Taisch's NaNoWriMo (and other writing) Blog

What do you mean it's 2012!?

2012-01-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

Urgh. Yeah. So I haven't been writing much. I really need to finish the stupid novel before I go work on the other story idea that's been gnawing at my heels.

I tried the lock-self-in-library-and-write thing yesterday.

Key mistake: I decided to take a few minutes to "glance at the new books section on the way to the quiet room."

Oops.

So yeah. I wrote a bit, then couldn't resist the books sitting right there in front of me on the desk.

What's really unfair is that I can read a book so much faster than I can write one. ARRGH! But I suppose it would be even more frustrating if it was the other way around. Still. Annoying.

I suck at romance. Let's forget the whole romance angle. (Yes, Nyima and Chola still end up together, but we won't dwell on it. And there's no sexxors in the novel.) Maybe that will help with the whole finish-the-first-draft issue.

There. It's the last couple of chapters of my novel, and... um... ok. Now THREE of my main characters are locked up in prison, while three others are being possessed. What is wrong with you people!!!?!?!!?!!!!111111one!!

"I have a frog on my head!"

Oh, please. Can't you think of anything better than that?

...

I guess not. I am writing this blog post to convince myself to write the next few sections, in which we escape from prison for the last time and gang up on the murderous usurper Prince Senge, arrange "democratic" elections for Shambhala, declare "Mission Achieved", and then get the hell out of there and hide behind the "The End" sign. Yeah.

Lots of words...none of them mine

2011-12-16T11:07:00.000-08:00

A.k.a. "Oh my god! There's only a week until Christmas! I gotta buy presents for people!"

So yeah, been off spending time at the bookstore, ha ha ha. I'm terrible at the whole gift giving thing (not just Christmas --- any conceivable occasion for giving someone something large or small, I suck at it), but over the years I pretty much gave up on it. Now I mostly give people books. My kids: books. My cousin's kids: books (and toys, as they're still very young). Other friends and family: books. I suppose it's a failure of empathy: I know I love to get books myself. Relatives have given me... clothing before. And I just grump in a terribly ungrateful fashion. I imagine some of them do the same upon receiving some random book. Ah well. I mean, I do try to make them age-appropriate, and I don't give people books I don't like, but still. Yeah. Books!

...all right. Books, and weird toys that I found amusing. Cute wind-up toys! Gliders, airplanes, kites, and other flying things! Spinning rail monkeys! Cheap yet effective. The screaming monkey was not so successful. I have hopes for the magnetic cannon this year, but we'll see how it works out when we get the package.

...and yeah, we have too many computers and video games in the house. I think we have more computers than people at this point. Pathetic, eh?

...so, no writing done this week. Gah.

Gah! My Shambhala is populated by hobbits...

2011-12-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

...or something. I have to stop romanticizing rural villages. I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy at an impressionable age, and this mental image of low-tech farm life as being an innocent paradise has stuck with me ever since. Even though I have relatives from a low-tech rural background. Even my father is not that far removed from it. And I have personally visited (briefly) poverty-stricken villages in China, including the one where my father's older sister lived, and I heard with my own ears about the bad times when they nearly starved, with kids suffering permanent damage from the starvation and others dying. There's a reason why people in rural villages want to leave, and try to send their children to school so they can have a better life.

But here I sit in the comfort of suburbia writing... the Shire, except with more yaks and sheep. Um. Yeah. No wonder I'm not convinced. On the other hand, Shambhala is supposed to be this fantastical place, in fact, a rural paradise! It seems incongruous if I make it all urbanized. Ok, it does have at least one city, but...can we imagine it full of traffic, smog, and modern skyscrapers?* I can, but is that what I want? I can't stand the confusion in my mind!**

What does this have to do with anything?

I need to smudge the "rural paradise" aspect in order to make my ending make more sense. And there's the problem that two (three, but one's dead by this point) of the characters are supposedly from the "real world" (or an urban fantasy version of it), so the fairy tale has to meet that halfway.

Ok, yeah, enough blather, back to writing.

* and sewage. I nearly included in my NaNo some scenes where people discuss the various types of toilets and the disposal of the waste (and whether demons/spirits/magic is involved in Shambhala), but didn't. My children accused me (when I was talking about it) of being obsessed with the subject. So yeah.

** random classic Doctor Who quote.

NaNo Fools! THIS is what a "word war" is!

2011-12-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

Word War vi

Damn you kids and your fancy schmancy writing software! I always do my NaNos (and first drafts in general) in plain text files, using my favorite text editor, vim. (Though I have been known to use notepad when I didn't have vim at hand. I don't like notepad, but it does stop me trying to edit anything, because editing is too tedious and annoying in notepad.) Hrmph! Vim is small, fast, and pretty easy (except when I accidentally delete 30 lines or cut and paste something 100 times because of a typo). It matches up brackets for me: (,{,[, trouble me no more with the nested nested nested nested bits of code! Ha ha! And it knows things like html tags and php functions and so on and so forth, marking stuff with color coding so I know when I've misspelled a function or forgot to close a comment section.

Anyway. Thank you, vim, for getting me through another year of NaNoWriMo!

And die, emacs, die!

P.S. Just kidding about the emacs. Some of my best friends use emacs.

Argh! Still not done.

2011-11-30T11:25:00.000-08:00

Well, I got to the 50K goal (actually, the NaNo validator gave me 500 more than the word count on my computer!), but the story is still not done. I think 1.5 chapters plus the epilogue to go. Blah! I guess I'll finish it next week, before I forget what I was going to write.

So I procrastinated more than ever and ended up having to write 3000 words today. Blew everything else off and just sat down and typed, without any food, water, or bathroom breaks! Took about three hours. But it doesn't get any easier for me. I get tired. And my sentences start coming out...

Like this.

Again.

Because that's all I can think of.

Because I can't hold more than a handful of words in my mind at a time.

And it makes me feel I am making progress.

Down the page.

If not in word count.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, this year's NaNo. Um. I stopped before I got to the really Oedipal part with Prince Senge. Well, the revelation of it. He's been doing what he's been doing for like half the book now. And as usual, the "minor" characters take over. Why? I think it's because I tend to "play it safe" with the "main characters". I worry about them. I don't want them to take too many risks. I want them to seem nice so people like them. Bah! It's a pain to continually fight this tendency. I guess I could just write the story, then turn it around afterwards to make someone else the "main character". But then if I ever try to write a sequel, it'll be the same problem all over again!

What did I like? Well, I was happy that all my "long long ago" flashback sequences eventually did tie into current events. Writing out the past helped me figure out the ending.

Right, I'm gonna go eat and go to the bathroom now...

I just meant to take a short nap and...

2011-11-28T11:30:00.000-08:00

...it all makes sense now. Dawa is the Blind Frogmaker's granddaughter!

Wait wait wait. What? WHAT? WHAT!!????

(I'm retconning the story as I wrote it in 2010).

It's one of those days. I was struggling to figure out how to make my ending less like this:

and more like this:

All right, that was a bit of a nerd joke.

And ok, I'm slightly more awake and calm now. Yessss.... I will write some words today. Yessss.... later... yessss... I'm currently at 45K. Trust me. She's his granddaughter. He's possessing the body of her half-brother. I just have to get over the newly discovered squick factor of him having had a thing for the demon currently possessing his granddaughter's body. Er. Yeah. Maybe I can smooth it out in the revision. Also still in the air right now...how am I going to have this little fact suddenly be revealed? Huh? Ah well.

Time to kiss the frog

2011-11-27T05:53:00.000-08:00

It's funny what things get into one's novel. Now it's the "Frog Prince" story, with the Bastard Prince playing the part of the princess, and the Blind Frogmaker as the frog. (The Frogmaker retrieved the "golden ball"/terrorists-in-inaccessible-location for him, then was hosted reluctantly/kept prisoner in the royal palace, etc.) In the Grimm version, the princess throws the frog SPLAT! against the wall, but in the popular culture, it seems she kissed him and he turned into a prince. Mine has elements of both. Heh. And the turning into a prince bit...in my case, it's more like the frog turns into a prince by possessing his body (hey, he's a demon, that's what they do!)

More generally, we're getting into the last few days of NaNo. So I need to finish this story! For once, I feel that I may actually be close. I've told nearly all the "long ago" sequences. There's just one final captivity-escape-fight-triumph bit for the "now" section. And then...look! Just around the corner! Do I see the magic words, "The End"?! Ha ha!

Also, I've run out of the good Halloween candy. So I must finish soon.

Is it plagiarism if it happens in a dream?

2011-11-25T05:57:00.000-08:00

By the last week of NaNoWriMo, it's invading my dreams! Yikes! And worse, in my dream I am flirting with a completely different story idea... and I'm copying bits of something I'm reading (in the dream) into my story. When I woke up, I really wished I could have written down the actual words. I mean, in the dream I was thinking "I can't keep that! It doesn't sound at all like anything I'd write!". Yet it was something my subconscious had made up. I could read the words! See them clearly on the page and mark them up with my dream pencil. So now I wonder what I write like when I'm deluded into thinking I'm someone else?

Can I hypnotize myself into writing something that isn't "me" at all? How can I think of words or sentences that I don't think of?

Actually, I'd be happy just to hypnotize myself into finishing my current novel. *mutter mutter* The closest I get is late at night, when I'm really sleepy, but I force myself to get some words in before I go to bed.

So anyway, still behind, at 39K. Must...finish...novel...

Catch-up time

2011-11-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

Not to be confused with ketchup time. I don't even like ketchup. Yick!

So yeah. I'm behind, behinder, behindest. Not that bad, really, but when I could have been done by about now! Bah, humbug. I'm at about 35 K today. I plan to improve that number before I go to bed tonight.

And do I suffer from "fear of finishing"?! That's silly. I've finished short stories, novellas, etc. But finishing a "novel" does make me feel more nervous. Hmm. But I can't until I figure out what happens in the "Now" section of my story. It's not quite making sense in my head yet. I need Nyima and the Bear to head back into town rather than just running off to live out their remaining time in some remote wilderness. Hm. Obviously, Bear must think there's a cure for Nyima back in Kalapa somehow, preferably a cure that involves trying to break into the royal palace, but I'm fuzzy on the details. He knows he shouldn't take her back: she just lopped off Prince Senge's head, for heaven's sake! It's not safe for her in Kalapa!

So yeah. I gotta have all the players in place so I can railroad them into some kind of ending. They're all run by me me me, so there will be no OOC bitching! But now I'm complaining about my own bad plot? GRRRR!

Last week of NaNo, making less sense than ever...

Crawling, we crawl along...

2011-11-17T15:07:00.001-08:00

Taking a break from typing on my novel for a message from the earworms that brought us chapter *mumble* six:

Double, double, this this (fist, fist, palm, palm)
Double, double, that that (fist, fist, back of hand, back of hand)
Double this, double that (fist, palm, fist, back)
Double double this that (fist, fist, palm, back)

(Alternatively, substitute "Bubble" for "Double"). I love these children's rhymes and clapping games. It's a pity I can't fit any into my novel this year, but perhaps I can have a future story with the Goose Sisters, those demonic/ghostly spirits who make use of such things. My younger daughter came home with this clapping game this week and has been making me play it with her whenever she sees me.

And then there's the Sibelius violin concerto, getting me through those wearisome nights when I just want to plop off to bed. It doesn't seem to get the same exposure as, say, the Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or Tchaikovsky violin concertos, but it's still pretty damned cool. Admittedly, I'm not too fond of all those violinish cadenzas they have. To me it sounds like a bunch of lonely violins desperately seeking a mate by showing off their super-violinistic screeches and cries, and I'm not an unattached violin, so it all goes over my head. But other than that, I <3 the Sibelius, especially the first and third movements.

Anyway, lots more to do tonight. Urgh. At least one problem I don't have is thinking of what I need to write next. I always have way more stories I'm wanting to write than I have the willpower or skill to set down. So, onwards with the NaNo!

25K! After a slow weekend, contemplating cheats...

2011-11-16T06:25:00.000-08:00

So, here I am starting the morning at 25000 words, also known as "-7000". Ha. I'm now at the point in my story which I originally thought of (last year) as the "halfway point". Does this mean I'll get to 50K this year and STILL not be done with the story? Probably. Oh well. When I look at what I've written, 50000 words feels like it's hardly anything at all. Blah. For a novel, I mean.

Today I am going to "cheat". Not a word count cheat, but an author cheat: I'm planning to withhold information by not including a scene in its "proper" order. Why? The usual. Create a bit of suspense. I'm ambivalent about this kind of thing when I read books. Sometimes I just think it's annoying (when used over and over for many small things throughout a book) and sometimes I HATE it and think it's just UNFAIR (when used for a major plot point and the cut is slipped in where a cut really doesn't fit in with the flow of the narrative.) Megan Whalen Turner, I'm looking at you!!! (Mainly in The Thief, but in part because of that little trick, I dislike the character even in the subsequent novels).

But I think it's all right in one of these cases of "is she really totally under his control now? Oh noes! Oh whew, it was a trick all along!" People kind of expect a trick anyway, and then they can feel happy and relieved when they're proven right.

After that, it's all a muddle which I hope will sort itself out once I get to writing it. Ha ha. If not, I'll skip back to the flashback "ancient Shambhala" section for awhile, because I know what happens there, more or less. So. Onward! (After I go buy food, take shower, blah blah blah.)

Solve a problem, add a problem

2011-11-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

And so it goes.

Having Mr. Tumnus poison Nyima and sell her to Prince Senge solved some of my plot difficulties (how to get Nyima into the palace and on site), as it now turns out that Senge wants Nyima to personally execute Chola T'hom, as a sadistic way of saying "in your face!" to his rival. It also pushed Nyima into studying the Blood Attunement Sutra faster, which we'll need later. And explains what happened to Achamo's staff. (Still working on the details. I expect to write out these scenes later this weekend. And I'm wondering if Nyima did let an ancient name slip...the old horror from Ancient Shambhala that may or may not still be accessible.)

The problem is, now Nyima is stuck with an incurable deadly poison (technically, it's a magical parasite called a "Ruin"). Now, Mr. Tumnus (I must stop calling him that) did say "there's a first time for everything", but it's still terribly cheesy if Nyima manages to get cured. I am NOT doing a side trip to a magical biowarfare lab to consult the scientists who created this Ruin! NO NO NO! I utterly refuse. So what, Nyima dies? Bah! Poisons and diseases are incurable...until someone figures out a way to cure them. Happens all the time. The main characters should be able to trade in their drama points to get the cure before they die! I don't want to write a tragic love thing. Enough people die horribly in real life. This is meant to be an upbeat fantasy. (Well, except for the horror-torture-evil and dead-mentor bits. The point is, the main characters survive.)

If Chola T'hom really cares for her, he'll have to find a way to save her! Ha!

Ok, meanwhile, in the long-long-ago fairytale flashback section, the "so they get captured by rebels and Younger Sister is killed" bit now has to be written out. It sounded so simple in the outline, but hashing out the specific details is a pain. Also, it turns out they were doing a census, so I also have to make up random statistics for my ancient fantasyland villages. Gluh.

Yeah. Starting Saturday morning (the second weekend in NaNoWriMo!) at 19K. That's "-5000", as I'm calling it this year. Hope to be at 25K by the end of Sunday. Enough random babble.

Day 10, Year 7!

2011-11-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

Starting off today at -5000 again. *insert usual whining*

So it's my seventh year of NaNo! Scary. Just think, seven years ago... I would have been typing this with an infant in my lap. Well, no. That was before I decided to have any kind of blog (well, it's more just random personal notes) at all. One kid would have been in preschool, while the other had just started elementary school. Seven years ago, this was my second day of NaNo. I had found out about it from a post someone made on some fan forum (I forget which). I clicked on the link and the rest...well...here I am still. At least I no longer type while simultaneously breast-feeding and eating a snack.

In six years...I got pretty good at writing the first fifty thousand words of a rough draft. Ha ha ha. So so useless. Hence, this year, I am writing the second fifty thousand years of my rough draft.

In six years...I find that the main difference between writing during NaNo and writing at other times is that... I write it, as opposed to thinking about writing it, writing a hundred words and calling it a day, planning to write something, jotting down notes for something I intend to write, telling people about a story idea I want to write, etc. etc. etc. The actual quality (or lack thereof) of the writing isn't noticeably different. The actual time spent butt-in-chair writing isn't that bad. (It's the time spent butt-in-chair-playing-computer-games that kills me.) The only force other than NaNoWriMo which can get me to write this much by myself, this quickly, is a Big Finish "writing opportunity" *laughs hysterically*, and those were short stories/scripts, or I likely wouldn't have finished those, either.

Yes, yes, I do write things outside of NaNo, but it just takes me much much longer to do them. To be fair, I do use time before NaNo to think about my story and characters and hack out an initial plot idea. But to be honest, it doesn't require (for me) more than, say, two weeks. I do a fair amount of all that during the writing process itself. (My first year, when I started late, I actually just continued my work-in-progress, which I had coincidentally started in October. I didn't want to try to think up a brand new idea in 0 days. But I only counted words written after I joined for my official word count!)

And yes, I do need to learn to revise my work more thoroughly. At the moment, I can only manage a short story or novella. I quail in horror when faced with anything long. Well, I'll see in January what I can do.

"Wait wait wait...didn't I just escape?!"

2011-11-09T08:51:00.001-08:00

Mr. Tumnus! No! You've poisoned her!

Ok, ok, it wasn't actually Mr. Tumnus after all. It was some random goblin, because random goblins pop up everywhere in this universe. At this point in time, they're supposed to be buying up fantasy weapons for the Queen's R & D department back in Goblinland. (Whoa! Can it be? A link to a story I wrote earlier? And here I was beginning to think that this Shambhala novel was diverging too much from the "established" setting I had made up.)

Actually, it was kind of funny, because first he tried to poison her with the sesame crackers, but she didn't eat any, because her true love had given her some fresh pears before he ran away. Then he tried to poison her with the tea, but she accidentally knocked the cup over when he told her the aforementioned true love had been captured. Yeah. So that's about as romantic as I get. Some women get gifts of jewelry or flowers. Mine just gets Asian pears. Whee! But the Bear is a seer, remember? He KNEW (subconsciously) that the goblin would betray them, and that's why he left her the pears.

Too bad it didn't work, and the goblin poisoned her with smoke instead.

Anyway, I'm getting tired of them getting captured all the time. In fact, I think most of the characters are in captivity at the moment. Any minute now I'll skip to the flashback/ancient history section, and they'll be taken prisoner there/then, too. ARRGH!

And I'm still at -4000 on today's word count. *cries* Takes me forever to get the words out.

Another day, another prisoner...

2011-11-08T10:34:00.001-08:00

Now it's Nyima's turn in the "Argh! I'm trapped in the Matrix!" spinning chair. Mostly wuxia novels seem to do more of the "oh noes! I'm poisoned and dying!" thing, but I haven't had any of that yet for some reason. None of my characters so far are poison specialists, nor do they have their super-duper magic poison/antidote powers working. Hrm. I knew I was missing something. I have people throwing things, using swords, teleporting, seeing the future, flying on clouds (or with their scholar's hats!), using magic folding fans, using telepathy, traveling between worlds, generating random frogs, turning people into frogs and back, using magic tattoos, ghost bombs, etc.

But no cool poisons! Unless you count Senge's perversion of the Blood Attunement Sutra as a type of poison. Which I don't. Oh, there's also the Soul-Ravaging Incense, but you don't have long to use the antidote. I guess that counts as a poison.

Poison! Invent some magical poisons before the month is up! Yes. I will make the next random character someone with a signature poison. [Edited to add: as I can't help thinking that the next random character is Mr. Tumnus, the Narnian faun...um...that's a bit disturbing.]

But never mind all that. I'm way behind. WAHHHH! BEHIIIIND, I tell you. -5000 words or so at the moment. Yeah. Time to get back to writing (words in my novel).

It's all going to end in frogs...

2011-11-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

They're here, they're there, they're everywhere. Blame the Blind Frogmaker for this. And he doesn't really seem to be blind. It's a case of "I'll take the 'blind' flaw for 10 points, then put 5 points in extra senses, so I'm not really blind after all, ha ha ha!" You know, like all the other Daredevil clones out there, along with the legions of super-elite "blind" wuxia characters.

Anyway, it's day 5, and I'm already behind. I mean, behind even in my tippy-top secret schedule which has me writing 2000 words a day. The 5000-a-day thing was a joke. Yeah. Sure. At least I finished the first section (basically a novella). Thank you, Robert Schumann. Your symphonies 3 and 4 got me through in the end. But I'll probably change my writing soundtrack for the next section! (You don't want to know just how many times I went through the loop to get to 8000 words!)

And to celebrate (or to motivate me to get to work on the next chapter), I'll post the excerpt with the Blind Frogmaker. (Note that at this point Lady Bloodless is possessing Dawa.)

Dawa suddenly realized that the dog had stopped barking. Short on the heels of her realization came the sound of a distant voice, Lopsang's voice, shouting for Moghi.

The sound seemed to galvanize the stranger into action. His axe flashed silver as he channeled his internal energy into it. He hacked at the chains binding Dawa. They came loose in a slithering jingle, leaving Dawa now attached to several separate lengths by the manacles still clamped to her body.

"Moghi! Moghi, don't come out, it's not..." The door burst open in a blast of cold air, followed by Lopsang. His face paled at the scene that met him. His voice dropped from a shout to a whisper. "...not safe."

"Did you think these walls would keep danger out?" Lady Bloodless smiled ironically as he stared at her in horror. With the loosening of the manacles, the power of speech had returned to her.

"Oh, very good!" Lopsang recovered his poise with obvious effort. "This is called 'Luring the tiger away from the mountain.' Moghi, your death will be avenged!"

He jumped to one side, spreading his fan in front of him open to the word "Shield!"

Nothing happened.

"I think," said Lady Bloodless, "you are confused about who will be avenging whom." With a quick twist of her arms, two of the chains whipped out, sweeping down a row of the prayer flags hung from the ceiling. Instead of holy symbols and scripture, each one now held only the outlined sketch of a frog.

Lopsang's eyes widened in shock. "The Blind Frogmaker!"

The gray stranger choose that instant to step around Dawa and reveal himself. A wide grin split his face. His voice came out in a gutteral hiss, "Surprised? No one ever invites the Blind Frogmaker, but I arrive or I go just as I please."

"Yes, I am surprised," said Lopsang. "Surprised that Lady Bloodless scours the dregs of the Hundred Sunless Valleys for her army of terrorists."

Lady Bloodless lashed a chain straight at his face. Lopsang ducked away barely in time. She said coldly, "We fight for the freedom of survival, while you and your traitors defend the right of ignorant peasants to grow fat on the backs of our kind."

/Don't waste your breath! Kill him!/ urged Dawa. She instinctively reacted to their unexpected reprieve with a chaotic mix of terror and rage. She wanted Lopsang dead, for Xie Yiping's sake, but also out of fear that the hunter would trap them again. /Kill him now!/

"Do you forget your history? Shambhala gave you mercy and let you live, yet you repay good with evil! Only in hell is that the law," declared Lopsang.

"Damn you!" snarled the Blind Frogmaker.

"You can try," retorted Lopsang, but the Frogmaker had not waited for his reply. Frogs dropped by the hundreds from the rafters towards Lopsang's head.

Only to be met by an open fan...

...and be scattered as a cloud of dismembered parts to every corner of the room.

...while Lady Bloodless sent chains spiraling around to snag the fan.

...only to have the chains looped around Lopsang's left forearm, then caught in his fist.

Energy streamed up and down the taut chain, clashing in the middle. Lopsang and Lady Bloodless stared at each other with fixed concentration. Lady Bloodless had the advantage of Dawa's energy added to her own, but Lopsang had the advantage of superior energy techniques, using advances made in Shambhala since Lady Bloodless's era.

With his free hand, the hunter pressed his fan, now folded once more, onto the chain, introducing a perturbation into the energy stream. If the wave reached her body, it would jolt her heart into arrhythmia.

/Technique...does...make...a difference,/ came the rueful thought from Lady Bloodless.

/So do numbers,/ returned Dawa.

...because a single frog had penetrated Lopsang's defense.

One.

One was too many.

I don't think he had this many frogs (nor were they so demonic!) when I started. I'm not one of those people who can have a fully shaped character before they start to write. I have a name, a concept, and then make it up as I go along. Any inconsistencies will have to be fixed later.

Day 3

2011-11-03T06:38:00.000-07:00

Starting the day at about 4100 words. I have to finish the chapter today. Probably will end up at around 5-6000 words, which is pretty much what I had planned. When I say "chapter", I mean a mental unit that's convenient for me while planning and writing. Each "chapter" is basically a mini-story, which is why they tend to run long. Once I get around to editing, I'll probably chop them up and rearrange them.

