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I spent a lot of time thinking about plot this morning. Is it better to plan it all out, or to just let it happen? I have a rudimentary idea of where things are going now, but I feel like it’s pretty cleche, and I haven’t figured out certain motivations yet either. I keep changing my mind, actually.

I think I need an entirely new and fresh perspective in the novel, perhaps I should bring in another plotline… I only really have two right now, even though I’ve got about three different perspectives. I really should have gone the absurdist route with this… I think I would be much happier writing in random strangers that just die horrible deaths. I don’t know how I ended up with this crappy drama, although i guess drama is really what keeps you reading. There has to be some plot or motivation. Is it too late to change my tone entirely? I’m afraid it probably is. I’m keeping everything plausible, at least to me, and I guess I should just finish and be done with it. If it sucks ass, I can let it suck ass… But I guess the whole point is that I’d rather it didn’t.

So much doubt, so little writing.

I’ve told myself today that as soon as I catch up to where I “should be”, I’ll let myself play all these video games that I’ve been meaning to play. Last weekend I picked up the new stupid Morrowind with expansions, and Ape Escape 2, (which is pretty fun, I took a break and played it briefly the other day), and then yesterday I picked up Jak 2, (I’m SUPER excited about it) and this PS2 Eye thing… there are like 10 games that come with it, they all look pretty stupid and simple, but I’m excited to play them anyway.

OK, enough procrastination. I’m off to write myself into as many corners as I can find!

[novel update: I’m at 437 words, at 9:38pm. As soon as I post this blog entry, I’ll be starting in earnest. I’ve even taken my laptop into the bathroom with me. Yes, I know that was something you didn’t want to know.]

I was blogsurfing today, and stumbled upon this guy who was talking about how he cheated on girls, and how he’d never been able to stop. That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that what he wrote about his emotional perspective and relationship “history” seemed at the time very similar to the way I would describe things. Actually, the more I sat there and thought about it, the less our histories sounded similar, but at the time, it “struck a chord” (that’s the way I put it in the comment I left on his blog). When I write about people’s blogs, or their entries, I usually link to them, but I don’t have the link handy, and I wanted to post this stuff…it’s all stuff I wrote that I thought I was going to post in response to his blog entry… but then I realized that, at the end of his entry, the message was clear, he wanted to change. He had met someone new, and he really thought this would be a new leaf for him… so much of what I said below just wasn’t relevant. (I went on about my open relationship.) So I deleted it from the comment, and decided to post it here instead.

I guess my point is that I knew at an early age that I was going to have trouble with commitment. Even in my 2 year relationship (3 years if you count the year afterwards that we kept trying to make it work, even though she could never trust me again) we started out with a 1 or 2 month period where we were “dating other people”. (Until we both decided we were “it” for each other. Last mistake like that I’ll make.) Almost every relationship I’ve been in has either a) had a point where my girlfriend decided she didn’t want to be in this open relationship anymore, or b) fizzled because somehow lack of commitment turned into lack of intensity (to be fair, there may have been any number of other factors involved in any of those “fizzles”.) At least, that was true until just recently.

A little over two years ago, I went through what felt like a very long dry spell in relationships. I only dated one or two people in a 2 or 3 year period… and I was just about ready to abandon the whole idea of “open relationships” entirely. It seemed the older people were the less likely they were to accept the idea of a serious relationship where you could still date other people.

Then I met my current girlfriend. We’ve been dating for 2 and a half years, and are still going strong. We’ve both “made out” with other people plenty of times… (we have a “no sex” rule–intercourse only, oral sex is fine). Anyway, it’s working great. We’ve lived together for over a year, and I think this truly is “it”. I mean, why would I ever leave her? Why would she leave me? We’re both happy with the situation… So take it from me, it can work, you’ve just got to find the right girl.

Yes, I wrote all that crap in a comment on someone else’s blog. But I changed my mind at the last minute. I’m now returning to my regularly scheduled slavish novel writing.

Well, I’m about 1000 words short now. My completing this beast depends on being able to write more on the weekends than I can during the week. I have plenty of excuses for last night… I didn’t start actually writing until at least 11:30 (and not really until midnight), but those are still just excuses. Hopefully I can eek out more than 2000 today, and catch up fully by the end of the weekend. I think I’ve decided though, that if I don’t complete by the end of this month, I’ll make every effort to continue until I do finish. If that means it takes me two months, so be it.

Where is this enthusiasm while I’m writing?

Well, I’m a couple hundred words behind… (never mind that my story is going nowhere fast.) I’ve noticed this novel is doing wonders for my blogging. This week is the first one in probably months that I’ve posted four days in a row.

There is an immense sense of accomplishment that goes along with finishing my obligatory 2000 words. So far I’ve only felt that twice, and last night I was tossing and turning the whole night, agonizing about whether I should get up and try to finish again. I hope tonight I can actually motivate myself to get 2200 words in, hopefully before it’s time for bed. I have family dinner before I can start, which isn’t going to help anything.

Alex sent me a link to Blovel 2003 this afternoon. I will probably sign up… but since I’m posting my actual novel to a different blog than I normally post to, they’ll only get my novel updates, not the blog posts about them. When I surfed the site earlier, I found that the meta-novel posts were actually more interesting, I felt than the ones of the actual novel. It’s probably a lot like reading the nanowrimo forums… which seems incredibly addicting. I’ll bet there are hundreds of people who don’t finish each year from just reading those forums. I also wonder if anyone has done a percentage study/comparison of how many people post on the forums regularly, versus how many people finish their 50.000 words.

I discovered today that amazon’s new “search entire text of book” feature is good for something. You get to the end of their “sample pages” you can just search for the next page number! I’d never make it through a whole book that way (I’m guessing), but I’m excited to try! Who wants to make bets about how long the page numbers will be searchable?

