jhameia: ME! (Default)
- Finished marking the unit exams today! On Sunday, I'll go over the pile again and do math and calculate the grades.

- I also got out to the NNWM write-in today!

- I then also attended the second half of the talk on Latin American SF. I didn't really understand what was going on but it was neat and I met folks and felt normal.

- In the evening, I went downtown by bus (caught it right on time! how neat!) to see EA play at Back to the Grind.

- While I was there, I also wrote more words. Promised myself, 30k tonight or bust! My final wordcount of the day is 31k.

- Had a minor crisis when I called my ride to confirm details for tomorrow only for her to tell me that she couldn't make it because she was now in LA being involved in some play. I really would have appreciated notice of that earlier! So I got another friend to come get me, but I feel bad because she lives out in Diamond Bar and has other commitments and aaaah. She very kindly re-arranged things for me, omg. Also, she realized that Clockwork Couture is not a regular bookstore, but like a clothing boutique, and Grant Imahara models some of their menswear so she's now super excited. Yay!

Then my previous ride called me again feeling bad and that she was coming back to Riverside and ??? Anyway, Rubato will get me to Burbank, and Maurisa will bring me home. I hope. We'll see how that works out XD

So I'm going to bed early tonight and getting a full night's sleep for tomorrow!
jhameia: ME! (Default)
So... on Facebook I was like "porn? romance novel? YA novel? Hmmm" and everyone was like "ALL OF THEM" except I am not suicidal and I don't think people understood that each phrase meant a completely different idea that would be difficult to overlap while still maintaining cohesion. Also it will have to be written alongside a dissertation prospectus. I aim to use NaNo for getting started on a new manuscript, not necessarily to hit the 50k wordcount (which from past experience I know is possible, even when I'm doing seminars and TA'ing at the same time, hence why I just dropped off from doing it the last couple of years... and the trouble of getting downtown to events here is a HUGE turn-off. However, there appears to be a pretty strong contingent of UCR students so I may try to rally with them instead).

So if any of you were curious as to which ideas I'm currently wrestling with, here they are under a cut to save your f-list )

Aha!

Nov. 16th, 2011 12:29 am
jhameia: ME! (Default)
Despite the dreadful depression of the day which prevented me from concentration on ANYTHING but a novel (I started reading Ekaterina Sedia's Heart of Iron, which is pretty good thus far... I find it much more engaging, if less poetic, than Alchemy of Stone), I finished the day with 4700 words AND finishing HIS CLOCKWORK HEART! This brings me to a grand total of ~38k.

There were no rocks falling nor dying, and there was a sappy happy ending. There was, however, an explosion and a fire that may have been started by my heroine's dropping the right disgruntling words to the right disgruntled people, in order to ward off powerful politicking business people.

However! It occurs to me also that it doesn't quite have the oomph it could have, so I'm considering rearranging the series of events. I don't know! We'll see.

I'm having trouble sleeping before midnight and waking up before 10am, so tomorrow I'm forcing myself up and about to go for a jog. I need it.

Tomorrow I'll get started on the mermaid story and continue the other steampunk story, and I am still taking flashfic requests!

Merf.

Nov. 13th, 2011 12:34 am
jhameia: ME! (Writing in my Blood)
I kinda wish my social justice nonsense wouldn't get all up in my fiction sometimes.

Lilian was just supposed to fix her boyfriend's heart by giving him a clockwork one and then there would be angst about how he's no longer quite human and has to keep replacing body parts until he's unrecognizable.

But no, instead it's become this sappy nonsense where her interactions with him bring back memories about her own impoverished childhood and so she turns her skills to helping other people which gets her in political trouble with Big Business (thus complicating her brothers' careers as politicians but I haven't thought that through) and now I just want to blow up the whole city. Which would be SO MUCH FUN.

But anyway. She has just replaced Darren's heart and he seems to be okay, so.
jhameia: ME! (Default)
So. Like, this list came up on my Tumblr dashboard? And it was kinda hilarious so I reblogged it, right? Then Nisi was asking me, over Twitter, how do these things work? Especially terms like "Flap Dragon" and "Moist Camel Hump" and, my favourite, "Skin Wand Scarf"?

