18.9 In-Progress

Holy crap.

The show is over.

NaNoWriMo begins in three days.

The hell scene characters have been satisfied enough by the awesomeness and closure of the final performance to leave me alone for the month of November.

And the wind is currently blowing at a million miles an hour outside my house as Sandy comes to visit.

The lights have flickered a few times, but I haven’t lost power yet. Here’s to hoping I don’t. Granted, I am on my laptop, which has three plus hours of battery on it, but if I lose power I think our wifi hotspot will get shut down. So hopefully that won’t happen.

And luckily it’s not a constant million miles an hour. It comes in gusts. It blows at varying speeds for about thirty or so seconds, and then there’s a calm of little to no wind for about another minute, and then it starts up again.

And it’s not even raining yet. Though that’s just in my area, I think. I know a few people farther north have lost power.

But hey, I’m just glad the storm waited until our show was over to come.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. That was just to show that no storm is going to stop me from writing.

Like I said, NaNoWriMo begins in three days. I have two and a half more chapter synopses to write and then those will be done. I will be writing first person past from Simon’s point of view and will be getting right up in his head like in the interviews I did with him.

At this point, however, I’m just glad that Lena and Devon are leaving me alone. I won’t go into details about the show yesterday, but I’ll just say it brought excellent closure to everything and I understood more about them and their characters and their story than I ever had before. I wrote all about it last night and now they’re not saying a whole lot except that what happened last night is how it’s going to be. And once I accepted that, they shut up, silently swearing to leave me alone this month.

So. NaNoWriMo.

In coming to the end of my synopses, I’m getting quite excited to write this story. I’ve got it all plotted out from beginning to end and everything in between, how characters act and how this happens and how that happens.

The awesome thing is in writing the specific synopses, I’m referring back to the full synopsis and brainstorming I had done back in September, and I’m realizing I forgot how awesome everything was. I’m reading things and laughing out loud because it’s so brilliant and I didn’t even remember coming up with it. Like at one point in the story, Simon sees a book that he hadn’t touched in the last week because of all the crazy hero stuff going on. And keep in mind Simon is a complete bookworm. A very irritable and snarky bookworm, but a bookworm nonetheless. So for him to not read a book in a week is a big deal.

He picks the book up, turns it over in his hands a couple times, and throws it at the wall.

But then, as he has a perfect memory, he remembers the last words he had read a week ago, so he picks it up again and settles down to read it anyway.

Just little moments I didn’t even remember coming up with.

It just makes me excited to write it. Excited to get back into his head. I’ve got everything planned out and prepared so all I have to do is refer to my synopsis and I’ll know exactly what needs to happen next.

Look, I don’t have a lot in the way of advice for NaNo, for any fellow NaNoers reading this blog. I have what works for me, which is extensive outlining and planning up to two months in advance and doing interviews with my character and answering 100 question sheets. But if that’s not what you do then I don’t have much to say. I just know I’m going to finish because I do NOT invest this much time and energy into a project without finishing it.

Good luck to everyone doing NaNoWriMo. I’ll keep you posted each week on how I’m doing. Let the games begin!

87.4 In-Progress

It’s high time I posted about my bracelets and belt again. I’ve done a lot over the course of September and October.

Well, not a lot, but enough to warrant a post.

A bracelet I made in August for my friend’s birthday in September that I couldn’t post until now because her birthday hadn’t happened yet the last time I posted about bracelets.

I actually liked this pattern a lot. A, because it looks 3-D, and B, because it was actually really easy to make. It’s double-stringed, which means that for each string it says to cut I cut two and I tie knots with two strings at a time instead of one so the knots are twice as big. It was just easy and awesome.

A pattern for a bracelet I made for a friend.

A friend of mine told me she’d pay me to make her a bracelet, so of course I agreed. It wasn’t part of my original bracelet-making schedule, but she was paying me so it was worth it. I pulled out a really cool one I had found a while ago and was wondering what I could use it for.

The finished result of said previous pattern.

Cool, isn’t it?

Next belt pattern.

The belt pattern I was working on for September. I didn’t have one for October because it was opera stuff happening, but that’s okay because I sort of planned it that way.

All the strings for it.

I like how even the string count was. Six colors, and three shades of each color; dark, normal, and light.

Here we go.

Yay!

And here it is.

Tell me that isn’t really cool. It is. It just is.

That’s all I’ve been working on. I didn’t have one of that last pattern attached to the belt because it was too long for a picture anyway. But you know what the belt looks like. Just imagine this tied onto it too.

I won’t be seeing you next Sunday, because I have another performance, but probably next Monday. So then.

18.8 In-Progress

Aaojdfubioajweituoiasjbaopsuierljaopysubifjklwer.

That’s essentially my mind right now.

Our show is next weekend, and we have rehearsal every day. And we had it yesterday and Friday, too. So I’m torn between trying to do more for Lena’s story and working on my chapter synopses for Masks.

To not make either character angry, I’ve been doing both at once, sort of. I finished the main synopsis for Masks, and now I just have to do the chapter synopses so I know what to write each chapter. I have two to write today that I haven’t done yet, but I’ll do it and it will be ready by November.

Luckily, as I’m only doing one a day(with the exception of today), this leaves my brain a lot of extra thinking space. Masks doesn’t have to consume my thoughts until November.

So I’ve also been thinking about a lot of things in relation to Lena and Devon. Trying to figure stuff out for them. What happens after they leave the cult? Where do they go? What do they do? How do they rejoin society? Can they rejoin society? She killed someone, are the police after her? How is she supposed to live a normal life again?