Also, I’ve decided I really want to read Rucker’s The Hacker and the Ants.

(PS, this entry is over 330 words, words that could have gone towards the novel, damnit.)

Massive re-writes will be happening when this is done, I think. I’m tempted to do them now, but I think the idea is to just get everything down first, then clean it up, so I’m going to stick with that plan of action. The whole asteroid-mining thing needed some scientific consistency. I almost scrapped the concept entirely, but I think they’ll still be doing it, just on the same asteroid for months at a time rather than flitting from one to the next. There are simply a) not enough asteroids for that to continue all that long as a career, and b) not asteroids close enough to one another. The time period is still akin to the gold rush, the scale has just been cut back some.

Of course, none of this helps me find a plot. Lesbian Space Vampires may or may not make an appearance. That was Travis’s contribution to my novel, but I mutated it into Lesbian Space Ninjas, as I’d already mentioned the vampire thing, and I didn’t want to have to wait to tie them in.

In an hour, I’ll be in a movie theater about to watch the finishing sequel to the Matrix. I’ve got my fingers crossed. Critics have panned it, but it could be good anyway, who knows? I’ve invited my friend Alex, who told me yesterday that he’s going to do the nanowrimo thing with me!!! Yes! A partner in crime. And he’s leaning towards space opera, which is simmilar to my genre.

Ok, so the second installment is live. I feel like I’ll never do it. Every word was forced. My entire entry. I even started different places, completely new characters, and I don’t know that any of it was good. If this were just a short story, I would force myself to stick with one narrative, but that was getting agonizing. I’m not sure if I can do it. Maybe I’m not cut out for it. I didn’t think it’d be this hard. I hope I can make something interesting happen. Maybe I should just break from the plausible entirely. I think I’d have more fun that way. I do so admire people who’ve done it well…

It’s like I’m trying to write hard SF so far, and I’m not even sure that’s my favorite genre. I’m a much bigger fan of the surreal sci-fi (Noon and Rucker are my favorites), and the humorous pseudo-real (I’m thinking Douglas Adams now). I should really read more for inspiration, but I don’t have time. I think I spent at least 3 hours last night, and tonight it was more like 4 (with some sleeping thrown into the middle of them, so that may not be entirely fair, but STILL).

I am talentless and worthless in ways I didn’t even imagine before starting this exercise. I must endure… no matter the cost to my time or patience. This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic. Wish me luck; I need your encouragement.

ARG! I’ve just realized that this whole concept of a “sounding cannon” is completely ridiculous in outer space. Now what would you use to survey asteroids before mining them? Radiation? Grrr.

Possible directions I could go… Mir’s father could become a main character… the whole story could be about a massive political secession from earth’s government(s) by those in extra-earth space. Or it could just be a travel story ala gulliver’s travels, from one freaky space station to the next… (I’m thinking space vampires here…)

Whatever the case, I have to describe the mining ships better. Everything needs more exposition, in my opinion. Then again, I probably also need more action.

Well, I just spent another hour deleting spam comments… I hope that mt-blacklist thing gets modified to not require the perl module today… (he’s releasing another version today, but I somehow doubt he’s made that major a reconstruction.) I should just buckle down, and ask my host to install it, but I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t know how to do it myself. (I tried, I swear, but it just didn’t seem to work–I’m not sure what I did wrong.)

Novel writing began last night… he first day’s 1900 words are here: /novel/ I’m hoping that I’ll get more structured and focused as time goes on… I really had no idea what I was writing when I started. (And consequently, I thought the tone was much better, which seems common for me. When I sit down with something in mind, I end up writing pretty plain, but when I have nothing in mind, prose blooms flowery and more interesting.) I also changed the person about halfway through, (first to third) so there is a lot of editing to be done in there dealing with that.

I’ll work on consistency. I hadn’t exactly meant to write a novel about a space miner’s kid, but that’s what ended up coming out so far. Of course I didn’t know it at first, and the passages jump around quite a bit. Transitions? What transitions?

I’ve been thinking about plot all morning. I need to have one… I’m sure it’ll come to me eventually, but will it be too late when it does!?! Of course, it could just be one of those journeys of discovery sorts of things. (New working title: “Letters to a young space-pirate”???)

Yesterday Laura did some research on how you can tell… and we now think Zelda is a male cat. This is weirdly huge news. I mean, it doesn’t change who she–er, he–is, but it also somehow does. Plus, this turns their feisty play/licking into cat homoeroticism. (Or just brotherly love.)

Laura said my plot could be like that discovery. Maybe my main character will turn out to be female like some kind of weird Shakespearean plot twist, or maybe I’ll just figure out halfway through what I’m writing about, and everything will change as a consequence. Whatever happens, it doesn’t matter. Quantity over quality is what matters here, right? 50-thousand words, here I come.

I want to do this. I’d be starting three days late, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do… and even three days late is less than 2000 words per day. I could do it. I’d have to skip out on a lot of things. I’d have to make it a priority. But I could still do it. I think I will.

Very tentative title: The Festering Spores of Sollitude

I ran into the link again (I end up meaning to do this every year, well, not THIS year!) when reading a new blog linked from another blog: Leora the sane is going to write one too… and then I remembered this guy rob callahan who I met at a party a few weeks back is also doing it. Apparently Leora went to a kick-off party for people in Minneapolis. There must be a final party at the end too… I’ll look forward to it.

Nate posted on his blog last Friday about his first “physical” experiences since his girlfriend broke up with him (or rather, decided they were “just dating”. Then last night she spends the night for the first time in weeks. Is it crass to ask whether this is mere coincidence?