alanajoli | Entries tagged with saving tara

So, back at the beginning of January, I posted some goals: one about developing a spiritual practice and one about returning to an actual writing practice. Then

devonmonk posted another entry about goals over at Deadline Dames, and I set a couple of mini-goals, mostly about meeting my deadlines (with additional uber-goal of doing actual fiction writing between then and now). How am I doing?

With the spiritual practice, actually pretty well, comparatively. I'd been doing nothing, really, so anything is an improvement! Breakfast with Barfield is going well, and I'm pleasantly pleased with how easy Saving the Appearances is to read this time around. It's not as hard to wrap my brain around the ideas as it was when I first started contemplating them, and I'm glad of that. I've also been back to lighting candles for people with some regularity, which is in part due to the ridiculous number of candles we found when we moved, but largely because I've been thinking about people who need positive spiritual energy sent their way--and even if candles are only a representation, it's a meaningful practice for me.

As for the writing practice, I have say I'm not doing as well as I'd like. This is, in part, because I keep taking more work. I haven't yet gotten up to Jayne-level ("The money was too good. I got stupid."), but I'm keeping myself busy and working. If all goes well, I'll have an adventure gig shortly, and I've been working on Baeg Tobar shorts; I'll soon be starting the long project for them as well. That's definitely good work flexing my writing muscles, and I'm enjoying it. But "Good Company," "Chalice Girl," "Saving Tara," and the Blackstone novel are still just hanging out, waiting for me to pay more attention to them than I've been able to.

What about those mini-goals? I mostly made them. Considering my schedule being shifted some by new work that inserted itself, I think I met them all. Specifically, though, there's one piece that didn't get written that I still need to work on this week, before next week's deadlines catch up with me. To use Devon's technique, I'll put my goals here for my next two week period: one reasonable goal and one completely unreasonable, sky-high goal, and then I'll check back in two weeks from now and see how I did.

Reasonable Goal: Finish the essay that I meant to complete for the last set, complete the first set of copyediting/writing assignments that go with a three-part project, complete one reference writing project, and complete one large review/article project. Blog at least twice a week. Provide good critiques to the Substrate crew. Make progress on either "Good Company" or the Blackstone novel.

Unreasonable Goal: All of that, plus finishing another reference writing assignment early, blogging every day, and completing "Good Company," "Chalice Girl," and several Blackstone chapters.

For those of you who do resolutions, how are you keeping up with your January goals?

P.S. Congrats to

devonmonk on getting contracted for six Allie Beckstrom books! I really enjoyed Magic to the Bone, and I'm thrilled that there will be that many in the series!

I had a lot of ideas about what to post on today, but I keep coming back to the one that's on my mind at the moment: interactive storytelling. There is just nothing more satisfying to me than making a story with other people. (I'll use the term interactive storytelling for CRPGs and VRPGs, but they're really a substitute for good old fashioned gathering with friends and, roughly, playing let's pretend.) When I was a kid, these stories didn't often have a lot of plot, and since I was the middle kid in the neighborhood, I usually followed the lead of my surrogate big sis, and my own younger sister followed along. We were pioneers or astronauts or pirates, usually making the swing set in her back yard or the rock garden in ours the home base. At school, for kindergarten and some of first grade, I was the lead storyteller in my class, because I had a lot of good let's pretend ideas. But right about five or six, real life starts getting more interesting to most kids than full-on games of let's pretend--or the pretending at least takes a real life turn rather than the fantastic--so it really wasn't until discovering D&D in high school that I had an outlet for shared fantasy.

To say it was life-changing may be a slight exaggeration, but not much. Here were people I not just traded stories with (I had done that on and off in middle school), but created stories with me. There's something magical about that, about sharing imagination space. Mythically speaking, the collective representations of that group of people shift to something new and different, and while that can be shared with people who aren't there, being in the moment and creating those new representations--that sub-reality or sub-creation--is profound.

A friend once asked me how I could become so close to my gaming friends. It wasn't like we had any real experiences together. We just sat around a table playing make-believe. But to me, well, I've always made the best friends of the people who have shared imaginary realms with me. Sometimes that's in the world of theater (because I think theater touches on that same bordering realm), and my fellow mythographers in our thought experiments certainly touch that same profound experience, but most often, it's been my gaming group. I suspect it's not always quite as powerful for them as it is for me, but sometimes, I suspect it is.

And those are the games I can't help but think about between sessions, desperately craving what comes next, no matter what that happens to be.

