nothing to see here

Words (Written Today): 769

Words (Total as of Today): 7939

Mood: Tired. Kinda meh.

Treat: see my issue here is I just don't know what to treat myself with, and so I inevitably end up not treating myself at all........ sigh.

First Line (Written Today): It wasn’t hard to find it among the gaping absence of his other magic, all locked away by the engraved shackles on his wrists.

Last Line (Written Today): Tron and Ram lowered Flynn onto the bed. “He’s one of the new recruits,” Ram said. “He arrived this way.”

Favorite Line (Written Today): In his mind’s eye, it looked like a piece of wool no bigger than his fist, fuzzy around the edges but still strong. He imagined pulling a few bits of it free, as a spinner might from their carded wool, working it into a fine thread that he tied back on itself, creating a small ring of healing magic. He laid his hands on the unconscious man and let the imagined ring pass from his body to the other, directing it to alleviate the man’s pain and exhaustion, and bring him slowly to the waking world.

He opened his eyes. The bruises that covered the man’s body seemed only slightly better, still covering his skin in a patchwork of black and blue, but he shifted under Tron’s hands, and a few moments later, his eyes fluttered open.

His eyes were [gray], and darted between Tron and Ram rapidly. Then he closed them, and groaned deeply. “Where... where am I?” he asked, his voice slightly raspy.

Ram glanced over at the barracks door; Tron followed his gaze, and was unsurprised to see one of the guards peering at them through the grate. Ram looked back down at the man. “You’re a guest,” he said softly, “of the Emperor Chesst. You’re in the Emperor’s Arena, in the Fostian Badlands. You’re going to play in the Games for the pleasure of the Emperor and his court.”

Other Stuff: Not a busy day, but tiring nonetheless, somehow? I don't even know at this point. I'm getting kind of tired of being tired all the time (nothing new for me, but still). Glad I managed to get some writing in, though. Just a couple days away from two weeks straight of writing!!

Words (Written Today): 502

Words (Total as of Today): 6133

Mood: Tired (again) (some more)

Treat: I had some hot cocoa with whipped cream.

First Line (Written Today): An air of celebration, or something like it, permeated the barracks the next morning.

Last Line (Written Today): The groups brought in for training were seldom in any state to fight, but it seemed to Tron that this group in particular was barely fit to stand up.

Favorite Line (Written Today): The gods were never much inclined to move through humanity, even for a knight-paladin like himself, but he had felt their presence once or twice in his life, and he hoped he might one day feel it again. He recalled the true joy of that connection, and the peace that came with it, and prayed a silent prayer: May I feel your presence again, o gods. May your hand guide me ever towards the light.

Other Stuff: Got a bit of a late start on writing today; I accidentally took a three hour nap this afternoon, and didn't get a chance to write anything until after dinner. I thought I might write some more, but at this point in the evening, I'm just too tired to really get anything decent on the page. There's always tomorrow.

Words (Written Today): 573

Words (Total as of Today): 5106

Mood: Decent.

Treat: I had tea and shortbread just now??

First Line (Written Today): He remembered when he earned his shield and knighthood, and became Knight Tron of Northern Glen.

Last Line (Written Today): The endless days in a small cell, wondering when he would be put on trial, and when he would be executed for the treason he was accused of.

But those things never came.

Favorite Line (Written Today): The priests, led by old Dumont, had helped to raise the money that sent Tron to the capital for his studies, and he wanted to repay that debt in whatever way he could. While his work as a knight was one such way, he felt that the shabby temples of Northern Glen could use the coin. The head priest always smiled and thanked him, and Tron always smiled back.

Yori had joked that he would be the only knight whose great deeds made him a pauper, but he—was not thinking of her now.

Other Stuff: Only managed one writing session tonight, but I think things turned out all right. This first chapter is proving a bit infodump-y, but I think it's needed to establish the world a little, so whatever. Hoping to get through this scene tomorrow.

Words (Written Today): 619

Words (Total as of Today): 3707

Mood: still tired, but better.

Treat: maybe some leftover Halloween chocolate?

First Line (Written Today): The pair gathered their swords and shed their padded cloth armor.