So I wrote her some flashfic to demonstrate just how they work! And have been taking requests in my Tumblr Ask box ever since. Here's a full list of what I've done so far (masterpost on Tumblr):

- Skin Wand Scarf
- Moist Camel Hump
- Flap Dragon
- Sin Flower
- Secret Fish Forest
- Stripped Monkey
- Twaddle Dandy
- Blood Sewer
- Satan’s Doorbell
- Harpy’s Nest
- Pink Velveeta Shell
- Satan’s Rose Bud
- Sweet Snackbox

If you, too, would like to request a flashfic, just drop it into my askbox! I will post my response on Tumblr (which also gets linked onto Twitter) and update the masterpost.

So go ahead, help me up my NaNoWriMo wordcount today! :D
jhameia: ME! (Default)
So I'm going to repeat myself here:

While writing today, was struck by how much I like writing about jacket lapels, and of characters holding them, touching them, and stuff.

It's like jacket lapels are the textile equivalent of labia.


There is your thought for the day.

SNARL HISS

Nov. 6th, 2011 10:07 pm
jhameia: (RAEG!)
SO my computer has this problem where the battery doesn't last much longer than an hour. Which thus far hasn't been a problem while I write on my couch, because frankly, there is something about this table, and something about this setup, that aggravates me a great deal. I've not been able to get any writing done in this fucking apartment, and I feel like the energy isn't flowing very well. Part of it has to do with the apartment setup, with narrow corridors and awkward corners and shit. I do believe in chi (although not necessarily feng shui) and I feel like there is something with the way the apartment is set up that is preventing energy from flowing as smoothly as it could.

BUT ANYWAY, I've been getting good results typing on my laptop while on the couch, so I was doing that this evening. And usually when I hit a critical level, my laptop warns me. IT WARNS ME!

BUT TONIGHT?

NO IT DIDN'T.

That's about 3000 words, writing on NotePad because that's the software I'm most comfortable with, because it doesn't have a distracting UI, GONE. GONE. GONE! WONDERFUL WORLDBUILDING SCENES, GONE. WONDERFUL EXPOSITION ON MY CHARACTER'S FAMILY LIFE, GONE. WONDERFUL GENDER-NEUTRAL SEX SCENE, GONE.

I AM SO PISSED I am literally HISSING and SNARLING while I pace my hallway (can't pace my living room because it makes too much noise, which adds to my crankiness).

In a word,,hb4 gn rqnklhitwoqbdfiuhdvroitkjn vdwkj b rg3oih wrtlihgrjhvf,m vcx .
jhameia: ME! (Default)
So that's about ~2500 handwritten words today. I'm beginning to see Lilian and Darren's dynamic fleshed out a bit more, as well as the stakes involved in restoring Darren back to health.

Still not ENTIRELY sure if rocks fall everyone dies, but... who knows?
jhameia: ME! (Default)
so in addition to writing half a dozen stories for NaNoWriMo, I've also decided to hand-write as much as I can.

Not to make things more difficult, but because I think I'd get a whole lot more done sitting at my kitchen table focusing on my writing than on the internet.

I plan for 4 full pages each day, typed up, then more throughout the day as it trickles in.

So we'll see whether I end up crashing and burning this year =)
jhameia: ME! (Writing in my Blood)
So, I appear to be writing three things for NaNo, because I can't really see them as very long projects. They're somewhere in the realm of 10k - 15k stories, and actually, a couple of them are more like, music concept albums in my brain ala Interstellar 9999, so I really don't expect to get a whole lot of them in terms of text, when I'm kind of thinking in terms of lyrics and actual sound. But I have no musical skills beyond theory I learnt as a kid, so as a musical project, the stories are useless to me.

Story #1 Lilian Memoria is a genius inventrix who has pulled her family out of poverty on her own through providing wealthy clientele with amusing automata. Her frivolous life is disturbed when she meets Darren Hayward, a schoolteacher with a fatal condition.

I've been meaning to write a short of this for a while. A lot of it comes from the desire to twist the lyrics of "Her Clockwork Heart". I think because at the time, I was also encountering a lot of stories of the "doctor tries to save dying (female) lover" variety, and the song kind of made no sense to me, like, I'm sorry, the narrator is a woman, and why the fuck couldn't it have been about an inventrix who tries to save her husband's life? Is this way too alternate for alt-history? Given the issues surrounding androids replacing sex workers, women as literal dolls, and science gendered male, I just didn't like the song as it was. Even when I hear it in my head, I always replace the lyrics to his clockwork heart instead.

