Sunday, August 25, 2013

Summer Challenge Weeks 4 and 5, Beta-ing, and Cake (sorta)

And thus passes yet another week where I didn't update...
At least the delay was again because of massive writing that you fine folks can read. Although, looking back, it was a silly reason to delay - and eventually just all out miss - my weekly update.

I have been running behind on the recaps that I've been attempting for the writing challenge over on Writers' Huddle. Originally, I was going for little blurbs about what happened on the X-Future boards. These would be posts of about 1000 words or so; maybe even less. Because my plans originally had me writing so little, I had decided to write two recaps a week.

Well, here we are at the end of Week 5 out of a 6 week challenge, and these recaps are starting at about 1000 words each! It's keeping me about a week and a half to get the two recaps completed each time, but more on that in a moment. My point is that I'm only going to attempt one recap for this last week of the challenge.

Wow... last week of the challenge.... That's weird to think about. Maybe because the summer challenge I participated in last summer involved me writing a brand new short story every day, and so even though I only write 14 out of the 31 days of the challenge it still felt like a LOOOOONG challenge. This one with the weekly updating seemed to have flown by. I wonder if I can keep up this pace even without the challenge incentive....

Anyway, let's go back and recap the past two weeks.

As I stated before, I did have one recap finished last Sunday. Well, in truth, I had the whole thing read, written, proofread/edited, and then posted all last Sunday over my husband's overnight shift. It was a simple update consisting of about four or five posts regarding a semi-crucial event in the game. Basically, it was celestialTyrant trying to cause mischief for his character Nix. The hardest part about the whole recap was that CT left little snippets of what happened here and there, and I had to take a lot of creative liberty in order to lace everything together in to a neat little narrative.

Well, I had the recap written and posted with enough free time to write up a blog update last Sunday. However, I was determined - especially since the Nix update was only about 1000 words long - to write my second recap of the week before blogging about Week 4 of the challenge. I didn't realize that the next part that needed to be recapped would be our longest Danger Room training session. It's also one of our longest scenes on the board. Whoops.

It kept me off-and-on writing between Sunday and Wednesday to finally finish the second recap. Between finally trying to make up for the chores I had been neglecting in order to push the recap out and people visiting, well, I just never got around to either a mid-week blog update to make up for missing Sunday or working on the official recaps for Week 5 of the challenge.

So, I say the short Nix update was the last-minute recap for Week 4, and the three-day writing frenzy on the Danger Room narrative was the recap for Week 5.

Anyway, for those who haven't found them yet, here are the two recaps.

Nix Loses Control on FF.
Nix Loses Control on DA.

Capture the Flag on FF.
Capture the Flag on DA.

The writing challenge for week 4 was to write as fast as possible for ten minutes. As evidenced by the "10 minute writing exercise" I wrote for Week 2 that ended up being the 3hr long writing session that resulted in the X-Future Snippet "[Screw Driver] Attacks"; when I start writing a scene I don't stop until it's done. And most times I don't write fast enough - or short enough scenes - for it to be finished within 10minutes of writing. So this was going to be the trickiest challenge for me yet.

I solved my "I can't stop" issue by making sure to try out the challenge over my work breaks. Fifteen minute breaks that included a quick trip to the bathroom, and some time to get in to my locker to get my pad and pen. More-or-less leaving me with ten minutes to write, and forcing me to stop no matter where I was in the writing so that I wouldn't get in trouble for taking too long of a break.

I ended up repeating the challenge during three different work breaks in order to finish up the scene. It's not nearly compelling enough for me to post it as one of my X-Future Snippets, but you will EVENTUALLY get around to reading it as part of the recaps.

I had been stalled for about three weeks on what to do next with Lia. Ripley had just asked her to pack up some things for them to have a weekend away in NYC. However, her father Jamie "Multiple Man" Madrox has been depicted as an insanely overprotective father. There was no way he'd let his 17-yr-old daughter go on a weekend trip to NYC alone with her 19-yr-old new boyfriend. I thought the drama of either Jamie finding out or Lia trying to find a way around her father would be amusing and help catapult the stagnant Lia. However, I had no clue where Lia would run in to her father or what the conversation would sound like.

