Project: Magnus

I got dragged into this by the awe­some Rachel Desilets because I whined about peo­ple ignor­ing the fact I was a writer.

So…

I have… I think three WiP going, but for this I picked Chron­i­cles. BTW, I am not work­ing on this for NaNoW­riMo. No idea what I'm doing if anything.

1. What is the title of your Work in Progress 

Chron­i­cles: Ball of Fate

2. Where did the idea for the WiP come from?

My twisted head. That and read­ing far too many Terry Pra­chett books and try­ing to write Fan Fic.

3. What genre would your WiP fall under?

Satir­i­cal Fan­tasy. That's assum­ing there isn't a WTF? genre by then.

4. Which actors would you choose to play char­ac­ters in a movie rendition?

Will Smith would play Phineas, Any brown and black Aus­tralian Ter­rier with Steve Car­rell as the voice. David Bore­anaz as Faulkner Seth Green as the Pro­fes­sor Emma Wat­son as Mel

5. What is a one-​​sentence syn­op­sis of your WiP?

A nor­mal cargo run turns into the adven­ture of a life­time for the crew of the [Cor­sair] as they encounter pirates, a lost Admin­is­tra­tor, Knights of Orange (who are actu­ally orange), and Dawge­ri­ans priests who believe the proph­esy of the Ball of Fate begins to come true, sort of.

6. Will your book be self-​​published or rep­re­sented by an agency?

Rep­re­sent! Oh, I mean Rep­re­sented. Not sure I'm allowed to say who yet.

7. How long did it take you to write?

It's start­ing life as a ser­ial then get­ting con­verted into a book so… how­ever long it takes.

8. What other WiPs in your genre would you com­pare it to?

Dis­c­world and/​or HHGTTG

9. Which authors inspired you to write this WiP?

Terry Pra­chett, Dou­glas Adams, Issac Asimov

10. Tell us any­thing else that might pique our inter­est about this WiP.

It con­tains a talk­ing dawg, and evil sci­en­tist named Lit­tle Mis­ter, six foot tall faeries, a giant octo­pus at the cen­ter of the galaxy that only wants to drink frothy lemon­ade (frothy is a require­ment), and a semi-​​bio-​​organic ship. Kind of.

There are two days left and I'm still at 13k words. But you know what? It's okay.

This is another long mis­sive. Weigh­ing in about around 1300 words. Feel free to skip if you like, but I think some will find it inter­est­ing and help­ful maybe.

I knew going in I would never make 50k. I wanted to. I really did, and I had every inten­tion of mak­ing it to that goal. How­ever with every­thing going on in my life I knew it was going to be impossible.

I didn't think I'd only end up with 13K how­ever. I fig­ured I'd hit 30 or so. 20 at the very least. But 13? Easy.

Not so much. And it was my fault. Yes, I was sick for the first 2 weeks and felt the after effects of that ill­ness until… well, I still do. But I still could have writ­ten more.

What it boiled down to was a fail­ure on the most basic levels:

Poor plan­ning Poor exe­cu­tion Severe lack of discipline.

I thought I knew my story. After all, it's been sit­ing in my head and on var­i­ous notes for almost 7 years. I had started writ­ing parts of it out pre­vi­ously in an attempt to maybe film it and post the episodes online. How­ever costs became pro­hib­i­tive (as in I had no money for sup­plies or even a cam­era), I had mapped out 12 episodes, knew the char­ac­ters, and had a plot worked out (actu­ally, I have the 'plot' worked out for the first 5 sea­sons /​ books /​ story arcs). So I knew what was going on and how to pro­ceed right? Wrong.

I used the orig­i­nal screen scripts as research since I knew I would have to alter and expand a good bit of it see­ing as how all my visual gags and fun­nies now had to be han­dled dif­fer­ently. I fig­ured no big deal, I'll just put in more descrip­tion and switch up the dia­logue a bit.

I decided to write it and turn it into a weekly ser­ial. So I broke each 'episode' into 4 'scenes', and fig­ured 1K words per scene. That had me at 48K with­out even try­ing. I fig­ured I knew sev­eral of the scenes very well so I could write those first then focus on the ones that I didn't know quite so well. This was going to be cake!

What an idiot.

I can see now where I failed. Where I assumed too much in some cases, and not enough in oth­ers. Places where I blindly blun­dered in think­ing I knew the space so well the words would just flow.