More captivity today. The genre being what it is, it seems the characters spend most of their time either fighting or being held captive. Later I expect to have some "on the run" sections. Not that I'm that fond of writing fight scenes or captivity scenes. It's just what it is. Argh! By the middle of NaNo, I will be wondering what else one could possibly write about. (No, no porn. Not in this story.)

At least the captivity scenes do seem to have relevance to other captivity scenes later. I had to modify the "escape" method used in the later one, when I realized that it wouldn't work (the characters tried it already now and the captors already know about that trick). This may be a good thing, as I think it will make my ending make more sense. (Don't laugh!)

Plan for today: captivity, a rescue and a fight, then a new chapter, which has a magical ritual, a fight, and then ends in captivity (though one person escapes). Why yes, I AM going around in circles. D'oh!

Ok, so I lied...

2011-11-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

Or I just ran out of willpower points. So much for "5000 words a day." Ending this writing day at about 2000 words. Hrmph. And didn't make it to the end of the chapter.

Random thoughts of the day:

Characters seem cool in my head until I start writing about them. Then they're dull, dull, dull.
Ditto the action.
The demon hunter known as the "Scholar Who Sleeps in Clouds" can turn his hat into a magical hang glider!
I like Kit-Kats better than Crunches. And pumpkin seeds more than both. I've been eating those all day long.

I'll try to get a bit more done tomorrow. I will!

Oh...yeah. So that's what it was like...

2011-11-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Otherwise known as, "Day 1 of NaNo! Hooray! Hmm, I'll just check my email and log on to the NaNo site." Half an hour later, "Ok, really, I am going to start typing now." Then, an hour later, "Oh god. How am I ever going to make my word count goal!?!!!! That was only 300 words!?!? Never mind. I have to go buy food now." Another hour or two later, "ARGH! I'm behind already?! Chapter. Finish this chapter. Focus on finishing this chapter."

And now, "Ok, while I try to visualize how this fight scene works out (and what is Xie Yiping doing in all this? He can't do superleaps, so he must have found stairs somewhere) I'll just make a post on my stupid useless blog." So I am. And after I do that, I'll go eat a piece from the Halloween candy stash. Then close my eyes for a few minutes while I work out how to have Lady Bloodless seem to be winning, then lose catastrophically, then transition to the interrogation scene. And don't forget that they capture the van, too, and search it. Vans just don't seem to belong in wuxia fiction, but hey. This story is set in the 1990s, I think. 2003 at the latest. Yes, I did have to make up silly fantasy reasons why people use swords and hand-to-hand combat when guns are available, but it's just One of Those Things. Genre convention. And no, I'm not using light sabers. Oh yeah. Also there's a satellite phone involved. A magically-modified satellite phone. This is important, even though it is a divergence from my outline.

Day 1! And I'm already diverging from my own (revised, 2011) outline! The truth is, I don't have a proper outline. I do my stories by imagining them in my head as a movie/TV serial, then run them back and forth until I'm convinced. Then I write down notes about each scene I've "glimpsed". Sometimes (often) the scenes turn out differently by the time I get down to actually writing them. So. What happens next...hmm...

One day more...

2011-10-31T05:49:00.000-07:00

Another day, another destiny, this neverending road to...

Gah! Shut up, stupid mind(ear)worm! See? See? This is why I don't listen to music with words when I'm trying to write. Next thing you know, I'll have a bunch of oppressed people rise up against tyranny in revolution, and it will all end in buckets of blood and tears and...

Oh. Too late. I am having all that in my novel, according to my outline. Whether I can pull it off is another matter. I've been skimming over last year's NaNo, and it's a truly wince-inducing experience. I just want to take an axe to it. Still, being ever the optimist, I tell myself that's ok, that the important thing is to get this story told. After that I can go back and edit out all the incongruous bits that fell in from the OTHER story, you know, the BAD one. Ha ha ha.

Anyway, technically, it's LESS than a day till NaNo starts. But since I don't usually stay up past 11 pm, I'm not gonna get started until tomorrow morning. After I get the first batch of kids off to school...

So yeah.

One day to a new beginning...

The Countdown continues!

2011-10-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

Well, no duh. Isn't that the nature of a countdown? So about 4 more days to go. Ready? Ready? READY?

Alarm clock. Working alarm clock! CHECK.
Donation to NaNoWriMo. CHECK.
Outline for novel. CHECK. Er. Mostly. Yeah. Kinda. Sorta. I have some notes, yes.
Clean the house. Ah. I'll get back to you on that.
Jack-o-lanterns carved. Um. I'll do that on Sunday.
Kids have Halloween costumes? Probably.
Fix the mumble mumble mumble deleted mumble. No.
Find my leaf blower. It's gotta be in there somewhere.
Do stuff with the garden. Get rid of the damned garlic chives!!! When I'm procrastinating during November.
Regain sanity. No no, too early for that. Ask me in December.
Get new glasses. Real soon now.

Less than a week to the starting line!

2011-10-25T06:47:00.001-07:00

Yargh! A week until NaNoWriMo officially starts. It's going to be evil this year. I'm feeling more blah than ever. And I really need to get it done in the first three weeks or so. I swear, I'll try REALLY HARD to go for 5000 words a day. That's about a chapter a day, what with my fairly long chapters. I now have an outline (it almost makes sense now) for about 11 chapters.

As usual, I'm getting all obsessed with the side characters! Gah! I suppose because everyone turns all boring and stupid once I focus on them and actually write about them. Also, maybe it's because villains are cooler anyway. These two are the other ends of the main love triangle things I have going. I suppose the triangle is more credible if I do flesh out the "other woman"/"other man" enough to give them their own interesting stories.

My whole "way back when/past lives" section is going to be from the view of Lady Bloodless (before she was ever called that). So we'll be looking at Nyima/Bear's past lives from the outside. We can roll our eyes with Lady Bloodless at their lovey-dovey relationship. Or something. And Lady Bloodless will do that whole he-saved-me-I-love-him! thing. In the "now/what-the-heck" section, by symmetry, we'll have Lady Bloodless doing the saving, so then Bear will feel obligated to go with her even if he doesn't actually love her (because she saved Nyima as well!).

So that's the plan. Yes! I have a plan! Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha!

My outline even includes the bit where Prince Senge's crazy mother has had her son's corpse mummified and now animates it as a life-size puppet using her evil hair! Ha ha ha ha ha! (Ok, fine, just imagine it as an anime sequence here.)

Outline, outline, la la la

2011-10-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

Today I'm gonna work on the outline for my 2011 NaNo project. I think I'm just one of those people that really needs some kind of plan before trying to write something. Without a map, I get hopelessly lost. I usually end up diverging from the outline, but that's ok. I can always make up a new plan. The outline gives me the momentum to keep writing.

I tried to do my Camp NaNo stories without an outline. Massive fail. Not to say I would have succeeded if I had used an outline, but I probably would have got farther in the story than I did. Once I start writing down the outline, it's not as much of a leap to start writing words in the actual story. Later, reading the outline helps me get into the right frame of mind for continuing onwards.

Not that my outlines are very detailed. I find if I put too much into the outline, it kills the story for me. I end up feeling as if I've already written the whole thing. Time for a new project! Oops.

So yeah. I'm picking up from where I left off last year (coincidentally or not, the same point where my NaNo diverged massively from last year's outline!) and patching it into the new plotline I'm adding in this year. This includes adding in another minor love story, ha ha, that cliche where two side characters who were hopelessly in love with the major characters keep squabbling with each other and finally realize they're in love with each other. Well, demonic torture will probably be involved, but they're who they are and that's what they do.

I'm gonna cheat at NaNo this year...

2011-10-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

It's October, which means it's time to think about NaNoWriMo, which means I'm thinking that I really just want to finish the novel I started last year. So I will. I already know I can write the first 50,000 words of a novel in a month, as I've done it for the past six years. It will be more useful and entertaining (for me) if I can write the second 50,000 words of a novel in a month. I do have new ideas for the story.

I will pick up with a "THEN" (past) section, but this time jumping hundreds of years (or possibly over 2-3000) into the past of Shambhala. As usual for these fantasy novels, I don't think things change as much as they do in real life (blame the conservatism of magic.) I will do it from the point of view of the character now known as "Lady Bloodless" and see how the old love triangle thing played out in their past lives (which she is the only one to remember now) between her, Nyima, and the Bear.

So that means, before I start, I have to invent a whole new set of cheesy fantasy names. Grrr. Ok, Lady Bloodless was a slave-assassin created by the priests using the magical mutagenic properties of their imprisoned superweapon, so she was named for her year of birth: Golden Serpent 14. And the other two were pirate-rebels. He was the Navigator and she was the Warleader. They also had names, obviously. Grrr. I'll decide on them by November. Anyway, I have to explain what happened to the old Shambhalan Empire, and what happened to turn everyone else into demons.

(Ok, and let's not talk about the Santa Claus versus Drosselmeyer faceoff, which wasn't nearly as much fun to think about as I'd hoped. I hearby banish it from my mind!)

Blah blah blah. Random babble to get into the mood for novel-writing.

The birds know too much...

2011-09-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

They sent the hawks to watch me today. "Fear! Feeee-aar!" they say, but I know better than to listen. They know the serpents came to me in a dream last night and suspect the worst:

I now have access to the secret alphabet!

But they are wrong. It's not the alphabet that is secret, it's the punctuation. The parrots can recite from the spellbooks until Doomsday, thinking it's only their pronunciation holding them back. No. Without the correct punctuation, all they have is a big ugly string. The spell will never be an executable.

Ha ha! So turn the trees against me if you like, let the potatoes infiltrate the apples, and let the tomatoes turn traitor, none of that matters anymore.

I have the secret punctuation now.

Remember. The magic is in the punctuation!

Tentacle fail...

2011-09-23T06:25:00.001-07:00

Great Kroll forgive me, it's just not working. How the heck does a land-based creature manage all those tentacles? Like a bad hair day, only a thousand times worse! Here I am trying to walk down the street without tripping over them...um. And I used to think making a winged (human-sized) humanoid was difficult. Yes, yes, these are magic tentacles. They only interact with physical reality when convenient. But what kind of lame magic power is "convenience"?! I haven't even got to the rape part of "tentacle rape"! Grrr!

Why did I think I wanted to use some kind of sex magic in the story!?! Gah! I blame it on Gilgamesh. Well, Shamhat. Priestess of Ishtar with her love powers that transformed Enkidu. Why why why!? I guess it was inevitable once I named my city "New Babylon". But then why mash it up into the Church? Now it's not just one hot priestess out in the wilds, but we have a whole bloody song and dance with chanting and robes and everything! D'oh!

...but damn it, tentacles! Must do the tentacles! Some people use them to cheat at cards. My character will use them to...er...become an origami expert? A one-woman chamber orchestra? It's a pity she's not musical. Hrmph. I'll just set their reality quotient low enough that we can ignore them most of the time.

Anyway. I give up on attempting to make it seem reasonable and coherent. From now on, I wade into the stream of consciousness and follow the fish of destiny! As long as I finish before November.

Things I learned from my July NaNoFail...

2011-08-03T13:57:00.000-07:00

So, I only got about 2800 words into my novel in July. Oh well. On the plus side, I did learn the following:

A seven-year-old jumping and shrieking on the bed while rolling around in a big fluffy blanket is even more distracting than I thought. Especially when being attacked by an irritated older brother.
Santa Claus is gay! There was never a Mrs. Claus! Drosselmeyer was his lover until they broke up about 150 years ago. And the reason for their falling out...involved timey-wimeyness.
I have a love-hate relationship with the timey-wimey. Argh! That's such an idiotic sounding term. Thank you so much for that meme, Stephen Moffat! ARRRGH! Even worse, there's a timey-wimey paradox thing that's become a major plot element in the now. NOOOO!!!
I'll never get anything done if I don't do anything. D'oh!
My kids are insisting that I supervise their (instrumental) practice sessions. Argh! So now I'm a personal music coach? I'm not very good at that. I lack patience, loll around on the couch with a bad attitude, and I am not a metronome. And of course people don't like to practice. It's boring and repetitive. D'oh!
And so is writing a novel, when it comes down to it. One word after another, gotta do it today, tomorrow, yesterday, make up for days missed, we're so far behind, oh noes!!! So I should stop being a whiny hypocrite, ha ha!
Ellie's grandfather is her daughter's son. Her grandmother was the Clara from the Nutcracker story (ballet version).
I'm bad at secrets and suspense. Um. The moment I "know" anything, I have a tendency to spell it out for the reader, too. And then my characters end up knowing too much, too soon. Gotta watch out for that. Maybe I can improve it in the revision.
There will be nothing to revise if I don't even get a first draft done.
August is another month! I can do this! I will do this!

Depressingly behind...

2011-07-14T09:19:00.000-07:00

In fact, I've hardly started. My word count total right now is a meagre 2000 or so. And I wrote 1000 of them in the last hour.

On the other hand, that just means if I write 5 hrs a day for 10 days, I can get this sucker to 50k! Ha ha ha ha ha! Yeah, sure.

At least I haven't lost interest in the story or been distracted by other story ideas (so far.) Heh. So, the latest discovery is that the Sweeper is an Asura! I got tired of generic demons yadda yadda yadda. So she is a (vaguely Buddhist style) Asura. Yeah. Except it's about as faithful to tradition as my Sinterklaas is. Which is to say, not at all. Apparently, my Asurans are not human at all. Their mating habits are a bit weird, too. Polygamous like my orcs/goblins were, but in a more civilized way (meaning, they have cities!) The marriages seem to only last for one "season", meaning the eight years or so it takes for the woman to bear a child and raise it to age 7. The marriages are arranged by the woman's father.

Other than that, I think the story still falls under the umbrella multiverse of my "Time's Children" series, with the prophets, etc. etc. The gods are pretty much the same gods. The supposed Christians are a polytheistic version (with the gods taking the place of the saints, and the saints being something else altogether.)

So yeah. Maybe I can write 4000 more words today. Or not...anyway. Must try.

Oh. My. God. It's Drosselmeyer!

2011-07-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

I love making these "discoveries" as I write. I think I'm gonna ditch the "erotica" aspect of this story, as I'm far more excited by the conspiracy theories than the theoretical s3xx0rs supposedly to take place. So it all makes sense now! The Sweeper's ghostly prophet is Drosselmeyer. He's older than you think. He was allied with Sinterklaas back when they were plotting Jesus's birth. (Jesus is a failed Khristos, as far as they're concerned, but they still put in some propaganda efforts to establish the church, etc. etc. The supposedly resurrected Jesus was actually one of Drosselmeyer's simulacra, but at the time his art was more primitive, and it fell apart after a few days.)

And obviously Drosselmeyer made Santa's magic sleigh and flying reindeer, too! Yes! It all makes sense now! Mwah ha ha ha ha! And later Drosselmeyer and Sinterklaas had a falling out, so now they're enemies.

So I hacked out a few more words. Still ridiculously behind, though.

/Bravo. What are you waiting for, a presidential Medal of Honor? Let's get on with it. One more sweep and we can call it a night./

/I KNOW,/ snarled Jashika. At least the temperature was hovering above the freezing point tonight. Icy roofs made her job that much more difficult. She peered down over the corner where a particle of Infinite Time, washed down with the rain, had seeped into a gargoyle. The grotesque face turned and grinned back at her.

She had left it for last, and this was the result. By the time she traced the intrusion to this rooftop, it had already begun to infect reality.

No matter. She stabbed the broom in its direction and brushed alien time from its head. Stone hands grabbed futilely at the bristles, then froze in place again.

/Hmm. The alignment's off, now. Careless of you./

/No one's going to notice, Dross! So the water flows a centimeter to the left./

/Perhaps you're right. A trivial flaw compared to the ghastly monstrosity of the whole. Now if I had been the architect.../

His voice broke off, as the distant rumble of the train reached them. Jashika nodded towards the sound. /There, see? Thirty minutes to midnight. I finished early./

The ghostly presence in her mind made no response.

/Smug bastard. You know I'm good, you just don't want to admit it./

/Listen.../

/No, you listen.../

/Do you hear the bells?/

/Bells!/ Jashika clamped her jaws shut abruptly. She /did/ hear bells. A faint, silvery tinkle.

/It's him./

Who else? She lifted her head to scan the sky, and there he was. A red sleigh, drawn by eight flying reindeer, descending in a wide arc.

/He's coming here!/ she thought, bringing her broom up in instinctive defense.

/Look at that. Still working exquisitely even after all these years. You call me smug? Could you craft such perfection?/

The reindeer were mechanical creations, but in such fine detail that they were nearly indistinguishable from living flesh. The reindeer didn't really fly. They trampled a path through time and space, bending reality under their feet in a leap of faith. They /fell/ freely, eternally, even when standing still.

As they now did, their driver bringing the sleigh around to hover. "Ho ho ho!" he boomed through his expanse of white beard, then turned to stare down at Jashika. "What brings you here, my child?"

"Lord Sinterklaas," she acknowledged grudgingly. "Just doing my job. What brings YOU here?"

"What? Don't you know night it is? Children all over my favorite city lay out their shoes and hang up their stockings, listening for the clatter of tiny hooves and the jingle of tiny bells!"

"Very jolly," grunted Jashika. "But I hardly think there's any children /here/."

Oh well, it's a start

2011-07-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

At least it's 200 more words than I had this morning. It didn't come out the way I had it in my head, but there you go. As openings go, it's not that exciting, but I had to start somewhere. (I may revise it all once I have something to revise. Ha!)

New Babylon was a colder place by night, city lights reflecting from the dour sky while any hint of warmth bled away into the wind.

But day or night, winter or summer, the cathedral rooftop was Jashika's last choice for her perch. If her ghostly shackles had not bound her so tightly to her duty, she would never have come here at all.

Not to the Cathedral of the Incarnation, the rotten heart of the Church of Earthly Desires. Bright specks glinted through pyramid shaped skylights. Jashika's hand tightened on her broom: she knew too well what services were held below. She had peered down through those windows before. The sight had roused an unpleasant feeling in her, disgust mingled with envy at what she could not have.

Shoving the thought to the back of her mind, she scanned the ornate peaks, valleys, and domes of the roof for traces of stray time. Not the ordinary moments of the world's time, but the mutating flurries of Infinite Time that infested the world since the Shattering. She inched across the ledges crossing the roof, one hand out against the slanting side, grimacing at the grimy dampness left over from the day's drizzle. Others could clean the dirt, but only a specialized sweeper could collect droplets of Time.

Evil Santa it is!

2011-07-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

Agh! So does scribbling in a notebook count as writing? It seems that story idea got stuck in my head, and while I was sitting around waiting (again) at a doctor's office, it suddenly all made sense.

It's all a plot by Santa Claus! Him and his sidekick Black Peter and his sleigh drawn by the eight tiny reindeer, yes yes! Only I'm going to be calling him "Sinterklaas", because that sounds more steampunk. (What!? Is this supposed to be a steampunk novel? And "sounds more steampunk", my ass.) At any rate, Sinterklass is the secret Hierarch of the Church of Earthly Desire (obviously that's why he goes around handing out toys and money!). He was a saint (in this setting, saints are those who work miracles on behalf of mortals), took part in the Shattering, and became a prophet when that failed (prophets being those who work miracles on behalf of the gods). But he's a double agent! Ha ha! And soon his plan will come to fruition in the Cathedral of the Incarnation, and he will be revealed as a fallen prophet! Mwah ha ha ha ha!

See? It all makes sense! Er...honestly. It does!

So where do my other characters come into it all?

The Sweeper Street sweeper or chimney sweep, one of those things. Hermaphroditic demon (though she thinks of herself as a woman) haunted by the ghost of the prophet who bound her to serve the cause of the gods (or some of them, anyway.) She is haz tentacles of teh sexay! Just because they're used as super-long phallic extensions (sex with 15' reach!) doesn't mean girls can't use them! Hrmph! The ghost is suspicious of Santa. So they happen to be at the Cathedral on the critical night.
The New Mary Culmination of Santa's secret breeding project. She's supposed to get impregnated by a god and give Santa control of a divine infant. Why? Because who doesn't want to have a divine infant to control? Eh? Eh? (Miracles! More and better miracles! He will save the earth! Be able to make everyone happy! It's his duty as Santa Claus!) Except of course that the Sweeper interferes at the critical moment and kidnaps the Mary. Wacky antics ensue! And lots of sex. Wasn't this supposed to be my attempt at erotica, dammit? Geez I suck at it.
The Bishop The dude officially in charge at the Cathedral. It's his head on the chopping board now, so he's gotta get the Mary back, whatever it takes. And restore her virginity in some gruesome ritual or other, probably.
The Reverend Mother The woman who raised the Mary. A bit of a cipher at the moment. I'll have to think about this.
Santa's army! So, you don't think he handed out all those toys with no strings attached, did you? Hmm? Beware the children!

Ok, yeah, I'm starting a week late. Better get writing...

Camp NaNoWriMo...?!

2011-07-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

Oh good lord, it's July already!

So...um...yeah. I guess I'm gonna rebel and try to finish my NaNo from last November rather than starting a new novel. Although yesterday morning I did think about writing something else, I banished those thoughts after a few hours, once I was properly awake. I wanted to do one of those supernatural erotica thingies, but then I realized that a) I didn't have any decent ideas for an ending...splattered across the universe as "glue" just didn't seem romantic or sexy enough and b) who else is gonna find my erotic fantasies sexy at all? and c) writing about naughty tentacles just seems silly and d) where does evil Santa Claus fit into all this and e) ok, maybe next year I'll sit down and actually write this story.

So by the time I was waiting in the doctor's office (damn the waiting, they made me wait for over an hour this time!) I was definitely, certainly, thinking about the Shambhalan demon novel. Ha ha ha! I even scribbled down a few notes. Which may end up with me having to retcon the earlier chapters, but there it is.

We'll see how this goes.

Another month, another day, another chapter...

2011-04-03T13:54:00.001-07:00

...another wretched combat scene with more disposable demons and/or demon hunters. Gah! At least I managed to dribble a few more words into my novel today. For me, at least, the secret to getting any writing done (outside of NaNo) is to sit down with my laptop somewhere by myself, with no internet access and just force myself to open the story file and start typing. It doesn't always work, but it works more often than the other methods I've tried.

The story...the story...the story... Thinking back, my current story originated in a dream I had. I then combined it with another dream, put it in a blender with the series I was currently working on ("The Salt Gang Chronicles") and came up with Shambhala and demons/demon hunters. And a romance! I like the idea of soul mates, who, when together, can do anything! Unstoppable! Mwah ha ha ha ha! In theory, anyway.

The sad thing is that even after 50000 words of NaNo, plus whatever else I've written since then, I still haven't reached the scenes from my original dream. Gah! And even if I do get to that point, it's still nowhere near the end of the story. All right, all right, no more blog nonsense. Back to novel-writing!

National Kite Festival...

2011-03-27T12:12:00.000-07:00

...postponed due to the weather. Awww. It actually turned out to be sunny and not too cold this afternoon, so I got a chance to test out my kites in the back yard (there's just enough space if one is careful about it). Both of them flew, yay!

Here's my younger daughter with one of the kites:

The theme this year was "spring and blossom-inspired kites". For once I made an attempt to follow the theme (that's supposed to be a cherry blossom design, damn it! Even if it is completely invisible once the thing is in the sky.) (In 2009 I went with a Dalek kite. Heh. Well. It was one of the usual shiny-wrapping-paper diamond/square thingies I always make, as those are reliable flyers and not hard to make. I just glued on a drawing of a Dalek. Also invisible once it was in the sky!)

Ok, then. Back to writing I go. I need to finish the story before the next season of Doctor Who begins, or it'll be even more hopeless. I'm such a slacker. I should be more inspired by the example set by Diana Wynne Jones, who was apparently writing just about up to the day she died... R.I.P., DWJ. We'll miss you. :(

I feel like a vulture...

2011-03-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

...picking over the dying Borders bookstore. Wah. It was my favorite local bookstore, and the main reason my family ever went to that mall. (A mall which as a whole seems to be dying a slow death, too, sadly.) I suppose I'm part of the problem: nowadays I buy at least half my books online (many of them used). But I still prefer a bookstore I can physically walk through for browsing and buying random items that catch my eye.

So, I've been going every week or so, picking out a few books to take home with me. I find that I have much less patience these days to read novels (especially not big long epic ones), so mostly I end up with fluffy nonfiction books (preferably written by a scientist/doctor/engineer/whatever as opposed to a journalist).

