A Flicker of Progress

Hey, folks! Check out what it was doing outside while I wrote up this post. Granted, it stopped now, and already starting to melt, but still.

Bleck. Winter. I hate being cold. At least the snow is pretty when you're not the one who has to drive in it or shovel it. It's also pretty when you're tucked inside under a blanket and drinking coffee.

Speaking of, I splurged on myself.

As a lot of you might know, Steampunk is kind of my aesthetic. I don't know what it is specifically about it, but it's my jam! You might also know that this year's NaNo has a Steampunk motif. So, despite this year's NaNo going kind of abysmally, I had to snatch up as much promotional stuff as I could.

On Thursday, I got an email stating all of my Christmas gifts to myself had arrived, and I was itching to get home. The first thing I wanted to snag - even though I don't have the wall space to hang any of the other ones my mom bought me as Christmas gifts a couple of years ago - was this gorgeous thing!

Sorry for the poor picture quality, there were still
creases in it from being rolled up

While I was searching for the 2019 NaNo promotional poster to buy, I also found this beautiful mug. Now, I already have too many mugs, but I don't have any NaNo mugs - I have a NaNo travel mug, but that doesn't count - AND it's blue and gold - my favorite color combo - AND it's Steampunk. Get into my cart. NOW!

 

And yes, this IS the mug I'm currently drinking coffee out of, which is how I got onto this train of thought to begin with.

But, of course the most important part of NaNoWriMo merch is the T-shirt to proudly wear around. I should have purchased it in October so I had it to wear all month, but having it for the back-half is good too. Plus, I now have a lovely Steampunk-y shirt to wear in later years.

Yes, I doctored a pic of myself
using my Bitmoji avatar for my face.
What of it?

I ended up accidentally buying the shirt at least one size too large, so it just kind of hangs off of me, but it also reaches past my butt, which I am always a fan of. Also, here's a better view of the logo. I had to shrink the above image so much to fit the Bitmoji file that I don't know how clear the shirt looks anymore.

Designed by the lovey people at
NaNoWriMo.Org

Today is my first official full day of wearing this shirt after giddily bouncing around in it Thursday night for a little bit. I wanted to make sure I had it for my writing sprints at Group tonight. Although, I'll then either have to hand-wash it, or save laundry for after 8pm so I can wash it and have it ready for NEXT week's final NaNo writing sprints as well.

We'll see how lazy I end up being....

I was doubly excited to find out my NaNo care package to myself showed up on Thursday of all days. I had forgotten how quickly my order was supposed to arrive, and I coincidentally wrote OVER 2000 WORDS on Thursday! I mean, yeah, I do that without even trying most days, and I've written probably about 10,000 words if you count all of the work I've been putting into the outlines for One and the Same, but after 15 days of not really writing ANY new prose for this story, I'm pumped to have added 2000 words! Whoot!

I EARNED my splurge! It was like Past Me knew I would accomplish something Thursday, and perfectly timed my reward for it.

Alright, Past Me!

Hacker Boy and Hacker Girl
Facebook sticker
by Birdman, Inc

It's a shame I haven't really written more than maybe another 200 words since Thursday.... But we'll ignore that. YAY! Writing ON Thursday! Whoot!

As I mentioned, I am still grinding away at that dang OatS outline. I'm not quite done breaking down exactly what plotline(s) each scene is supposed to land on, what plot points each scene resolves, and how each scene advances said plotline(s), but I'm getting there. The real sticky wicket is the transitional scene(s) between two of my tent pole scenes. I know what plot beats I want to hit. I know I need to somehow hit both Marinette's and Adrien's POVs before the next Big Scene. Mainly because Marinette had the one "tent pole scene" and Chat Noir has the other, and I want to keep the story tag-teaming their POVs: Marinette for odd chapters; Adrien for even chapters. I feel like it would be a bit jarring if the first seven or so chapters keep bouncing back and forth in that pattern, only for the eighth chapter to be a second Marinette chapter in a row, or if the eighth chapter is an Adrien one, only for the ninth chapter to also be Adrien's before bouncing back to Marinette.

I mean, it's going to be jarring enough with those final chapters tag-teaming both POVs within the chapter itself. I don't know if I want to press my luck by breaking pattern earlier as well.

So I have this block in the middle where I know the plot beats I want to hit, and I know I need to somehow separate it into at least two chapters so I can get back into pattern by my next established scene. I had worked, and reworked, and re-reworked, and so on, about a half-dozen times to try to figure out my best plan of attack.

I'm still not sure I quite have it, mostly because the Adrien part seems a bit overly loaded with scene transitions as he kind of advances the story's timeline a full weekend. In contrast, Marinette's chapter is kind of a precursor scene that in-universe would be about two hours of the overall story, before handing the reins back to Chat Noir to continue the story roughly fifteen minutes after the point Marinette stopped.

Like, the chapters are fairly balanced - count wise - and I'm trying to keep the word-count fairly even as well without putting TOO much thought in that vs good storytelling. However, I feel like Marinette's parts are all real-time moments, whereas Adrien's parts tend to recap days worth of story to help push the timeline along.