Prob­lem was, they didn't flow. I didn't know every­thing as well as I thought I did. On top of that I tried to be a real writer. By that I mean I tried to be seri­ous. Tried to write like I though I was sup­pose to, not how I do naturally.

I play with words and phrases. I don't put things in the proper gra­mat­i­cal place all the time (some­times even by acci­dent ;) I have fun. I wasn't doing that here.

I'm not seri­ous by nature. If you're read­ing this you already know that (prob­a­bly). You should already know about some of the images I post or the snip­pets I write. At the very least you will prob­a­bly know about the I'm on a horse! line I post in response to just about anything :)

Of the sto­ries about the cats tak­ing over my mind /​ body and plot­ting to take over the world.

If you've read any of my writ­ings, espe­cially the Tribe Detec­tive Agency or the pre­vi­ous post­ings about Skies Above you know that I'm not.

I can be. Other sto­ries reflect that. And future sto­ries will be more seri­ous in nature. But for this story I didn't want to be. For christs sake, on of the main char­ac­ters is a talk­ing dog that is the chief engi­neer for the ship and invents things in his spare time. It takes place on a planet cre­ated my pow­er­ful beings (called Excep­tions) that get drunk on a reg­u­lar basis and play with real­ity. It has a Mag­i­cal Cr-​​-​​ (oh wait, you aren't sup­posed to know about that yet). How the hell can I ever take a story like that seri­ously! I imag­ine you could write that with­out the gags and jokes and smart assery. But I also imag­ine it would suck. Which it did.

Okay, off the tan­gent. The point is, was, is… I basi­cally set myself up for fail­ure. And I let that get me down. Way down. Way, way down. To the point where when my wife made an inno­cent com­ment about 'magic' I took it to mean some­thing it didn't and got majorly depressed. I let that hap­pen. Worst part is I could have stopped it, or bet­ter yet pre­vented it from hap­pen­ing in the first place.

So, to that end I have a new plan going for­ward. I have an ongo­ing chal­lenge with +Kather­ine Dal­ton we dubbed the 4×4×4 in which I write 40K words a month for 4 months on 4 dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Novem­ber was to be Skies Above (now called Sky­line thanks to +Greg Christo­pher :), Decem­ber was going to be God Shaper, Jan­u­ary was 5^th Source and Feb­ru­ary hadn't been decided yet. Which in a way is good because I'm going to shift every­thing back a month.

Plus, I've come up with what I think is a good plan for me. 2000 words a day.

Now before you all freak out and tell me that if I can't make the 1600 for NaNo I can't make the 2000 for myself let me fin­ish. When I'm free writ­ing, just putting words down I aver­age about 1600 words in 48 minutes.

When I'm not forc­ing it.

So, if I plan out when I'm writ­ing bet­ter (map out in fur­ther detail) I think I can make it. I can always find an hour to write, espe­cially if I stay up after the wife goes to bed. In a thirty day month that will give me 60K words.

Since I work bet­ter when things are fresh in my mind, so after I hit my goal each day, if I spend a few min­utes map­ping out the next cou­ple scenes (each scene is about a thou­sand words remem­ber) I should be able to just sit down the next day and write.

That cov­ers the Plan­ning and Exe­cu­tion issues.

I've learned that when I'm upset or not feel­ing good it's near impos­si­ble for me to write. I'm hop­ing that hav­ing the next scenes mapped out will help with the 'sit and stare' prob­lem. If not I plan to get up from my chair and go play Fruit Ninja Kinect or some­thing like it. Or go for a walk. Or work­out in some way. Get my head away from what­ever I was think­ing and get phys­i­cal (I sus­pect Fruit Ninja will be a good dis­trac­tion. Maybe too good… :) Then go back and try again.

The Dis­ci­pline will be harder. Want­ing it isn't enough. I just have to work at it and do it every day. How­ever, I have given myself per­mis­sion that if it just isn't hap­pen­ing or I just don't have the time (doing other things) it's okay. That should help with the I'm fail­ing, I'm no good at this. I just suck feel­ing that tend to dom­i­nate me at times like that.

So los­ing NaNo this year might have been a good thing. It helped me see a few things that I hadn't seen before.

All in all, it's been a pretty good weekend :)

(I worked out some other things too, but you don't need to hear about those :)