So I used the 10min challenge as a way to just write the dialogue. I'd figure out the location later.

For those who are curious, the short version is that Lia runs in to her dad who was terrified after hearing about the attack on the prom after party. She reassures him that she's fine - albeit a bit banged up - and that she was in the recovery ward for so long because she was visiting Ripley. Jamie then goes on a mini-tirade about her being too young to keep wasting her time spending every waking moment with her boyfriends as they get themselves thrown in to the infirmary. He then commented that he was still mad at Chayse for dumping Lia, and that he needed a good man-to-man talk with Ripley. Like the typical 17-yr-old I'm trying to have her be, Lia is beyond embarrassed about everything. She defends Chayse and Willow before begging her father to not bring out any dupes while talking to Ripley - this tactic having been used in the past to scare off possible suitors. Jamie agrees and decides that the three of them are going to have a nice dinner in order for Jamie to better know Ripley; problem being that Lia and Ripley were already planning on being in NYC when Jamie wanted to have the dinner. So now Lia is dancing around the fact that she has no clue how to "escape" the Institute without her father knowing where she's going, and of course forbidding it. The scene closes out with Lia nervously laughing as she is escorted back to Ripley's room by her father, still unsure how to navigate the whole "Dinner with Dad vs Sneaking out to a weekend in NYC" dilemma.

It will be a while before I'm far enough in the recaps for this scene to show up, but fear not. I do have at least one Snippet currently in the works and - depending on writing free time - I might have it written in a week or two. The thing with this Snippet though is that the ENTIRE thing is a spoiler. Hubby made a comment to me about how he wanted to evolve the relationship of two characters, but it hasn't been presented in any form on the forums. I just ran with the idea, however.

I had Hubby greenlight all of the details I bulleted for the scene I want to write, and so for intents and purposes what I'm going to write will be canon. The details may even sneak their way in to the role play eventually. It will be a little fun to write, so we'll see how that goes.

Alright, so all that was Week 4's mini-challenge, what about Week 5?

The challenge for this week was to keep a writing journal, and write in it after at least one writing session. I definitely need to do something like this. I can really zero in on what inspires me to write vs keeps me sitting on the couch watching TV. I can focus on what time of day I seem to get the most writing done during. I can figure out what causes the largest distractions while I'm writing and what techniques are most effective in keeping me focused. I can narrow down what music helps me write vs. the music that just distracts me more by messing with my emotions a bit too much. The list of benefits to keeping a writing journal just go on and on.

I sort of did a writing journal back when I attempted NaNo last November. I had an excel spreadsheet where one page was the count of how many words I needed to write to stay on-track with the 50,000 word goal, as well as how far I had actually gotten with my word-count. It was a nicely done calculation device and I'll definitely have to use it again this year - as well as perhaps find a way of sharing the blank file with other NaNo-ers.

Anyway, the other page in that spreadsheet was a log of my writing. It listed what I worked on - blog post, NaNo novel, or "other" - what time I worked on it, how many words I got in, what the environment was like - isolated, internet/TV free, friends around, in the work break room, comfortable chairs, laying in bed, etc - whether or not Hubby or I had work, and if the upcoming deadline was self-imposed.

I'm lazy and therefore haven't actually gone through the spreadsheet yet to see if any patterns arise, but it's there for the day when I'm not so lazy. So would a journal with more narrative specifics.

Considering my difficulties in writing in the first place, I ended up not truly writing a journal like the challenge requested. Although, I do still consider the mini-challenge completed. After nearly every writing session I posted something about it on Facebook. These statuses are sort of my journal for the challenge. As is this blog post. I mean, I'm still going over everything that more-or-less went through my mind and the distractions I had to deal with during the past few weeks of writing.
I count it at least.

In fact, I went so far as to teasingly tag Ali on one of my statuses in order to ask her if it counted. She agreed, but mainly because she was on vacation this past week and was feeling lenient.
I was able to accomplish something outside of the challenges as well this past week. Omnibladestrike - along with CT, The Bard, Ronoxym, Cyhyr, and Gunvalel - invaded my home on Friday; mainly because CT was crashing the night, and it was the first time any of us really got a chance to see him pretty much the entire summer. Well, while Omni was over to hang out with Hubby, CT, and the rest of the gang, he wanted me to help him with his story.