Today's catch:

The Food of a Younger Land (Mark Kurlansky): I really liked Kurlansky's book Cod, and enjoyed some of the others, so this looked promising. I also vaguely remembered reading a review of this book in the Washington Post, so...hmm... I did always wonder what Americans ate in the old days when food was a local thing. (I remember years ago I read some old book about turtles where they talked about eating them as if it was common! Well, who knows?)
Survival of the Sickest (Dr. Sharon Moalem): Subtitled "The surprising connections between disease and longevity". They had lots of them at the store. I'm not sure how "surprising" it will be to me, but it looked like a fun book. It was on sale! It should help me design my next generation of vampires and werewolves. (Remember, in my world, vampirism is caused by mutant magical parasitical worms.)
The Island of the Colorblind (Oliver Sacks): I've always enjoyed Oliver Sacks' books. This one is from 1996, but I don't have it in my collection. I do now! Ha ha! Anyway, obWriting: this kind of thing helps me think about how aliens might be alien (mentally and in their perceptions). Also about how in the future humans might meddle with their own minds. Or how you might design AIs. Etc.
Quirkology (Richard Wiseman, Ph.D): Subtitled "How we discover the big truths in small things". Is this trying to capitalize on the popularity of "Freakonomics"? Still, I do have a weakness for psychologist-magicians, so there we go. Humans! Ha ha! Silly creatures. So yeah...this is the first one I'm actually reading!

Once I finish these books I'll get back to writing. (Ha ha ha ha ha! Shyeah, right. Ok, I did do a bit yesterday, but now I need to start a new chapter and I'm not sure what happens in it, so I stopped writing. Um. Later.)

My story never writes itself

2011-03-02T09:06:00.000-08:00

It's so annoying. I'm jealous of all those people out there who seem able to go into the "zone" and feel that their stories are flowing freely...just about writing themselves!

For me, it's like pulling teeth. Every single time. I wrote a bit this morning, but only got about 300 words done. I mean, I like to have written stuff, it's cool, and keeps me motivated (if I keep at this, I'll have some stories to show for it). But now, NOW I am hating having to think of what words to type next. "Now" may not actually exist and be purely an illusion, but that's how our minds work, so it's "now" that I am wasting words on this blog and not putting them in my novel. Hrmph.

Maybe it's just me trying too hard to write a "wuxia anime" fantasy thing. The Doctor Who stories were so much easier to do. (I just don't really WANT to write a ton of DW stuff. Come on. I'm American. Of course, you could say the same about the "wuxia anime", but hey, at least I don't have to worry about trying to sound British!) On second thoughts, the non-"wuxia anime" non-DW stories aren't any easier. I'm just grasping at straws.

Here's one of my "wuxia anime" confrontations. Can you count the cliches? Also, yes, I am very literal-minded.

A cold fog lay draped over the folds of the hidden Shambhalan mountains. Chola could smell the wet green of new leaves. Somewhere in the fog, he could hear a creek trickling past.

Somewhere in the mud and the fog, he knew he would meet those he had come to meet.

Somewhere in the fog, he heard the soft pip-pip of frogs. The sound echoed in his mind, shaped a name, a name he had tasted many long years ago. Chola stopped walking. He unsheathed his deathblade and held it before him.

"So the Blind Frogmaker walks this world still!" Chola sent his challenge into the fog.

The frogs fell silent.

A shape formed in the fog: gray and hairless, long-limbed, stooped. It was naked except for a ragged white loincloth. Eyeless sockets turned towards Chola. "The Carrion Bear. Fancy meeting you here."

"It's not you I've come to meet," said Chola.

"Of course not," hissed the other. "No one ever wants to see the Blind Frogmaker. Not this ugly thing, when there are so many more pleasant things to rest your eyes on. Oh no. But it's me here, nevertheless. Here to tell you: don't look for a welcome. You will find none."

"Where is she?" asked Chola. He had no patience to waste on the Frogmaker's self-pity or resentment.

"She doesn't need you," said the gray figure. "She doesn't need you, and she doesn't want you. Go away while you can!"

"Let her tell me that herself," said Chola. He sensed the shift of energy around him, but made no response. Not yet.

"You don't deserve even a single word from her lips!" The chorus of frogs had started up again, louder than before. To Chola's ears, they seemed to be shouting curses.

"That's for her to decide," said Chola. "Lady Bloodless! Call off your pet before he ends up skewered over an open fire!"

"You think it's so easy?" sneered the other.

"I already know," said Chola. "Guard yourself!" He leaped upwards, slashing all around him with the deathblade. Gray strands fell away in every direction.

His trap dismantled, the Blind Frogmaker grunted and flew back, using a hand and a foot to catapult himself into a tree. From his other hand, a shower of fist-sized frogs shot towards Chola.

Chola reacted instantly, severing each frog before it could reach him, taking care not to let the venomous blood drip on him. Just as he was about to launch his counterattack, he heard slow applause from behind him.

"The Carrion Bear is the Carrion Bear," said a woman's voice.

"My lady!" The Blind Frogmaker dropped from the tree and went down on one knee, lifting his hands and cupping them in respectful greeting. "The Frogmaker has offended you."

Chola lowered the falchion and turned, careful to keep the Frogmaker in his field of view.

The woman was a stranger to him, yet he recognized the mind behind the face. "Lady Bloodless."

She smiled. Without taking her eyes off Chola, she said, "There's no need for hostility. We're all friends here."

"Friends?" said Chola.

"Frogmaker, aren't you going to thank our friend for destroying Heartless Killer Achamo and avenging your son?" said the woman, not bothering to even look at the kneeling figure.

Chola's jaw tightened. You have no proof, he thought. Though he kept the thought to himself, she clearly read it in his expression.

"Who else could it be?" The woman laughed lightly. "How could anyone else have killed her if you had chosen to guard her? You would not be standing here today. There would have been two dead bodies on Stone Monkey Mountain."

Chola had no answer for her.

"So you killed her, or you abandoned her," spat the Frogmaker. "Faithless or gutless, I name you."

"Yet you owe him," said the woman. "Whatever the circumstance."

"So be it," said the Frogmaker. He lifted his face towards Chola. "This debt I will repay!"

Gah, it's turning into a soap opera

2011-03-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

A cliche-ridden soap opera, at that. Well, this is what I get for being bad at plotting. I end up just doing the cliched thing to keep the story going. (Let's not think about is-there-anything-I'm-actually-good-at...I'd just get depressed.)

So after thinking about what the heck is going on in my story, I realized that oh, so the Blind Frogmaker is in love with Lady Bloodless (she has that effect on people), while the only one Lady Bloodless likes is the Bear (Chola). (And of course the only one he likes is Nyima, but she's confused and all that, so...) So now we can have the cliche plot element where the spurned lover is captured by the enemy, turns traitor to save his own skin and to get at his rival and ex-love interest. Woot. I was wondering how they ended up being captured. Now we know.

I also know when: it's just when Chola and Lady Bloodless were about to gate off into hell and it looks like Nyima and Chola are about to be separated forever. (Yeah, another cliche.)

And it seems the Bastard's been busy. He's apparently invented some kind of anti-demon taser-like device. Ha ha!

Anyway, that solves the problem of what I'm going to write for the next few days. (Made a small start today, hope to get more done tomorrow.) As to what happens AFTER that...I'll think harder about that once we get there.

Trudging onwards, ever onwards...

2011-02-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

No, I lie. Yesterday I deleted 30 words from my novel. Whee. (I'm sure it'll get much worse when I get down to serious editing. That was just a few sentences I couldn't bear to ever look at again, hence the immediate deletion. When I revise, I tend to cut things more than I add them in.)

But today! What about today? Well, it's a start. I finished one scene, started the next. (+700 words!) And so it goes. One scene after another. If I just keep writing, I'll get to the LAST scene. Eventually.

In the next scene: the return of the Blind Frogmaker! In which he thanks Chola (unhappily and grudgingly) for killing Achamo. So there. I didn't just introduce a random demon for a flashback scene to kill him off and never have him appear again. However, I must ask myself, what's with the name? Self? Am I supposed to show him making frogs now? Huh? What the hell is that all about? Why would anyone make frogs? Is he a random frog generator? Why? Why why why? It's all Glen Cook's fault. He had that Toadkiller Dog character and I could never get the name out of my head. Ok, and Richard Dawkins' fault for having a whole book called the "Blind Watchmaker". [ETA: and Patricia Wrede, for introducing me to the term "frogmaker".]

Obviously the Blind Frogmaker is actually a god running experiments with the evolution of "frogs" which are just a type of artificial lifeform...um...or not. But if he is a demon, one wonders if he had some kind of weird agenda. Maybe he did want to be a god, and all the other demons mocked him for only being able to produce "frogs"? But if you mutate and evolve the frogs enough (one wonders what kind of selection pressures their maker would use on them), frogs can do anything!

Oh, never mind. I'm gonna go eat lunch now.

I really need better notes...

2011-02-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

Dammit, I knew this would happen. I admit it, I haven't worked on my NaNo in 3 months. *hangs head in shame*. And today, when I opened up the file for the last chapter I had been working on, I couldn't remember what was supposed to happen next.

Yes, I have an outline, but alas, my outline is full of lies. I guess I'll read everything I have up to that point (while cutting the bits that are especially cringe-worthy) and try to get back into the flow of the story. I did have a plot in mind at one point. I'm pretty sure I did...no, really... gah...

Why is Chola T'hom going to that town? Wait, he can't, because all the demon wards will go off if he tries. That's why he's coercing the herdsman. The herdsman is supposed to...find a corpse from the latest DLF attack and...do what? Chop off a piece and bring it back to Chola? Why? I forgot.

Oh yeah...something about Chola's method of divination. Eating the dead to learn about the living? 'Reading the Gnomen of the Carnate', that was it. So what did he want to find out? Oh yeah. He knew his mind had been messed with by Prince Senge. He wanted an ally to back him up before he went after Senge again (and he thinks Nyima is the Prince's prisoner?) so he wants to find out where he can meet Lady Bloodless. That was it. Remember, this is the same Lady Bloodless who lusted after Chola back when they were all demons together.

Ok, but what was the deal with Dawa's Chinese boyfriend and the masidi overdose? Something something something. Lady Bloodless kills him for his faithlessness? Huh? Hopefully it'll all come back to me soon.

It's 2011!

2011-01-01T17:25:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year, and all that...

...I guess that means my little writing vacation is now over. Back to finishing my novel! *cracks the whip at self* Man, I'm feeling unmotivated. For now, I declare my self-bribe to be a reward after every 5000 words. Ha. And if that doesn't work in the next week, I'll have to get stricter on myself, and go on a media restriction diet.

Did I write anything today? Umm...not yet. I'm getting the story back in my head and trying to remember what I meant to do with everyone. Tomorrow. Definitely. Tomorrow is a yes writing day. A pity I'm hating my story right now and think it's utterly stupid. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that I get the words down and finish this first draft. Yeah. Ask me again in a week where I am.

Happy Winter Solstice!

2010-12-21T04:43:00.000-08:00

Gah, I'm tired this morning (I must be having NaNo flashbacks, as it's causing me to post on this blog), as I was up at 3 am (and dragging everyone else out of bed with me) to go outside to view the lunar eclipse. Well, it was a clear night, not even that cold, and it was a cool thing to look at. (Only marred by the neighbors having their outside lights on all night. Bah.) No, the moon didn't look as red as it did in some of the pictures we saw on the internet, but it did look more orange than usual. So there I was in the middle of the night trying to explain the geometry to my daughter. Hrm. I think I was awake, at least. Sometimes they ask me questions when I'm asleep and I answer them out of my dreams, and end up saying the gods only know what.

So yeah. It's been 20 days since my last post, and no, I haven't done any writing on my novel. Ask me again in January. I got sucked up into another time-consuming project which I'm not admitting to. But I should have the bulk of that done before the end of December. After that, yeah yeah yeah, I'm gonna finish the damned story. I'll even make it my New Year's resolution.

Baby rape, even better the second time around!

2010-12-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

...so is that my most perverted-sounding subject line yet?

Sorry to disappoint anyone googling for evil activities involving mammalian infants, but I refer to the young tender version of the Chinese vegetable also known as "yu choi", "yu choy", or "you cai". (This is the same plant people use to get oil from, hence the name, but it's very tasty. I prefer it to most versions of broccoli, eastern or western.)

I had it for lunch yesterday. Mmmm.... On Friday night I had cooked it in a pan with oil, garlic, salt. Yesterday I combined it with the leftover pasta (rotelle in red sauce, in this case a jar of marinara from Trader Joe's, an onion, a couple of tomatoes, and frozen artichoke hearts (also thanks to TJ's!). Maybe it's just me, but I like artichoke hearts in my pasta) and some of what my family calls "the chicken sauce" (i.e. the Huy Fong brand of sriracha). One of my favorite foods in the world!

This has been another pointless post brought to you by the post-NaNo blahs. I've written more words in this post than I wrote in my novel all yesterday.

50039!

2010-11-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

That's my official word count according to the NaNoWriMo web site. Well, it's over 50K, and that's good enough for now. It coincides with the end of the scene I was working on, so it's a convenient place to take a break.

Ha ha!

A winner is I! Let's see...that's...the sixth year now? Gah, what a thought. All right. I'm going to go eat lunch (I vowed not to eat lunch until I hit 50K today), then go on a wild shopping spree (I promised myself rewards) then waste some more time.

Yeah. I'll finish the novel in January, or at least that's my plan. Out of NaNo, I don't have the willpower to force myself to do 2000 words a day, but 1000 is easy enough. I do know more or less where the story goes (Lady Bloodless luvs Chola! She made him promise to run off with her back to hell if she helped him "rescue" Nyima! Lady Bloodless has to give up the body again when it turns out the manacles are keyed to her name, not Dawa's! Masidi powder usage causes lipodystrophy!) so I'd better get it all down before I forget and get distracted with a new story.

48K, and the first kiss!

2010-11-28T13:07:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, it's to the wrong person. *headdesks* Taking a break, and then I'll get back to writing about how she runs away and jumps off a cliff when he pursues her.

Luckily, she's a demon and easily survives stupid stunts like that.

I'm slightly optimistic again. Last break I took, I thought about the storyline and got a bit more of the plot hashed out. It turns out Chola and Lady Bloodless are going to kidnap Nyima in order to save her from Prince Senge. First Nyima stops Chola from killing Senge. Maybe she'll do that cool sword-grabbing thing. (How can I write that? I get squeamish just thinking about the times I cut myself while chopping onions.) Anyway, after that we have the runaround, then they all get captured. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, Norbu and Dawa have their shocking reunion (dum dum DUM!). Meanwhile, Senge, Chola, and Nyima do their thing. After that, Chola and Nyima are on the run again. Oh yeah. Don't forget the Guru Achamo's staff in all this.

The end is in sight?

2010-11-28T05:48:00.000-08:00

Well, not really. Yeah, I'm past 46K, but I just finished chapter 7 last night, and I'll be lucky to get to the end of chapter 8 by 50K. There's at least 30K more to go to finish the story (guess I'll be writing in January!) After I reach 50K, I think I'll redo my outline so it bears some resemblance to the actual novel. I need to figure out how to get to the ending so it ends where I need it to end. I have a problem, too, in that I've been alternating "THEN" and "NOW" chapters, and the "THEN" story is about over. (One more to go, maybe.) Am I going to end up adding gratuitous "THEN" chapters? Possibly some historical bit that is only related by theme to the main story. (Theme! Ha ha ha ha ha!)

Ok, I want to get it done...even if it is just escapist fluff that fails to capture the complexities of the real world. It's impossible for me to keep everything in my head. Anyway...I estimate I'll reach 50K tomorrow. I could do it today if I really tried, but I probably won't.

43K, and the origin of the DLF

2010-11-26T13:14:00.000-08:00

That would be the "Demon Liberation Front", which may get a new, improved name in the second draft. Meanwhile, I'm at 43.5K and taking a break. I'm figuring on 2K a day for the next 3 days. All 3 of my kids are now asking me "Are you writing yet? Why aren't you working on your novel?" Yeah. I did tell them to "encourage" me. Ha ha ha ha!

I've downloaded a few more songs to add to my writing soundtrack. But I still hate the actual bit where you have to, you know, sit there and write (type) words in the actual story. (The songs are nice, but gibberish as far as I'm concerned. I have enough trouble trying to understand Cantonese, much less sung Cantonese. I rely on subtitles a lot for someone who's basically illiterate.) (It's supposed to inspire me to write my novel wuxia style...the best I've been able to manage is to think of some cliched Chinese dialogue now and then and kinda sorta translate it.) (Though if I "win" NaNo, I'm going to buy that "Dark Tales" DVD I've been watching on youtube.)

Here's another excerpt:

Dawa climbed out the other side and unloaded her folding stall from the back of the van, setting up her "AUTHENTIC BLESSING SPICE! VIRTUE GUARANTEED!" shop next to Yiping.

But even as they started chatting to their prospective customers, an outcry arose at the edge of the crowd. As quickly as they had gathered, they were gone.

"What? What's going on?" Yiping couldn't follow the hurried, excited yells of the villagers.

Dawa frowned. "A demon hunter, they said. Here?"

"Really? Let's go see!" Yiping slung his small camera around his neck, locked the van again and tugged at Dawa's hand. "What does a demon hunter look like?"

Dawa held back. "It depends. I wonder why they're here?" It must be a coincidence, she thought. No one had any reason to suspect her. Still, she was wary of attracting the attention of a demon hunter.

"Go and we'll find out," said Yiping.

Dawa sighed and nodded. She made sure to lag behind him as they made their way to the other end of the village, and this time found themselves at the back edge of the gawping crowd rather than front and center as the main attraction.

The demon hunter was a man. He rode in at a leisurely walk astride one of the rugged hill ponies. He was dressed in leather and furs, with a whip coiled at his side and a short sword in a scabbard hanging from the saddle. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat which shaded his eyes but did not hide the oval tattoo on his face.

"What's that mark under his left eye?" whispered Yiping.

"They call it a 'Buddha's Tear.' It means he's a demon himself."

"Really!" Yiping studied the man with even more interest.

"Shhh," warned Dawa. She suppressed an impulse to duck down and hide behind Yiping.

She needn't have worried. The villagers around her were pointing and chattering with far less restraint than Yiping. Only when Yiping lifted his camera and took a picture did the demon hunter's head turn, sharply, at the sound of the click. Even so, after one assessing look, he paid them no further heed.

"Where is the one called 'Old Man Gyalt'?" asked the demon hunter, pitching his voice to be heard over the crowd.

Another wave of speculation rippled through the villagers.

"Old Man Gyalt?" "Did he send for a demon hunter?" "I didn't know he was demon plagued!"

"No, he's fine, I saw him just yesterday." "But his goat. Tell him about the goat." "Shut up, it's not for the likes of us to tell him anything." "Is there really a demon?"

But enough of them said, "Old Man Gyalt lives over there," and pointed the way for the demon hunter. He nodded and urged his pony towards the outskirts of the village, as directed, picking his way carefully through the horde of bystanders.

Gyalt's house was a run-down affair, a two story farm cottage much like the others in the valley. A white plaster wall surrounded his yard, which was just beginning to fill with rows of pea plants, radishes, and leafy cabbages. The demon hunter dismounted at the front gate, muttering a command to his pony.

"Is there really a demon here?" The foremost villager looked over the hunter's shoulder at the house.

"What else am I here for?" said the demon hunter irritably. Two wooden dogs, guardian figures, flanked the gate. The demon hunter scowled and pointed at them. "See? Iron nails through the eyes."

The villager's eyes went round. "You're right! Hey everybody, take a look at this! How come we never noticed before?"

Another one pointed a chin at the house, "But the prayer flags...wouldn't they cry out if there was a demon inside?"

"Stay back," the demon hunter grunted. He pushed through the front gate and stood on the raised dirt path that cut through the vegetable garden to the door of the house. He lifted his head to survey the lines of colorful squares strung up from the roof to a pole in the ground. Then, without apparent transition, he held a whip in his right hand. It uncurled with a crack, the end licking towards the flags and returning to the demon hunter with a pale orange cloth caught in its coil. He took the flag with his left hand and held it to his face, tasted it. "It's been brined."

"Brined!" Everyone knew what that meant, except for Yiping, who made it a question.

"Brined?"

"Soaked in salt water," Dawa explained in Chinese, keeping her voice down. The language already made them too conspicuous. "The salt breaks the binding on the spirits. Without a spirit in it, the flag won't give any warning even if a demon is near."

The demon hunter opened his hand, letting the cloth fall. He stared at the the house for a moment. There was no sound or motion inside. No smoke came out the chimney.

"Where /is/ his goat?" muttered one of the villagers in front of Dawa. "Has anyone seen the goat?"

The demon hunter cracked his whip once more, this time in empty air, then called out loudly, "Old Man Gyalt! It's no use hiding, Old Man Gyalt! If you have the guts, come out and face me!"

Nothing.

The demon hunter called a third time, "Old Man Gyalt!"

This time the front door creaked open. A stooped figure stood in the frame, hobbled out. As old as his name suggested, the man was stooped and withered, blinking in the sunlight with an arm over his face to shade his eyes. He hawked and spat on the dirt outside his door.

Then he said in a voice thin with age, "Here I am. What do you want?"

The demon hunter said coldly, "Steal a goat, steal a man. You know why I'm here."

The old man hobbled a few steps closer, then stopped. He straightened his back, dropped his arm to his side. "So. I thought I got them all, but one of the spirits escaped."

"Escaped, yes, and brought its message to the Muruk Gar Tower of Silence. I was sent for."

The old man pointed at the demon hunter. "You. I know that mark on your face."

"I tell you, I was sent. The mark is veiled. Don't bother trying to read it."

"I don't need to read it to know you've sold out your own kind."

"Enough!" The whip flew out again, this time coiling around the old man's torso, pinning his arms to his sides.

Old Man Gyalt, or the demon in his body, offered no resistance. He allowed himself to be jerked forward, falling to his knees in front of the demon hunter. He shook his head. "You know I'm right."

"I know you're a murderer." The demon hunter, still holding the whip in his right hand, used his left hand to draw his short sword from the sheath on his back. With one swift motion, he plunged the blade up into the old man's throat, all the way through the neck.

The old man twitched and gurgled, but the whip held him fast.

The demon hunter muttered an incantation under his breath.

"What's he doing?" whispered Yiping to Dawa, not taking his eyes from the scene he watched through the viewfinder of his camera. Click.

"It's a spell to extract the demon's name," said Dawa. "I hope the hunter doesn't mind you taking his picture."

"Why would he mind? This is all perfectly legal here, isn't it?"

"Yes, but you know that doesn't mean he wants pictures." She put a hand on Yiping's arm.

Reluctantly, he lowered the camera. "All right."

Minutes later: "He's dead?" "He's dead." Question and answer flew through the crowd. "Then why is he still standing there?"

The demon hunter was still standing there, as if in a stupor. Then he jerked his sword free, simultaneously loosening his whip and coiling it back into his hand. The corpse flopped to the ground. The demon hunter spoke aloud into the blank air, "Why didn't he fight? I thought he'd fight me for his life."

"Come on! Time to go," said Dawa. She tightened her grip on Yiping's arm and pulled him away with her, threading a way through the crowd. she broke into a jog, and didn't stop until they were back at their van. She rested there with her head on her arms.

"Dawa? What's wrong?" Yiping held her around the shoulders. "You're shaking."

"Sorry," said Dawa, her voice muffled through her arms. "It's just seeing that..."

"I know," said Yiping. "I didn't expect it to be like that. And it was strange. Neither of them looked like demons to me. They looked like humans."

At this, Dawa whirled, reversing their positions to grab Yiping by the wrists. "Of course they do. /I/ look human, don't I?"

"Yes, but..." Yiping looked at her blankly. "What are you saying?"

"My father was a demon. That was the scandal, not only that my mother had a lover. The Guru Achamo told me. /I'm/ illegal, here. And someday maybe some demon hunter will track me down and slaughter me in the middle of the street, with no judge, no trial."

Happy (American) Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T11:18:00.000-08:00

Whee. At about 41000 words and I don't feel like writing (I know, when do I ever?) but looking at last year's blog, I only got to 40K on about Nov 27, which makes me feel (foolishly, I'm sure) that I have plenty of time left, why rush? Ha. Ok, ok, I'll go write something anyway. I know. Must keep going. The story's only about halfway, I think.

Starting chapter 7 today. Dawa and Yiping are driving around Shambhala in a breadloaf van ("mian bao che"). I dunno. It just seemed more likely than them having one of those big tricycles or an animal cart. Where do they get their fuel? Does Shambhala use vegetable oil in diesel engines? I just can't see big gas pipelines running into a supposedly secret mythical fantasy kingdom. So anyway. Moving on.

They're driving around Shambhala...the remoter villages...when...something...happens. Ugh. Obviously if I'm starting this chapter here, I must intend for something important to happen to them. Or they see something. Or they do something.

