Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Moving Forward with Collaborative Writings

Once again I find myself with no motivation to write. Normally I have all of these ideas, and I'm just geared up first thing in the morning. That's the main reason I chose to shift my updating to Wednesdays - a day which I can write in the morning. However, I'm just so drained and sore from work lately. All I want to do is curl up in bed and forget there's anything outside of it. No dishes. No laundry. No cooking. No cleaning. No bills. No work. And, sadly, no writing either. Mainly because that requires sitting at the desktop, which is killing my back right now.

Yet, here I am. Once again using the "just write a little" method to push me along. Using that drive of having SOMETHING posted every week for you fine folks to get my butt moving. Now, to do the same with my non-blog writing.

To be fair. I DID do so yesterday. After literally two full months of not knowing what to do with her, I FINALLY role played as Lia. I didn't do anything major, but I did get the girl out of her damn room finally! No one is really on the boards anymore, and so who knows if I'll actually have anyone besides Hubby to interact with, but it's out there. We can start to move on.

Speaking of which, Ronoxym finally moved on with our collab - sorta. As I had mentioned last week, I had finished re-reading the first two-thirds of our story and had tons of notes. So many that I felt it would just be easier to restart the story with the typos and missed punctuation fixed, and then reposted up on Google Docs as something we could both edit.

Although, honestly, I think it would be better if we just mailed the file back and forth to each other so we could actually SEE what we each other edited, and decide if we thought it was a good idea or not. This way we don't have all these notes back and forth debating if we should use this word over that word, or whether or not there should be a comma somewhere. I'll have to check if the "track edits" feature in Microsoft Word is also in Google Docs. The closest thing I could find - which is only available for those who can edit - is a revision history.

By the way, quick shout out to ChibiSunnie for showing me the editing feature in Word in the first place. Made my work as a beta-reader so much easier!

Alright, back to the collab.

So, I'm in the midst of updating the 13-page story, but I take long breaks due to how tedious a task it is. Plus, the whole sitting at my computer thing. Well, in the meantime, Ron finally decides to go through my epic amounts of notes on our Doc file - which isn't even all of them, all of my notes in the middle I never typed up - and edits the document to fix my concerns.

Surprised the crap out of me, actually. I was even excited Saturday night to see him logged in to the story and editing. I figured I'd have more to read during my normal Sunday insomnia.

Well, seems editing was indeed a daunting task, because he didn't update the story after working on editing the second draft. So now I have the version I was editing merged with his edited version. I have notes EVERYWHERE of portions deleted or inserted between the two. My fun task is to now go through all those edits and have a coherent draft to post up for us both to edit from now on.

Maybe Ron editing what we did so far has resparked his interest in the project that had taken such a strong hold of him back in January. Perhaps within the next week or so he'll move the story forward. That would be awesome, and might even kickstart my own drive to once again write.

Although, I do have another collab story in the works. Well, in the very beginning, researching stages. Way back in 2012 I had the fantastic idea of doing a Hey Arnold parody of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This idea must have struck a cord with AngelBlood666, because this past week he asked me if I wanted to work together in actually writing that parody. It's a story I keep absentmindedly drifting back to, but haven't done anything with in over two years. Perhaps having a co-writer on the project is just the push I need.

So we're both re-reading the play and taking notes so that we know what we wish to do with the concept. Heck, I spent an hour this morning just jotting down plot notes on the FIRST SCENE OF THE PLAY! Act one. Scene one. I ended up with TWO looseleaf pages filled FRONT AND BACK with notes. Now to type them up so that AB666 can see them too.

This could prove so much fun!

I've also been casually working on more research for world building both Gyateara and the X-Future reworking. Not too much advancement with either one, but it's better than completely forgetting about them.

Speaking of which, as much as it's grown on me, the placeholder name of Gyateara does seem a bit heavy-handed and lazy: "Eh, I'll just mesh Gaia and Terra together, tweak the spelling, and voila, a planet name!" I'm still not 100% convinced I'll be keeping it when I eventually get to officially writing stories about it; although I might keep the name for D&D sessions. So I'm thinking of using Hubby's suggestion of rearranging the letters until I get something a bit more original, but also keeping the basis of "my planet's name is based off of Greco-Roman terms for Earth". We'll see if I can come up with anything better.

Yay, naming things....


Honestly, if I'm not at work I'm either crashed on the couch or frantically cleaning the otherwise neglected apartment. So I'm not entirely sure I'll be making much progress in writing until either a) the apartment is actually clean and I just need to do maintainence every day, or b) work becomes less frantic. I'll try though.

Until next week... let's just focus on the "try a little and hope for a lot" mode of productivity every day.

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