So, even though I still have three of ChibiSunnie's stories in my "Need to Beta" queue since June, I ended up reading Omni's story - which, to be fair, was also in that queue for about a month now - and gave him notes both in person and in the margins for him to reflect back on.

Once more the boy more-or-less completely changed his opening, and I feel like it will change about a half-dozen times more. However, I think I finally got him to realize that he needs to complete the manuscript first, and then rework the opening during his re-write. So that's progress.

Although his writing has indeed improved each go, I feel like this opening might be his least compelling. Add in that the main character Mekonraiba only makes a brief appearance, and I fear the first chapter will be on the chopping block during the first revision. He at the very least has the basic plot points he wants to focus on in future chapters, plus it's entirely plausible that the events in the first chapter can be reworked in to future chapters through snippets of flashbacks and information dropped.

Point is, I'm proud of his improvement and I'm excited to hear that he's already in the midst of his second chapter - finally.

Omni's struggle, as well as mine for a WHILE now, brings me to my last point.

Author Rachel Aaron runs a writing blog entitled Pretentious Title. I started following Rachel after one of the Writers' Huddle members posted a link to her post How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day. Well, the update she posted just this afternoon was especially poignant.

Don't Stomp on My Cake talks about the stress she puts herself under and the guilt she overwhelms herself with due to her overly high writing expectations and fear of failure. She also comments about how she lost hours, days, weeks, months, and even YEARS of writing due to this morale-sucking, motivation-killing guilt and stress in regards to writing.

I completely related to everything she said, even the comment about "Oh, I only have 1/2hr to write in... screw it..."

I feel all writers should read this post, learn from it, and feel less alone in their perceived failures.

Write on, ladies and gents, and take care until the next time I can get my butt in gear and write another post.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

LOTS of X-Future Writings and Starting Two X-Future Stories

Wow. Another 2.5 week hiatus. What is wrong with me this summer!?

Sorry, guys. I really am. I'm hoping to whip myself in to writing this blog regularly again. This is pathetic.


At least I was productive in my time away. And the best part? You'll be able to actually see the results this time! So let's go back in time to see more-or-less what my blog posts would have been...

August 4th
I spent the week of July 28th through August 4th frantically working on the prologue, and then hoped to make it to at least the Student Mixer recap. The prologue ended up taking FOREVER to finish. In the end, it was 12+pages/7500+words long! This thing is a BEAST! A hopefully entertaining beast.

Instead of updating my blog, I finished off the prologue, read it off to my Hubby, posted it on Fanfiction.net, posted on Writers’ Huddle that I completed Week 2's goal, posted the prologue on DeviantArt.com, and then went through the minor chaos of posting the prologue over on the forum. Over 12pgs and 7500 words is WAY too large to have as just one post, so I had to find a way to break it down for the forum. Plus - and this may be a bit selfish and presumptuous of me - I wanted to be the only one capable of writing up these recaps for everyone. So I had to work with Hubby to figure out how to set up a thread for me to post these recaps to, and have the other players able to read without being able to post or comment themselves.

The prologue thread ended up having fifteen posts in order to tell the full story. I broke them down based on the mini-story arcs involved. I then titled the story arcs and posted roughly the "years" the events took place. I'm debating going back to my FF and DA posts and breaking them down the same way. It reads less like a story that way, but it may ease confusion. I'll have to think about that.

Anyway, the fifteen different mini-arcs include:
  • First three years after X-Men: Evolution ended.
  • Phoenix Saga
  • The Reaping
  • Disappearance of Storm and The Kinneys Go on the Lam
  • Toad's Unrequited Love: Scarlet Witch Becomes an Avenger
  • The White Queen Joins the Team and a New School is Built
  • Two Weddings and a Hook-up
  • Quick Blip About Angel
  • An Acolyte and Lieutenant Leave The Brotherhood: Four More Boys Born
  • Illyana's Epic: Magik Rules Limbo
  • Quick Catch-up with Psylocke and Spike
  • The Kinney Saga Continues
  • Discovery of Fireworks and Playing with Shadows
  • The Disappearance of Magma
  • The Future is About to Begin
I received great reviews over on the forum about the prologue, so I'm glad my hard work paid off. I then quickly crashed before I could get to writing the blog post. Whoops.