When in doubt, add a demon attack. Oh yeah. That was it! Random demon attack number...what are we on now, number three? (Not counting the one on the Guru Achamo.)

Ok. I'm going to spend Thanksgiving thinking about a demon attack. Go me.

Finally got to 40K...

2010-11-23T20:21:00.000-08:00

You'd think I could come up with a better name for the demon advocacy group than the "Demon Liberation Front", but apparently I can't. So DLF it is for the first draft. I'm going to have to explain all that in the next chapter...not really looking forward to it, since the whole thing is a complete muddle in my mind.

And now in this chapter, I decided that Chola T'hom is looking for them. Now that he's sucked into the evil plot of evilness, I guess he needs whatever help he can find, and the DLF is his best bet right now. How he's going to find them, I don't know. Maybe he can go munch on some dead person. A victim of a DLF attack? That would do it. But how to get there without raising the alarm? Erm. Dunno. Thinking about it.

So yeah. I hope I can figure all this out sometime between now and my next writing session.

3 pm, 36K, end of Chapter 5

2010-11-21T12:00:00.000-08:00

There's probably something wrong with Chapter 5. It's the shortest one yet. I suspect I'm missing a scene. But I can't think of anything I want to put in there right now. I'll get back to it all in chapter 7. I think. Maybe my outline will help me.

*checks outline* HA HA HA HA HA! Whose idea of a joke was this outline? Um. So the novel isn't exactly following it.

I want to get to 40K before I go to sleep tonight. That means I need to go write chapter 6 real soon now. Gonna take a break first. I'm one of those people who visualizes their story as a movie in their head before writing it down. Well, maybe not a movie, but maybe an audio drama, or just running through the words mentally until it sounds (more or less) right.

Someday I will think of a better name for the town/city than "XXX".

"Kundun Goba!" An old woman's voice shouted a name that, in his dream, Chola mistook for his own. Then he woke up.

Two days after he had left XXX, Chola woke up in confusion, thinking that a spirit was gnawing at his ear again. Then he remembered that he was stretched out uncomfortably along the back seat of the Land Rover. The knocking and rattling came from the window, not his skull. He blinked up, seeing a head silhouetted against the brightness of the morning sky.

He sat up cautiously and rolled the window halfway down. "Excuse me?"

"It is you! Kundan! I knew you'd come back." The speaker pressed in closer, and Chola saw that it was a woman dressed in the thick layers of a typical mountain villager. The clothes were old, faded and frayed at the edges. The woman herself was perhaps not as old as he first took her for, though her face was clearly weathered by age. Not a demon, ghost, or a demon hunter, he determined after a moment's observation.

Chola opened the door gently, forcing the woman to back away. He stepped down and shut the door behind him. What was she doing here? He had parked a mile away outside the outskirts of the nearest village, and that after taking a less frequented road than the one he had used in going to XXX. "I'm sorry, but you must be mistaken."

"No mistake." The old woman grinned with unsuppressible glee. She looked up in his face, then looked away again, as if shy. "You don't look a day older. Not like me. All those years...but you found it after all, just like I knew you would."

"Found what?" Chola thought about jumping back in the Land Rover and driving away, but something nagged at the back of his mind.

"The Buddha's Ear, of course! I know I laughed at you for wasting your time for hunting the fungus of immortality, but I didn't really mean it. Kundan Goba, tell me you forgive me. Tell me you won't leave me behind again!" This time, when the old woman stole a glance at him, Chola saw tears in her eyes.

Kundan Goba?

Why, in his dream, had he thought that was his name?

Then he remembered.

Chola T'hom reached out with both hands, grasped the old woman by the arms. He said quietly, "Didn't they tell you? Kundan Goba was killed by a demon thirty years ago."

"No!" The old woman shook her head. A tremor ran through her body. "No. That's a lie."

"It's the truth," said Chola.

"No. No, don't say that. My love, you've come back to me. I...I understand if you don't want to stay. You're still young, you don't belong with an old woman like me." The old woman tried to shake free of Chola's grip, but he held onto her.

Was this madness his fault? Were human minds so fragile? He had to make her understand. He threaded truth into the weave of her memories, but her thoughts rejected his name, his voice, and heard only her husband. If I am your husband, he thought, then you have to hear my words. If she was deluded, then let her delusion force her to believe him. "Would your husband lie to you? Listen to me. Kundan Goba is dead. You won't meet him again in this life. You have to let him go."

The woman began to weep. She dropped her head and twisted away, shoulders shaking.

Chola put his arms around her and held her as best he could. "You mustn't blame him. He loved you very much. I know. And don't blame yourself."

"We have a daughter. You would be proud to see how she's grown."

"I know," whispered Chola. He stroked her hair as gently as he could. "Hush. I know."

The memories came back to him in a flash. Memories, and new understanding. The Guru Achamo must have been on her way between her mountain and her school when she encountered a wild demon newly arrived in the world. The villagers had been lucky to have her protection. He thought he had only taken one life. Now he realized that perhaps he had taken two.

"Mother!"

Startled, Chola and the old woman each turned at the voice.

A woman strode quickly towards them, coming down the village road. She shouted again as she came. She, like the old woman, was dressed like a villager, but her clothes were less worn and her coat flapped open in the wind as if she had run outside in too much of a hurry to fasten the buttons. "Mother! There you are!"

The old woman wiped at her eyes, then turned a smiling face at the younger woman. "Ah, daughter, you worry too much. Look who's come to see us! Greet your father, my dear."

If anything, the younger woman's forehead creased into even deeper worry lines. She nodded to Chola without really looking at him. "I'm sorry, sir, but these fits take her, and she wanders away before we can stop her. She doesn't mean to disturb anyone." She took the older woman by the hand. "Come on, mother. Let's get back home before you catch a chill."

"It's all right," muttered Chola. He patted the old woman on the shoulder. "Look, here's your daughter. She's right. You should be getting home."

"/Our/ daughter," insisted the old woman. She dug in her heels, refusing to be dragged away. "Daughter, you still haven't greeted your father!"

The younger woman darted an embarrassed glance at Chola. "Yes, yes. Ever since my father passed away, my mother sees his face in everyone." Then she blinked. "But...you /do/ look like...I mean...I'm sorry. It's just that you do look a little like my father. I mean no offense."

"None taken," said Chola. He wanted suddenly to hide his face from their scrutiny, but resisted the urge.

The younger woman dropped her gaze to the Land Rover behind him. She recognized Achamo's crest painted on the door. "Oh, is that a school car? I used to go to the Chancemet Friends School when I was a child. You're on school business? They don't usually pass through this village, we're pretty far out of the way."

"I was driving two guests of the Guru Achamo to the school," said Chola neutrally, as if that answered her question.

"Ah!" said the younger woman. She tried again to steer her mother back to the village.

"Then won't you come in with us? Have some tea, some breakfast? It would be our honor."

"No," said Chola softly. "I thank you for your hospitality, but I need to be on the road."

"Of course. Good bye! Thank you for humoring an old madwoman." The younger woman tugged more insistently at her mother's arm, and this time the old woman followed her.

"He's not coming? He's leaving again?" The old woman asked plaintively.

"No. No, mother. Now come on, let's go home."

Chola watched them leave. Only after they were long out of sight did he climb back into the Land Rover and drive away.

I hate precogs

2010-11-19T14:52:00.001-08:00

I hate prophecies, too. Naturally that's why I always have them. Argh! Well, once one character had the ability, I had to give it to an opposing character to balance things out, right? Bah.

Incidentally, my names are getting worse. (Also the plot and the pace of writing, but never mind all that. I will get more words done tonight. Yes. Truly. I will listen to this album five more times and have no more clue of the lyrics than when I started. 'hong coi nan tian ning nan hai...mon tian mo dui wu blah blah blah I have no f***ing clue' and why can't I type as fast as he sings, anyway?)

And the demons...what is the point of having these demons pop in, threaten someone, then get defeated? It's not as if my characters are getting XP and leveling up from random encounters here, dammit. Also, can you spend a drama point to make the GM run a flashback scene in which you gain enough XP to be a higher level in your current scene? I don't think so! *kicks the novel*

(flashback excerpt for the win!)

"I will have your name if I have to read it from your stinking flesh!"

Nyima felt the demon's name being drawn away, ground between Chola's teeth. To destroy the name was to destroy the demon. The demon panicked. "Stop! If you kill me, you kill your sister!"

The demon took her name and knotted it into his own, gripped it with all his strength.

But Chola did not relent. Bit by bit, he pulled the demon's name free. Bit by bit, he devoured the name as he devoured the demon's flesh. Nyima felt his teeth as clearly as if it were her own life being inexorably chewed away. Together, they were helpless. Together, they were consumed by pain and fear.

"Stop! Have mercy, master," came the demon's agonized plea, indistinguishable from Nyima's agonized plea, so tightly were their names tangled.

Chola said nothing. Nyima saw him through the demon's mind, a ravening, implacable presence. As well ask mercy of a forest fire. A horror of their impending death filled her mind. The demon's horror, her horror, there was no difference. Their senses dimmed. Only their tormentor remained, and the only retreat was the infinite darkness.

"Mercy," croaked the demon, choking on his last breath. "I beg you."

"The Blind Frogmaker begs for mercy!" The new voice cut through the darkness like a bolt of lightning. "I never thought to meet such a day."

The Guru Achamo.

"...Heartless...Killer...Achamo," gasped the demon, gasped Nyima. The pressure on the demon's name slackened, just enough for him to draw a few desperate breaths.

"I'm retired now," said the Guru Achamo. "Why are you here, Frogmaker?"

"You...killed...my son," said the demon.

"Ah. I remember. The Gatherer of Leaves." The old woman sighed. "I did kill him. After he killed how many humans?"

"Nevertheless," grated the demon, "He was my son."

"And your vengeance has brought you to this."

"My death..." The demon struggled again to free himself, but Chola's teeth were still clenched around his name. "In the jaws...of the...Carrion Bear." The demon let out a strangled laugh. "How was I...to know? You have no...no right. How was I...to know?"

"Let her go," said the Guru Achamo. "Release her name from yours. Then leave here and never return."

Nyima felt the demon's shock. A tremor of hope ran through them both. "You...would let me...go?"

"Didn't I say I was retired?" The old woman's voice was serene. "T'hom. If he frees her, let him go. Do you hear me?"

Chola growled. The sound was a knife scraping along the demon's name, but he endured, understanding that it was the last blow struck before the peace. And the demon leaped at that chance of peace, of escape. Nyima felt the demon's name slide away from her.

The world went black.

Picking my way through a minefield of flashbacks...

2010-11-18T19:41:00.000-08:00

Or at least that's what it feels like. There I am, going along, then BOOM! My characters are sent back in time again for yet another crucial memory. Ah well.

I'm at about 31K. Only got 1000 words done today. I can see I have to do another 10K weekend if I ever want to get to 50K. And I can see it will take more than 50K to finish the novel, too. I have to finish this one, though. I have an extra incentive in that I need these characters to appear in a future story, so I have to find out how it all turned out! (Yeah, I really wish I knew. My outline is full of lies. I knew when I wrote it that I'd need to fix it.)

Ok, things to remember for now:

The normal usage of the Blood Attunement Sutra is to attune yourself to a rock or some such, making it impossible for a demon to possess you. You're not supposed to attune yourself to someone else...but a demon is vulnerable because they lack grounding in this reality (lack 'earth essence'). This is the same weakness that makes it possible to summon them. It's a difficult defense developed by the Guru Achamo. Other demon hunters used other forms of defense, but Achamo says her way is the strongest.
There's a weak spirit bound in Achamo's staff. It witnessed her last moments. That's why Nyima tossed it into Snake's Cradle Gorge when she decided to cover up for Chola. Later when she gets it back, she will find it also knows the Blood Attunement Sutra. Nyima can't directly learn it, but she can figure out how to counter it. Remember the Prince used it on her as a means of tracing her.

28K and the end of clarity...

2010-11-17T04:31:00.000-08:00

A bit behind on writing in the last two days, but I did get some words done. Now I'm on the last part of my outline that actually makes sense. After this, it's all rather fuzzy and "I'll figure it out when I get around to writing it." Well, that time is rapidly approaching...

Um. So my next flashback chapter will have to explain and motivate all these characters so that they will be where I need them to be now and do what I need them to do for the scenes I had planned. Argh. Life has to get a lot more unfair for them. I was never much good at that. Anyway, I'll try to get back on schedule today with the writing 2000-3000 words every day.

Chapter 4! (in which I dream of teleportation)

2010-11-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

Another excerpt, in celebration of my reaching 25000 words. While you might think I got my love of short-hop teleportation from "Sapphire and Steel" (they did it with such style), actually it does appear now and then in wuxia fantasies. (Remember that awful movie "(Tian Long Ba Bu) The Dragon Chronicles: The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains"? Yeah. Actually, it wasn't that bad. It had Brigitte Lin in it!) Oh yeah, and another thing Sapphire and Steel has in common with wuxia movies: insta-costume changes! Ha ha! I haven't had any of those in my novel yet, but who knows...someday...

Now:

Rosecrown Abbey:

Nyima couldn't move.

She couldn't move, and the air was running out. The ghost's recitation of her name held her in herself.

Stupid, thought Nyima dizzily. Stupid and pointless. Damn the old fool. When they had first met, the abbess had pitied her. When had pity turned into unreasoning fear? I should have tried to talk to her sooner.

The dizziness grew worse. Nyima slid helplessly down to the ground, back against the rock.

She couldn't see, she couldn't breathe, and she couldn't move. She felt the darkness closing in.

She tried to remember air, tried to imagine it into existence as she had once done to spin silk for Tenzin's family. She could remember the sweet feel of fresh air, could remember drawing it into her lungs, but she couldn't remember what gave it its life-sustaining properties. Her memory failed in capturing the essence of breath. She had taken it too much for granted ever to /know/ it.

She tried to remember herself, to preserve herself by remembering it perfectly in every detail.

But it only hampered her thoughts. To think human thoughts in a human mind, was to change the state of the instrument that did the thinking. If she succeeded, she would be frozen in a single moment forever.

No. She would rather let fate take its course. If there was no way out, then here she would stay, just like one of the rocks lying around her. Did the rocks complain? She, too, could lie here for a thousand years, ten thousand.

Then, from the bottom of her mind, dreamlike, a thought: /There is a way out./

She didn't believe the thought. How can I get out? I can't even move.

/You don't have to move./ It felt like a memory. She remembered...

/You are here, but you are also there./

Where? Where am I?

/Where you are, your name is. Where your name is, you are./

She struggled through the dizziness to make sense of the thought. My name. My name is here.

Where else? It's in the voice of that ghost. The ghost is inside the rock. How will that help me?

/But where did the ghost get your name?/

Then Nyima remembered. The abbess! The abbess had spoken her name. Held it in her mind.

/She is thinking of you even now./

Was she? Nyima could only feel her own desperate wish to be elsewhere. She struggled again to break free of the ghost's voice.

/Don't move. Concentrate,/ admonished the voice of her memory. /Concentrate. You are not this sack of meat rotting in the darkness. You are yourself. Your name contains you. Let go. Someone is thinking of you. You are that thought./

I am that thought. Nyima let go of consciousness. In a dream, she could shift from thought to thought without ever moving.

/Someone is thinking your name./

Nyima fell into her name. It felt like suddenly turning her head to find herself in a new house with no memory of how she arrived.

It was raining.

That was the first thing she noticed about her new house. She hadn't known it was raining, but now the steady beating of raindrops against the roof was unavoidable. Rain. Rain, and cold. Sweet air in her nostrils. Light.

She opened her eyes, though she found her eyelids strangely stiff. They cracked like a layer off a thousand layer pancake. She was in the abbess's room. She looked down at her hands, causing more skin to crumble and flake off. The left hand held a rosary. The abbess's rosary. She recognized the sleeve of the abbess's robe.

She was inside the abbess's robe.

No.

She was inside the abbess's skin.

Then where was the abbess herself?

The abbess was screaming. Inside her mind, Nyima heard her voice, crying for her lost reality. Two people in the same place could not coexist in any sane or stable way. One more push, and Nyima could send the abbess irrevocably over the edge. On the other hand, if she eased away, gently disentangled herself, the abbess might still recover. Nyima trembled with the strain of keeping them both balanced inside one skin.

Carefully...carefully...she forced herself to think through each tiny step before moving.

Her own finger lifted a fraction of an inch. The abbess's finger stayed behind. Another adjustment...another...

"Abbess!" The shout from the corridor outside the room jolted Nyima's meticulous focus.

Concentration lost, she froze. She didn't dare speak. She hoped the intruder would give up and go away.

"Abbess! It's me, Dolma. Please, I need to speak to you."

Dolma! What did the little novice want with the abbess? Nyima clutched herself tightly inside her limited space. A drop of sweat burned on her brow, and she suppressed the urge to wipe it away. She couldn't afford to move.

"It's about...about Sister Nyima. Please. I know you're in there. Abbess! Novice Dolma begs you!" The door rattled. "Abbess?"

Did you come to beg mercy for me? wondered Nyima, touched by her loyalty. But she won't, not now, there's no chance. Brave Dolma. Don't you know when you can't win?

25K happy dance!

2010-11-14T12:30:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I didn't make it to 25K yesterday, but I did manage it today! That means I just have to do another 1000 words for my 10K weekend, and I'm at -3000 words from my personal goal (2000/day->28000 by today.) I got to the end of chapter 3 (finally) and started chapter 4. It's a bit annoying to write with the alternating flashbacks/now chapters, because if something unexpected happens in the flashback part, it may mess up what was planned for the present-day part. Still, it does let me go around through different characters and so on and pretend that it all makes sense. I don't get quite as blocked this way (though naturally I still don't feel like writing.)

So yeah. I'm gonna take a break, then write some more later.

20K...5000 more to go today

2010-11-13T04:24:00.001-08:00

Or at least that's my plan. Sadly, my novel has degenerated into a bunch of "As you know, Bob" passages where people explain their backgrounds to each other. ARGH! Another damn thing to fix later. Very annoying. Also, I simply don't know enough about the life of a shepherd (Tibetan or otherwise), so that whole section is never going to be convincing. I'm just going to make it as short as I can, and tell it as if it were a fairy tale.

That's chapter 3. I hope to finish it this morning and then move on to Chapter 4 by noon. I don't think chapter 3 goes as far as Tenzin's death. Probably just ends with the baby dying.

Then in chapter 4, Nyima (last seen trapped motionless in a cave-in), magically escapes. Gah! I hate this. Fantasy! People keep developing random new powers to save their butts. In this case, she was always supposed to have the teleport power (come on! One of the reasons I'm writing this is to indulge in my teleportation fetish!), but it's awfully conveeeeeenient here, isn't it? Ok, so she's not that great at it. In fact, she kills the Abbess when she teleports into her body. Nasty. Nyima's only friend in the Abbey witnesses it, then runs screaming her head off (not literally). Cue demon wangst! Anyway, that's my plan for today. We'll see how it goes. In the second half of chapter 4, Nyima and Chola T'hom meet again over a dead body. Those sure are piling up. I think Chola is eating the liver at the time. Livers are good. Mmmm.

Most pathetic excuses yet...

2010-11-12T04:29:00.001-08:00

Uh... why am I so behind? Was I super-busy? Did I have the flu? What? No, not really.

It was my dog's birthday!

Then I had to unlock the hidden level in Gemcraft Chapter 0!

Then I had to dig some holes in the yard with my daughter!

Then I had to go buy my own personal leaf-blower! It has steel blades!

Then I had to think about what the deal is with Dawa Gephel and how she is connected to Nyima. It's because Dawa's mother was the last King's Demon-hunter before poor Lord Pema, and she was also the Guru Achamo's student, and Achamo was the King's Demon-hunter before Dawa's mother (Achamo retired when the old king died 50 years ago) and that makes Achamo Dawa's grandmother (sort of). Achamo also has to be the Gandalf and explain blah blah blah Dawa is a half-demon blah blah blah her mother is a murderer blah blah blah to her.

So yeah.

I came down with a case of the "Week Two Blahs" and basically, felt tired and didn't feel like writing. Guess it's gonna have to be a 10K weekend now. Oh well.

Week 2, 15K, let's get that to 25K, shall we?

2010-11-09T04:30:00.000-08:00

Day 9, and damn, I'm so tired. I have to start doing my daily writing earlier. If I wait until after the kids go to sleep, it means I stay up too late, and as I have to get up at least 30 minutes EARLIER than they do, this isn't really working. Plus, I don't use an alarm clock, which means I tend not to sleep very solidly the hour before I do get up (unless I oversleep). (But I do like being awake before I HAVE to get up and lying there for awhile to gather my thoughts before rushing about doing morning stuff.) Gah. I suppose I should get a working alarm clock. I just hate being woken up by an alarm (though it's better than being woken up by a phone ring).

Still, I'm at 15K this morning, which isn't too bad.

Consider that the first year I did NaNo, I didn't even START until the 9th (because that was when I happened to find out about it) and I still made it to 50K without too much trouble. (When I say "without too much trouble", I mean, not any worse than any other year has been.) Of course, that means I'm not getting any faster at writing. Ha ha ha. I can only hope the quality is improving. Um. Yeah, right.

So today I hope to start....*dramatic drumbeat* Chapter 3! In which we jump back seven years again and figure out what happened with everyone back then. Too many things are fuzzy in my head. The Bastard isn't supposed to be some kind of slacker, damn it. Um. Yeah. Let's write.

Day 6: Stupid Demon King...you are NOT helping!

2010-11-06T17:26:00.001-07:00

Bleargh. Still behind. At least I'm not more behind. Yet. Not in the "writing mood". Then again, I'm only in the "writing mood" maybe 1 in 100 days. That's why I love NaNoWriMo. Being "in the mood" has nothing to do with it. So yeah.

Today I find that it's the Demon King who tells my FMC all about the whole sorry reincarnated lovers/soulmates business. I mean, that's ever so romantic, right? You'd believe it if some demon started babbling about how you and so-and-so used to be such a famous couple in Hell... *headdesks* Ok, but they were famous, she did use her signature Special Attack, and he did want to piss her off, and...

I still have to think up a decent side-story for the MMC. One of those "Enemy Mine" plots or something. Or maybe a fairy tale. Fairy tales are my friends! Truly. (But not that one about the mouse, the bird, and the sausage. Or is my subconscious trying to tell me something?)

Mother issues? Why do you ask?

2010-11-05T04:37:00.000-07:00

Day 5, and I'm already 1000 words behind on my personal word count goal (well, it's better than -2000, which is where I was yesterday). At least someone finally did something evil in my novel! Woo hoo!

Then (7 years ago)
Snowbell Valley (The southern ridge)

On the rocks on the opposite wall of the valley, another set of eyes watched the wedding festivities.

Prince Senge. Lurking discreetly a few lengths behind him, a handful of men in royal livery waited for their master. However many hours it took, they were accustomed to such duties.

Only after dusk had overtaken them did the Prince turn away from the cliff's edge. His eyes hid fury behind a rigidly calm face. "Damn her. Who does she think she is? What is she? A nobody born out of a nameless hell. Nothing at all."

His guards knew better than to react. One and all, they stood blankly to attention.

Senge surveyed them, laughed shortly. "Come on, then. Time to go home."

***

The royal palace in Kalapa:

Home held little welcome for the Prince.

Senge was soon summoned to his mother's chambers. He gathered his resolve and obeyed, knowing that he was likely in for another tongue-lashing. He had been due back at the palace days ago, and had missed any number of ceremonial duties, mostly concerned with appeasing the guardian spirits of the royal palace. Even though his years under Achamo's tutelege had left him with little awe of the spirits, the others at court were less sanguine at the prospect of causing offense to the unseen.

Her quarters were in the same wing as his own, and it was only a short walk along the verandas lining the buildings of the palace to reach the Queen. Senge left his guards outside her door and passed through the antechamber to the richly furnished inner room, where the Queen of Shambhala sat crosslegged on her bed. Gauzy drapes hung from the bedframe, hiding the Queen's features behind the rippling phoenix stitched onto the cloth.

"Senge greets his mother the queen," said the Prince.

"Back at last," snorted his mother. "What kept you?"

"I had...other business," said Senge.

"Ha! Pining after that little apprentice sister of yours again?" His mother sat up straighter. Senge could feel her eyes boring into his thoughts. He had long ago learned to shield his mind from her prying, but the very act of shielding betrayed him. "So! It's true, then. What is wrong with you, my son?"

Senge had no answer. What could he say to that? "Your son begs forgiveness for his error."

"Forgiveness? Is that the best you can do?" The curtains parted and the Queen lifted herself out of the bed. "Let me look at you. So. I spend a fortune and all my heart's blood convincing that old hag to teach you, because she's the best, because she's the most respected, retired or not..."

