Productivity Report Mar 17-30

Oh my gosh, I don't even know anymore.

I can barely remember what's been going on. Like. Things.

Things have been going on. They have been  going on all over the place.

Lots of posts backlogged. I've read two stories and written reviews for them. Those reviews should be appearing over the next few weeks. Here, White Marble Block, and The Oak Wheel. Also appeared at Goodreads and Smashwords. Need to fix my problem with Amazon so they can appear there too.

Got a couple of issues of comics to review, and then the author of one of the books I reviewed may be sending me another book or two. So that's good.

Building contacts, reading books and feeling productive, yeah. Yeah.

Things. Going on.

I've gotten established on Ficwad. Archive of Our Own. Tumblr, too.

Everything's happening on the Twitter, lords and ladies. Everything.

So many followers. So few that aren't spam.

I've stopped auto-following. I was told to follow anyone who followed me but I'm going to follow just the ones who seem relevant to writing. Twenty million followers don't mean anything when they don't pay attention to your tweets.

Going on.

Getting established on Dreamwidth. May be getting established on LiveJournal, but that's a trip for another month. Not doing it tomorrow. No way, nuh uh.

Good amount of outlines finished up. Should go well. Won't be twenty even by the end of tomorrow but hey hey hey, that's alright. I'll get it done. Without prepped outlines I was able to do well last month anyway.

We'll figure it out.

So many things.

But it's getting easier and easier, smoother and smoother, yeah? Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't even know anymore...

Things That I Like: Some ways to draw out a fight scene

This article originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on March 13, 2014. 

…

In my last post on the Oak Wheel I established a problem with fight scenes, namely that the longer they are the more unrealistic they become. Like any good problem it’s a solvable one, and I’d like to suggest some possibilities. A lot of these will draw on examples from my own writing because, after all, other people may know us better than we know ourselves but we don’t know anybody better than we know ourselves (at least, we shouldn’t, but luminosity is a discussion for another day). I don’t expect all of them to be immediately applicable to your story but hopefully they should be able to give you some ideas.

There are a few different things that I’ve done. The first one is make both parties very, very skilled but just as lucky. This is very contrived, and I don’t think that I’ve ever managed to do it well, but in the right hands I think it’s possible. I don’t think that it’d be possible to do more than once a decade, let alone more than once a book, though.

Another possibility is disregarding some of the other shortness advice and zeroing in on every detail. Second to second, what is being felt, physically and mentally? Give us the panic, give us the adrenaline, give us the waves of pain from a broken rib, and the will that keeps someone moving despite internal bleeding. Lavish us with it as if we’re watching the scene in bullet time with an MMA commentator. Take the sensory detail and stab us in the heart with it.

It won’t work every time, but it’s possible.

For SF writers there are a few more options. In one story, maybe i’m just tired, people like the main character couldn’t die until they lost the mental strength to keep regenerating. Battles between such beings were long, hard slogs that were as psychological as they were physical, fought with the intent to stab, crush, beat, and chop the limbs off your opponent until the pain and the effort of regenerating were too great to summon the strength to heal themselves anymore. In fact, pure psychological attacks (such as when another character was taunted about her mother’s death, which she hadn’t known about until then) could be as deadly as anything else if they made it harder for your opponent to find the mental strength to keep going.

Similar to this, The Buddha on the Road features characters who, by dint of being zombies, are trying to make each other nonfunctional rather than, um, dead. Brain trauma matters to them as little as torn jugular veins (well, maybe a little bit more, but not by much), so the intent of each one is to take the other guy down into so many pieces that he’s no longer a threat. Both of these ideas are pretty similar to each other (i.e. characters with superhuman toughness) but the details are enough to make them and their fights distinct from each other. Whether you take these mechanics or come up with your own spin on superhuman toughness it should still result in something that smells fresh.

Fighting on some other plane is also great stuff. In Lost Girl the actual physical combat is presented but ultimately takes a backseat to the real conflict being fought between the two characters as they wield a kind of story magic against each other. Each one of them was trying to fit themselves and the other character into a particular archetypal story where their victory was inevitable, nay, required, and drew on incidental details to force the other character to fit the role that had been chosen for them.

This brings up magic in general. Perhaps there are enchantments at work which must be penetrated or used up before anyone can actually be hurt. Something like a mix of this and maybe i’m just tired was done in Her Body Moves, whose characters benefited from a regeneration system that can be overtaxed by suffering too much over too small a span of time. Or they have but one weakness which must be exploited in order to kill them (remember, one of the reasons that real fights end so quickly is because there are so many ways to kill a person).

Before you start to figure out how to justify a long fight scene, though, make sure that you should. Is it something that you can write well? Do you even need it? Many times the tension in the build-up to the fight, and even the aftermath, can be more interesting than the fight itself. Like everything else, you should only bother with a long fight scene when it’s going to serve the story to begin with. And most importantly of all, don’t forget the implications: Your justification, whether it could only exist in a fantasy novel or actually does have some realism to it, will undoubtedly have an effect on the rest of the story and its world. Even zeroing in and slowing down, as described in the third paragraph, will at least have an effect on the style of the rest of the story, which needs to be one that this technique can reasonably fit into and complement.