NuaNia Facebook sticker
by PRANEAT

Why??? Why does this story have to be so difficult!?

Generated by Bitmoji

The 2000-words came from all of my reworking of that "what do I do here!?" part of my outline. I just got inspired for this scene of Adrien going to Marinette's house to ask her over. I don't know if this scene will stay or be added to my "Deleted Scenes" project, but at least I wrote something. So.... yay?

I had to stop to either help customers or to close up shop, I can't recall, and I didn't get a chance to get back into the story that night, and so I ended up losing the momentum as well as the direction I was trying to go. So that kind of killed that progress. Hoping to get into The Mood again, I went back to the outline to try to solidify that middle bit some more now that I have that scene.

I'm STILL unsure if I know what I'm doing there. So I paused and went in yet ANOTHER outline direction.

At the beginning of the month, I stumbled upon an old post on the official NaNoWriMo blog. It talked about [Outlining] Your Story Like a Subway Map. Basically, it is figuring out the plot points for the main storyline, as well as the ones for your subplots. Write them each out individually as if they are the only story. Then, see which scenes overlap. Link those overlaps together to see how each plot interacts with each other.

So, yesterday, that's more-or-less what I did. I wrote up the plot points I wanted for each plotline, which helped me solidify how many plotlines I actually had.

In the end, I have a little over 4pgs of bulleted storylines, and when I went back over it I realized I did miss some key points in my bullets, so they should total closer to 4.5 pages after adding those in. I then wanted to come up with a literal subway line-like outline for me to print out and keep at my desk to look back on as I finished off my detailed outline of "what does it resolve/how does it advance"for OatS.

I might not have the actual first draft complete by November 30th, as I had wanted, but by gum I will have the outline FINALLY figured out so I can march my way through the actual writing of this dang thing!!!!

Now, there are a LOT of plot points for me to have to write up on a piece of paper for this physical "map," and I don't have any long sheets of paper anyway to do it on. So I figured it would be easier for me to do this project digitally so I could shift things as I need, and then once it's solid I can print it off.

Microsoft Paint wasn't going to cut it. Neither was Pixlr.com/editor, which is usually my go-to and where I've designed my ML fanfic covers. This project seemed a bit... much... and, even with ad blockers, the right-most quarter of the screen is sectioned off for ads, leaving not much room to work within. On top of that, my internet has been a bit spotty lately, so doing something offline was probably for the best. True, it makes it hard to continue working on this project while I have downtime at work, but it is what it is.

So I downloaded GIMP. It's free, it works close enough to Photoshop, and I see a lot of amateur artists I follow either have used it, or still do. I'm not a graphic designer or artist, so it seems to be best for my needs. Kept me a bit to get used to the interface since it is different enough from Photoshop to be a bit disorienting to me, and I had to google quite a bit, but I have a usable knowledge of it. I used GIMP this morning to doctor that photo of me in my shirt. Not my best work, but good enough until I learn the program better.

Anyway, I have all of my points written up on a file, and the next time I'm free - possibly while watching The Masked Singer tomorrow night - I'll work on drawing the literal plot lines so they look kind of like this example from the Subway Lines article.

Of course it uses The Hunger Games for the example.
That seems to be everyone's favorite example choice lately.
Also MDQ stands for Main Dramatic Question (Main Plot)
LDQ stands for Lesser Dramatic Question (subplot)

In the meantime, I still have my 4pg print out of those same plot points, and I'll see how much of that detailed outline can be figured out based off that. Maybe I'll be re-inspired to write a scene. As it stands, I already have one brewing in my head, I just need to iron out how it goes down. My main concern is making sure Marinette doesn't get too comfortable with Adrien too soon.

The last two episodes of the Miraculous Ladybug 3rd season aired this past week as well - and holy crow, the feels! - so maybe obsessively watching those will help me with inspiration as well. The one, "Chat Blanc," has a LOT of fodder in it. I just need to sort out how to USE said fodder.

I also need the finale to be translated into English...

Generated by Bitmoji
(Also, I know it's coming,
but Dec 1st is so far away still...)

Anyway, backtracking to WHY I couldn't get back into my writing Thursday night while I was on such a roll. It was another "meh" football game that night - for us at least - so we had Omnibladestrike and Wolfhearted over for yet another D&D session! Whoot! We're still not quite out of that randomly-generated dungeon Hubby created for our "one shot" D&D night about a month ago, but we should be close.

I do appreciate that in-character, Wolfhearted's human fighter Cutter seems 1000% done with my dragonborn bard Kriv. It's getting borderline if Cutter will just kill off Kriv himself and be done with him. Wolf, on the other hand, seems to absolutely ADORE Kriv. So. Yay!

I also realized, the more I play Kriv, and the more I lean into whatever it is that will annoy Cutter most, the more Kriv is turning into a character from an anime Hubby and I watch with Omni.

It's an older anime called Eyeshield 21, and is a high school football anime by the same writer as the now largely popular anime Dr. Stone. Well, technically the same man wrote the MANGAS each anime is based off of, but you get the idea. Anyway the character is the tight end Natsuhiko Taki.

