In The Garden Living an RPG Life

Yes, I said 33 days.  I started in earnest today doing the prep work.  The next few days will be dedicated to collecting notes from wherever and making sure I know where they are.  Today, I collected all my “how to write” notes into a Freemind file on my laptop.  Tomorrow, I’ll be putting them all on a second drive: backing up the novel early!

I’ve started wondering what the actual structure of this year’s story will be.  I know what story I want to tell.  I just don’t know all the twists and turns.  One trick I play on myself got formalized today.  It’s the word count building strategy.  Generally, we have strategies to build our word count when we run out of steam.  For example, instructions from one character to another is a good way to build word count.  In one of my novels, I used my need to research geography by sumarizing the research as a presentation of several arguments in the field.  Another time, I used my need to study for the FCC exam to fill out word count.  I just put a lot of the elements I had to learn into a context.  Which leads to how I formalized my strategy.

In a file called “word count” I made a list of things I will need to pay attention to in my story.  There is a wonderful short story called “The Things They Carried”.  When in need of word count, show don’t tell, what is being carried in a ladies’ purse, for example.  Far from being filler, it can become a way to show character, setting, culture.  It happens that the world I’m building is based on the fabric trade so what is carried as a purse can be important to the story.  Again, it’s also a way to fill the word count well when the story stream runs low.

I found a great book on drawing costumes and that helped me think about how to organize what they are wearing.  What I like about doing these kinds of lists, the preparatory ones, is that I find myself asking when or why a list might be used in the story.  It gives me material for a scene that builds character and culture.  I now have a scene planned that has a young girl seeing a town in the throes of a market convention for the first time.   I knew what her role in the story would be and it’s important. She is after all the title character. What I didn’t have was the lead up and revealing kind of story bits.

That’s what I use word count padding for: to help me fill in the necessary parts of the story.

In all the advice about worldbuilding, having a sketch of the important bits is more important than knowing all the details.  My online writing “mentor” Holly Lisle has a method that she’s come up with after creating a couple of world bibles before writing the novel.  I like my lists of things the story needs.  Like weather, landscape, economics. Why? Because in this novel these things are important.  That was the lesson Lisle learned: create only as much world as you need to tell the story effectively.

Remember, I said I wrote this out in Freemind.  That means that there are lots of sublists.  One of those sublists is from a special episode of the Shakespeare and Dragons podcast, Monsters.  That episode, which was created to help raise support funds for the podcast, gave me an important concept for not just this novel but for the whole series.  So, I used the monsters character sheet to make a list in my lists.  In the process I discovered that role playing character sheets can be useful in making characters for novels.

I don’t take the categories literally sometimes.  There is a category called “reach/space”.  When my characters encounter the “monsters” how will I express “reach/space” for them.  They are a couple of women who know little about the world.  At this point I don’t really know.  This is what makes it fun: the intrigue and the puzzle.  Oh, and “saving throw”… How is that going to be expressed in the novel.  While this kind of thing might not generate a lot of word count, it is such an intriguing question that I am sure it will keep me writing.  It might turn out that I write it and don’t use it in the final novel.  That’s what revision is for after all, isn’t it.

I’m yawning. Time for bed.  Early start tomorrow.

Oh! Almost forgot.  Got my Catrina fabric in the mail today.  Slightly disappointed with it.  Why? I didn’t get the measurements right.  Didn’t notice that until last night when I was redoing it. I posted the pattern as 18″x24″ rather than 18″x21″, a proper “fat quarter” yard of fabric.  It’s my first doll panel.  My first contest.  My first fat quarter.

There are a lot of good things though.  I absolutely love the sound and feel of the fabric itself.  I love the scale of the image. I bought a yard of the fabric: one panel for myself and one for Gretchen.  I will figure out what to do with the leftovers another time.  Did I say how much I love the fabric itself?  The sound of the scissors cutting through it, the sound of it as I flap it to straighten it out, the texture.  I didn’t get the same feeling with the samples.  Too small to make that big sound.  I think I’ll like the fat quarters though.  Could really get to like them a lot.  Enough to run my hand over.

Hmm… I know what I’ll do with the misprinted parts of the yard I bought.  Will share later.  Bed time now.

So writing poems is not the same as posting poems.  I ‘ve got the whole month done.

They are in my journal.

OH.  And I was wrong about American Sentences being 27 syllables. They are 17, just like Haiku.  I’ve had the priviledge of trying to explain the concept to a couple of people lately.  Need to brush up on what I know for sure and what I think I know.  Having certainty in both would be helpful and build confidence.

Meanwhile, I’m back on Second Life on Saturdays leading the Global Healing Circle. That means creating more Heart Meditations.  I am thinking of publishing them in one form or another.  I like the sound of my own voice (in a non-ego kinda way) and doing a set of recordings might be nice.

Writing down my ideas for a set of stories about shamanic kids.  Thought of the idea a long time ago when I was reading more about Navajo and Hopi legends.  It was meeting Kahu and Brun in Second Life and Kuel on Huna Trainer that inspired me to finally put the idea into words.  I could see them in their adult struggles to be like children still.  Struggles with the shamanic things, anyway.  I’m having fun thinking of how to bring the world to life.  I don’t think of them as children’s stories, by the way.  Just stories about children.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they all come out.  I did a recording of the draft of the first one and like what I’ve heard.  Too much information in it, though.

I’m taking an online writing course–Holly Lisle’s “How to Think Sideways” and the lessons I’ve got through so far are really cool!  I like how she thinks and what she’s focusing on.  Since I am coaching a couple of other people in their writing endeavors, it’s nice to have someone coaching me.

Well, this is family weekend and it’s time to pay attention and visit!