Your turn: How do you handle action scenes?

R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available here for free. He also maintains a blog at White Marble Block, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction.

A glimpse of the wall of doom

I have begun to post an ever-increasing amount of pages on the wall where I generally write, in order to easily access information without tying up my hands. One of the downsides to putting your computer on a stand barely bigger than your laptop is that there's nowhere else to put papers.

I imagine that I'll be adding yet more pages in times to come.

This is the list that I printed off to keep track of what I needed to do in my off/prep-month. "Vocab?" is in reference to the idea of printing off a sheet or two of words that I want to add to my vocabulary or that I think might be useful in a particular situation. 

As you can see I'm continually making notes, rearranging when something's getting done, etc. If something is circled then that means that it's not a high priority and doesn't necessarily have to get done this month. 

This is the sheet that I made use of while I was working on some of the articles for the Culture Column. Now that I took the pictures, in accordance with the note at the bottom of the page, I guess it's time to retire the page to free up space for more important things. 

The on/crazy-month's counterpart to the first page, I suppose. Going top to bottom, left to right: The first list (1-9, Finding Ginny, etc) listed the stories that I had already completed by the time that I first made this list. The second list (1-9, all scribbled out) is the list of stories that I was working on in order to hit fifteen stories. The third list (1-9, Irem, etc) is a list of culture column articles that I was planning. The to-do list made that obsolete. The mini-calendar to the left kept me aware of how many days were left until the end of the month. As you can see I didn't always check the days off. The last list, titled "Stories Outlined," is keeping track of the stories that I have outlined in preparation for the coming on/crazy-month. I aim to have twenty outlines, as you can see. 

Productivity Report

Did pretty well this past week, all things considered. Only 47 poems submitted, but that's alright. Also didn't expand the card catalog, but this weeks submissions showed that I actually have a large enough selection for now. I don't really need another twenty non-paying markets in the list just yet and I've got most, if not all, of the professional rate markets.

The blog is filled out for stories up through the first full week of April. I may or may not write another one. By the end of today [writing on Saturday] I should have gotten an idea of which stories I'm going to be outlining over the next two weeks.

Besides the tasks written out at the beginning of the week I also got two shiny published stories to review. I should have the first book finished and reviewed by the end of the month. I've also begun planning a little bit for a Lovecraftian toolkit PDF for gaming and writing, getting the basic structure figured out and asking people at RPG.net what they'd like to see.

This coming week it's looking like:

• Monday: Create three Useful Notes PDFs and the So You Want To PDF. Shoot an email to see if they'd mind me putting a link up on TV Tropes to the PDFs. Write So You Want To Write the Next HPMOR and shoot it to Eliezer Yudkowsky for props or anti-props, as the case may be. 
• Tuesday: Do a little more uploading of fanfiction (ficwad, etc). Restructure White Marble Block. Clean out the bookmarks. Clean out my files a little more. 
• Wednesday: Clean out email account. A story outline. Flesh out some fanfic seeds (a paragraph where there is none, doubled length where there is). After all that's done and I've read some stories for review purposes, see how much I can do on the Unlikely outline. It'd be great if I could get the outline down pat enough that, come next off/prep-month, I can take a five-day to sit down (or stand, as the case may be) and churn out 20-25,000 words and get it all done then. Assuming I update it every week and every other week includes an additional story, that's eleven weeks (22 chapters total) that have their stories taken care of. 
• Thursday: One or two Culture Column articles. A story outline, possibly but not probably. 
• Friday: Arrange for guest posts for White Marble Block. One or two story outlines. 
• Saturday: Take a day off to heal. 

Scattered throughout, I'll also be reading and reviewing all sorts of stories, some on Absolute Write and at least one of the published stories that was sent to me. 

The Commercial Curmudgeon: The Sad Demise of the "History" Channel

Keep in mind the soul of your story as you're writing it. Whether it's while you're still working on the original product or writing the fifth sequel, don't sell its soul just to play things safe. Unless that was what you were intending to do all along, of course. But if it's got a soul to start with then make sure that it's still got one at the end.



The Commercial Curmudgeon: The Sad Demise of the "History" Channel: I love history. When I was a kid, I'd spend hours poring over old history textbooks, looking for maps, graphs and charts and reading ...

Beta Schedule is progressing smoothly

I had to take yesterday off [as I write on Sunday] for a variety of reasons. Painting walls took some time, but for full disclosure I was reaching a burning out point anyway and the most that I was able to do was (in all fairness, a considerable and tedious amount of) prep work for some Culture Column articles. Which, by the way, I'm a little unclear about the status of, as the CC didn't go up last month and I haven't gotten a reply back about that situation.