I couldn't tell if this is official artwork
but it's what's used on the Eyeshield 21 wiki...

This absolute moronic dork is somehow my favorite character in his extra-ness and dorkiness and just overall blind optimism.

He thinks he's God's Gift to Football despite his skills saying quite the contrary more often than not. He ran away to the United States in order to get onto a football team - without letting his mother know what he was doing; worrying her needlessly - and after 2yrs, he STILL couldn't get on to a team. His sister tracked him down and brought him home, and the Devil Bats took him on as a teammate.

He is an idiot, unfocused, and cares too much about becoming a famous football star to actually be useful. HOWEVER, if/when the team CAN get him to focus, he's a powerhouse nearly worthy of the pedestal he puts himself on.

He also has two goofy quirks that are annoying as all get-out to the other characters, but they make me giggle each time. First is his signature stance to showcase his flexibility. You saw it in that first image, but he's CONSTANTLY holding up his right leg and spinning on his left. Like 90% of the time we see Taki he's spinning on his left while holding up his right.

He even does it in the opening credits because it's THAT MUCH his signature move/pose.

The other main characteristic he has is referring to his sister in English by calling her "My Sister," which is kind of adorable to hear said with a Japanese accent, as well as his signature exclamation.

He does that to punctuate sentences, or to call attention to himself, or to laugh at a joke he finds droll. It is nasally, and kind of sing-song-y, and hella-annoying to hear all the time. But for some reason I LOVE it, and I chuckle each time he does it.

It's kind of like the character Sekke Bronzazza from Black Clover. 

Sekke says "Bah-ha" in nearly every sentence. He usually does so to punctuate the sentence, but he'll also use it in multiple-syllable words starting with the "bah" sound on occasion. He does it so frequently that just about all of the other characters have forgotten his actual name - despite his constant reminding them - and just refer to him as "Bah-ha!"

Anyway, my original point was I love Taki, okay? He's my guilty-pleasure fave in Eyeshield 21. Plus, he actually does look cute when he's serious and has his hair pulled back...

Not that it's a requirement for a character to be my favorite. Honestly, there are so many adorable beans in the cast of Eyeshield 21, I love them all. And their quarterback is terrifying, but in the most fun way possible that I love him too. I'm just really enjoying this goofy anime, okay?!

Generated by Bitmoji

My ORIGINAL point was that Kriv is slowly evolving into a D&D party member equivalent to Taki, and I kinda love it????

As I'm writing this, Quarthix is over to draw up a character to add to our campaign once we get out of the dungeon. According to Hubby, Q is fully aware of the existing party dynamic and personalities, and he's game to add his own flavor of crazy to this bunch, so that could prove fun.

Also also also! I still absolutely love one of the 2 party-NPCs - characters that are unofficially part of the party that the DM runs. The campaign started on a ship that was attacked by pirates, and the party all fled together in the same lifeboat. One of the crew members was rowing the lifeboat for us, and was kind of roped into joining us as we became shipwrecked on an undeveloped part of an island. He uses what's known as wild magic, which means every time he taps into this magic to cast a spell, there is a percentage that the magic will go crazy and do its own thing. Usually the "do its own thing" bit is in ADDITION to whatever the spellcaster wanted to do, but not always. Anyway, the NPC accidentally de-aged himself to the ripe old age of 12 with one of his spells, and Kriv ADORES the "kid." Kriv is going full-on "Older Bro" mode despite the fact the spellcaster started nearly twice Kriv's age - the guy was originally late 20s/early 30s, and Kriv is 16. Granted, for a dragonborn, that's the mental age equivalent of a human 20 year old, but still.

The spellcaster, a half-orc named Hakeem, seems to eat up the attention and praise Kriv is giving him, so I'm running with it for as long as Hubby is.

Okay, I'm getting stupid-long again with this, and I'm WAY past my noon update. So a couple of promotions to close out this post.

First up is Omni. He's having similar struggles with his story as I am with OatS, so he put his main story on hold and decided to work on another story within his overall series. He already has the first two chapters up, so if you like fantasy stories, and want a taste of something original, why not give his story a try?

Dancing Fate

Summary: A shadow has spread across the land of Akierna. Kingdom after kingdom has fallen, even the grandest of armies have crumbled. A collection of survivors now seek a home on a new continent. After a massive storm sunk their ship, Raina the queen of the Dragonesium kingdom now leads her people into a hopeful future.

Current Word Count: 2,023

Looking to stick with some fanfiction? Well, Taurus Pixie has updated a bunch of her stories this past week, and so you KNOW I have to point people towards the latest chapter of Chat Vert. So. Much. Lukanette. Goodness. *Squee!* She just does such an awesome job at writing Luka.

Generated by Bitmoji

AAAAAH, my precious son!

So, while you're waiting for me to get my act together and publish something new, why not give these two writers some of your love? They both totally deserve it. Trust me.

Alright, off to pretend I'm being productive!

Generated by Bitmoji