday morning writing and researching, followed by another round of evening cat-naps.   Even my cats are looking at me strangely.  Worst yet, this time-change has messed with the circadian rhythms of my Muse.  Now, she floods my mind with wonderful story ideas while I’m at work, but when I get home — nothing.  I just stare slack-jawed at the blinking cursor.   Fortunately for me, I was able to stealthily tap some of those story ideas into my mobile-app while I was pretending to work, so at least I have that.  But right now, I think my Muse is getting her beauty-rest, so I’ll have to type quietly.   She gets sarcastic when she’s cranky.

Focus Writer

My goal for the rest of this week is just to maintain the productivity momentum that I established last week.  I have maintained a constant pace of 500 words-per-day all month long, but the quality of my writing has varied wildly.  I’m hoping that will improve the more I write.   Like many of you, I have been using FocusWriter to get my daily word-count in.   I like the fact that it allows me freely write my  “stream-of-consciousness” exercises in a separate, dedicated writing space.   My Scrivener files are cluttered enough without the added ramblings.   If I do write something profound in FocusWriter, I can easily just copy-and-paste it into Scrivener.  I also like the fact that it keeps track of my daily progress and that it marks my calendar with stars every time I accomplish that day’s word-count.  Even when I don’t feel inspired to write, I think ‘gosh, I’m on a roll. I don’t want to break the chain.’  So I pound out word-after-word until I can happily stare at all my stars in a row.   Yeah, small victory, I know.  Currently, my streak is ten days now (’Yippy-Skippy, Newbie’ — sorry, that was my inner-editor popping-off there).

That’s all for now.   My Muse is starting to stir, so I want to be there for her when my “sleeping beauty” awakens.  Please visit some of the other writers in the ROW80 Community…

Finding My Rhythm

“Olivia reclined in the bows of the gently rocking boat, in a state dreamy and unreal.  She experienced an illusion that she was floating in midair, stars beneath her as well as above.  Her silent companion was etched vaguely against the softer darkness.  There was no break or falter in the rhythm of his oars; he might have been a fantasmal oarsman, rowing her across the dark lake of Death.   But the edge of her fear was dulled, and, lulled by the monotony of motion, she passed into a quiet slumber.”

(excerpt from, Shadows in the Moonlight, by Robert E. Howard)

Finding My Rhythm

So far, the first week of March has been relatively productive for me.  As I prepare for the next round of ROW80, I feel like the preliminary planning of my [World-Building] project is right on schedule.  This past week has mostly been about organizing my project folders, and copying-and-pasting all the “good stuff” from my NaNoWriMo world-building manuscript into my new folders.  Once organized, editing these new components into something useful has been the hardest part.   For example, I have some scenes that I have written where the story is told using a certain protagonist, but then I think ‘hey, wouldn’t it be better if this happened to my other protagonist in a different story?’  Well, that’s what I’ve been doing to a couple of my scenes, swapping out one character for another, then changing the new character’s reactions and dialog to the scene.  In other words, I end up re-writing the entire scene using a different lead character.  It’s a lot of work, but the end result is a stronger, more compelling, scene.

Random Scenes

In my [Brainstorming Ideas] folder, under a sub-folder called [Scenarios], I’ve been free-writing all the random scenes that I have floating around in my head.  Maybe it’s an exotic setting, like that of a crumbling temple, strangled by the vines and roots of the deep jungle.  Or maybe it’s a dramatic situation, like a hero frantically trying to unfasten the clasps and buckles of his heavy armor as he sinks quickly in deep dark waters.  Sometimes it’s nothing more than a mood or a tone that I want to convey in a story.   Mostly, these ideas come to me as nothing more than a vivid snapshot, without plot or context.  I don’t know if I’ll use these scenes in any of my stories, but I figure it’s good writing practice and counts toward my daily word-count goal.  More importantly, if I don’t get these thoughts out of my head, I’ll forget them tomorrow.  As the ancient proverb states, “the palest ink is better than the sharpest memory”.  Write it down before it’s forgotten!

World-Building Research

I’ve been doing some online research for my world-building project.  Many of the fantasy world-building articles that I find are geared towards video-game designers or role-playing-game dungeon-masters, but many of these same concepts can be used by fantasy writers to develop their world.   Here are some great world-building links that I discovered this week:

• A World Building Checklist — A well-organized list of all the world-building components that a fantasy writer will have to consider.  It is similar to the S.F.W.A. Questionnaire discussed in a previous post.   A great place to start.

