Memo: College

A year ago, I was typing furiously at a very different blog full of very silly things like the girls I was dating and whether I liked my high school teachers or my mom at the time. I also wrote several posts about how a broken fire alarm influenced my decision to hate school and want to never ever go to college.

As you can see, all of this was very irrational of me, and I am now very glad that it is separate from this writing blog, since it's much more available to the public. My only wish is that I had the willpower to delete the old one from existence. But that's entirely beside the point.

It took me a very long time to finally change my mind and try my hand at college courses. My main problem was that something wouldn't let me realize that an unreliable prospect is the last thing you want as your backup plan. This world is pretty risky as it is, and it's only because I'm very lucky that I continue to live in any amount of comfort, let alone with the little effort I've put into my life so far.

So today, when I finally went into my very first college class, it was definitely something different for me. Funnily enough, though, even though I had put off going I was still the youngest person in the room. Most had gone to college for a while before, gone off to work for a few years, and were now coming back for further education. I felt weird for reasons much different than I was expecting.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that it hasn't been terribly exciting. We were introduced to the course, and then I learned how to write a memo. Obviously this blog post isn't a memo despite the title, but there's really not much else to say about what I actually did today. This semester will consist mostly of homework, but that's alright. The deceiving but great thing about homework is that you can do it pretty much anywhere.

New Year's Resolution

Get The Third Face revised enough so that I'm finally actually happy with it and willing to look for and send it to an agent or something. I can't just sit back and wait for my mind to come up with some sort of brilliance anymore. This is getting rather ridiculous.

Predicament

Out of all the fancy certificates and stuff that the National Novel Writing Month offers after the fact to winners, there's only one thing that I find to be useful at all. A special code to CreateSpace allows 5 free paperback copies of the winner's finished novel. Needless to say, I'm planning on taking advantage of it. Not for the novel that I wrote this year, but rather The Third Face.

The problem is that I still don't think I've revised The Third Face enough to even show 5 people. There are some pretty big problems with it, mainly the near-absent setting descriptions and the overwhelming rush through a seemingly disjointed plot. Its main villain just suddenly appears in the last few chapters without fanfare, and the conflict that set off the story is not resolved, but rather conveniently escaped by the heroes.

This would all be okay if I was still willing to revise it. But as things stand, I don't even like The Third Face that much anymore. After 5 drafts of overthinking everything, I'm just kind of sick of it. I contacted someone for help, then realized I couldn't even bring myself to write a simple outline to share because I didn't want to go back through my work anymore.

The code I got is good until June 30th of next year, so it's not like I'm in a huge hurry to get this done, but I also know that I take a very long time to get done with most tasks, and tend to just forget about them if I've been neglecting them for too long. That's not a good formula in this case at all. Okay, it's never a good formula. I should probably do something about that problem, but what? How can I approach this? It's hard to get started on anything in the face of the holiday season, and I just kind of feel stuck.

Oh Right

National Novel Writing Month ended a week ago. Before, I was constantly making blog posts about my writing, but after my lull in productivity in the novel, a similar lack of work went into this blog.

Unlike the blog, however, which has gone without a single post since then, my novel did pick back up, and I managed to finish it just in time to win! I was very excited, just as I have been each year before, and it felt great to let out the customary giant sigh of relief. There are few things more joyous than the finishing of another brand-new novel, and it never gets old, either.

After the euphoria stage came the relaxation, this idea that since the novel was finished, I could just sit back and do nothing. With no school or work, only projects that I choose to do are there to occupy me. Thus, I played video games and then spent three straight days with my girlfriend before finally coming back to reality last night.

It wasn't until a few minutes ago that I realized that, in addition to the things I had been catching up on (like steadily working out more pages for my Pokemon webcomic and uploading more gaming videos to my Youtube channel), I still had this blog to update. Naturally, I came right to it and began typing up an entry. Then I got distracted and it took another good hour to get it finished, and I still haven't gotten to any of the other things that I was about to do before I thought of this. Man, task management is hard.