"Your son is grateful," said Senge, dropping his gaze to the carpet. A mistake. The carpet was woven with designs that compelled submission and truth. His tongue slipped and the words fell out, "But she is the past. The future, my future, is with Nyima..."

"That demonic whore!" *THWACK*! His mother slapped him brutally across the mouth. "Don't speak her name ever again in my presence. I sent you there to learn, not to play at love!"

Senge felt the blood drain from his face. He touched his lips, feeling the sting of her slap, his fingers trembling with fury. Closing his eyes, he said with forced calm, "Your son is no longer a child. Please trust that you have taught him to judge his own path."

"I see. You think you don't need me anymore, is that it?" The queen paced a slow circle around him. "Ungrateful brat! You think you'd be here today if it weren't for all I've done for you?"

"Yes, Mother. And a fine job you've done of pruning the tree." Senge paused to lend weight to his next words. "And what would the king my father think if he knew why his junior wives all fail to produce any healthy heirs?"

The queen stopped. Her voice came straight into his right ear. "What's this? Now you think you can threaten me?"

"I think you can't stop me," said Senge with deliberate rudeness. A thought glittered at the bottom of his mind. It was an old thought, but this time he let it rise to the surface rather than trying to bury it. Yes. Perhaps it was time. He opened his eyes and looked coldly at his mother. "So please. Just leave me alone."

"Alone! I should have left you alone when you were but a sickly infant and borne a more filial son. Tell the king! Then we'll both be shorter by a head. He has plenty of years in him yet to bring up a..." Her words faded in silence. She raised a bejewelled hand to touch her lips in question.

/Enough, Mother./ Senge needed no sound when he had already tuned himself to the beat of her blood. Without warning, he struck straight at her face with his right hand.

The queen's response was instant. She needed no forewarning to block him with the edge of her own arm.

Then Senge's left hand struck, and this time his mother was too slow, too weak, to deflect him. He jabbed once, twice, at the acupoints below her collarbone, left and right, drilling her with enough energy to paralyze her for twenty minutes or more. Plenty of time. With a twisted smile, the prince eased his mother into a sitting position on her bed.

/You see, Mother, I did learn from the old woman. But she is a short-sighted fool and afraid of true power. I am not. That, Mother, you taught me./ Senge drew from inside his robe a glass vial, no bigger than the palm of his hand, filled with a thick red liquid. With his other hand, he held a syringe. He began muttering, the sound swallowed by the silence, but the pattern of the rolling chant hung in the air between mother and son.

He filled the syringe. The queen's eyes pleaded with him, cursed him, but her body was helpless to move.

/Power,/ said Senge. /Isn't that what you schemed for me? But you were mistaken about who would be the puppet and who would pull the strings./

The needle plunged through layers of royal brocade, through skin, and into her side beneath her ribs. Fluid seeped in, diffused through her body.

/We are of one blood,/ said Senge, his eyes avid for the final consummation. He focused his thoughts on the incantation, threaded his thoughts through blood.

The queen began to tremble. Her inner energy flared in chaotic waves, resisted the taming influence of Senge's spell, burst through her sealed acupoints. The tremble became a violent shuddering. All her limbs spasmed uncontrollably, and her head tilted back, the cords of her neck drawn tight, and her mouth opened in a voiceless shriek.

/No!/ Senge struggled to maintain control, but the pattern of his incantation dissolved. The threads of his power tangled, broken and clotted. He groped for the remaining pieces, but the ends were beyond his reach.

The queen's head flopped forward, an abrupt and unnatural motion. Then, without lifting it, her head shook back and forth, faster and faster. Her hands rose, clawed off her golden hairpiece, scattered pins like darts.

Senge staggered back, blocking most of the pins, but one of them drew a line of blood under his left eye. Worse, he had lost his attunement with the blood he had injected. If she recovered... she would never forgive him. She, too, was preserved by her arts, and had time to bear another child.

All or nothing. It was too late to take back his gamble. Senge drew the dagger from his belt. In this frenzy, she had no defense. He calculated his aim with cold care. One strike, under the bone and into the heart. Decision made, he moved forward...

...to find his wrists seized by impossibly long strands of hair. More hair lashed out, curled around his neck. They were tightening, tightening, choking his cry of shock. Hair cut into his skin, denied him breath, denied him blood. Senge couldn't move. Every hair was thick with power. He couldn't break free. His own energy was fatally disrupted.

He was lost. His mother was going to kill him. Literally. He wanted to laugh, at how badly he had failed. He wanted to beg for mercy.

But he stared into eyes blind with madness, immune to any appeal.

Darkness blurred his vision. The world receded.

And then the doors opened. A confusion of feet and arms, shouts and flashing blades, prayer beads and ribbons, all burst into the queen's chamber in a cloud of incense.

Someone pulled the queen away from him, cut him free of the strangling hair.

Senge gasped for breath, massaged his wrists, ignoring the questions pelted at him by the guards. Then he remembered, and groped behind him. Lucky. He had fallen on the evidence of his misdeeds. He slipped the empty syringe and vial into his sleeve while waving a distracting hand towards the window. "A demon! We..." He coughed, gathering his wits. "We were attacked. In the queen's own chamber... how is my mother the queen?"

He straightened. One of his guards moved quickly to support him.

"She is taken by some fit. She does not hear us," said the guard.

Senge peered over towards the queen's bed, forcing his eyes to focus. Two more of the guards restrained his mother, while a gaggle of her attendents entreated her to peace. He couldn't see her face: her head was canted forward, rolling against her chest, while straggles of hair still writhed and lashed at the empty air. "She was possessed. I strove to expel the demon, but...its power was too great for me."

The queen howled a spine-shattering cry. It went on and on.

Unable to endure the wordless accusation, Senge struggled to his feet and with the help of his guard, hobbled towards the door. "Quick! Where is Lord Pema? Why isn't he here already?"

Lord Pema was the King's Demon-Hunter.

He was also incompetent, uneasy in his office, and addicted to /masidi/ powder. The queen knew of his addiction and helped him conceal it from the king. He owed them. He would not dare challenge Senge's version of events.

Lord Pema was on his way into the queen's wing of the palace when Senge met him. All due credit to the demon-hunter's young apprentice's long ears.

"Lord Pema!" shouted Senge. "You are late. The queen my mother is in dire need, and due to your negligence. A demon slipped through your net and attacked her."

Spirits wailed soft protests that only Senge, Pema, and the apprentice had any inkling of.

"I d-d-didn't know, your highness," stammered Lord Pema. He was a small man, as emaciated as any wandering monk, and cringed when the prince loomed over him. "The spirits beg a thousand pardons, but they...the demon must have slipped through. They promise it will not happen again."

"See that it doesn't!" snapped Senge.

They returned to the queen's chamber to find the royal physician there as well, sitting by the queen and frowning over her pulse.

"How is she?" asked Senge from the doorway.

Lord Pema hurried inside, lighting sticks of demon-repelling incense and mumbling prayers, while ordering his assistant to stick thin sheets of holy scriptures on all the windows.

The royal physician shook his head. He gave Senge a grave look. "I fear...I fear for her mind."

"And her recovery?"

The royal physician shook his head again, looking even graver. "I can promise nothing."

Senge bit back hysterical glee. /Good/, he didn't say. Feeling his legs weak and shaky in delayed reaction, he retreated to a chair from which he could maintain both distance and an appearance of concern. He /was/ concerned. Why hadn't it worked? He had tested the procedure on goats, pigs, and a handful of beggars until he had perfected it. Then he realized: none of them had any training in internal energy techniques, whereas his mother was an adept. Of course she had been able to resist, and the resulting conflict had burned out her mind.

Senge sighed inwardly. He would have to think about it. Find a way to overcome any resistance. Next time...

Next time he wouldn't fail.

Day 3...and still on chapter 1

2010-11-03T04:46:00.000-07:00

About 4000 words in, and I'm still on chapter one. Which is a bit absurd, considering that I managed to fit entire short stories into 2500 words before (and one of them was EPIC, dammit! In my head, anyway.) So it seems like nothing's happening...and more nothing's happening... perhaps I did start at the wrong point after all. I don't care. It's NaNo. So since I have to get the second batch of kids ready for school in 10 minutes, I may as well post the next bit continuing on from my previous excerpt.

Hmm. Yeah. I can see I've been reading too much Stephen R. Donaldson again. The weird influence on my word choices comes and goes. Bah. Better to be consistent. Fix later.

Chapter 1, continued

"It's no bigger than my wine bowl!" Chola scowled down at the stairs. "Stupid ghosts! A book like that, the words must be too small to see. How can he even read it?"

"Not with a giant magnifying glass, if that's what you're thinking," said Senge.

"There's a machine," Nyima explained. "From Outside. A 'lightning brain'."

"Just so!" Chola slapped the railing in emphasis. "If he can't read it with his own brain, he can't read it at all. And if he can't read it, it's not a book."

"Yet the information exists in it. It is written. His illiteracy is irrelevant. That, my brother, is the law." Senge smiled. "But my opinion is also irrelevant. Take it up with the Guru if you wish to contest the point."

"It makes a mockery of all tradition."

"Say that to the Guru's face if you dare," said Senge.

"Your teacher, not mine!" Chola shook his head and turned to glare at the prince. "You're a student. /I/ am a prisoner. I owe her nothing."

"Chola, don't say that," whispered Nyima. "You know that's not true..."

Chola's eyes burned into Nyima, denying all appeal. "In your heart you know I'm right. How much can untested love be worth? You cheat yourself in this."

"Love is not a bag of wool," said Nyima. "We give it to each other freely."

"What? To that...that milkdrinking boy down there? That sheepheaded fool?" Chola growled in wordless outrage, turning his gaze back onto the figure scaling the
cliff. "He'll slip and fall to his death. What then?"

Nyima tried to speak, couldn't. Why did he have to ruin things for her?

Suddenly, Senge burst out laughing. "Give it up, Chola! Even if all the shepherds in the world dropped dead at our feet, she still wouldn't have a beast like you. Isn't that right, Nyima?"

Nyima flinched at the venom in his tone. She grasped at the fraying threads of her happiness. "Stop it. Both of you. Please."

"Maybe she won't have me, but at least I don't hide a knife in my smile." Chola turned to the stone table and slumped back onto his stool, reaching down for another jar of wine. Finding it empty, he flung it onto the rocks with a muttered curse. He heaved himself back onto his feet and stomped off along the path to the temple where their teacher, or jailor, waited. "This show isn't worth watching. See you two later."

A morose silence hung inside the pavilion while the wind hissed bleak nothings around them.

"Well," said Senge at last. "He does have a point. You're wasting yourself on that poor fool down there. And he seems an innocent. Does he know what he's in for, fastening his fate to a demon?"

Nyima flushed. Her hand rose to cover the red and black spiral design tattooed under her left eye. Buddha's Tear, the commoners called it. "I bear the mark. I'm no danger to anyone. I'm no different than any human."

"No? Then he's not the only innocent. But I trust you'll come to your senses someday. I've always been very fond of you, you know. My offer still stands."

"No. No, thank you. Your highness." Nyima's hand dropped to her side. Once, she remembered, the prince had been a frightened child. Now she was the one who found him unnerving. She sensed a coldness in him. In that, she /did/ agree with Chola's judgement. But that was unfair of her, so she added as gently as she could, "You have been a good brother to me. But not...I mean, not in the way of a man and a woman."

"What do you truly know of men and women?"

"I've watched them for a hundred years."

"Watching isn't the same as knowing." Senge smiled, but his eyes were cynical. "And you don't know what you want. Until then... I've no more interest in this show than Chola. Later, Nyima."

Alone now in the pavilion, Nyima let out a relieved sigh. Having had their say, Chola and Senge dared do no more to hinder her. The Guru's law wouldn't permit it, and the Guru held all their names in her hand. Soon now, Tenzin would reach the top. Then would come the third ordeal. A mere formality, and then she would be freed to go with him. Down the mountain and into the mortal world. Nyima smiled at the thought. Mortal life. It was what she had always wanted, and ever since she had first seen Tenzin riding down the valley road, driving his sheep to the market, she had recognized him as the key to that life.

The first 500 words or so...

2010-11-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

Well, it's a start, isn't it? Yeah, I've fallen victim to N'ame A'postrophitis. Grrr. Stupid alphabet doesn't work the way I want it to. Just pretend it's Wade-Giles or something (even though it ain't.) Here it is:

Then (7 years ago)

Stone Monkey Mountain:

Two thousand haunted steps, some wide and shallow, others narrow and steep, but each inhabited by a hungry ghost, are carved into the western face of the peak. At the bottom, Monkey's Gate marks the entrance: three arches of weathered stone, with the words "Stone Monkey Mountain" written on the plaque over the central arch. A sculpted rhesus leers eternally down from the top of the third pillar. At the far end of the two thousand steps, a small round pavilion clings to a granite outcrop.

Inside the pavilion, Nyima Khandro leaned against the railing and squinted down at a distant figure trudging along the path towards the gate. Behind her, T'hom Chola and Prince Senge sat drinking grape wine and playing go.

One of them set down a stone with a decisive clack. "Is he there yet, this shepherd of yours?" Chola's words were precise, showing no hint that half a dozen empty jars lay scattered by his feet.

"Yes," said Nyima. Tenzin must have started before sunrise, she thought proudly. "He made it through the Forest of Uncountable Paths. That's the first ordeal."

"Not much of an ordeal, now that there's a line of telephone poles marking the easiest road," said Senge.

"And whose fault is that? Highness?" Chola's teeth ground shut on the honorific.

Senge laughed. "You can't blame my father for wanting to be able to contact me. How many other sons does he have?"

Chola grunted. "The boy still has to climb the stairs. Without the word of the Guru Achamo, the spirits won't let him pass."

"He's through the gate," reported Nyima. Laughter bubbled up within her. "He's up to the first landing."

"Impossible!"

Nyima heard stones clattering to the floor behind her.

"The game ---" began Senge reproachfully.

"It's yours," snarled Chola. He was a bear of a man, and when he hurtled himself at the railing, she feared briefly that he would plunge through it and over the cliff. But the wood held. His shadow loomed over Nyima, his aura fierce as a summer storm.

But on this day of all days, she would back away from no one. She pointed down with her chin. "See? There he is."

"Huh," snorted Chola. "I don't believe it! What's that he's holding? There's no talisman you could give him... the spirits wouldn't regard your word any more than they would mine."

"They'd regard the Mapbook of the Lawgiver of Ancient Shambhala," said Senge, who had not stirred from his stone stool.

"It's not a book," said Chola. The man on the stairs crept steadily upwards. Sunlight flashed from the disk hanging around his neck. "It looks like a mirror."

"It is a book," said Nyima. "The Mapbook of the Lawgiver."

"What? All seven volumes?" Disbelief dripped from every word. "A thousand pages per volume, at last count."

"It's a /CD-ROM/," said Nyima, pronouncing the foreign word carefully.

"It's the latest thing," said Senge, yawning pointedly. "As you would know if you ever set foot off this mountain. Available in temple shops all over the capital this year."

So much for the early start...

2010-11-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

"Agh! Stop biting my skirt!"

"WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF!"

"name redacted is pulling my hair!"

"I need new pants!"

And, of course, me writing about five words per minute didn't help... I had to do last minute research, meaning Google and distraction. Bah! Ok. Goal for the day: 2000+ words. It would be nice if I could manage 5000 each day and finish in under 2 weeks. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

"I eat dead people!"

2010-10-27T06:41:00.000-07:00

So I decided to delve more into the background of the main characters. The male love interest was still something of a mystery to me, so I thought about it for awhile, and, um, that's what he told me. His demon (nick)name was "the Carrion Bear". He was known for a method of divination called "reading the gnomon of the carnate". (Would it look more impressive if I used more caps? Reading the Gnomon of the Carnate!) So while he does do the warrior demon thing, he gets his edge from knowing more than others. He can eat a corpse and mystically read past/present/future and pick out a path for himself and for his lover, the Taker of Eyes.

Oh yeah. It seems I have a case of "reincarnated lovers" on my hands. It's sad because she used to trust him completely, but now they hardly remember each other. I think he followed her when she was summoned by the Shambhalans. He cast himself into the wind that blows across the void, losing most of his remaining memories in the process. It took him years, decades, to reach Shambhala. And now he is not a student, but a prisoner of the teacher (whose name I forget or didn't decide on yet.) He's an illegal demon, so the sentence is for life (unless he chooses exile).

There we go. That's my story note for the day. Why am I writing this thing again? I suppose because I feel like it! I haven't read this story yet. Why shouldn't it exist? Hmm? And if I like it, maybe someone else will like it, too, someday. Or not. Anyway, I had a dream. Most of my stories have one or two bits that were inspired by a dream.

No more stuff until I hit 50K!

2010-10-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Heh, can't let my shopping sprees get out of hand. I can already see I'll be distracted with the books and DVDs I've already ordered. No more!

No books, no DVDs, no VCDs, no downloads (except what I already have a subscription for), no more than one youtube video per day, no CDs, no e-books, no comics, no manga, no "borrowing" from the rest of the family...

Not until I have 50000 words of my NaNo story typed in.

I'm declaring it here so I can't lie to myself and pretend I didn't really mean it. Hrmph!

Name the characters, round 2...

2010-10-25T06:28:00.000-07:00

...with one week to go before NaNoWriMo starts. Hmm. Let's see, my 6 year old likes to give everyone names. This morning she says I should be "Mrs. Pompygan". All right. Maybe not for this story. I'll put it in my name file. Too bad the name file isn't much use to me as I've already used up the best names in previous stories. It's time for me to add to the list. Wait, isn't that what I've just been saying?

So yeah. Didn't I once use the rat-across-the-keyboard method for naming demons? That's why I called my random name generator "ratnamer", yes? Hey, I still have it on my computer. Let's see...

"Gweczambleblicztagl Wrautchczrterer"? "Eklionaiffish"? "Iohr Letfithschaipluis"!?

What the hell was I thinking? That was the worst random name generator ever (even given that I have the parameters set for long unpronounceables.)

Well, I did come up with a couple of demon nicknames over the weekend. It's a pity they aren't more inspiring, but these are the ones that stuck.

Taker of Eyes: so-called because she was once famous for her mastery of the Eyetaking Stance. What we need to remember is that demons are nearly immortal (meaning they can heal from just about everything), don't react to pain in the same way as humans, and can function even with massive blood loss. This makes the eyes a good target because even if you can heal them eventually, what matters is that you can be blinded right now. Another popular strategy is limb removal. I don't care if you can grow it back: you're going to have a hard time fighting with no arms or legs (the Monty Python Holy Grail sketch comes to mind). Ditto decapitation. Merely breaking a bone (or the neck or spine) doesn't work as well, because a demon can still get around that quickly. It's demon magic!

Fearless of Envy: this is our mini-baddie, the demon king-in-exile. He's there for the first big fight scene with the nuns. Poor fellow. He's there to show how bad demons can be, tell us about the Woman's demonic past, show how demons are seen in Shambhala, and demonstrate the rules governing the powers and limitations of magic in this fantasy world. And then he dies (after breaking the woman's leg/removing it?). His carcass stays around long enough to get a reunion between the Woman and the Prince. Why is the demon king called "Fearless of Envy"? Uh...um...because! Because I felt like it!

So there we are. I'll try to figure out more of my outline before next Monday.

Marital expectations...

2010-10-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

Story note of the day: Why the woman's first marriage was a failure...

So it's like this: when the Shepherd married her, he thought he'd be getting a fairy wife just like in the stories. She was supposed to use her magic powers to make him rich. The first morning after the wedding, he snuck outside to count his sheep...and was disappointed to find the same number he had before. Gold, jewels, and jade were not served up along with his breakfast. He kept quiet at first, but then his parents began nagging him about it (that was how he convinced them to let him marry a demon, remember? He made all kinds of extravagant promises.) So first he drops some hints, then he just tells her outright...

Meanwhile, the spirits are laughing at them. She can see them but he can't. Well, she went into this marriage because she wanted to be human, didn't she? And human wives try to please their husbands, don't they? So silk is what she knows (from the years being bound at the silk factory), and silk is what she spins from her fingertips (literally?). (She also knows about being a demonic warrior, but she doesn't want to do that for profit.) It's something, but not as much as the Shepherd had hoped for...

Peace for awhile. It's only when they have a child that things really go hideously wrong.

My outline disintegrated...

2010-10-20T06:23:00.001-07:00

Bah. I keep thinking of stuff that happened to this that or the other person, but it doesn't fit into the beautiful Plan that I once had for this novel. Oh well. When NaNo rolls around, I'll just be writing whatever scene comes to mind. I can worry about piecing it all together later. Meanwhile, I should be writing all the ideas down, but I'm not. I have this delusion that I can keep it all straight in my head for the next couple of months. Well, it may be possible. I'm not GMing any games any more, so there's that mental space freed up for novel-ing.

Thought of the day: the Bastard wasn't possessed after all. It's the king-his-father who is, but he doesn't know. And then there's his half-sister, the revolutionary/political prisoner. The Bastard suspects that she was responsible for the terrorist attacks, but he doesn't want to know. He doesn't even want to kill her (and can't bring himself to do it personally), but he believes her death is necessary to progress into the modern, demon-free New Shambhala. It's a symbolic thing. He, like all the Shambhalans, must reject the demonic!

Meanwhile, remember that we have demon-hunters, monks (roughly divided into mountain, village, city, and road sects), and spiritualists. And the problem with demons isn't that they can do bad things to people (anyone can do that. Even I could in theory go out and buy a gun and shoot someone) but that they probably WANT to do bad things to people. And they're good at it. And they're just not human. But the distinction blurs between demons and spirits... out in the countryside, people do have their hungry ghosts that they secretly feed babies to. Some of the older ones are worse than the demons. (Ghosts who are independent of the organizations in the outer world!)

What do demons do all day?

2010-10-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

At least, why do the Shambhalans enslave them?

Ok, it's like this. They still have remnants of their old magic tech from the bad old days. In this case, mandalas!

They can use a mandala to drill a hole into Infinite Time and bind it into common time. Remember from the other series that Infinite Time is bad news for mortal life (those two prophets ran around trying to plug up leaks: that was their whole raison d'etre), so we need to have a demon sitting inside each mandala converting the power into usable form (heat, electricity, etc.) It's Eeeeevil energy, but mostly clean. Let's not talk about the long term effects right now. Eventually, the demon sucks up enough thought/biodata/whatever from the mortals around it that it can incarnate properly if released. After 100 years, the law says that the demon is to be freed. About one percent choose to stay on Earth (and get marked and "adopted" by a sorcerer/priest type). The rest are banished back to whatever hell they were summoned from.

So while enslaved, the life of a demon is pretty boring. Not much of a life at all. Once freed, they can eventually get a human style life for themselves, though they do face some prejudice. Would you let a demon (however tame) marry your son or daughter? Especially as human/demon hybrid babies are unlikely to survive without illegal interventions (like feeding it a mortal baby to give it a stable body-print). My main character got as far as the "giving birth to a hybrid baby" part, but she couldn't bring herself to murder an innocent. So yeah. That's why she's not the happiest person in the world (and the marriage didn't last.)

Short version: "Kill, kill, hate, hate! Maim, murder, mutilate!" (What a demon thinks while trapped inside a mandala.)

Another day, another story note...

2010-10-12T04:36:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's October, which means that after a month or two of messing about with other story ideas (which I dropped after not being able to come up with good endings for them), I'm back to the main NaNoWriMo novel. For once, I already know which (out of the half dozen stories that are always lurking about in the back of my mind) I want to work on at the moment. Yes, it's that stupid romance and action in Shambhala thing.

This year, my goal is to 1) finish the novel, however many words it takes and 2) write a novel that I myself want to read. Some of my short stories I've kinda liked (maybe not brilliant, but at least I thought they were ok!) but the novels...eurgh...

So today, I'm thinking about where the "demons" came from... I realize that yes, they are actually demons (in the sense that I use the word in the world this novel is set in), but they're "lost" demons from desolate hells. That is, they come from planes that have been utterly drained of life. Wracked by war and abandoned even by the Dark Queen of the Abyss (or whatever I'm calling her these days), they are broken places scoured by the mind-destroying wind that blows through the Void. The "Dry Kingdom" where the Salt Gang are headed to now is one such place. A few of the planes bordering Shambhala are also, as a result of the wars from the time of the Golem Empire (yeah, remember that other story? The one you decided was also set in Shambhala, but back when the rulers were basically gods?)