Last Line (Written Today): Tomorrow would bring what it willed; for now there was food to eat, and friends to share it with, no matter how bleak the circumstances.

Favorite Line (Written Today): He and Ram would have to train one of these prisoners together, and more than likely watch them die a horrible death. It was not the sort of thing that was pleasant to participate in. But then, that was all of a piece with how the Emperor Chesst ran his empire. All too often, the cruelty seemingly baked into a new custom or law was the point of the whole matter. The arenas robbed each of the conquered realms of their strongest fighters, and the fighters themselves faced death, and even if they survived, they were forced to shepherd others to their own deaths.

It was the kind of thing that would break lesser men. It was coming close to breaking him.

Other Stuff: Actually getting everything done in decent(ish) time today!! I should have maybe done my writing earlier in the day, but it's been a slightly busy day. Tomorrow is mostly open and free, though, since it's Election Day, so maybe I'll do some morning writing for once!

Words (Written Today): 361

Words (Total as of Today): 2835

Mood: Very, very tired from a very, very Full day.

Treat: Going to bed.

First Line (Written Today): The day dawned over the Emperor’s Arena with a golden beauty that did not fit Tron’s mood.

Last Line (Written Today): He dropped his voice and continued quietly, “The gods only know how things could have gotten so bad this quickly.”

Favorite Line (Written Today): “You feeling all right?” Ram asked, bending to pick up his fallen blade. “You almost seem angry at the sun itself.”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Tron admitted, bowing his head. “Recent history, for one.”

“Ah.” Ram dusted off the wood on the sleeve of his practice armor. “How recent, then?”

“Four years past.” They shook hands, and resumed sparring stances. “So much has happened since.”

Ram made the first move, and Tron answered with a parry. “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Ram replied.

Other Stuff: I had a very busy day hanging out with family and amusing my nephew and so on. I only managed to write for 30 minutes right before bed. I'm still ahead of my personal pace (I am aiming for 15k for the month), but I'd like to get a bit more written Sunday if I can. (this is also a backdated entry, because I did not have the mental energy to write this up Saturday...)

Words (Written Today): 743

Words (Total as of Today): 1777

Mood: fairly good, I guess?

Treat: going to bed

First Line (Written Today): Time has lost what little meaning it had to him.

Last Line (Written Today): “Your death will come in good time, o god. But not quite yet.”

Favorite Line (Written Today): [The emperor] says a word of the gods’ old tongue, and the god knows it for a moment—and then it is slipping away from him. And then everything—everything is slipping away, fading into darkness and oblivion. His knowledge, his sense of self, all suddenly locked away. Everything but a single syllable of his own name.

Flynn.

Other Stuff: Posting this a day late, with backdating, because... I got busy. Also yesterday was very busy and I just wanted to go to bed, so here we are. I'm not as pleased with today's writing, but it's not like I'm posting this right away; there is always time for an edit.

So for the last couple months, I've been working my way through Ursula K. LeGuin's book Steering the Craft, which has exercises to help a writer work on the actual craft of writing. The exercises involve such techniques as sentence length, repetition, and so on. One exercise asks you to write a descriptive scene with no adjectives or adverbs, for example.

The two exercises I'm sharing from today are Point of View and Voice related, Exercises Seven and Eight in the book. Here's LeGuin's preface to Exercise Seven:

Think up a situation for a narrative sketch of 200-350 words. It can be anything you like but should involve several people doing something. [...] It doesn't have to be a big, important event, though it can be; but something should happen[...] Please use little or no dialogue in these POV exercises. While the characters talk, their voices cover the POV, and so you're not exploring that voice, which is the point of the exercise.

LeGuin later says that the same situation can be used for Exercise Eight, which is what I did. The situation I came up with involves my TRON/Pacific Rim crossover, which I've been poking at since 2019 or so? One of the stories in this crossover involves TRON character Quorra's quest to become a Jaeger pilot. This little scene follows a couple weeks after Quorra has a disastrous first Drift with another solo Ranger candidate, Ari Mendoza (an OC). Meanwhile, another candidate, Eddy Dickinson (also an OC), has been harboring a bit of a grudge against Quorra. He's young and a bit of a hothead and is convinced that Quorra's bad Drift with Ari means she's not fit for the program.