So far I've completed five of the eight stories for White Marble Block (first one is going up the same day you're reading this), gotten an agreement for a guest post for WMB, completed a Culture Column article, all four articles for Things That I Like on The Oak Wheel, and ten of the eighteen WMB posts needed to carry me through this and next month and into the month following.

This coming week I intend to: finish the last eight posts for White Marble Block, make eighty poem submissions, increase my card catalog by twenty entries, write another story or two, get another two guest authors for WMB, and finish four more Culture Column articles.

Going day by day that might look like:

• Monday: Last eight posts, two Culture Column articles
• Tuesday: 80 poem submissions
• Wednesday: CC article, increase card catalog (if not done the day before)
• Thursday: CC article, write a story (maybe)
• Friday: CC article (sixth of the month), get another two guest authors for WMB, write a story
• Saturday: Take a day off to heal

I also want to have in mind, oh, twenty story ideas from which to develop my thirteen outlines, critique some stories on Absolute Write (gotta pay it forward!), and do some posting/editing/backlogging on dA, Tumblr, and so on. 

Leaves me with just forty-two items to complete in the two weeks following, fourteen of which are ultimately of varying degrees of optionality (that sounds like a made-up word for some reason but Dictionary.com confirms its existence). 

Next week I'll have pictures of the work-wall that's developing next to my computer so that you can see some of how I operate. 

Stage 2... Begin

And a new month begins.

Day 2 of the new month as I'm writing this, and I'm making a respectable amount of progress with preparing for my second on-month of crazy takka-takka keyboard smashing come April.

There are a few changes that I'm hoping to implement with this coming month that should help me to be a little more effective. The first one, as you may have noticed, is that I've changed my posting time. I'm going to be experimenting with this for a few months based on what reports have said is the best time for posting and see which works best for me. Some days and times are better for page counts, others for comments, others for getting people to link to your stuff. I don't know yet which is the most important for me yet, since it's not just what I'm losing or what I'm gaining for a certain day or time but how much I'm losing against how much I'm gaining.

Another change that I'm making is automating my Twitter account to schedule my Tweets like I do my blog. This'll mean that my Twitter account is something that I only have to think about once in awhile instead of something that can force me to choose between posting at a good time and disrupting a good writing period.

Productivity report

For-market stories currently completed:

1. The Albatross Came 
2. The Angel in the Basement (completed this week)
3. Azazel's Goat (completed this week; formerly The Scapegoat)
4. The Dog Set Free
5. Finding Ginny
6. An Honor and an Horror 
7. Lost Girl
8. The Man with the Bloody Coat
9. Percival 
10. Perfect Engine
11. Pickman's Estate
12. The Philosopher's Ship
13. Sedatophobia
14. Thomas Edison's Last Gambit

You'll notice that I don't have The Buddha on the Road up there. I kind of dropped the ball on that one. Well, what's done is done...

There are a lot of forums that I plan to get into, for the first time or not. Community is essential for both feedback and awareness, and if I'm going to have any success then I need to pay it forward on credit: If I'm going to get reviews then I need to review other people first.

There are some other websites that I plan on posting fiction to, too. Every little bit helps. Most of them are fanfiction sites but I'm looking for original fiction sites too. Does anybody know of a site that uses the structure from Archive of Our Own but allows original fiction? That'd be all kinds of sweet bro and hella jeff.

Also: restructuring my blogs (and getting a few more guest posts like Mr. Gagne's); getting back to cleaning my files out;  reading more (both online and in print); writing enough fiction, WMB and TWTIGTD posts, & guest posts for The Oak Wheel and The Fridge to last until my next off/prep-month; finishing the last nine articles in the Culture Column; drawing up... thirteen outlines so that I have twenty come my next crazy/on-month; maybe finish cleaning out my bookmarks; send out a load's load of submissions (mostly poetry) to publishers (let's aim for... eighty? yeah, eighty poems) and build my card catalog of publishers; maybe do some pre-prep prep to make next off/prep-month a little easier; do some work on the Useful PDF; write a So You Want To... page or two; outline Unlikely; probably edit some stories; maybe do a little more tinkering with different story ideas I've got...

Oh, and do a little bit of work on Sundays for a certain story that I won't be telling you about until I've got it all figured out. It'll be interesting, I hope. Abraham Isaac and WWI and Catholic priests and maybe Tarot and... Well, it's defs not what you're thinking it is. Nope, not that either.

Just wait and see, kk?

...

Yeah, I think that's a good laundry list, plus the school prep and work-work that I need to get done. I'll take another looksie over the next month and let yous know if there's anything else I had to add, and probs get an actual schedule out for getting this done. I'm hoping to get all the stories (maybe all the posts) done by the end of this week. If I can get four or five culture columns done in a day then that leaves me with the two of the three biggest jobs done when I wake up on the Twelfth. Let's say Thirteenth to play it safe. Still gives me fifteen days plus Sundays to get the rest done, and that'll be good enough.

Yeah. I can work with that.