So the lost demons have lost their bodies and most of their minds. They're worse off than the goblins. They wander into the world of the living and latch onto the first embodied, sapient mind they find. So the Bear killed someone, and she can't forget that... he is living a stolen life. She, on the other hand, was summoned into Shambhala and gained her incarnation more slowly (over a century!). Note also the "latching onto the first sapient mind" thing: they instinctively seek out "complexity", so people who work out in the borders try to keep their thoughts calm and wordless if they can. The monks/nuns who defend Shambhala against the demons do that "Empty Mind" thing. In the chapter with the demon attack, note that the younger novices have trouble with this...that's why they were targeted.

The Prince's Mother has Evil Hair!

2010-10-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just a note to myself: the queen was a princess from a sub-kingdom where they had a tradition of magic hair/beards/eyebrows/nose hair/whatever. When the prince was moping after the Woman ran off to marry the human shepherd, the queen berated her son for wasting his time. She spent all that effort to get him a good education, not to play at love. This was the last straw for him: he said he'd show her what he'd learned! He's improved on the Blood Attunement Sutra... except it doesn't work as well as he'd like. When he tries it on his mother, she fights back (the magic hair is loosed!) and it ends badly. Her mind is destroyed.

This is when the Revolutionary sees that she can return. Way back when, her mother had fought the Queen and escaped with one of her (magic!) hairs. Put a spell on it and put it in a cylinder of (something), trying to burn. It glows red hot for years but never burns, even after the Revolutionary's mother dies. But now that the Queen has lost her power, the cylinder has only ash in it. So it's time to plan a trip back to the homeland...

A bit after this is also when the King makes noises about abdicating again (what with his wife in the state she's in and all). The Prince mutters darkly (but needs to refine his powers before he tries to take over.) The King just likes to talk about it, though. He wouldn't really quit.

I suck at the food pr0n too...

2010-09-21T06:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish I could write the yummy delicious food porn, but then realize that I made my characters vampires, or vegetarians (so much for writing about the scorpions-on-a-stick or adventures in eel-cooking). Gah. But then I realize it would all just come out like this:

Last night's dinner: Some random fish thing

Ingredients:

fresh trout fillet (one per person)
cooking oil
olive oil, lemon juice, soy sauce, ginger, red and black pepper (mix and marinade the fish in it for a few minutes)
a bunch of fresh spinach (wash and trim this first)
cooking oil, salt, garlic (chop into chunks and put in the oil)
bread or rice or something

Heat oil in pan. Add the trout fillets and pour "marinade" over it. Cook on medium heat for 6-7 minutes on each side. Add a bit of water as needed. Heat oil in other pan. Add the spinach. Cook on high heat for about 5 minutes (stirring frequently) until done. Serve with the bread or rice or whatever. Await appreciative reaction.

"Fish! Again!? Ewwww!"

"I hate this supper!"

"Remmie! OFF! No stealing food!"

"Can I have macaroni and cheese?"

* headdesks *

Um. Yeah. Maybe I'll try writing my paranormal erotica/romance again. (But not the one with the sweet cuddly tentacle rape. The whole "Sex with everyone in a 10' radius" area attack is just...words fail me.) So I have this angel/demon thing I wanted to do, but then I keep getting distracted with random thoughts, like, "Ok, so the angels are all naked except for their robes of Light. So what does that look like exactly!?" and "Just how perverted am I for thinking Brigitte Lin is soooo hot in that scene where she's being tortured in that movie that I've watched too many times and how can I rip off that scene so it works in my story?" Well, it's something to do before NaNo. (I'm going to try to write the Shambhala romance during NaNo...which is just over a month away!)

Distraction, thy name is Crawl!

2010-09-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

Which is to say, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a free open-source roguelike. Agh! The free games are the most addictive, and this is a really nice roguelike. Nothing like running around beating ASCII characters into submission (or dying a sudden horrible death as you are surrounded by a herd of killer Y's. Curse those yaks!) Ah yes, youngsters today are coddled, with their fancy graphics and saved games and lack of permadeath... *shakes cane*

Actually, I'm not that hardcore. I use the tiled version, which has little icons to represent the various monsters, items, dungeon features, etc. And the mouse controls are handy, especially as it lets you navigate by clicking on a mini-map that shows the explored part of your current level. Plus I cheat and disable the "player ghosts", so I don't keep getting killed by the ghosts of my previous characters, who always seem so much more effective against ME than they ever were when alive and I was playing them! Confused and poisoned and poisoned again and dead within a few rounds every time... Damn that teleport delay. (This game doesn't teleport you instantly after reading a teleportation scroll, but waits a few rounds, which is often enough to kill you.)

Anyway, I have yet to win (or "Ascend", as they call it). Or even make it into the deeper levels of the dungeon. I had a hard time keeping my spell casters alive, so now I'm trying a Troll Monk (basically, relying on unarmed combat and throwing stuff, as trolls suck slightly less at that than they do at everything else) of Kiku (which is a necromancer's god, so all the necromantic spellbooks he keeps giving me are so much toilet paper, but I like the pizza (troll style --- fresh corpses!) delivery service and protection from torment). This makes a refreshing change from D & D, where we're told players can't play trolls as level 1 starting characters blah blah blah level adjustment blah blah blah racial hit dice blah blah blah unbalanced blah blah blah...

So let's hope I get bored with this game quickly, or I'll never get any writing done again...

It's too easy to buy books nowadays!

2010-08-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

Arrrgh!!! Long ago in the dark ages, I used to carry around pieces of paper with my list of books I wanted to find, and once in awhile in a used book store, I'd stumble across one or two and be all happy and excited. Now I get obsessed about some subject or other (telling myself it's RESEARCH for my work-in-progress, RESEARCH, damn it!) and spend a morning and way too much money on amazon.com and everything (mostly) gets delivered to my doorstep in the next week or so.

ARRRGH! Do I have enough book shelf space for these books? No. Am I going to have enough time/energy to READ all these books? No. Will I ever manage to resell these books? No. (I can't stand to part with books. I might want to read them! Someday!) Did I ever finish reading all the books from my previous obsession/book-buying binge? Hell no! All I've accomplished is to make my kids sad when all these packages start arriving for me and not for them...

But I do look at the pretty pictures and maps. I love pictures and maps. Hrmph.

Ok. That's it. No more ordering anything online until October.

*mumbles guiltily and swears to read something from the previous set*

Another day, another peach crisp!

2010-08-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

Ha ha! The box is empty. Finally. Well, it was peach (and blackberry) season in Maryland again, and we could hardly miss out on that, could we? So last weekend I took the kids to our favorite pick-your-own farm. It's weird how the boxes seem so small while we're at the farm, but once we get home they suddenly seem to grow bigger...

Argh! So once the peaches start getting moldy and mushy, I have to do something with them. It's a good thing "crisps" are easy to make and eat. (Gone within hours, usually.) I'm sure the same will happen when apple season rolls around, though the apples do tend to keep better. (But I think we end up picking more of them!)

Mmm... peaches.... so yeah. I'm just killing time until it's done cooking.

The subconscious has spoken. Shambhala it is!

2010-08-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

Or at least, snippets of the story keep writing themselves in my head while I walk the dog every morning. More of the background is coming to me, and reasons why X did Y. So yeah. I'll try to finish this one between now and November so I can start something fresh when NaNo rolls around again.

Cliche of the day: the misunderstood dying confession. "I should never...never have taught him..." (dies) Name names, people! Is that too hard for you? *facepalms* Of course, as I don't know what their damn names are, either, it's hardly fair of me to blame the characters! (Once I know their names, I think I'll start on my first draft.

Not just the names of the characters, come to that. I need names for their Super Secret Elite Powers. So far, all I have is the "Blood Tuning Sutra", which is some kind of psychic tick magic. And I know the Shambhalan adepts use mandalas to trap alien spirits into human time to use as energy sources. (The evil bastard half-brother of the prince is trying to get more dams and windmills built, and he'd like a nuclear plant but that's difficult without kidnapping a bunch of foreign engineers...)

P.S. No, coal is not really an option because they exhausted their coal deposits hundreds of years ago, during their "Golem Empire" phase. Remember what I said about golems being energy-hogs back in story 4? Hmm? Hmm? (Though they wouldn't be called "golem" there. Obviously a translation convention.) Same with natural gas. The Shambhalans don't want to rely on imports from the rest of the human world.

Onward to Shambhala!

2010-08-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

Mwah ha ha ha! More mythical lands to ravage! Last time, it was Kukayne (aka Cockaigne), which I had set under the rule of Mother Goose and her order of weregoose nuns, which got invaded by the goblins. This time it will be the fabled Buddhist "Pure Land" I'm gonna mess with (along with Shangri-La, while I'm at it.)

Actually, this is a side-step from the main "Salt Gang Chronicles" sequence. I had two new characters which I planned to introduce in story 7 or 8 (I know, I know, I haven't even written number 6 yet!), but had no clue about their backgrounds. Then it came to me they they were a romantically bonded couple, and that they came out of this romance plot (hey, I've always wanted to write a romance), and the details slowly solidified. By which I mean, a bunch of cliches accrued in the rough outline I'm scribbling in my notebook. The love triangle! The evil-but-handsome prince! The good-hearted monster framed for murder! Revenge! Misunderstandings! The bastard half-brother of the prince who turns out to be just as evil! The political prisoner/revolutionary! But I didn't know where exactly it was set, except that it should be a kingdom connected to, but hidden from, the ordinary world.

And then it came to me that it was obviously Shambhala! I can set it without much trouble in the geographical region I want (roughly speaking, in the mountains between China and India, well, probably in the western Kunlun range on the edge of Tibet). I still have to come up with names for the characters. Looks like I'm gonna end up mutilating bits of traditional Sanskrit and Tibetan words/names. Ah ha ha ha ha! (It's either that, or continue referring to people as V, W, X, Y, Z, etc. as I do in my preliminary notes.) And of course my Shambhala will not exactly be such a holy place... the inhabitants will be more highly magical than those of the outside world, and in the past they did come out and meddle with Tibetan (and others in the area) politics/religion, but the Shambhalans are as corrupt as anyone... And it looks like Time is going to be an element here again. Cycles! Periodic blah! Mandalas!

Looking into it...there's tons of interesting small kingdoms that existed all over Asia that I never learned about in school. It's a pity! The world is so big, and history so long, compared to the size of textbooks and school hours. I come across them here and there and wish I knew more. (For example, I never heard of the kingdom of Dali until I started reading Jin Yong's books. Now I want to visit it...must have some cool historical sites there!) So yeah. I'm gonna make up my own version of a small secluded magical kingdom. The problem now is that it feels like it'll take at least a whole novel to do this...hrm...yeah. I dunno. Start it now? Or use this as my NaNo writing project and write the next two Salt Gang stories first? I've been doing them in order so far. I suppose I shouldn't let myself get distracted. But I do want to write this one sometime!

Finally done with my Salt Gang story #5...

2010-07-11T15:40:00.001-07:00

"The Empress of Bells". Whew, that seemed to take forever. And things didn't quite go as I outlined. I don't know if I like the story, but at least I've done the first draft and now I know what happened. Two of the recurring characters got killed, but not the two I had originally planned! Bah! Also wrecked another kingdom/plane of Hell, ha ha ha. So much for wuxia, eh? I get carried away with the demons/angels/magic/fairies/blah blah blah.

I have some ideas for the next two stories (and that will be the end of the "season"), but I think I'll take a break for awhile. Wait until after I go to the beach to even try starting the next one. :-) And hopefully the air conditioning in my house will be fixed by then. It's pretty hideous here in the 100 degree weather with no AC. But the last couple of days were nice, so I felt cool enough to turn on the computer during the day and type. (About 4500 words today. I was really really really sick of my story.)

The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang...whew, that's over...or is it!?

2010-06-27T07:13:00.001-07:00

Yes, well, I'm such a sad Doctor Who fan that the wait for the season finale rendered me pretty much unable to concentrate on anything else for a week! And now that I've watched it...

What a cheap trick! Damn cop out! The Doctor was in the unescapable box for what, ten minutes? (While we had the "previously" recap and Rory's scene). "And then a miracle occurs" indeed. Grrrrr! If you're going to let that kind of time loop (the sort that in the New Adventures they claimed was caused by Time herself) in the show, there's no dramatic tension left. If the Doctor is already out, of course he can easily get himself out. (Like me muttering to myself, "If I had my glasses on, I would be able to see to find my glasses.") Even worse, they didn't really explain anything. River Song, the mysterious voice, why the TARDIS was exploding, why it would cause the universe to end, we didn't find any of that out. I don't really like multi-season plot arcs. One of the things I always liked about Doctor Who was the self-contained nature of the stories.

Ok, that said, I loved the rest of the episode, so I'm willing to forgive the cop out, but I'm rewriting it slightly in my head to something I like better. My personal version of the story:

The Doctor does NOT get out of the Pandorica. He's stuck in it for about 2000 years, until the universe ceases to exist around him. Only the Pandorica is left. Then that goes, too, and the Doctor is finally released. By then, it's too late to save the universe. Half mad, the Doctor thinks "to hell with the Laws of Time, there's no time left to bother with any laws" and crosses his own timeline. He gives the time vortex manipulator one final push and sends himself sideways (to "when" the Earth still existed) and back to 102 AD, and releases himself from the box. However, this destabilizes his personal timeline, so this "2000+ years Future Doctor" vanishes at some point. "Now Doctor" finds Rory and Amy, does the same thing with putting Amy in the box, jumps forward in time and does much of what he does in the televised episode. When "2000+ years Future Doctor" vanishes, he realizes he needs to go back and release himself. Fez-and-mop Doctor version 1 appears to Rory. This is what we see in the opening and where (in my deluded vision) the episode "The Big Bang" picks up from. "2000+ years Future Doctor" never appears now. However, this way, it makes me feel better that the trap really did do something to him and he didn't need a miracle to escape!

Ok, there, I've typed that out so I can stop thinking about it! Time to get back to the story I was supposed to be writing. At least I managed to hack out an outline for the second half, so I should be able to finish it in the next couple of days. *suppresses hysterical laughter*.

[Edited to add: "So what about all the other times we had loops like this? "Blink"? "The Lodger"? Multi-Doctor stories? My theory is that the Time Lords do have the power to insert loops into the universe, but this type of loop is more damaging (because you have to poke holes into the continuum) than the simple repeating timeloops which they use more frequently. They only use it in emergencies (or if some Time Lord goes mad). The Doctor can do the same thing, with the help of his TARDIS (or vice versa), but he tries to keep his interventions minimal. The 7th Doctor probably went too far with it (in the novels), and the 11th is showing signs of falling down the same slippery slope. The intervention in this case was far from minimal, plus there aren't any Time Lords around (unless they turn out to be behind it all next season!) and the TARDIS was exploding, plus the Doctor wouldn't score any drama points for using such a cheap trick to resolve a major cliffhanger, so that's why I insist he got out some other way...]

Argh! It's June already!

2010-06-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

So it's paper fan season again. No, wait, it's time to plant the pumpkin seeds. Maybe. No, it's tick and Lyme disease season. No, it's time for the first round of beans from our cute little plants. No, it's school concerts and shows season. No, it's the girls' birthdays... ARRGH! Whatever. It clearly isn't novel or story writing season for me.

And the stupid deer came into our backyard and ate my tomato plants. Stupid deer! They don't even taste any good! I had hoped the stinky clumps of garlic chives (those things really are weed-like once they're established) would keep the deer away, but no. It's not even as if the tomato plants taste any good. Grrr. So I ended up attempting to transplant some of the volunteers from the happy happy cherry tomato plant I had last year. However, I suck at gardening, so they will probably all die. I suck so much that the tomato plants I started from seed inside were tiny feeble things compared to the ones randomly growing outside. Bah! I didn't even think they'd grow like that outside in our climate. We'll see what happens...

I hate ticks. Did I mention? I've always hated ticks. Big ticks, little ticks, all evil evil evil. I'd try that repellent stuff the vet gives me, but unlike my dog, I do bathe more than once a month. Darn.

On the plus side, the school concerts were surprisingly musical! The teachers are amazing people. We had the 6th grade band, the 6th grade orchestra, then the 7th grade ones....ai... that was the only drawback. So many kids participating that they have to split them up into so many groups that we were there for three hours.

You'd think I could spin a story out of all this. Hmm. I did want to have something involving a music school (probably descended from my "Firebird and Violin" thing which...I don't remember much about). And the invasion of the evil alien plants. But I have yet to get around to writing them.

The White Tiger Billion Goods Company (Doctor Who)

2010-05-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

This is the second story I wrote for the Big Finish Short Trips thing (got it done right before the deadline.) It was also rejected. Heh. Features the 8th Doctor and Charley.

A picnic. That's all Charley asked for: a sunny meadow, a blanket, and a basket of food. Not monsters, not deaths, and not endless chases up and down corridors. The Doctor did his best to oblige.

"Saena Prime, a bucolic paradise of villages in perfect harmony with the countryside. Overly regimented for my taste: they achieve their harmony by regulating every last breath and footprint." The Doctor headed for the TARDIS doors. "Still, it's the perfect place for a picnic, as long as we keep a low profile. Just smell that air!"

Charley followed him outside and inhaled deeply. "I smell smoke." She found its source in the village square below. "People with torches, about to light...a bonfire?"

"Probably some traditional summer celebration. All the better. The locals will be distracted."

"There's an old woman tied to that pole. They're going to burn her!"

"They what?" The Doctor spun around. "We have to stop them!"

He dashed back into the TARDIS and re-emerged with what looked like bright orange guns. "Here. Andromedan fire extinguisher. Point the nozzle at the base of the fire and pull this lever."

They hurtled towards the village, the Doctor using one hand to fish an official-looking card out of his pockets as they ran.

"Everyone freeze! Health and safety inspection!" The Doctor flashed the card at the startled crowd, then dived forward and shocked the growing flames into submission with a spray of white foam. Charley followed suit on the other side. "You are in violation of Regulation 7532 governing carbon combustion in open spaces."

"But we have a permit for the fire!"

"Ah, but not for the smoke. I see no record of form 7532-C on file." Then he muttered out of the side of his mouth, "Knife. Left front pocket." The Doctor aimed Charley at the prisoner. "We'll be taking her, of course, as evidence."

"Now wait just a minute..."

"No time!" The Doctor took the freed woman by one arm while Charley supported her on the other side and navigated back through the mob, brandishing his card as a shield. "Quick, Charley, back to the TARDIS."

"...that's a library card!" shouted the closest torch-wielding villager. "Get them!"

The Doctor dropped the card and the woman's arm to fire foam straight at the man's face. "Not today, thank you. Run!"

They barely made it back to the TARDIS ahead of the mob. The Doctor hit the dematerialization switch while the old woman collapsed, coughing and wheezing, into an armchair.

"Don't worry. We're safe here." Charley fetched the woman a cup of water. "This is the Doctor and I'm Charlotte Pollard."

"Felicity Chen, eternally in your debt," gasped the old woman once she could speak again.

"Well, we could hardly let them burn you at the stake," said Charley.

"Indeed," said the Doctor. "What did they have against you, Mrs. Chen?"

"I'm from off-world. Mistake. Meant to land at Saena Secundus."

Charley eyed the Doctor. "Just as well we left, then. 'Bucolic paradise,' you said?"

The Doctor coughed. "It's been a while since my last visit. I don't remember them being quite so xenophobic. Anyway. Saena Secundus, main spaceport. Will that do?"

"Wonderfully!"

The journey didn't take long. The old woman was recovered enough by then to hobble out on her own feet. She marvelled at the blue police box shape. "It's very compact."

"I find it convenient," said the Doctor.

"And the interior! A real eye-opener. A perfect home, except..." The old woman hesitated.

"Except what?" asked Charley.

"It's only my bad taste that I find any fault in it. Except it's lacking one thing. A Nine Happiness White Tiger Clock. Thank you so much for saving my life!" She grasped the Doctor's hand between both of hers. "Good bye!"

Mrs. Chen was soon lost in the anonymity of the spaceport.

The Doctor blinked at the glossy flyer he found himself holding.

"What's that?"

"'Come to the Grand Opening of the White Tiger Billion Goods Company,'" read the Doctor. "'Spend one thousand imperial flying tortoises and receive a free gift...'"

"Isn't that redundant?"

"'...of a special collector's edition of our famous Nine Happiness White Tiger Clock. Offer ends soon!'"

"It's a trap," suggested Charley.

"Probably not." The Doctor stared in bemusement at the illustration. "Who baits a trap with something so...kitsch?"

"Oh, please, Doctor. You can't be thinking of going?" Charley sighed. "So, what can you buy with one thousand imperial flying tortoises?"

"About one milligrain of jethrik, or a ten year subscription to the New Galactic Herald. Come on, Charley, let's go."

The journey took no longer than the previous one, though it spanned a greater distance.

"Here we are. Orange yellow green. Remember that." The Doctor nodded at the striped column next to the TARDIS. "I hate forgetting where I parked."

"In the middle of Kitchenware," said Charley. She frowned at the brightly lit displays. "Miles of shelves and not a shop assistant in sight."

"Oh, it's completely automated," explained the Doctor. "It's basically a vending machine the size of a small moon."

"Lovely. I can't say I care much for the background music. Or the merchandise. Do we really need a ---" Charley paused to read the label. "A Draconian egg slicer? Or a salamander grill? Or a cast iron karahi?"

"Mmm. Maybe not," conceded the Doctor. "Perhaps we'll find something more interesting...this way!" He strode off confidently in a random direction.

"Doctor! That wall. It moved!" Charley stopped in her tracks. "So this is a trap after all."

"Nonsense," scoffed the Doctor. "The place is fitted with smart shelves, that's all. They're all the rage in this time zone. A computer tracks your eye movements and deduces via a rather ingenious algorithm where your interests lie, then generates a path to maximize your expected spending."

"It's watching us? Ugh, what a thought!" Charley flung an arm over her eyes and tried to follow the Doctor without looking at anything.

She studied their fellow customers, instead. "Hmmm. Not much of a crowd, for a Grand Opening."

"Well, it's a big place. Besides, places like this, if it's not the Grand Opening, it's the Store Closing sale. I once knew a shop that was officially closing for over ten years."

"Never mind that. Doctor, that man over there looks just like you. I mean, exactly like you, except with shorter hair."

"What man? Oh, him." The Doctor sauntered up to his lookalike. "Hello, there. What do you think of this --- ah --- sonic bread machine?"

"Shuh shuh fablo!" said the man.

"I quite agree. It uses sound waves to make the dough rise. That'd come in handy in the Yeast Exclusion Zone."

"Wunka shoom. Aloka ha ha ha!"

"I see." The Doctor frowned and turned to Charley. "You're right, he does look like me."

"But what is he saying?" whispered Charley. "I thought the TARDIS translated everything."

"It can't translate what isn't there. He isn't really talking at all. In fact ---" The Doctor abruptly swung a hand right through the man's face. " --- he isn't there at all! Randomized holographic reflections, generated to make the customer feel at ease."

"It's creepy!"

"Ekili dekily," burbled the hologram. "Help. Help us. We can't get ---"

"Wait, what did you say? Doctor..."

"Yes, I heard."

The hologram hiccuped. "Ekili dekily. Help. Help us. We can't get." Blip. "Ekili dekily. Help..."

"Sounds like a message. But why is it repeating itself like that?"

"A sign of hasty programming," muttered the Doctor as his holographic reflection continued looping. He squinted up at the ceiling. "The projectors are up there. I wonder if I can access an interface... Charley, hold the shelf steady."

He hauled himself onto the nearest display and climbed. Charley grabbed the edge, but as she followed the Doctor's progress, the shelf slid away from under her hands.

"With your eyes, Charley! Keep your focus on the bread machine."

"Ah, right." She dropped her gaze to the machine. The hologram continued pleading behind her. She heard the whine of the sonic screwdriver, then a click.

"As I thought. Now if I can... Charley!" The Doctor scrambled for his footing as the shelf jerked beneath him.

"Sorry! But someone's coming!"

"Where?" The Doctor dropped to the ground with a thump. "It's Mrs. Chen!"

The old woman hobbled purposefully towards them, shelves parting before her.

"Is she a holo-whatsit too?"

"I doubt it. Or the shelves wouldn't register her presence."

The old woman shuffled to a stop before them. She raised her hands and clapped. The holograms disappeared from all around them in a fizz of static. "A glitch. The White Tiger Billion Goods Company apologizes for the inconvenience."

"Hello, Mrs. Chen." The Doctor smiled. "How pleasant to see you again!"

"'Again'? Forgive me, but you must be mistaken. We've never met."

"Of course we have," said Charley indignantly. "Of all the...wait. Doctor, do you think we've arrived here before she left?"

"No, it's not that."

"I understand." The old woman smiled. "Perhaps it was one of my sisters. We all look the same to you."