So. Here we go.

Exercise Seven, Part One: Two Voices: First: Tell your little story from a single POV, that of a participant in the event. Use limited third person. Second: retell the story from the POV of one of the other people involved in it. Again, use limited third person.

( First: Quorra )

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( Second: Eddy )

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Exercise Seven, Part Two: Detached Narrator: Tell the same story using the detached author or "fly on the wall" POV.

( Read more... )

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Exercise Seven, Part Three: Observer Narrator: If there wasn't a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character's voice, in first or third person.

( Ari observes... )

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Exercise Seven, Part Four: Involved Author: Tell the same or a new story using the involved-author POV. Part Four may require you to expand the whole thing, up to two or three pages, 1000 words or so. You may find you need to give it a context, find out what led up to it, or follow it further.

( Read more... )

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Exercise Eight: Changing Voices, Part One: Quick Shifts in Limited Third: A short narrative, 200-600 words. You can use one of the sketches from Exercise 7 or make up a new scene of the same kind: several people involved in the same activity or event. Tell the story using several different viewpoint characters (narrators) in limited third person, changing from one to another as the narrative proceeds. Mark the changes with line breaks, with the narrators name in parentheses, or with any device you like.

( All together now... )

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Exercise Eight, Part Two: Thin Ice: In 300-1000 words, tell the same story or a new story of the same kind, deliberately shifting POV from character to character several times without any obvious signal to the reader that you're doing so.

( Read more... )

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That's all from me! Thank you for indulging my nonsense, such as it is.

I think the weather's finally turning towards spring! We've had highs in the 50s and 60s (F) all week, and it doesn't look like it's stopping anytime soon! I haven't seen any buds on trees yet, but the daffodils in the neighbor's yard are blooming, and it's been lovely and sunny the last several days and it's all very nice. :D (It is going to rain all week next week, though, which I am... less enthused about.)

In other news...

I got the yarn for my new crochet project! I am trying very hard to pace myself with the pattern, though, because I don't want to run out of rows I can do too quickly. I only ordered the first eight colors needed for the first two parts of the pattern; I have to get the other four at some point, but I don't know when that will be. Hence: pacing myself. Or trying to. I did very badly the first couple of days, but I've just done two rounds for the last few days, so that's good, I guess.

I have also been working on an afghan I got from a kit a couple years back. It's a much simpler pattern, thank goodness, and I'm making decent progress for something that's going to be nearly 5ft long. I had an incident with some tangled yarn yesterday, though, so I'm hoping I don't run out of that color before I reach the end. I salvaged as much as I could from the tangle, so... fingers crossed.

Also still working on the Rivendell cross-stitch, though I've slowed down a bit on it. I've got like 11 blocks of stitching left to do on the third page. After I finish page 3, I think I'm going to set it aside for a bit, though. I'm getting kind of tired of it, to be honest, and a break is always a good thing. I found a pattern on Shitpost Sampler [link] that I'd like to make for the guy who DM'd my last Dungeons and Dragons campaign, so that would make a nice project for my downtime from Rivendell.

Speaking of DnD! The new campaign started this past Saturday, and it was a lot of fun, though I continue to be clueless and awkward when it comes to improvising crap. Still, I had a good time, and the new DM is lots of fun, so that's all good. My character got half killed by a giant centipede! It was fun! The new group is meeting the last Saturday of every month (mostly because the DM is driving in from about an hour away), so I'm looking forward to our next meetup. :D

I also finished a book recently. I managed to snag the library's copy of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood last Thursday, and I finished it on Tuesday. It was a very gripping read, and discomfiting in more ways than one. (Mostly because I get the feeling nowadays that a lot of people in the US would love it if this country was more like Gilead. ://////) Still, I quite enjoyed it, and I am going to borrow my sister's copy of The Handmaid's Tale so I can reread that. I read it over the summer several years back, but I still don't have a copy of my own. So that's going to be in my near future, reading-wise, though I'd like to get through the backlog of ebooks I have out from the library as well.