Another thing I worked on this week was the mini-challenge Ali presented for the Huddle's summer challenge. Originally - and for everyone else participating - the challenge was simply to write at a different time of day than normal. If you normally write at the end of your day, try writing first thing in the morning. If you only write on the weekends, try writing during the work week. If you only write when your kids are down for a nap, trying writing when they're in bed for the night. You get the gist.

Well, I don't ever have set times. I write whenever I'm free and I'm inspired. I naturally write at all hours of the day. I asked Ali what I should do with the challenge.
Ali: You know, you could've just kept quiet and had an easy pass…
:-P
Here's LycoRogue's challenge (and anyone else in a similar situation, feel free to do this one instead):
Use one (or more) of these objects in your scene/chapter/whatever, in an unconventional way:

  • A large hardback book
  • An empty Starbucks cup
  • A laptop power cable
(By "unconventional" I mean your character can't be sitting in Starbucks with their laptop, reading a book and considering getting another coffee because theirs is empty… but anything non-obvious goes!)
If this really isn't going to work with what you're writing, then you can do a 10 minute timed write incorporating at least two of those objects instead.
As soon as I saw "unconventional" I instantly had a fight scene going through my head. Screw Driver was going to make another appearance as he attacks Willow and Chayse. The thing though, is when I start a scene I don't like stopping until it concludes. So this "ten minute timed write" turned in to "Lyco writes for three hours and fills four pages with a little over 2500 words".

I discovered that I still can't write fight scenes. I suck so much at them. But I guess the only way to improve is to practice, right?

August 4 - 11
I had every intention of writing the blog post on my day off on the fifth, but instead I attempted to work on the Student Mixer recap, spend the day with my husband after his morning shift, and cleaning the house. I was too zoned out on Tuesday after my long shift, so no writing then. Instead of catching up with my blog post, I attempted the Student Mixer recap on Wednesday.
It was both a fantastic use and waste of my time.

I got about 2pgs and a little over 1200 words in to my "recap" before I realized that I wasn't even an 1/8th of the way through the role play event. I looked what I had written back over and discovered why this "recap" was taking so long. I wasn't recapping jack! I was straight up converting the script-like writing of the game in to prose. I wasn't summarizing anything, just organizing it in to a different format.

Whoops.

Good old ChibiSunnie sort of laughed about it when I complained on my Facebook page about what I did. She then stated:
Chibi: "That just shows how much of a novelist you are if you can't avoid writing out the whole story."

The next day I attempted the recap again. Although I was able to summarize instead of writing a straight adaptation, it was still 5pgs and over 3400 words! I just wasn't sure what to cut! Since it was introducing the characters to everyone I wanted to include more of their interactions with each other so people to get a feel for the personalities and the dynamics of the group. Also, I wanted to make sure to include the characters that were eventually going to be killed off due to the players not participating anymore; simply so that when they died the players/readers wouldn't just see a name listed and go "Oh, okay, and who was that?" I was also fearful of the current players maybe complaining that their character wasn't in the recap.

The issue being that, due to how active they are on the board, the only characters that really had any significant impact on the story - and therefore the only ones the players/readers needed to know about in order for the next portion of the story/game to make sense - were Nix, Chayse, Lia, Devon, and Annika.

Those five aren't meant to be the main characters of the game, they just sort of BECAME the main characters simply due to how active the characters are in-game. I just hope none of the other players feel scorned about this....

So, Chibi - after again laughing at me complaining a second time about my failure to be succinct - offered to read over the Student Mixer recap and help me out. My goal was to write them like those recap montages in the beginning of episodes, letting viewers know the key points from previous episodes so that events in the current one make sense. She struggled a little bit to try to help me out, but in the end I think she helped me cut it down to exactly what I was aiming for.
So super-duper big help to Chibi and her assistance! Hopefully I can do it on my own this week, but we'll see.

