Life in a Northern Town
May. 26th, 2002 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2I haven't played any Everquest since at least Tuesday.
It's not really that amazing... I go for long periods of not playing, then long stretches where I play every night. It's an addictive game, but you can't play every night without getting bored of it after a while.
Ideally, I should play a couple of times a week... but I think it's just the way my mind works. I get really into something, get bored, go move on to something else.
Anyway I've been theoretically working on my story "Constellations" but in practice I've been thinking about it and not doing much writing, just some half-scenes and dialogue jotted down here or there. Gene suggested I read some of it at writer's night, but I don't want to do that. To be honest, I never really expected to tell anyone about this story unless I could finish it, and right now I don't know if I CAN finish it.
My first problem is that it really is an attempt to write a novel length story. I've only attempted to do that once before (my sprawling open-ended fanfic doesn't count), and that other novel-length story is also sitting on my hard drive, bogged down several chapters in. With short stories I can clearly see in my head how all of the scenes fit together and how the plot is revealed to the reader -- with a novel I have trouble finding pacing and keeping the plot moving along.
My second problem is that I'm trying to write something like a gothic mystery, and it would help if I were more familiar with both genres. For one thing, I've noticed that I don't have enough sinister people about, or rather, all of the people that MIGHT have committed the murder, but didn't, I've been either avoiding or making them more human & friendly than I ought to, especially so early in the book. For a mystery, everyone should seem a likely suspect or at least have something to hide -- which most of the characters do, but I haven't managed to get that into the story yet. And for a gothic atmosphere you really need even the good guys or love interest to seem aloof or dark and mysterious... and I don't know if I have that element working either yet.
So yesterday I visited Uwajamaya and then Half Price Bookstore, and among other things I picked up a couple of gothic stories (which are pretty hard to come by these days) and I found a bunch of Victorian mysteries by Anne Perry, who has written two different series of mysteries set in Victorian England. I'm reading one now, and I can't help but thing it's good background material for our Steampunk campaing (actually -- much more useful for that than for helping me write my own story, which after all isn't set in Victorian England).
I also picked up two Samurai Cat books, and some CDs, and "Realware" by Rudy Rucker, fourth in his weird cyberpunk series. Rudy Rucker is one seriously weird writer (and also a brilliant mathematician).
The guy at the checkout started talking about how many books they got in the day before by... I can't remember the author's name at the moment, someone like Jack Vance or A E Van Vogt or... it was Philip K Dick, I remember now. Anyway I replied that his stuff is hard to find these days, and we had this short conversation about Philip K Dick, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how the subject came up. Then I realized that the Rucker novel was a trade paperback printed by a small-press publisher with a weirdly colored spine... it looked a lot like the trade reprints of Dick and Moorcock and all those classic sci fi authors, so he must have thought I was buying a Dick novel.
So anyway, I went home, watched Andromeda and Relic Hunter, ate dinner, didn't go to Gene's place to hang out, read one of my new mysteries for a while, played Dungeon Siege all night... and today Jeff is here so I'd better get off the computer and socialize.
It's not really that amazing... I go for long periods of not playing, then long stretches where I play every night. It's an addictive game, but you can't play every night without getting bored of it after a while.
Ideally, I should play a couple of times a week... but I think it's just the way my mind works. I get really into something, get bored, go move on to something else.
Anyway I've been theoretically working on my story "Constellations" but in practice I've been thinking about it and not doing much writing, just some half-scenes and dialogue jotted down here or there. Gene suggested I read some of it at writer's night, but I don't want to do that. To be honest, I never really expected to tell anyone about this story unless I could finish it, and right now I don't know if I CAN finish it.
My first problem is that it really is an attempt to write a novel length story. I've only attempted to do that once before (my sprawling open-ended fanfic doesn't count), and that other novel-length story is also sitting on my hard drive, bogged down several chapters in. With short stories I can clearly see in my head how all of the scenes fit together and how the plot is revealed to the reader -- with a novel I have trouble finding pacing and keeping the plot moving along.
My second problem is that I'm trying to write something like a gothic mystery, and it would help if I were more familiar with both genres. For one thing, I've noticed that I don't have enough sinister people about, or rather, all of the people that MIGHT have committed the murder, but didn't, I've been either avoiding or making them more human & friendly than I ought to, especially so early in the book. For a mystery, everyone should seem a likely suspect or at least have something to hide -- which most of the characters do, but I haven't managed to get that into the story yet. And for a gothic atmosphere you really need even the good guys or love interest to seem aloof or dark and mysterious... and I don't know if I have that element working either yet.
So yesterday I visited Uwajamaya and then Half Price Bookstore, and among other things I picked up a couple of gothic stories (which are pretty hard to come by these days) and I found a bunch of Victorian mysteries by Anne Perry, who has written two different series of mysteries set in Victorian England. I'm reading one now, and I can't help but thing it's good background material for our Steampunk campaing (actually -- much more useful for that than for helping me write my own story, which after all isn't set in Victorian England).
I also picked up two Samurai Cat books, and some CDs, and "Realware" by Rudy Rucker, fourth in his weird cyberpunk series. Rudy Rucker is one seriously weird writer (and also a brilliant mathematician).
The guy at the checkout started talking about how many books they got in the day before by... I can't remember the author's name at the moment, someone like Jack Vance or A E Van Vogt or... it was Philip K Dick, I remember now. Anyway I replied that his stuff is hard to find these days, and we had this short conversation about Philip K Dick, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how the subject came up. Then I realized that the Rucker novel was a trade paperback printed by a small-press publisher with a weirdly colored spine... it looked a lot like the trade reprints of Dick and Moorcock and all those classic sci fi authors, so he must have thought I was buying a Dick novel.
So anyway, I went home, watched Andromeda and Relic Hunter, ate dinner, didn't go to Gene's place to hang out, read one of my new mysteries for a while, played Dungeon Siege all night... and today Jeff is here so I'd better get off the computer and socialize.