Writing-wise, I have been doing... okay? I didn't manage to write on Saturday (too tired after DnD), but I did write for four days in a row, which isn't nothing. I've written a couple days so far in March, and I'd like to start writing more consistently, but we'll see if that actually happens. Who knows, maybe the changing weather will put me in a good enough mood to write more.

At any rate, I'm going to do my best to enjoy this spate of nice weather we've been getting, and maybe soon the world will be green and growing again! Hope you all are doing well, and best wishes for the rest of your week.

Some good news first: I made my goal for NaNoWriMo/getyourwordsout! I set a goal of 17k for NaNo so I could meet my pledge for GYWO of 75k, and I can happily report that I made it! Not sure anything I’ve written—either this month or this year—is really any good, but... hey, I wrote something. And I made a goal and reached it, so that’s also nice.

So I’m feeling wiped from writing so much and so often this month, which... okay. That’s fine. But at the same time, I am so stressed out still by everything left to do this month/year. I’ve got one cross-stitch project I’d like to try and finish, but I just don’t know that that’s going to happen, even with like 1/4 left on it. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough, and my cross-stitch hyperfocus is just gone and ARGH. Also I still have to do Christmas shopping. And figure out what I’m getting everyone in the first place.

And all I really want to do is... nothing? Stardew Valley just updated for PC with a ton of new content, so I’d love to play that endlessly. And just hang out watching movies or whatever all day. I don’t want to have to do anything, but there’s so many things I have to do and it’s just............. argh. I hate everything.

I don’t know. I don’t really have a lot to share, just that I’m tired of.... everything. Hope you all are doing well.

Everything continues as it was, more or less. Still cross-stitching, still crocheting. Working on NaNoWriMo. I'm in a good mood more days than not. Or at least, I'm not in a bad mood, which is always a good thing.

I finished the first page/half of the cross-stitch cat for my SIL. (Here's what it looks like. [link]) I'm planning on taking a break on that one for the time being, and focusing more energy onto the Rivendell one, which is much more urgent considering how big it is. I might alternate weeks I work on each project, just so I don't get burned out on one or the other. Here's hoping, anyway. I think I'll probably get them done in time for Christmas, but not in time to get them framed. Oh well.

Still working on the crochet shawl. I've started the ending border now. I might have had enough to do a couple more repeats of the body, but I wasn't willing to engage in a game of yarn chicken. I've only got the two skeins of this color, so I might as well make sure they last. I'd rather have some left over than have an unfinished shawl.

NaNoWriMo has begun. I'm not aiming for 50k this year (haven't done that in several years now), but I'd like to write 17k and get over my goal for getyourwordsout. I'm at 1400 words right now, and once everyone in the house is gone to church, I'll probably write something for today. I'd like to keep up a streak of writing every day if nothing else, so... yeah. Here's hoping it all goes all right.

I didn't manage to finish reading The Feather Thief in time, so I've requested that again from the library's ebook collection. I checked out another couple ebooks, and I guess I should probably get started trying to read those.

I downloaded a Picross game for my Switch. Been having fun doing puzzles, though as I've gotten to the harder 15x15 puzzles, I've had to take breaks more frequently. It usually helps get my brain in the right space for solving them, though, so that's not a bad thing. I haven't been playing Ori as much; I am stuck and I can't figure out what to do next. I may have to watch a walkthrough for that one. Also debating using the last of my eShop money (and a little of my actual money) to get Stardew Valley. I do love me some Stardew. Though playing mod-free is going to be tough. (I mean, I've done it before, but life is so much easier when you don't have to worry about dying in the mines because you can one-hit-kill everything.) Also also I need to get a microSD card for my Switch because the basic storage is... 32GB and not great. So I'll have to budget for that as well. Also also ALSO debating saving my money up to get Pokemon Sword eventually. Though I may just put that on my Christmas list and be done with it.

Outside of all that... not a whole lot going on? I can't believe the end of the year is so close now. Just a couple months away. I'm not ready for this year to be over; it feels like it's just begun.

Hope you all are doing well, as ever. Best wishes and hugs if you aren't. :)