"No, it's not that, either," protested the Doctor. "Unless..."

"It's ok! No worries. I am here to welcome you to our Premium Membership Club." The old woman stepped forward to shake both of their hands simultaneously.

"Charley, keep back!" The Doctor dodged away, but Charley was a beat too slow.

"Ow!" Charley snatched her hand back when the old woman released it. The image of a tiger's snarling face was inked deeply into her palm. "That burns!"

The old woman reached for the Doctor. She said sternly, "The upgrade is mandatory!"

The Doctor looked at his hand. "You mean that literally, don't you?"

Then with his other hand, he aimed the sonic screwdriver at her head. It buzzed shrilly. The old woman crumpled. The Doctor caught her and opened a panel on the back of her skull. "And you really do look just like your 'sisters'."

"She's a robot?"

"Something like that." The Doctor fiddled with the controls. "I've switched her power off."

"And the one we met before?"

"Yes. That would explain...yes. The people of Saena Prime have an intense dislike for artificial life forms."

"I'll say. But she seemed so human!"

"In a way, she is." The Doctor frowned. "Hello, what's this? Emergency power?"

The old woman stirred, joints creaking. She croaked, "Emergency program...online. You must...leave...now. She is...marked. Danger."

The Doctor turned to Charley and seized her hand. "What kind of danger? Poison?"

The old woman stood. "Marked for special packaging. Must go to...Central processing." Her voice changed. "Help. Help us. We can't get out. The system won't let anyone leave. We're in Central, but the doors won't hold for long. I can't override the main computer, but I can hack into the emergency protocols and record a message, piggybacked on the PR droids."

"I see," said the Doctor.

"You do?"

"We have to get out of here." The Doctor pulled Charley after him. "Which way to Central?"

"This way." The old woman hurried away, shelves shifting away to give her a straight path. "Don't waver..."

The Doctor and Charley followed.

Then the ground began to vibrate. A deep rumble shook their bones. Something very large and very heavy was approaching.

Charley risked a quick glance over her shoulder. A vast machine rolled towards them, walls prostrating themselves before its bulk.

"The Mobile Packaging Unit!" cried the old woman. "It's homing in on her. Run!"

But more walls slammed shut, barring their escape. The Doctor pushed and glared at the shelves in vain. "They're locked."

"The packer projects an override signal."

Charley searched for something to defend herself with. She settled for what looked like a spear. "It says this Githarian lobster pick can cut through the diamond shells of Githarian lobsters. Let's see what it does to --- agh!"

The pick clattered aside as a scaly steel tendril wrapped itself around her wrist, then reeled her inexorably closer.

"Stop!" The old woman inserted herself between Charley and the machine, clamping her hands over the tendril. Charley felt a shock numb her arm, then staggered back, suddenly freed.

"This way!" The Doctor tugged at her wrist. "I've over-ridden the override."

"But..."

"Go!" said the old woman. "It will process me, first. That will take time."

"Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Chen!" The Doctor and Charley fled, leaving ominous hisses, grinding whirs, and squeals behind them. But without Mrs. Chen's inhuman gaze to hold their path, the walls turned mazelike again, veering this way and that.

"This won't do!" The Doctor extracted a red cricket ball from his pockets and sent it rolling before them. "Keep your eyes on the ball! Focus!"

At first it seemed to work. Then Charley found blurry images flickering around her, demanding her attention.

"Holographic pop-ups!" said the Doctor. "Ignore them!"

She tried. She could hear the rumbling noise of the machine catching up behind them, and tried not to think about what "processing" might entail.

"Ignore it! We're almost there."

Charley nailed her gaze to the red splotch of the ball. But wait! There were now two of them. Four. Eight. Which one to follow? She couldn't tell which one was real.

Then she realized she couldn't see the Doctor anymore.

"Charley!"

Steel whipped around her ankles. Her wrists. Her waist. Coils tightened.

Ice stung at the back of the neck.

Then white.

White.

Silence.

Nothing.

***

"Once upon a time," said the Doctor, "one of the programming geniuses of the White Tiger Trading Company, tired of implementing the headache-inducing algorithms developed by the marketing mathematicians, decided to simplify his work."

It took Charley a long time before she understood that she was awake.

"He said to himself, this genius, that it was obvious that the longer a customer spent shopping, the more they would buy. Thus all he had to do was to program the system to maximize everyone's stay in the White Tiger Billion Goods Trading Company."

It took even longer for her to remember who she was.

"Don't worry, the paralysis will wear off. But you see what went wrong. A careless definition of 'everyone' and 'maximize', and hey presto, the computer responded by packing everyone into stasis bottles and shelving them with the rest of the merchandise!"

Charley tried to speak, couldn't. So how did we get out?

"I reached Central while you were being packaged. After that, it was simple to shut the whole thing down. First, though, I had to get everyone out."

"How?"

"Ah. I ended up ordering the lot and having everyone delivered to the TARDIS! And do you know, it cost me just over one thousand imperial flying tortoises. And you know what that means!"

Charley finally forced her eyes open. A tiger-shaped clock ticked away on the console. "It's tiny! And...it doesn't match the rest of your decor."

The Doctor's face fell. "No. Isn't that the way it always is? Now, about that picnic I promised you..."

Arvak's Ransom (Doctor Who)

2010-05-12T05:16:00.001-07:00

This is a story I wrote for the 2010 Big Finish Short Trips New Writers' Opportunity. As it was rejected, I'm posting it here for lack of anything better to do. :-) The limit was 2500 words (I barely made it!). Features the 7th and 8th Doctors and no companions.

Burning ice, biting flame; that is how life begins, say the storytellers. But this far from the origin, spacetime is a vast frozen darkness that breeds only monsters. It is so cold that even an icy wasteland like the fifth planet of the Arvak system can be considered an oasis of warmth and life.

But Gann, shivering with all his feathers fluffed inside a triply insulated environment suit, can only think how damned cold this planet is. He stands outside the sturdy dome that shelters his laboratory and watches the moon rise, cursing the waste as his body heat radiates into the void.

"That's the last moon," says Gann to his dog. They are the only two lifeforms on Arvak 5, and the dog is questionable. It certainly has no comprehension of Gann's words, being guided by a harness of delicately woven threads of coded light. "The last one, so this must be our final test."

The thing that Gann thinks of as his dog wags the conceptual equivalent of a tail and licks at Gann's gauntleted hand.

"Good dog, Sig, there's a good dog," says Gann. He knows it's a mistake to think of the creature as anything other than "Experimental Subject Sigma", especially given the failures of "Alpha" through "Rho", but he can't help himself. He checks the time, double-checks the coordinates, triple-checks the instructions, then finally allows himself to input the command sequence.

"Experimental Subject Sigma, ready and go dog go!"

The dog is gone from his side. Like a fading thought, like a shadow falling, it is gone without any hint of movement or existence.

Gann stares up through his visor at the moon, tracing his dog's path in his mind. He holds his breath, then lets it out in a laugh. The dog is already back. Has always been there. "You did it? Of course you did! Good dog."

Gann can hardly sleep that night. The next night will give him his proof.

The next night, Gann and his dog are outside again, watching the moon.

Halfway up the sky, the moon loses its lustre and slowly, slowly balloons outwards into a cloud of dust.

Gann is mesmerized. His dog has defied time and space to chase down tomorrow's moon, yesterday. It can fetch him anything from anywhere in this system, destroy anything, at any moment in his week. But Gann needs more. He triple-checks the next program, activates the command. "It's time, Sig. Time to go after the dragon!"

The dog flickers out of existence once more.

Gann gazes up towards the empty sector of space where once the fourth planet of the Arvak system would have spun. Not completely empty: it holds the sludge of dying thoughts from which he fished what would become Experimental Subject Sigma. And it holds his own past.

***

"What can I get you, sir?" The boy Gann couldn't help but stare at the stranger, because he had never seen anyone as strange as this: featherless and pale, covered in heavy white clothes unmarked by clan insignia and wearing a barbarian's hat. A furled umbrella leaned against his chair. The boy wondered why he needed an umbrella when he already had a hat.

"Ah, hello!" The man smiled, doffing the hat. "I'll be having one of your famous hravelberry pastries. The best in the galaxy, so I've heard."

"Right away, sir." It didn't take long to fetch the plate from the kitchen, but the man wasn't at his table anymore.

He was standing at the window, staring up at the sky. He spoke in a low, urgent voice, without turning around. "It's wrong. All wrong. Can't you hear it?"

"Hear what?" asked the boy, unsure what to do with the plate. "Sir, I have your order..."

"They're coming. The TARDIS... must return to the TARDIS." The man turned and glared fiercely at the boy, then hurried out the door. Once outside, he broke into a run, one hand clapped over his hat.

On impulse, the boy ran after him, still holding the plate. "Hey! Wait!"

The man disappeared into a tall, blue shed on the side of the road. The boy was surprised to see it, as it hadn't been there that morning. Even so, he knocked on what he guessed to be the door. "Sir? Your order..."

The door opened. "No. Not order. Chaos! Pure chaos."

The hooked handle of the umbrella caught the boy around the elbow. He cried out in surprise, dropping his plate, but the man dragged him into the shed before he could recover. He didn't even notice the doors shutting behind him. "But...but it's..."

"I know, I know, bigger on the inside," said the stranger. "I'm called the Doctor, by the way. Brace yourself."

"Why?" Even as the word left his beak, the ground shuddered under him, throwing him to the floor, where he slid until his back hit a wall. From this unaccustomed angle, he watched the Doctor race around the central pillar, hands frantically working the controls of this strange machine. It must be a machine. No animal ever made such a hideous, grinding cry.

"No!" The Doctor slammed a fist into the controls. "Too late. They must have scented the TARDIS and jumped the timelines ahead of us. I'm too late. I've failed you, boy. All of you. I'm sorry."

Bewildered, the boy crawled to the doors. He couldn't find a handle, so he pried at the edges. "Please, let me out."

"I can't."

"But Cook will be missing me."

"No."

"Then I have to go home. My parents..."

"They're gone, too. I'm sorry," he repeated.

"Everyone?" The boy wasn't sure what he was asking, but something in the Doctor's voice filled him with horror.

"Everyone."

The boy was stunned. Unable to grasp it.

"Everyone. Your whole planet. Millions of species. Now gone forever." His voice dropped, but the anger remained. "And they'll move on. Find another planet. And do it again. And again..."

"Can't you stop them?"

"Oh yes. I can stop them."

***

The creature that isn't a dog follows the track of the dragon that flies through the Vortex. Its quarry is far out of reach, but it will cross Sigma's path in its passage from tomorrow to yesterday.

When the dragon tumbles into view, the dog leaps out and tears into its belly. It wears the shape of a small blue box, but Sigma can feel the fire barely contained inside it, more powerful than any moon. It is too strong to be wrenched from its trajectory. The dog howls in frustration, refusing to release its grip. It chews its way through the armored hide of the dragon, searching for the heart that defies its will.

"Who are you? What are you?" The blinding light at the heart of the dragon has a voice. It has form and mass. It is a creature like and yet unlike the dog's master. For the first time in its life, Sigma hears the meaning in the vibrations in the air, understands it as a transmission of thought from mind to mind.

"Who are you? What are you?" Sigma recreates the sounds in its own form.

"I'm the Doctor. And I'm beginning to understand what you must be." The Doctor pauses, then says, "You're not at all what I expected to find here."

"Here. Here. Here." Sigma tugs at the dragon's tail.

"I see. You want me to come with you? Very well." The light dims from around the Doctor.

***

Gann watches the TARDIS materialize inside his laboratory. Sigma melts from around its outer shell and comes to his heel. "Oh, well done. I hardly believe it..."

The door clicks open and a man steps out.

"You're not the Doctor!"

"I've changed." The man frowns at the gun pointed at his chest. "And so have you. Gann, isn't it? What are you doing here? I thought I left you on a peaceful world far from here, with people to care for you."

"And they did. They were very kind. Don't think me ungrateful." Gann studies the stranger, finds something familiar in his strangeness. But he doesn't lower his gun. "They gave me a second chance at life. I made a fortune with a chain of patisseries, with my recipe for hravelberry puffs. Lucky for me I had a handful of dried berries in my pockets that day. Cook used to scold me for that. But it turned out to be a genetic treasure."

"But you're not a pastry chef now." The Doctor nods at the equipment stacked around them. "You've taken up engineering, I see. I like your dog."

"Sigma? He's an excellent dog, yes, but his range is limited to this solar system. He's missing quite a bit of his structure, despite my patching him up." Gann smiles and scratches the dog around its ears. Light flickers in contented lines over its body.

"Of course. But why go to all that trouble?"

"What a weapon he makes."

"Yes, I did notice a distinct lack of moons around this planet. I seem to recall there were once seven of them." The Doctor gazes steadily at Gann. "What happened to you, Gann?"

"When I grew up, I wanted to travel. So I did, once I had the money. And do you know what I saw in my travels?"

The Doctor's eyes darken, but he doesn't answer.

"Whole worlds stripped, civilizations destroyed, all to feed the Empire. What happened to my world wasn't an anomaly." Gann struggles to keep his voice even.

"What do you want from me, Gann?"

"The same thing I wanted before!"

***

"It's beautiful." A crystal glowed hypnotically in a nest of wires strung from the central pillar. Without realizing it, the boy leaned closer and closer.

The Doctor pulled him back. "Careful. It's more than just a pretty rock."

"What is it?" The boy couldn't tear his gaze away.

"A phase-modulated crystalline matrix. I've caught the void creatures inside it. They're really little more than a collection of cleverly woven equations. Mathematical lifeforms in the vast reaches of spacetime."

"It glows..." The boy saw patterns. Ghostly images. It should show him nightmares, he thought, but instead it filled him with longing.

"Because it's not entirely stable. It gives off light when the information trapped inside decays. What you see is its slow death."

"Are the monsters dead?" The boy blinked and forced himself to turn away.

"Not yet." The Doctor pointed up at the window set high in the wall. It looked out onto a writhing darkness, against a background of more darkness, with the faintest glimmer of stars around its edges. "I've stripped away their motion, but their shadow lingers. It will be gone after a century or so."

"Good," said the boy. "I'm glad."

The Doctor sighed. He began to detach the wires from the glowing crystal. "This will last considerably longer."

"Can I have it?"

"No! It's far too dangerous. No. All the power of those creatures, distilled into one handy container. I can't let it fall into the wrong hands."

"But what's wrong with my hands?" protested the boy. "Those monsters ate the world. I'm the only person left. I don't have anything else. Why can't I have /that/?"

"It would destroy you."

"But I want it."

The Doctor shook his head.

***

"You mean this?" The Doctor, this new Doctor, twists his hand around in a magician's flourish. The white crystal glows between his fingers.

Gann's feathers prickle. The shock of seeing the crystal again mutes him for the space of several breaths. He can feel Sigma quiver at his side. "Yes..."

"Pretty little thing, isn't it?" The Doctor gazes into the light. "Tell me, what did you see in it, when you first looked into it, all those years ago?"

"Possibility." The light stirs old memories in Gann's head, revives forgotten dreams.

"Whereas I looked into it and saw danger. But perhaps you were right all along..." The Doctor shades his eyes with his other hand and looks back at Gann. "And now? What do you see in it now?"

"Power!" Gann snaps his beak in emphasis.

"Power? Is that what you want?" The Doctor's voice turns weary, but still he asks, "Why?"

"What happened to my world wasn't an anomaly," Gann says again. "The strong destroy the weak. I learned that, Doctor. You destroyed those monsters, but you leave the bigger ones to thrive on the blood of the innocent. Why? Don't you have the stomach to finish the job? Well, I do."

"Bravo. You do realize I can't allow you to trample over the web of time like that."

"Allow? Doctor, I'm the one holding the gun." Gann steels himself to fire it.

"So you are. So why haven't you shot me yet?"

"I don't want to kill you."

"I don't particularly want to die."

"But I will shoot. So hand it over."

"Mm. I don't think so." The Doctor turns abruptly, and in the same motion raises his arm and hurls the crystal away. "Here, Sigma! Fetch!"

The crystal vanishes before it hits the ground. Gann catches a glimpse of the dog's jaws snapping shut around it, then nothing more. "What have you done?"

"I've given them their heart back. With a few small modifications." The Doctor turns back to Gann. "I imagine Sigma is on his way to deliver it to his kin. Out there."

"You're insane! They'll kill us all...unless...can you control them?"

"No."

"But you said, you said you modified the crystal."

"Yes. I taught them to hear our languages. Now that they understand that sentience can arise even in beings of mass and matter, they can choose not to prey on inhabited planets."

"They're monsters! They won't care," says Gann. "Why? Why did you do it?"

"Because I've destroyed worlds, too. I've wiped out entire races. But I'm tired of death." The Doctor looks upward, where one can see through the top of the dome to an empty patch of sky where a planet might have been, once. "I do what I can to save lives, but I can't do everything. And sometimes I make mistakes."

"You're making a mistake now! How can you take such a risk?"

"How can you? You lived here with one of them by your side as your faithful companion, for what, years now?"

"That's different...I could control him."

"Is that what you think? But you're wrong. And that's why I choose to take the risk." The Doctor steps back into the TARDIS. "Good-bye, Gann."

The TARDIS fades, leaving only echoes behind.

Gann drops his gun at last and sits on the floor, head bowed. Waiting for the monsters to come.

Some time later, a cold semi-material nose nudges at the back of his neck.

"Sigma! You came back."

Space is dark and space is bleak, but on a icy planet far from the Empire, a boy and his dog sit together, seeing possibilities.

So much for April...

2010-04-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

I decided to work on the next "Salt Gang" story instead of the "Future History Channel" story, but then this morning spent 3 hours uploading a video to youtube and doing English subtitles instead. *facepalm* Well, I should never complain about bad subtitling again! It was actually very difficult for me, trying to be both accurate and concise. (And I didn't entirely succeed.) Vaguely writing-related thoughts...yeah...um...watching TV shows (and movies) like this is what inspired me to come up with the Salt Gang Chronicles, a sort of Americanized fantasy hybrid that uses some of the tropes of the wuxia genre.

This clip is from CCTV's 2001 adaptation of "Xiao Ao Jiang Hu" (variously translated as "Smiling, Proud Wanderer", "State of Divinity", "Laughing in the Wind", "Swordsman" (for the movie versions), and "Blood Cold and Proud Hot"). This is from near the end, where Lin Pingzhi (whose family was destroyed way back in the early episodes) finally achieves his revenge! He's a bit "girly" because he's castrated himself in order to learn his family's "Evil-resisting Sword Art".

So yeah. I'll try to have the first draft of my story done by May! I'm having some plot issues. It feels more like a chapter in an ongoing novel than a story in itself, which is what I originally intended for the series. Righto. Off to lunch am I!

Upaya, or, "If you don't have a character for your story..."

2010-04-13T06:28:00.000-07:00

...then steal one. I think one of the reasons I'm having trouble writing my "Future History Channel" story is that I don't have a handle on the main characters. Really. All I have are some background notes, but it doesn't really tell me what the person is like. So when I say "steal", I mean "use one of my MUSH characters" (even if the character ends up substantially different than the one I played). It's either that, or use Doctor Who characters (and I'm trying NOT to think about Doctor Who, which is difficult when the new season has just started and I'm loving the new Doctor (Matt Smith) and the stories so far!) or write sequels to my previous stories (which I don't feel like doing at the moment.)

So, it's a question of which MUSH character I'm gonna steal this time... "Yang Xiaofei, I choose you!" Mwah ha ha ha ha! Oh good lord. Is this a good idea, I ask myself? You know what she's like. And she's a CthulhuTech character! Argh! But it's fitting, isn't it? And her background isn't too far off from what I need here. Yeah. I suppose it's workable. Fine. What about her boyfriend? Who am I using for her boyfriend? Hans? Hans the Tree Cultist!? HANS!? Are you serious? No no no. There must be none of this "Gospel of the Tree" insanity in this universe. He's a Good Christian Boy. Weelll...maybe a loony heretical Christian Boy, who was somehow able to slip past the almighty Screening Board with just a few points taken off for wearing a cross. Unfortunately, saying it's Hans doesn't help much. I last played him in 2003 and I can't find any logs. Grrr. And then there's Fei's resentful but dutiful (in her way) older sister and Fei's mother. Hmm. Maybe.

Right. Next, I need an outline. I've decided it's much easier for me to write a story if I have a decent outline (i.e. setting out the scenes, what needs to happen, etc. from beginning to end). The last 3 stories I did went much more smoothly because I knew what I needed to happen in each scene. Of course I deviate from the outline, but it's still a useful guide.

Declared goal: outline by Sunday, first draft of story written by the end of April.

A Hell Bank Note iPhone App!?

2010-04-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

...the mind boggles. While I was doing "research" (a.k.a. random distracted websurfing) on religious practices for my "Future History Channel" stories, I came across this youtube video. Someone really made such an app!? Apparently so.

I'm still boggling. Well. It's been many years since I burned "Hell Bank Notes" for anyone, but I can almost imagine that in the future, people really would do something like this...especially ones in space stations/spaceships/etc. where they wouldn't let people have real fires! It still seems a bit disrespectful to use something like that seriously, but... people have done stranger things, haven't they?

Ok, it's pretty damn hilarious, yeah.

(This is me, idly pondering world details while not writing the story because there's no immediate deadline looming over me...)

Oh, and happy Easter! (And what alien eggs will the Easter bunny bring to the colonists in their spooky semi-magical world, eh?)

Doctor Who hat trick!

2010-03-22T15:17:00.001-07:00

Big Finish didn't say no multiple submissions for their latest "Short Trips" thing, so I figured, why not? I already sent in my first story, but there's still a week to go. This would be my third Doctor Who story in a row. It's actually the fourth story idea I'd like to write, but the previous idea wanted to have more than 2500 words, so I just jotted down some notes and skipped it. Well, I can make up Doctor Who story ideas until the cows come home, but the best way to clear them from my mind is to write the damn thing down. That usually kills them!

So this time it's an Eighth Doctor/Charley story, a straightforward adventure. Maybe it's too straightforward and dull. I don't know. What do you want from a DW story anyway? I'm taking a break now after writing the first 500 words. Ugh. Stupid first drafts.

"Saena Prime, a bucolic paradise of villages in perfect harmony with the countryside. A bit too regimented for my taste: they achieve their harmony by regulating things down to every last breath and footprint." The Doctor headed for the TARDIS doors with a willow basket packed with food. "Still, it's the perfect place for a picnic, as long as we keep a low profile. Just smell that air!"

Charley followed him outside and inhaled deeply. "I smell smoke." She quickly found the source, down in the village square. "People with torches. They're about to light... I think it's some kind of bonfire."

"A traditional summer celebration, or some such. All the better. The locals will be distracted." The Doctor was already casting about in the opposite direction for a likely spot in a sunny meadow dotted with boulders.

"There's an old woman tied to that pole. They're going to burn her!"

"They what?" The Doctor spun around. "We have to stop them!"

He dashed back into the TARDIS and re-emerged with what looked like bright orange guns. "Here. Andromedan fire extinguisher. Point the nozzle at the base of the fire and pull this lever."

They hurtled towards the village, the Doctor using one hand to fish an official-looking card out of his pockets as they ran.

"Everyone freeze! Health and safety inspection!" The Doctor flashed the card at the startled crowd, then dove forward and shocked the growing flames into submission with a spray of white foam. Charley followed suit on the other side. "You are in violation of Regulation 7532 governing carbon combustion in open spaces."

"But we have a permit for the fire!"

"Ah, but not for the smoke. I see no record of form 7532-C on file." Then he muttered out of the side of his mouth, "Knife. Left front pocket." The Doctor aimed Charley at the prisoner. "We'll be taking her, of course, as evidence."

"Now just wait a minute..."

"No time!" The Doctor took the freed woman by one arm while Charley supported her on the other side and navigated back through the mob, brandishing his card as a shield. "Quick, Charley, back to the TARDIS."

"...that's a library card!" shouted the closest torch-wielding villager. "Get them!"

The Doctor dropped the card and the woman's arm to fire foam straight at the man's face. "Not today, thank you. Run!"

They barely made it back to the TARDIS ahead of the mob. The Doctor hit the dematerialization switch while the old woman collapsed, coughing and wheezing, into an armchair.

There...done 1st draft of my DW story...

2010-02-16T09:00:00.000-08:00

...which is still lacking a title. And is about 40 words over 2500. This writing of "Doctor Who" stuff is actually quite fun. Now I want to do another 2500 word one while I let the one I just finished sit for a couple of weeks before I revise and submit it. I'd need to be careful not to repeat myself. Maybe adopt a completely silly tone and use the 4th Doctor. (For the current story, I had Doctors 7 and 8, each of them travelling alone).

