Last Week Off

Update 43 23 Mar- 3 April.

I was going to call this post renewal, but that name doesn’t seem right yet.

This week was again spent away from the keyboard. It was like a vacation but not really. I have been suffering from a head cold and a possible stomach bug as well. At first, I thought it was my allergies playing hell and a stomach bug making me ill. But I’m pretty sure with it lasting more than a week now, its more than mere allergies.

I had trouble sleeping for the last two weeks but last night managed to sleep pretty well… then this morning my head was so full of… whatever (feels like its stuffed with jello and when I move, I get nauseous). Woke up from my good sleep totally nauseous and now I have a full cough. Luckily, I have two days off from work and I can just try to rest.

But enough about health. We’re here for writing, stories, and thoughts about other media.

Writing?

Now that it is April I will officially start outlining the next novel. I’m having troubles with it again, as I always do at the beginning. Part of the problem is that years ago I thought up the five part structure and wrote a single paragraph about each novel. Back then I had some pretty decent ideas for what stories I wanted to tell.

But I change my mind all the time and now years later looking at my plot map for the five books (which again is just a hastily drawn chart of character arcs and about two pages of quick notes). I find myself at a bit of a loss as to what is going on in this book… also I find myself more interested in the plot ideas for book 3 and 5.

I keep changing my mind on things, but to be fair to myself, I don’t officially start the outline until this blog is live. Right now, I’m just struggling to find the core story. Perhaps I worded that wrong. I have an idea of the main conflict, but it doesn’t feel… right.

I’ll work my way through it. I need to figure out my character arcs, essences, and desires…. To be honest I need to refigure my characters. I decided to drop a few and change a few. I also need to rename my main character as I was borrowing a name from a friend of mine and realized it wasn’t right for me to do that. It’s one thing to cameo my friend’s D&D characters in the books. But it is quite another to take the name of my friend’s most beloved (and most reused) NPCs.

Speaking of Gaming…

Since I mentioned NPCs and D&D I guess I might as well talk about gaming since there was no other writing this week and gaming is cooperative storytelling.

My monthly Strahd game got rescheduled to next week, so that was sad. But my alternating Saturday game was also Strahd so I got to play that.

It was a complete disaster. (Thought still fun in a way).

We got a slow start, saving a woman and bringing her back to the small village we found ourselves in. The night started off with a long talk about our current situation. That being that our characters while in pursuit of monsters ended up getting transported to a new world. And that by all accounts that new world was inescapable. My character is deeply pragmatic, and also a paladin who kills evil on sight. As such, finding himself trapped in a new world that seems to be full of evil is pretty much his new home.

We accepted our fates, that we could not return home, but at the same time we didn’t want to just move into the village and become farmers. Trapped for two days by a blizzard we decided to head toward the largest city in the land and see what we could find about the true history of the place and maybe find a purpose that we’re more suited to.

A bad end…

On the road to Vlacki, the “big city,” we were attacked by a handful of the werewolves we originally chased into this world. Werewolves that were supposed to be a long way off in the opposite direction. Things did not go well and my companions and I were torn to shreds. One of us managed to survive, and the last remaining werewolf fled with some of our looted weapons.

Bound and determined to save us the lone survivor grabbed our bodies and dragged them through the snow back to the village we had left only hours earlier.

Now at this point we all kind felt bad and the game was practically over. We had one survivor, who only survived by taking a dark pact and we were all a little salty to get wrecked by a random encounter on the road. Our lone survivor then learned that there was a woman with great powers who was said to be able to see the future and raise the dead. Taking a sled, he then dragged our corpses for two weeks to find the Vistani camp and we were raised from the dead, but at a price.

It might have been a downer of a night, and I think or DM was caught off guard with how bad things went. There were definite narrative devices he could have employed to keep things on the rails. I mean some Vistani could have arrived before we all started to die and helped or recovered our bodies and pressed us into service. A hunter could have arrived and distracted the enemy. The werewolves could have approached us as brigands first and we might have talked them off. Etc etc, but as they say, hindsight and all of that.

I could have killed one more werewolf before I dropped, but I forgot to use a power properly. That could have changed things up quite a bit.

In the end it doesn’t matter. We managed to save the narrative and still have a good time, and next week we’ll continue on with an actual mission. So it all worked out.

Other Hobby and Such during this Week Off

I have been watching old Toku. I finished Goranger and I really wanted to talk about it. But I have few friends who are into this stuff like me.

I started the next sentai series, JAKQ Dengekitai, and will say it is completely bat-shit crazy. The evil organization is called Crime, and that’s what they do commit crimes. But the translation can be funny. “Fight Crime with me.” “This is a Crime rifle.”

The show has crazy violence, like crashing an entire plane and killing 60 people including children, but then a handful of episodes later they have a talking cyborg hamster because the leader of the unit was bored and placed a computer in his pet hamster.

Part of me wonders if the earlier violence caused an outcry from parents and they shifted the tone of the show. I don’t know how they film; I know it’s only slightly ahead of the episodes coming out so they can adjust. Either way it’s crazy.

Outro

Well, I had a little more to talk about but just got called and asked to come into work and cover my co-worker. So I must go. This was longer than expected.

Next week we’ll start talking outlining, character arcs, and the other stuff I tend to work on before I get started. Remember I’m a hybrid writer, so I only plan a few of the details and the over arch, but I pants the hell out of the writing of the novel.

See you then.