Such are the questions I’ve been trying to answer. I got a new notebook and decided I’d put all things this story related into it. Nothing else will go in there, and the story ideas won’t go anywhere else. So I don’t have to search through my normal notebook to find stuff. It will all be in one place. Because this idea is going to take a long time to plan, especially with my also trying to work on my other writing projects over the rest of this year. It’s a very complicated idea and I’m planning on switching back and forth between their POVs to make sure I get both their stories in before they meet and both their thoughts and feelings once they do.

So it requires lots of planning and organization. Luckily I happen to be very good at that. It’s the multitasking thing that’s going to be tricky.

But I love my writing, so that helps.

And Simon is getting more and more irritable by the day. It’s actually rather hilarious. I had thought at first that he was just secretly irritable and mostly kept his temper, but the more I write and plan for him the less he hides it and the more he loses it.

I wish I had more to say, but my brain is fried from rehearsals this week. And it will be even more fried next week.

Oh, hm. Next week is a performance. I have no idea when I’ll be getting home.

I’ll do my best to post on Sunday, but if it doesn’t happen I’ll update Monday.

apobjaweurpiajoiupsiejtasopufbjlwehsriuj.

Sorry this wasn’t better.

18.7 In-Progress

The mind of a writer works in mysterious ways. Ways that are often looked upon by society as way too far out of the box with a touch of clinically insane.

I’ll give you an example. Here I am, getting ready for NaNoWriMo. Which is November. Fellow WriMos will know that October is officially NaNoPlanMo. Or National Figure Out What The Hell Your Plot Is Going To Be Month, for those of you who don’t think of your plot in March like I do.

Anyway. Here I was, planning out Masks.

Or at least, I was supposed to be. This has been an insanely busy week and my normal writing/outlining time(about 7ish-8ish in the morning, after my religion class) was filled almost every day. Monday I outlined a little, but then I had to go on my walk early because I had to go practice the organ a little later in the morning. Tuesday I had to finish a bracelet because I was supposed to give it to someone that day. Wednesday I went on my walk early because my mom and I were going to take off for the bookstore the second it opened to get the Mark of Athena. Thursday I was practicing parallel parking all morning because my road test was the next morning. Friday I had my road test. (which I failed, but that’s a whole different story that I’m not going to talk about. I’m taking another one in a month.) And that was the business that was these mornings.

Therefore, I only planned on Monday. So I went almost an entire week without planning.

The consequences: My writer mind thinking I was done with that idea.

And, fellow writers, you know what that means. That means your writer mind gives you a new idea. And give me a new idea it did.

Here’s what happened. I’m in an opera right now called Mefistofele. It’s one of the many versions of the story of Faust(except in this version he gets saved at the end). I’m in the chorus. And in one of the scenes, Mefistofele(which is Mephistopheles in Italian, the one to whom Faust sold his soul) takes Faust up to this mountain where there’s this cult of Satan worshipers.

Yep, you got it– I play one of the people in that cult. The opera itself doesn’t give the cult people any backstory at all– they’re just there. But one of my friends is an acting major, so she was saying from the beginning that these people need to actually have characters and backstories. Why are they there? What happened in their life that would bring them to a place where they would worship the devil?

So from the very beginning, I knew I would develop a backstory for this character. And in September, about a week before we actually rehearsed that scene for the first time, I wrote a little short story about her. Her name was Lena and she believes everyone is going to hell because all the people she’s ever interacted with have let her down in these huge ways. She doesn’t trust anyone. She killed her boyfriend and the girl he cheated on her with.

Then Mef appeared to her and took her to the cult. She liked it there because all those people basically knew they were going to hell and liked it and wanted the world to go to hell.

However. Enter another character. This other character just kind of showed up while I was writing and stayed. He’s just kind of there. I’m not going to get into all the stuff in relation to him because I don’t need to.

But I was talking to D about my character and this other character, and he ended up adopting the other character for himself and naming him and developing his own backstory and doing all these awesome things that I, as a writer, wholeheartedly approve of.

So we talked more about our characters. How they would interact with each other. How they felt about the rest of the crowd. How they felt about this cult anyway. All sorts of wonderful things that developed these characters more than I could have thought possible.

And what we kind of decided is that these characters were in a place that by the time the scene was over, and everything in the scene had happened, that they would leave the cult. It would be behind closed curtains, and it would normally be when everyone’s like “oh, yeah, we’re done with this scene, blah blah” but we just do it to give the scene closure. We leave the cult. That’s how it ends.

That’s how it’s supposed to end.

But then my writer mind whispered two fateful words.

“Then what?” 

The scene doesn’t go on. In the next scene we’re completely different characters and those characters aren’t heard of again. It ends there.

But I could feel it. The story of these two characters went on.

And today, which marked my sixth day since I had written a single thing about Masks, a story arose. I was out on my walk and it just came. What would happen then. The basic of what would happen then, but then, of course, the conflict.

I came up with the conflict. I was almost leaping with excitement on the way back to my house. I was about to ruin Lena’s life, but it was going to be so brilliant that I couldn’t help but be excited for it.

However, Simon then stormed in and sent us his most threatening glare. Lena and Devon cowered into a corner. I met him head-on but soon had to cave. He was right. I had to write him first. Lena and Devon would have to wait until next year.

And normally I would jump right into it the second NaNoWriMo was over, but I’ve got this other plan for a nonfiction book(looks like that life goal will get to be checked off!) about the first fifteen years of the opera company. (we’re in the fifteenth year right now.) And that will be very time-consuming– going around and collecting stories from the past shows and all this stuff. But I’m also excited to do that, and I have to do it this year before I leave home.

Next year’s NaNo.

They’re not happy about waiting, but they will get written.

Such is the mind of a writer.