--

In other news, "The Chalice Girl" is not coming together the way I'd like, and I think I'm going to put that on hold until the next time a Lace and Blade open call comes around. In actuality, I mean that I'm going to continue working on it, though with less focus, since "Saving Tara" is still waiting for attention, and I'm considering a piece on a vampire in the Revolutionary War mostly to entertain my friend Michelle, but partly because I think there's an actual story there to be told. (This last actually ties into the current shared imagination experience I'm having, and because of that, it may well not translate to actual fiction, but I think I'll give it a go.) The biggest thing I'm regretting right now is that I wrote down the final deadline for the Lace and Blade open call rather than the opening of acceptance of pieces. I really need to give myself a deadline at least in the *middle* of the call in order to not be rushing at the last minute--and then putting together something that isn't my very best. So I'm giving myself permission to miss this one in hopes of having something better the next time an open call that I care about comes around.

Well, as timely as the short story I'm writing is (Tara's still being threatened by the M3), I think it's not going to work for the open call I was hoping to submit it to. I reread the submission guidelines and think they're looking for something far more science fiction and far less urban fantasy.

I'm going to look up other places that'll inspire me to give it a deadline, but in the meantime, I think it's back to work on paying gigs. And editing "Choosing Fate" before the deadline, of course.

Yesterday was a fun productive day. I finished off "Choosing Fate" and got some work done on "Saving Tara." I also did Tae Bo. Now I am suffering. Apparently not stretching ones rib muscles (my sister the massage therapist will be irritated at my calling them that, but I never took anatomy) for months means they get sore when you stretch them and throw some punches. Ow.

So, since Zoukuto seems to be down, today we have word counts via Writertopia:

Choosing Fate

Saving Tara

Not too shabby.

Following the meme trend on

fangs_fur_fey (started by

melissawriting here), I thought I'd post the soundtrack for my books. Here's the rules:

"Pick one of your novels, screenplays, graphic novels, or short stories.

Tell us the name, the pub date & house if there is one. If not, just tell us the name & if the novel is in process, sold, shopping, or something else (i.e. everyone can play not just those on a shelf somewhere).

List 3-6 song titles (& the artist singing the song) that will give a reader a taste of the tone of said novel. Tell us why if you feel so inclined."

I'm just seriously picking one for this game (

frost_light was great and listed a bunch of hers) because there's only one that's really obvious to me. Into the Reach (White Silver, 2006) has a full CD soundtrack, Harris Moore's Stone Circle. I actually went out and bought more of this artist's music to write to because it was so perfect for the mood I was trying to set. (I'd bought the first CD in Ireland, and was relieved that they were on CD Baby as well.)

I think if I were trying to pin down Departure (White Silver, 2007), it would be somewhere between the Celtic instrumental stuff from Harris Moore & friends and the faux-Anglo Saxon riffs from Lord of the Rings, but adding French Horn. I have no idea of such a thing exists. And Regaining Home (White Silver, ?) would build from there, and include more drums.

I borrowed this from

janni and have seen a couple of other ljers do it, so here goes:

The opening of the oldest story I still have a copy of:

I hadn't read this in awhile, and that rewrite I've been thinking about for ages... it looks a lot better now. :) (This dates back to eighth grade.)

( Read more... )

The opening of the first story I sold:

(From Into the Reach)

( Read more... )

The opening of my current work in progress:

Some of you saw this in a teaser not long ago. (There's a minor bit of swearing here, disguised by accent, just as a warning for those of you who prefer "network" safe writing.)

( Read more... )

Here it is, already December, and I have short stories banging on my door to be written in between the skads of reference work I've managed to bury myself in. As is my usual, since my deadlines are a little bit away, and I just finished a project, I'm letting myself breathe. If I followed this tendency a little less, I would probably not go psycho when my deadline rolled around. I don't consider it procrastination, exactly--it's not like I'm doing things other than work to avoid work, I've just put relaxing higher on the priority list for now.

Enter psycho-busy 'Lana who didn't blog for a week because she was knee deep in coding-author-biographies-xml-help!

But now that I'm on top of the pile for a moment (or have only fallen in up to my ankles as it begins to pile around me again), I wrote two new script pages for Cowboys and Aliens, did some brainstorming with Jeremy Mohler on Worlds at War, and in general got that part of my schedule straightened out for a week or so. I still need some bonus pages, I believe, but nothing I can't manage.

The short stories on the other hand... well, I had three scheduled for December/January, but it looks like one, that was for a contest, is going to get dropped from my plate. (This is okay, since I think

tltrent's piece that I hope she's submitting will rock all the other submissions out of the water. *g*) Which leaves me with two. And they have names, so I'll actually put up the word counts here.

Wish me luck!

"Saving Tara"