Thursday, August 8th, also had my attempt at the Week 3 mini-challenge for the Writers' Huddle Summer Writing Challenge. The challenge was to use the provided picture as a writing prompt.
You can use the image however you want,
as long as the writing was somehow inspired by the image.
Be as creative or as straight forward as you'd like. Does the layout of the board inspire you to write about a maze? The layout reminded one of the Huddlers of the robots she used to build with Lego's as a kid. Ali even suggested maybe using not the Scrabble board, but the person holding the cup in the upper left corner. Maybe you would like to just select some of the words that were played. Maybe you're inspired to write about characters playing Scrabble or some other game.

That's what Hubby and I decided on. While at the laundromat we were talking about the challenge and he suggested I have two of the characters playing Scrabble. He then joked that it should be Deadpool and Trish while she's being interrogated in her cell. Taking my notepad, he wrote out the words the two of them would play. Trish would begrudgingly play by only spelling out curse words. Deadpool would then retaliate by using all of his words spell out a sentence that would piss Trish off. It was just too good to not actually write this scene out.

It was fun!

In fact, the scene was so much fun, and both Hubby and I loved it so much, that we went ahead and made it canon by having me role play it out on the 10th. 
Ronoxym, as Devon, absolutely LOVED reading the scene. Actually, he's greatly enjoying the entirety of Deadpool messing with Trish while she's incarcerated.
August 11
That's when Sunday came around. I again had every intention of writing a blog post. I'd start off for apologizing for missing my update the week before, and then talk about all the writing I had done the past two weeks.

However, since I had missed a blog post I wanted to give you guys SOMETHING to make up for it. I know it must be annoying to read about all the writing I've been doing, but not being able to see any of the fruits of my labor.

So that's when I decided to screw the shortened recap of the Student Mixer. First off, Chibi hadn't had time to look over it yet. Secondly, the almost bullet-points/news report/short-hand of the event is beneficial for the X-Future players, but for those who aren't involved in the game it would be sort of boring. So, much like with the prologue, I decided to go ahead and just post the 5pg storyesque recap of the mixer. Hopefully it will be more entertaining that way.

So, I had updated the X-Future story I had up on Fanfiction; having both the prologue and the Student Mixer. I then did the same over on DeviantArt. The only issue I really had was that while on FF it was easy to know the two "chapters" went together because it was on the same file. You just click "next chapter" and you go from the prologue to the mixer. DeviantArt doesn't do the same thing. These are two completely different files and unless I leave a link in the description, or if I had a Premium membership and created a subfolder specifically for this story, there's no way of knowing they connect. I then decided to do the same thing I did for my Hey Arnold chapter story over on DA. I was going to create a cover-art picture. This way people know it's part of the same "story" based on the same cover-art.

I had NO clue what to do for this art. I thought about a sort of collage of the X-Future characters, but I'm not a good enough artist to draw them all. I also don't have the pixel-dolls made up for even half of them; so that idea was out. The only place where we have all the characters made up is on the Xbox360 game WWE '13, and I couldn't get screen-captures of the game to use.

So there goes my idea to make a cover-art using the characters. I then thought about the picture I used for What Is Truly Meant To Be. I had grabbed the blue starburst background from the Hey Arnold end credits and wrote the title on that background using the Hey Arnold font. It was simple, but it worked. I could do the same thing with the X-Future story.

I did a Google search for the X-Men: Evolution logo since X-Future is a continuation of that. I figured I could doctor the logo so it would say X-Future; that way it still had the game's title, but it had a similar feel as Evolution. I messed around in Photoshop for about an hour before realizing that I really couldn't fix the X in X-Men: Evolution because "Men" was written across it. I hit Google Images again to try to find just the X from Evolution's logo so I could try to replace it that way.

Instead I made a FANTASTIC discovery. At this year's Comic Con Bryan Singer, the director and writer for the Days of Future Past X-men movie coming up next year, released the movie's logo:
I was amazed to discover that the only word that actually overlaid the X was "Future"! It was perfect! I spent another hour or so in Photoshop deleting the "Days of Past" from the logo without losing the textured black background. Only for me to keep messing with it - I'll explain that in a moment - and having to start all over again.
So, I had the image for X-Future all set up:

Looking at the image that I was using for the DeviantArt cover-art, I realized it would also make an awesome banner for the X-Future forum. I then messed around with the format and theme of the boards, much like how I did to customize the look of this blog. It was a bit tricky since Zetaboards isn't as user-friendly when it comes to customizing in comparison with Blogger.