Bah. No. You know you're just putting off other things you're supposed to be doing... Go do them first, and then come back and talk about writing another DW story.

Happy Year of the Tiger!

2010-02-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

I can't believe it's the year of the Tiger again. Gah! Well, never mind, happy Valentine's day anyway!

So I've done 2 out of 5 scenes I've planned for my Doctor Who short story. The very short one, with very short scenes. Heh. 2500 words is nothing. Obviously, we all did more than that in one day during NaNoWriMo. But to fit a whole story in, that takes more careful thought and planning, at least for me. (I know some people can dash something brilliant off in a mad stream of consciousness, but I'm not one of them.)

About 500 words per scene. Damn! This is going to be difficult.

Well, here's one of the two I wrote so far. I'll post it up here so I have something to stare blankly at while I think about the rest.

"What can I get you, sir?" The boy couldn't help but stare at the stranger, because he had never seen anyone as strange as this: featherless and pale, covered in heavy white clothes unmarked by clan insignia and wearing a barbarian's hat. A furled umbrella leaned against his chair. The boy wondered why he needed an umbrella when he already had a hat.

"Ah, hello!" The man smiled, doffing the hat. "I'll be having one of your famous hravelberry pastries. The best in the galaxy, so I've heard."

"Right away, sir." It didn't take long to fetch the plate from the kitchen, but the man wasn't at the table anymore.

He was standing at the window, staring up at the sky. He spoke in a low, urgent voice, without turning around. "It's wrong. All wrong. Can't you hear it?"

"Hear what?" asked the boy, unsure what to do with the plate. "Sir, I have your order..."

"They're coming. The TARDIS... must return to the TARDIS." The man turned and glared fiercely at the boy, then hurried out the door. Once outside, he broke into a run, one hand clapped over his hat.

On impulse, the boy ran after him, still holding the plate. "Hey! Wait!"

The man disappeared into a tall, blue shed on the side of the road. The boy was surprised to see it, as it hadn't been there that morning. Even so, he knocked on what he guessed to be the door. "Sir? Your order..."

The door opened. "No. Not order. Chaos! Pure chaos."

The hooked handle of the umbrella caught the boy around the elbow. He cried out in surprise, dropping his plate, but the man dragged him into the shed before he could recover. He didn't even notice the doors shutting behind him. "But...but it's..."

"I know, I know, bigger on the inside," said the stranger. "I'm called the Doctor, by the way. Brace yourself."

"Why?" Even as the word left his mouth, the ground shuddered under him, throwing him to the floor, where he slid until his back hit a wall. From this unaccustomed angle, he watched the Doctor race around the central pillar, hands frantically working the controls of this strange machine. It must be a machine. No animal ever made such a hideous, grinding cry.

"No!" The Doctor slammed a fist into the controls. "Too late. They must have scented the TARDIS and jumped the timelines ahead of us. I'm too late. I've failed you, boy. All of you. I'm sorry."

Bewildered, the boy crawled to the doors. He couldn't find a handle, so he pried at the edges. "Please, let me out."

"I can't."

"But Cook will be missing me."

"No."

"Then I have to go home. My parents..."

"They're gone, too. I'm sorry," he repeated.

"Everyone?" The boy wasn't sure what he was asking, but something in the Doctor's voice filled him with horror.

"Everyone."

The boy was stunned. Unable to grasp it.

"Everyone. The whole planet. Millions of species. Now gone forever." His voice dropped, but the anger remained. "And they'll move on. Find another planet. And do it again. And again..."

"Can't you stop them?"

"Oh yes. I can stop them."

Here we go again...

2010-02-12T05:59:00.000-08:00

More snow, more puppy (at least 2-3 more pounds of him, at a guess!), and another writing opportunity from Big Finish. This time it's for a 2500 word short story involving any of Doctors 1-8 and companions, but no old enemies or friends and nothing from the new series. 2500 words is pretty short. Difficult, but I'll do my best to have an actual story in it, because I prefer stories to random little vignettes.

What I have so far: I think it'll be something with the Eighth Doctor, alone, with a flashback to something he did in his previous incarnation. And it will have my Cute Fluffy Puppy...of DEATH! ... IN SPACE!!!. Yeah. And when you're as bad at plotting as I am, the thing to do is to steal a plot. So I'm stealing one from the Volsung Saga. It's obvious that the Doctor and his TARDIS are Fafnir. Isn't it? ISN'T IT!? And so the puppy must be Sigurd. Uh huh. Hey, where are you going? This makes sense. Honestly! But that all falls apart when Fafnir decides he needs to have a chat with Regin. Erm. Yeah.

What I don't have yet...a title! Argh! I need a title! And words that are in the story, as opposed to words written all around the edges of the story describing what I want to be in the story!

100th post! Finished draft of script!

2010-01-29T07:25:00.001-08:00

Woo hoo! I finished the first draft of the Doctor Who audio script I was writing ("Prisoners of the Forgotten"). Of course, this is days AFTER I got impatient and sent in my pitch to Big Finish, but oh well. Maybe later I'll clean it up and convert it into proper form in a Word document. I also have the feeling it runs too long, but unless Big Finish (against all odds) actually ask me for the script, I won't bother trying to cut it to fit. Foo. Still, I can tell myself, "Self, you did write a story during January. And you did submit it to be 'published'. Good for you, self!" Ha ha ha ha ha! (But does this mean I've written fanfiction!? Nooo! At least it wasn't too fanwanky. I hope.)

So what was it, and how much did I steal? It was a 5th Doctor and Nyssa story, which was fun, actually. I stole bits and pieces from my old files of stories-I-never-got-around-to-writing. It's set in an obscure future human colony, long removed from Earth. Tidbits from the Big Bag o'Cliches: prison planet, plague, possessed crazy people, tunnel runaround, "Guest cast explains the plot to the companion before dying to demonstrate the seriousness of the threat", the self-destruct, the war, bio-warfare, cyborgs, assimilation, the Doctor talks, giant killer worms, the Doctor opens a locked door, out-of-control AIs, We Haz Darkity-Dark Past, and much much more (or not).

Hello, 2010! Hey, what about the stories you promised?

2010-01-24T15:13:00.001-08:00

Yes, well, about that...

Um...

We got a new puppy over winter break. Very cute, but as a result, I'm more sleep-deprived than ever, as far as sleeping through the night goes.

Well, that's my excuse. But he's so cute when he attacks the orange bouncy kooshy ball! A Shetland sheepdog, but I doubt any of his ancestors have herded sheep for generations. All he gets is this fuzzy orange ball! Ha ha ha! ZOOM! ZOOM across the yard, ZOOM back, ZOOM past the ball, ZOOM! Then he gives the ball the evil eye and then runs at it again. Then picks it up and tosses it around the yard and chases it, all by himself. I wish I had that much energy!

Anyway. Writing. Yeah. I got sidetracked by Big Finish's announcement that they're taking submissions to pitch a 25 min 5th Doctor/Nyssa audio story. Whee! So, what the hell, I'll give it a shot. I patched together some ideas and cobbled together a synopsis and some scenes. Even if they never want to see the full script, I'd like to get a first draft done. If nothing else, it's practice for the next one I try to write. It's due on Feb 1. About a week left. Hurray for the power of deadlines and incentives! It even got me to learn a bit more about MS Word. And revise.

So, I'll get to the other stories I had planned later. Probably February. Yeah.

So happy 2010! (I can't believe it's 2010 already!)

Don't you miss that ticking clock?

2009-12-11T12:47:00.000-08:00

All through November, I was aware of every hour, every day going by, knowing I had to write X number of words, or if I was ahead or behind of my daily goal at any given point. It's like "mindfulness" theory applied to writing. Now... now... that sense of urgency has evaporated. Well, at least as far as writing is concerned. Now it's urgency about "HOW many days is it until Christmas?" and getting holiday shopping done and mail sent out and events to go to, etc. Writing? Err, what's that? Yeah. Bah, humbug!

What am I doing now? What are my characters doing? I have no idea. Spending money, I suppose.

New story disease...argh...

2009-12-04T06:59:00.000-08:00

And not just one, but three story ideas have burned themselves into my brain. It's three stories from my "Future History Channel". At least they're not completely new ideas, they're just things from a future history that I wrote up that I decided would make decent stories.

Upaya, or the Road to Hell: In which the "worst criminal in human history" explains why she had to save humanity by destroying it.
The Gate of Eirene: In which a despised cyborg observer first watches everything go to hell, and then decides to steal an experimental starship and take a group of surviving humans to safety out among the stars. And fails. Or does he?
The Peace War: How the humans colonized an inhabited alien planet while fighting off the enemy they brought with them.

I even started writing "Upaya". Couldn't help myself! Argh! Here's the opening:

The prison is an anonymous ship drifting silently in the asteroid belt, its location a closely-guarded secret. The prisoner is the only human aboard. The crew and staff are all machine intelligences, as they were deemed superior in reliability, patience, and detachment, with their emotions dialed down to their minimum settings. The machines don't care about the crime; they only care about the optimal operation of the prison.

Over the past twenty years, security has only been breached four times, and only once did the would-be executioners get so far as to board the ship. The hull still shows the scars where the assassins blasted through the airlock door.

Today's visitor is no vigilante. She has official clearance from the Screening Board to be here, in person, on this prison ship.

"Ah, so you've come to see the monster, have you?" The prisoner bares her teeth at the visitor in an approximation of a smile.

The visitor squirms and clearly doesn't want to look at the prisoner, even with the bullet-proof glass wall that separates them. She mumbles, "It's merely a formality."

...and just reading that much makes me wonder, why bother trying to board the ship? Why not just blow it up from a distance? But the ship must have sophisticated and powerful anti-collision systems/weapons/detection/whatever, as a stray hit from even a tiny rock could rip it open, so it would be well-defended against missiles. But then how could attackers get close? Traitors aboard? Not likely. Confuse the AIs and sneak in? Hit it with an EMP? (They defended against the possibility.) Overwhelm the defenses with a swarm, hope something gets through and hits? But you'd detect the swarm before it got that close and take evasive action. We're assuming the assassins can't get ahold of a whole fleet, which is true. They're the lunatic fringe of Solarian citizens. (Should I even be calling them "Solarian citizens"? Eh, what the hell.) So yeah.

Looking forward...

2009-12-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

...to revising? NOT.

It's been about ten years since I last sent stuff out to be rejected. I should get my act together (and a working printer) and try again. The idea of revising an entire novel makes my head explode, so perhaps I'll go back to writing short stories.

This time, I WILL learn MS Word, and it WILL obey me! Ten years ago, I made the mistake of doing up my stories in Latex, which worked great for setting out a bunch of complicated equations, but not so great for printing out stories in standard submission format. The trauma! Arrgh! I got two stories rejected in rapid succession from one editor, who told me not to right-justify the damn thing (on the first story), and then told me on the second one, "I told you not to right-justify them!" (or words to that effect). *headdesks* Well, he did include a comment on one of the stories, so maybe he did read some of it. Ha ha ha!

The other thing is that these days I don't really have the patience to read big long epic novels. I read children's books (short!) and short story collections and non-fiction mostly (if I'm reading anything at all.) Mysteries are good, too, in not dragging out forever and ever. Also Chinese swords-and-almost-sorcery books, which I read at the rate of ten pages every few months or so. :-P So if I can't even manage to read anything long, I can't expect to be able to write/revise one, either, can I?

So um. The plan. I has a plan? *chokes* I will work on short stories and revise them into submission and then send them out. Starting in January 2010.

50K!

2009-11-29T21:31:00.000-08:00

There, it's only half past midnight and I managed to drag myself to 50060 words. The story isn't quite finished yet, and I'm not going to finish it tonight, but it's nearly there. The Big Bad is defeated. We just have to do some mopping up.

The ending was totally anticlimactic. Magical powers out of nowhere, and "bye bye, bad guy!" Bah! There must be some way to make it seem more reasonable (and not just look like I wrote myself into a corner), but I'm too tired to think of one now. I'll just sit back and enjoy the purple purple bar for awhile.

I'm done with NaNoWriMo for this year! Thanks to all you fellow WriMos out there for the moral support, and to my family for putting up with me through November!

What giant mecha?! WTF? headdesks

2009-11-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why there's a giant mecha now stomping its way into my story, but there it is. Then again, perhaps it was inevitable. (No! No it wasn't! You're delusional because there's only 2 more days of NaNoWriMo left!) Every story needs a giant mecha! (NO! It does not! Shut up! You've lost your marbles! Oh wait, there's two still left in my pocket. That's all right, then. When your children like to play with marble-run toys as much as mine do, you ALWAYS have some marbles in your pockets.)

Um. So anyway. Got to 47K and I'm taking a little break. And then I really do have to get this thing done. I'm relying on the Kodo drummers to see me through. (Best writing music I had all month. Ha! Ha! Ha!) If I can get 1000 words per iteration of their "Best of" album, that's only 3 more times to listen to it! Whee! (Thinking about it, my actual writing speed is more like 700 words per iteration. Still, close enough.)

Onwards to... the climactic Giant Mecha vs the Zombie Goddess showdown! Mwah ha ha ha ha! (In theory. In practice it'll be something dull and anticlimactic. Goddess says: "Go away!" And he does. Because really I have no idea how you're gonna defeat a giant mecha without the massive application of explosives, and they just don't have any available. Pity, that. Well, maybe cause its nervous system to seize up. That's probably the best they can hope for. "I can't stand the confusion in my mind!" (Ob Doctor Who quote))

43K words

2009-11-27T20:26:00.000-08:00

...leaving me 7K more to go in the next three days. I supposed if I really tried, I could finish tomorrow or the next day. Hmm. I'm such a plodder. I have a terrible time trying to increase my output. I tried "Write or Die" and just couldn't do it. Bleah. My mind totally froze up and I couldn't type anything.

Will the end of my story coincide with 50000 words? Hmm. I'm trying to make it do so. I'm at the point where the sort-of-villains have morphed into SuperMegaHyperBadness, and the protagonist then has to do much the same thing, and they have their big face-off. Also I have a literal deus ex-machina: I just have to arrange to have the characters rendezvous with the machina part of that. As we already have two gods running around, one more popping out of a machine won't seem that out of place.

I have this thing about creating gods and destroying them. That's THREE novels now with that theme (last year's NaNo, this year's NaNo, and this year's NaNo that I wrote in an alternative universe where I picked the other plot). What can I say? They were different gods, created in different ways, and ... uh...ok, two of the endings aren't that different... um. Ok, but they're wearing different clothes, so to speak! (Not a new obsession with me. Remember when I was, what, 13 years old and I tried to start a cult with my friend, but we really wanted to be gods...? No, of course you don't remember, unless you happen to be that friend I tried to start a cult with.) At least no one in my "Salt Gang Chronicles" has any ambitions to godhood (universal domination, sure, but not godhood). Whew!

Day 27: A New Hope!

2009-11-27T05:36:00.000-08:00

...or something like that. I'm at 40K (10K more to go!) and there's only a few days left. I can't wait until I can blow up the Death Star, er, the "Ark"...yeah...that's it...

Oops, I got distracted (did laundry, ate breakfast, watched a few YouTube videos, thought about picking up the thousands of dollars in Monopoly money strewn about the house) and forgot what I was going to babble about. The world may never know! The world doesn't want to know...

(Wow, these little kids are talented!) What was I on about? Oh yeah. Something about staying off Da Intarwebs and concentrating on getting a few thousand words of my novel typed. The plot and I had a reunion early this morning (after I woke up and before I got out of bed). Now we'll see if it has the stamina to make it to the 50K mark.

(I wonder what my kids are building with the LEGOs...hmmm...) This blog post is completely pointless. Even more so than usual! Except at this point I really need to push on and get to 50K. Because I know I can. I just have to STOP WASTING TIME, DAMMIT!

Another day, another snippet

2009-11-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

...also known as "Don't bug me about getting the details right!" (Among other things, the light source(s). I keep forgetting who's carrying a light source. Fix in the revision.)

So our protagonists have run away, but it was all pretty useless because the evil Queen and the crazy alchemist have caught up to them again. This is the last thing I wrote. I'm going to take a break and get back to writing after I put the turkey in the oven.

Day ?

It was darker outside than I remembered. How long had we been underground?

Caith sat on the ledge running along the entrance. She turned as she heard us emerge. She said, her tone subdued, "At least we will not have to wait for them. Look!" She pointed her chin upwards.

I looked.

It wasn't dusk. It wasn't a cloud. It was a gargantuan flying rock that blocked out the sun.

The Ark. Its shadow crept down the cliff and sprawled across the rocky banks of the river and over the water. It hung lower in the sky than I had ever seen it before, only clearing the top of the cliff by twenty or thirty feet.

"They didn't need the horses," I whispered, stunned at the sight. "They took the entire Ark and flew after us. I feel almost honored..."

Caith laughed softly, bitterly.

As we watched, it floated silently over us, until the bulk of it hung over the river, while the edge was lined up with the cliff, though still some ways above.

"They know exactly where we are!" hissed Takesh. "Inside! Nothing's changed, just moved up the schedule. Come on!"

He led the way back into the cave. I had to scramble to keep up. I could hear Caith lagging behind us. We passed the trapped section and ducked behind a cluster of rocks on the other side.

"Now what?" I whispered. "Just wait for them to walk into it? We'll need to keep their attention on us."

"I brought this," said Caith grimly. She swung her backpack around and pulled out several pieces of wood and metal which she expertly assembled to form a crossbow. She hooked on the string and wound it tight, grunting at the effort. She set it down, pushing the back end of the stock into her ribs and the front down with her foot, drawing a lever to cock the bow. "One of Sviar's contraptions. Just a toy, but it is deadly enough at short range."

"I didn't know you knew how to use a crossbow," I said. This one was roughly twice the size of the enchanted weapon that Merel the assassin had dropped that fateful night.

"Every child of my village learned as much," said Caith. She loaded a bolt and rested the bow along the top of the rock, sighting down the stock into the trapped chamber. "To keep the sea-raiders at bay."

"Ah," I said. It occurred to me that I had never asked her about her life before she came to the Ark. It was no more her home than it was mine. Well, where ever we came from, we were both likely to die here, on this world. Whether it would happen sooner or later depended on whether we were able to take down Wensel and the Queen. I remembered Merel's spell-tipped bolts. "These two are more than mere sea-raiders. That one bolt won't do much, and you won't have time to reload, anyway."

Caith sighed. "I know this. But I will infuse as much fire as the shaft can bear. I may not have my lady's gifts of power, but I have learned as I can."

Was that a dig at me? "What are you saying? That I haven't? Fine, maybe I should have paid more attention to his crazy alchemist lessons in wizardry, but 'should have' won't help us now."

Unless, that is, I looked into the mirror shard, the one I could still glimpse in the corner of my mind's eye. If I embraced infinite possibility and leaped off the cliff of mortal life.

"I meant no such thing," protested Caith.

"Sure you didn't," I muttered.

"Peace," said Takesh. "This is no time to squabble."

I took a deep breath and shook the thoughts away. "You're right."

"That's because House Hummel uses more direct methods of teaching. They don't wait for the student to be paying attention." Takesh drew the knife from his belt. At least, I had always assumed it was his knife. Now I saw that it wasn't a knife at all, but a blunt-tipped black cylinder, tapered at the ends, with a handle on one end. Takesh spun it theatrically in his hand, then held it up and sighted along the cylinder. A weapon, then? "For instance, they taught me how to use a bio-disruptor pistol. Nasty things. It's meant for emergencies, but I'm beginning to think that's what we have here."

"Yes," I agreed blankly. "Er, what's a 'bio-disruptor pistol'? Does it shoot alchemical fire or something like that?"

"Something worse," said Takesh. "It fires a pellet containing a globule of nanobots designed to rip apart cellular structures and certain organic molecules. The pellet penetrates the skin, after which the casing dissolves and the nanobots are released. They are only active for about thirty seconds. That's more than sufficient in most cases. They can be keyed to specific DNA signatures, but this one isn't currently programmed for it, beyond the default user-coding."

"I'll take your word for it," I said. I could kick myself for not bringing any weapons of my own. All I had was my bare hands and teeth and my belt knife. Useless. Then an idea occurred to me. "Takesh. The lifeforce generators you took from the horses back on the Ark. Can I have one?"

"The what? Oh, the power cells. Right." He found one and handed it to me. He frowned dubiously. "I suppose you can rig it to explode? Be careful. You'll damage 1417, and it won't be able to implement the deep-freeze protocols."

"I should be able to control it better than that," I said. At least, I hoped so. I could almost hear Sviar going through the instructions in the back of my mind. A bit of work on the lifeforce generator with my knife, a needle from my mini sewing kit (I only broke three of them in the process), and silver thread, and I no longer felt so useless. That should wipe the smug look from Caith's face. I glanced secretly at her. Actually, she looked more worried than anything else. Oh well. "It should spit out a stream of fire, along the line of this needle so I can aim it."

"I hope it works," said Takesh.

"Here, I'll test it..." I pointed it behind us.

"No time," whispered Caith. "Listen. I hear voices."

Voices and footsteps. The grating crackle of rocks kicked loose and ground underfoot.

The three of us settled back behind what cover we could. Waiting.

The voices drew closer, the sound bouncing around the corner to us.

"What are you playing at, girl?" Wensel. I heard something scrape against rock, then, "You know it's won't be pretty if we have to drag out by your tails like a pack of cowering dogs."

"Caith!" called the Queen. "Why have you joined these rebellious knaves? I thought better of you. If they've coerced you, I'll have their livers for paste!"

I nearly answered aloud, but bit back the words just in time. I wondered if the others had felt it, this compulsion to stand up and surrender. I held onto my psychic shields. No need to listen for them mentally when we knew perfectly well where they were. Coming closer, coming towards us: that's where.

Now a dim blur of light was visible on the tunnel wall, just beyond our trap. I held my breath and tried not to think too loudly. The light grew wider, resolved into two separate beams.

"Are you here? I can smell your rotting bones, child. Come out before the Queen loses her patience completely," urged Wensel. I heard his stick tapping along the tunnel, and underneath that the uneven scuffle of his footsteps. And then he was visible, a dark silhouette behind the bright glare of the light shining from his right eye. His eye! Mother preserve us, he really had gone and done it. Apotheosis in a lab.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T10:58:00.000-08:00

Well, at least to those folks in the U.S. or celebrating American holidays. So! I'm thankful! I'm thankful!

I'll be inclusive this year and be thankful for the universe. It exists! Isn't that awesome? And life. Isn't it amazing that there's such a thing as life? Even if humans go extinct, still, just to think that life exists...wow. I'm grateful.

ObNaNo: I'm writing, I'm writing...slowly. We're just celebrating Thanksgiving at home, no huge family get togethers or anything like that, so I do have plenty of time today. I'm about 1 day behind my theoretical grand plan, which means I'll still have to be writing on the 30th. (Previous years I reached 50K a few days early.) Mostly I'm afraid I'll reach the end of the story before 50K. I should have made more of a plot to start with. The "plot developments" are rather thin. Hmm. Well, I'll know better next time. My daughter finished /her/ project (a manga-style comic this year instead of pure text) today. Yay her! Hrmph. Yesterday I was whining about my plot and she generously started showering me with "plot cards". Index cards with plot twist ideas she wrote on them. Aieee!!! Who ever heard of such a thing? It's a pity I'm too much of an inflexible doofus to use them. (They were perfectly good ideas, after all. Mostly.) *mumble mumble*

Vampire and elf

2009-11-24T05:06:00.000-08:00

The vampire and the elf (well, my vampire and my elf) are both long-lived, potentially immortal creatures, but they approach things very differently. The vampire is all about Plans, about considering the long-term picture. She's not very spontaneous and has trouble adapting to sudden changes in circumstances. Her "visual lag" is just a symptom of the overall problem: what she sees is what was out there 5 seconds ago, 20 seconds ago, a minute ago, etc. depending on how far away she is from where her outsourced visual processors sit. (Of course, she's going to junk her eyes and rely on vampiric bloodsight in the "Nik goes kablooie" story, but it's still relevant for past stories). The elf is all about optimizing for the current situation. Telepaths have a hard time predicting his actions because he has no plans. People can try to manipulate him by manipulating the environment around him, but it's tricky, because he usually sees it differently than you do (there's a chaotic/random element involved). However, one mistake on his part can land him into a hell of a fix. This is why he "went kablooie" after all.

The two of them were paired together, theoretically in order to compensate for each other's weaknesses. We'll see how that worked out...

Not that this has anything to do with my NaNo story. It's from the novel I'm NOT writing right now. I just wanted to jot down a note before I forgot (and my laptop is in another room right now, while this computer happens to be on already.) Naturally, I'm behind already in today's word count, according to my latest writing schedule for this year's NaNo. *mutter mutter*