Sunday, February 26, 2012

I Swear I'm Not An Asshole (I Think...)

  • I do this thing where if I hear someone who speaks in an interesting manner I will subconsciously start imitating them (I think everyone does this but I do it to a greater extent than most.) This occasionally leads to situations my friends find hilarious where I seem like I'm making fun of people.
    • The most memorable instance of this was one of the many times I ordered a pizza. When I order food I don't just give my order and get out (that's boring) I try and chat up the person I'm interacting with so my orders can take longer than normal. On this particular occasion the nice perky pizza hut employee had the most pronounced ridiculous lisp I have ever heard. When I had finished ordering my friends were giggling and giving me the expression I have learned means I just did something hilarious without realize it. I asked what it was and immediately realized (only then) that I was speaking with a RIDICULOUS lisp. I asked how quickly I had started doing it and they said I had spoken to her like that for 90% of the order.
    • I bring this up now because today I watched The Godfather Part I and Short Circuit back to back today and have had to constantly stop myself from speaking in an increasingly bizarre manner.
    • "You come to me on this the day of my daughters wedding and you say to me, 'Don Corleone I need input...'"
      • How the fuck do you punctuate a quote within a quote?
  • Big Big news, two whole people actually commented on one of my posts! They were both positive (which you could have read for yourself but i felt like saying it anyway). One of them said it is very helpful to him and he has learned a lot which is an enormous surprise (and mildly confusing) to me.
    • I can only assume he/she/it/them mean they have learned about writing from me which would make me oh so very happy and surprised (and a little bit afraid for them; I'm not exactly Heinlein)
    • Happy Note: the post box's spell check actually has the correct spelling of Heinlein.
  • In writing related news there have been a few developments:
    • I finally decided on a new years resolution: to write every single day (no exceptions) even if it is totally unrelated to any of my current book projects. I decided improving myself as a writer was more important than trying to force myself to complete projects.
      • I think stipulating that I don't have to advance a current project will make it far more likely that I actually follow through on this vow.
      • I also think that having a vow I will stick to will in the end make me far more likely to end up working on actually finishing projects.
    • On Thursday night/Friday morning I wrote an entire outline for a brand new novel from scratch.
      • It has all the parts a beginning, a middle, even an end (which I can usually never come up with.)
      • Having said all that it isn't very in depth (its only 920 words), and I think the end is kind of weak.
      • I have writen several other book outlines and then never (as of yet at least) done anything with them, but I think I'm going to commit myself to this one and try and actually hammer out a full manuscript for it rather than just fiddle around with it for a while before moving on because: 
        • A: At the moment I'm not heavily working on any other project (other than slowly going through Modsoldiers and cleaning it up line by line).
        • B: I like the main characters I've developed for for it, and for science fiction and fantasy (this one is low fantasy) I think the characters, more than the plot, are what make or break a good novel.
      • I'm going to try and do something new with this project which is tell it in a non-linear fashion i.e. start about half way through the story and reveal the first half through occasional flashbacks.
        • I think this will make the story much more interesting by creating more suspense/drama/what have you by making the reader wonder about previous events and the characters motivations. Also it should make the characters seem much more dynamic by juxtaposing scenes taking place at wildly different points in time. The changes in a character between scenes taking place at different points in the plotline should show far greater contrast than between scenes taking place one right after the other.
      • I'm also going to try something fairly new with perspective. Typically I write from an omniscient 3rd person point of view only occasionally poping into the mind of a character for a limited 3rd person perspective. For this book I'm planning on telling the whole thing from that limited third person perspective with each scene being from the POV of one of the characters in it.
      • My project name for this book is MartArt2. Yes I already have a project named simply MartArt (it is actually one of those outlines I completed, didled with for 2 days then never returned too) but this project is so different I felt it needed a different title.

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