In the process of trying to figure out how to put on a customized banner I discovered what's called the FaveIcon. You know how you go on to Facebook, or even here on Blogger, and you see the f inside the blue box or the b inside the orange box when looking at the page name along the tab? Well, those tiny icons are FaveIcons, and I could make a custom one for the board! The genius that I am, I was so excited that I started tweaking with the above image, and then the X-Men portion of the Evolution logo until I finally had an icon small enough to use as a FaveIcon. I was so proud when I completed my icon! Then I went back to undo everything I did to get back to the X-Future image above. That's when I realized that I had done too much to backtrack enough to get to the image. I also forgot to save the image.
So, that's why I had to start from scratch to recreate the image. Awesome. Once I was done - for a second time - I made sure to save! I then posted the image on DA as the cover-art of my story. I also wanted to try to use the cover-art option over on FanFiction as well. That's when I realized that the dimensions of the image were WAY off for the FF cover-art. Another 1/2 hr or so in Photoshop and I had the cover-art photo for FF.
Since I had spent so much time working on all of that I decided to go ahead and go one step farther for both X-Future images. As I had mentioned in a few past posts, I wanted to post up an anthology of scenes I write as writing exercises. Up to this point I had avoided doing so for a few reasons.
  1. Readers could be confused because they don't know these characters, their powers, and how they related to each other. I wasn't sure how to explain all of that before each scene without the Author's Notes being as long if not longer than the scenes themselves.
  2. Most of the scenes aren't canon and I didn't want to confuse anyone.
  3. Just about all of the scenes had some sort of spoiler in them depending on how much of the X-Future storyline you knew.
On Sunday I figured that I didn't really care about any of those concerns anymore. Plus, with the actual progress in the X-Future main storyline tale - which, as you can see in the above photo, I named "The Second Generation Begins" - readers would get to learn about the characters and their powers, as well as read through enough of the tale that the spoilers would be revealed anyway. Add in a warning about the scenes not being canon and all three issues will eventually be sorted out.

So now, along with the two chapters for "The Second Generation Begins" up on both FF and DA, I also have my scene anthology:

Now you guys have about six things to read! You can finally see some of the story and characterization that's been taking up my life for the past year! You can finally get in to X-Future along with me! Whoot!

You can find the two chapters of TSGB on FF here.

Chapter one of TSGB - the proglogue - can be found here.
Chapter two of TSGB - the Back-to-School Mixer - is here.

X-Future Snippets over on FF can all be found here, as well as an explanation of the anthology. Be wary. Due to the nature of some of the characters, there will be some T-rated chapters due to language, violence, and sexual content. There will also be a few M-rated chapters due to violence, sexual content, and Trish using her favorite curse word.
The first X-Future Snippet - "Flashes of Trish" - can be found here... and without her trademark cursing!
The second X-Future Snippet - "Ripley Vs. Lincoln" - can be found on DA here.
The third X-Future Snippet - "Scrabble with Deadpool" - is here on DA. This one is rated M for Trish's mouth... :-P This was what I wrote for Week 3's challenge
The last X-Future Snippet that I have - "[Screw Driver] Attacks" - is up on DA here. For this one I purposely changed the actual title here because Screw Driver's identity is a pseudo-major spoiler. This whole scene is filled with spoilers, so read at your own risk.
This is what I wrote for Week 2's challenge, but it chronologically takes place after the Deadpool scene, which is why it's the last one I posted.

All the design work in Photoshop, plus the editing and posting of all of those writings up on FF and DA kept me from 1am until 1pm. At that point I was done looking at my computer, which is why I didn't do the blog update last Sunday.

So, there you have it. A HUGE blog post, plus six "chapters" to read! Hopefully this will help appease you, my faithful readers, after the mini-hiatus.

Any thoughts on the X-Future tales? Drop me your thoughts below in the comments.