Discouragement

Have you ever used the writing software at Pangurpad.com? It's a pretty cool system focused on making everything as simple as possible. It allows easy-access notes with categories for characters, places, and items, as well as branching timelines of events--but other than that, it's just a plain and simple screen to type on with the ability to save onto the site's cloud server. That means your entire work is kept online and you can access it from your account on any computer.

So then, explain to me this: how me clearing my browser data somehow totally deletes the file. It's a good thing I backed up my novel a couple of days before, because even the small amount I did lose, 4000 words, is pretty much the death sentence for my novel. After some creative copying and pasting I got back to where I was in terms of word count, and wrote a nice little speech about how angry I was. Five minutes later, when I came to continue what I was working on, it was gone once again.

I have no idea what the problem is, but I haven't got a single word on that page, and frankly, I don't have the time to look for more writing software. My rant even declared that I didn't want to go through with my plot anymore, and that's even more true now. I feel completely defeated right now. What am I supposed to do if I'm physically not being allowed to write? My plan was to just summarize the ending of the story and write a shorter one for the 9000 or so more words I have left. Now I haven't the faintest idea what to do. I'm certainly not going on right now, and my methods for finishing it just might not be 100% legitimate but at this point finishing at all (short of typing random nonsense) is a miracle.

The bottom line is, my text editor hates me.

Plot Transformation

As anyone who's read this blog over the last month can see, the novel I'm writing places an pretty heavy emphasis on the main character Matthew Lothyre and the mystery of his strange-looking hat. The first conflict besides Matt's poverty is early antagonist Pat's attempts to steal the hat.

An earlier discussion also mentioned that the semi-rich, occult-loving girl Natalia Derinde essentially took over the plot with her strange behaviors and her deep connection with the mysterious dark spirit Leth. But what I didn't realize was that it wasn't her that was making things interesting--it was Leth himself.

Suddenly, my book is about Leth and his sister Parla in their competition of influence over people of Earth. Whoever can get their followers to win in a series of arbitrary yet heated contests with virtually no rules will take complete control over some important matters in their otherworldly home. Matt and Natalia keep their importance as the main players on Leth's team as this battle, apparently taking place over many human generations, comes towards its climactic end.

Obviously this still leaves a lot for me to work on, since that's still not the most thrilling plot you can ask for. I mean, the stakes are completely vague, and... well, okay, basically a lot of things are just vague. But that's something for another draft.

I wasn't really considering taking this too far, but if I can reconstruct my plot from some of its scattered pieces after this is done, then I might just have a decent novel on my hands. Due to the large number of posts about it on this blog (and how many people have just started reading this because of a certain NaNoWriMo Facebook post!) I can't exactly back out of the project now. I've invested not only my own time in it, but also what I suspect to be a fair amount of interest from others.

It will be a ton of work to revise it into a presentable form, but it's not as if I don't have other things to do in the obligatory don't-even-look-at-it period. The blog you see before you will probably die down a bit after this month is over, but it won't go back to the barren state it was in for a long time beforehand.

NaNoWriMo 2011: Objects

STRANGE-LOOKING HAT

Matt is the proud owner of this strange-looking hat, which has a special function so secret that nobody, not even the narrator, is allowed to know what it is until the appointed time.

It looks a lot like a black pirate hat. On the left side is some sort of golden satellite dish, while on the right is a colored feather that is the be changed every day of the week. However, since only a few hours have passed so far in the story, only the color for Thursday is known: purple.

DARK TOME

Natalia carried this black book closely with her for quite some time early on in the story.

She is sure that its contents are not meant for human eyes to see, and even if she wanted to look at it, there is in fact a lock on it which she doesn't have the key to.

Still, due to its apparent connection to Leth--perhaps on orders from him--she was very concerned with keeping it on her person at all times, right up until she failed to do so, which she lamented as a terrible mistake.