Thursday, January 15, 2009

Bad Company: The Mid-JanNoWriMo Progress Update

It's the middle of the month, and I'm attempting to finish Bad Company, or at least write 50,000 words of it, for JanNoWriMo. How am I doing so far? Right now, I'm behind on the word count — just a little over 15,000 words — but I'm ahead of where I usually am during any given WriMo. So far, so good...

Last year, I tried to fill in some of the many huge gaping plot holes that have always plagued BadCo. Most of them remain unfilled. This year, I'm determined to write every single chapter and scene that's still missing, and there's still a lot of them left to write. However, I've already written some very important scenes, and there's now at least a sense of continuity between the "trial of Desiree" subplot and the leadup to Dictel's invasion of America.

However, most of the early part of the novel remains unwritten, including everything Charlie's in until the "trial of Desiree" sequence. Also, I haven't gotten to the corporate invasion at all yet. However, the month is only half over, so I have more than enough time to take care of it all.

Stay tuned...

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Project Site Is Up...Finally!

At last, I've finally put up the Spanner's World project site — after many, many years of delay. I only put it up last week, so it's still crude and still has hardly any content yet. But at least it's up. Now I have a central site for all my projects in the Spanner "universe". From now on, when I mention any of my fiction projects here in this blog, I'll make a direct link to the project page on my new site.

Now, the hard part is thinking up exactly which content I'll post. I need to come up with story synopses and character profiles, and these take some thinking. Another challenge is the character designs I'll need for each profile, and the cover designs and logos I want to create for each story. I'll need to do this pretty soon.

Now I have no more excuse to delay my art or my site updates. (None except early burnout due to lack of sleep, something I've been struggling with recently due to the fact that I now have to wake up early, and I'm normally very much a night own...) Another thing to spur me back to the drawing table is my new DeviantArt page, which right now still doesn't have content — something I will correct very soon as well.

More project and WriMo updates coming very soon!

Sunday, January 4, 2009

A New Goal: A Drawing A Day

On the NaNoWriMo forums, I discovered something called Project 365, in which you take (and preferably post online) a photograph a day. Digital cameras make it easy. And so I set up a Flickr account and a photo blog just for this. (My blog entry on this is here.) Which got me thinking: shouldn't I do something similar with my drawing? If something like Project 365 can make you a better photographer, then posting a drawing a day (drawn and scanned that day, of course) can make me a better artist.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Bad Company: Finish It This Month!

I've started JanNoWriMo with a bang. Word wars, that is: I'm writing 10,000 words today, and writing the entire climactic scene of the trial sequence, the trial of Clayton Starr, Charlie and Desiree's persecutor and the head lawyer of Dictel. For my second word war, the first 10,000 words count toward the 30,000 I'm writing by the 5th. Why so many words so soon in a WriMo? Because I intend to finish the first complete draft of Bad Company this month!

Bad Company has always been incomplete. After every WriMo I wrote for it in, I left scores of plot holes, some of them humongous. I had many story ideas I never wrote. I've decided to write them all now.

The trial of Clayton Starr is the first of many plot holes I'm filling this month. Writing the unwritten scenes allows me to win a WriMo without cheating. I'm spending the first 5 days of JanNo writing as many unwritten scenes as I can so I can get the major word count job out of the way early and do some major rewriting till the last week of the month. I'll do all the rewrites starting the 6th; once I run out of chapters to rewrite, I'll go back to writing unwritten scenes and hit my word count target (I chose 50,000) and score my JanNoWriMo victory.

Meanwhile, I decided to do a simultaneous project that I think will help me with the novel. For a January challenge in the Script Frenzy, I announced that I would write the script for a BadCo movie adaptation. To this end, I'll be downloading the latest version of Celtx, a popular free scriptwriting program. (I hope Celtx has a comics template by now, or gets one by April.) Writing the novel and the script at the same time will help me put the long and complicated novel in better order.

Writing the "trial of Clayton Starr" chapter went a whole lot more smoothly than the rewrite of chapter 2, in which Desiree runs away to half-sister Ruby's apartment while Charlie is hiding out there. I didn't realize at first that Ruby would be a "mentor as threshold guardian" kind of character until I was in the middle of writing it. Chapters 1 and 2, therefore, will be the first chapters I'll rewrite once I've written my 30,000th word of new story.

I have my primary goal for January now. Soon I'll get Bad Company written, rewritten, finished, and ready for NaNoEdMo.

And now, back to writing...