Philotic Web

Incoming! Who's doing it this year?

I am doing it again! You may notice even I kept away from this thread last year: I figured I had neither the time, energy, nor ideas.

But this year I have an idea that I've been prepping for since... sheesh, May? I have a map and towns and people and an outline. It's for reals.

What about you, elfy?

Picking up a story that I started 3 years ago (yikes! I'm getting old, it was only junior year of college! why is that so long ago!), and put down when I ran out of time. So I started the month with 11k words, which let me slack off this weekend for comic-con =) But I sat down today and wrote about 900 words, plus got back in the flow of the story and reread it and did some editing so that was productive. It took me a while to warm up into writing and remember who the characters were. I put a ton of time into doing the worldbuilding for this though, so I want to get a real pay-off from it in terms of telling a complete story.

I put a ton of time into doing the worldbuilding for this though, so I want to get a real pay-off from it in terms of telling a complete story.

I'm trying to use my actually built world this time. It's really helped me flesh out things, and actually have stuff to go into tangents about or just hint at the existence of. It's made things a lot of fun, in other words. Normally I just come up with an idea and write by the seat of my pants. What kind of stuff did you do to build out the world beforehand?

As with every year, I don't have time to NaNo. But despite that, last night I was writing character sketches and outlines anyway. So hurrah!

I put a ton of time into doing the worldbuilding for this though, so I want to get a real pay-off from it in terms of telling a complete story.

I'm trying to use my actually built world this time. It's really helped me flesh out things, and actually have stuff to go into tangents about or just hint at the existence of. It's made things a lot of fun, in other words. Normally I just come up with an idea and write by the seat of my pants. What kind of stuff did you do to build out the world beforehand?

My starting point was wanting to tell space opera on human timescales without using standard FTL-tropes. So the first thing was coming up with the technological underpinnings and place setting that would make such a story possible, and then trying to figure out what a society would look like in that type of an environment, both in terms of economics/governance, and in terms of day-to-day stuff and idiomatic speech. And then trying to figure out what kind of characters I wanted to write about and what kind of story I wanted to tell, once I had that setting. I spent a lot of time mathing to get the spatial and temporal scales tuned to one another. The two biggest things as a starting point were working out the power sources involved, and the transportation/communication technology involved, which obviously needed to be cracked together, and once I had that, everything else began to coalesce. I have a mix of some fun (for me) high-concept hard-SF, mixed with a small amount of handwavium, but I think it's nonstandard handwavium (and it certainly is in the application), which makes it more fun. And the analogy driving the handwavium inspired me to draw on some mythological sources in a way I otherwise wouldn't have thought of.

Robot roll call!

I actually managed to get ahead by a day this year. It just started happening randomly; I would finally get the swing of the writing right when I was about 200 words away from the daily goal, and suddenly it was 400 words later. It all worked out really well, since I traveled for Thanksgiving for the first time in a long time.

I did really badly. I think I only actually stuck it out for 2 or 3 days. Being disciplined is hard.

Yo. Creeping out of lurkdom to say that November is ten months away, and yet I really want to do NaNoWriMo right now. Feeling so strongly about it that I came here to whine. The end.

Is anyone doing the camp NaNoWriMo currently? I was on amazon buying a case for my birthday gopro and it popped up books....ender/ bean series popped up. Reminded me of all my friends here I've not talked to; then I found this.

I am currently Writing (and hopefully a rewrite edited) a fantasy short story called Devil By Mistake

I am attempting (and failing). I'm doing a very modified version--multiple short stories and a lower word count goal. I've been way out of practice with writing in general, so I'm hoping this well get me back in a writing/storytelling groove.

I haven't written anything yet...I'm so distracted