• The Cartographers’ Guild — If you want to have a map of your fantasy world in the front of your book, this is, by far, the best map-making community forum out there!  Check out the Finished Maps and Cartographer’s Choice galleries.

• Medieval Names Archive — A fantastic collection of articles on medieval and renaissance names, and how to properly choose one.  A great resource for anyone wanting to add authenticity to their historical fiction.

• Ringwork’s Fantasy Name Generator — More than just a simple name generation tool, this one accepts complex commands that allow you to personalize how you character’s name looks and sounds.  Play around with the drop-menu.

• Donjon’s Fantasy Name Generator — A name generator used by role-playing-game dungeon-masters (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) to create characters for quests.  It has some fun drop-menu combinations, such as for naming adventuring parties and monsters.   Obviously, you would want to tweak these names with your own naming variation.  A good starting point.  Again, play around with the drop-menus.

• Medieval Demographics Calculator — This random kingdom generator calculates all the resources that are needed in order to support a kingdom of a certain size, such as population density, farmland acreage and trade services.  It is based on actual historical demographic data compiled by S. John Ross, in his article Medieval Demographics Made Easy.  Play around with the parameters.  Note: In order to get another random kingdom, refresh your browser.

• Fractal World Generator — A world creation tool where you can change the planetary parameters, like water and ice content, to create a map.   Press the [Create] button to see your fractal-generated world map.   A fun way to play with world-building ideas.

Okay, enough playing on the Internet; back to writing!  Just kidding.  I hope you find some of these links useful for your writing projects.  Please visit some of the other writers in the ROW80 Community…

Organizing My Characters

“Look at me, Conan!”  She threw wide her arms.  “I am Bêlit, queen of the black coast.  Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy mountains which bred you.  Take me and crush me with your fierce love!  Go with me to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea!  I am a queen by fire and steel and slaughter — be thou my king!”

— Bêlit

(excerpt from, Queen of the Black Coast, by Robert E. Howard)

Characters

Because world-building can be such a daunting (and sometimes overwhelming) task, I wanted to make sure, from the beginning, that my project was well organized and intuitive.  To that end, I’ve been trying to spend a little time each night organizing and editing some aspect of my [World-Building] project.  Lately, I’ve been organizing my [Characters] folder, which has many character-template files in it, all at various levels of completion.  Some of my main characters are decently defined, but they lack depth, personality, history and motivation right now (all of this will be refined later).  Most of the files are just generically-named placeholders of future characters I may need for my story plots (the cast of characters, as it were).  Here’s how my [Characters] folder is organized right now:

[Protagonists]

• [Heroes] — This folder contains all of my male lead characters.
• [Heroines] — This folder contains all of my female lead characters.

• [Allies] — This folder contains important secondary characters, including family members, friends, sidekicks, and mentors.

[Antagonists]

• [Villains] — This folder contains all of the main villains, including overlords, warlords, and arch-villains.

• [Henchmen] — This folder contains all of the main villain’s subordinates, including body-guards, bounty-hunters, spies, and assassins.

• [Adversaries] — This folder contains any character (excluding the villain and his underlings) that might get in the way of the protagonist’s goals, including rivals, traitors and scorned ex-lovers.

[Neutral Characters]

• [Supporting Cast of Extras] — This folder contains ambivalent characters (neither friend nor foe), like merchants, inn-keepers and bar-maids.

[Cannon Fodder] (expendable enemies that must die!)

• [Human Enemies] — Includes: enemy soldiers, rival mercenaries, elite assassins, savage cannibals, raiders, marauders, thugs, criminals, lunatics, zealots, fanatics and cultists (just to name a few).

• [Monsters] — Oh, yes! Monsters!  Lots of Monsters!  Everything from giant carnivorous predators to summoned hell-spawn to man-beast monstrosities!  I have a special character-template for monsters (more on that in a later blog post).

This style of organization may change as I move forward with the project.  I may combine some folders or add others later as needed.  So far, this method of organization is working for me.  I will go over some of the variables that I include in my character-template files in a future post...