Also, rocks fall, everybody dies. I think. I haven't really decided what direction to take with the ending yet.

Story #2 Ashn's lover has been kidnapped from their sea home, and Ashn has to travel as a human across a dry desert landscape, navigating dangers and the bewildering gender norms of humanity, to get Mryn back.

I made up that name on the spot. I wanted to write a lesbian-ish mermaid story that sort of talks about gender performance and appearance and reading gender on bodies.

There will be a love triangle thing, where Ashn is read as male by a human woman who resembles her lover and she is kind of sort of falling in love but can't help but remember "You're not her" (this was going to be a drawn out painful sad love duet) (because Ashn's language does not have a gender binary, I think I will use "she" by default based on Ashn's flawed understanding on how biology and gender are tied in this human world). Also, might have a kind of Wild West feel, not sure yet what kind of world this is.

Story #3 Where labourers are never taught of their city's name, only that they must work, two slaves find each other in the darkness.

Again, another musical concept. I was at the Clockwork Dolls' concert, right? And Helene has a lovely voice, but I guess I was still thinking about my "subculture is not an escape" article, so in one of the songs, the chorus goes "Fly away with me" and I was going all like "HALE NO the fuck do I want to fly away for? shit is real down here and it not gonna do anybody favours to just, you know, LEAVE. And who gets to just fly away, anyway?"

Also was reading Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines, and one of the privileged characters falls in love with a working-class character, and I was thinking through class differences, and how that separates people, and what does it mean for the privileged to help the disenfranchised, using that privilege to do so? And what does it mean to live in a space you can't escape, and you have so many social ties you wouldn't want to escape it because that means leaving behind important loved ones? How do you transform this space?

Although, really started with wanting to write a song about fucking in engine rooms hiding in the darkness and the noise.

And then there's the dragon porn [livejournal.com profile] moniquill told me to write so I better get on that too.
jhameia: ME! (Default)
I'm considering not participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but it sounds like a really bad idea, given that NaNo was how I made friends in Halifax. It's just... if I don't have a job in November, NaNo would be almost too easy? I've done it mostly for the social aspects, but eh. I don't know.

I'm going to outline my next novel (or rather, finish outlining it) and then we'll see.

[livejournal.com profile] moniquill has also challenged me to write dragon porn so I'll try.

But yeah. MRP's handed in. WCC6 essay's re-submitted. I have the Steam-Powered 2 Roundtable to edit (and by edit, I mean, I have to cut and cut and cut... the whole thing's 7,000 words, and Tor.com does a max of 2,000 usually... what I'll prolly end up doing is giving each set of author answers their own post in the weeks following Steampunk Week. Ay-leen's also offered to cross-post at BeyondVictoriana too). SIGH! Sorry ladies =(

I attended the department's Caucus meeting today, even though I'm not a student anymore. Mostly to rep for Vox Populi in case no one else showed up. I ended up taking minutes for the meeting, and I'm pretty proud of them, for some reason. I'm not used to formatting that doesn't involve Robert's Rules, but whatever. It looks good for an informal meeting.

And I had dinner with Sarah and we bitched about the Gay YA nonsense happening now.

Tomorrow: more editing.
jhameia: ME! (Default)
So today I woke up? And realized I had nothing to do, really, besides write for NaNo. I'd already accomplished about 2k last night and I thought, I could go a couple more K today. Did I mention I'd also written two response papers last night before embarking on the novel writing?

And I kept putting it off, because I had to finish reading some of the readings. In between I wrote 1K each time. And finally culminated the evening by raiding the databases looking for secondary texts I could use for my paper for my Politics class and writing up my proposal.

I PROCRASTINATED ON MY NANOWRIMO WITH MY GRAD SCHOOL WORK YOU GUYS.

I'm going to bed tonight feeling effin's accomplished.

Also, my wordcount for the day is 4103.
jhameia: ME! (Default)
For a novel that has yet to be written! But! I actually have no real idea how it's going to go! Thus, synopsis to help me.

This, while actually working on summarizing SUGAR MELTS into one page. Not fun, but still, a good exercise. It might be more useful for me to have looked up successful synopses beforehand though.

Still! A synopsis! Yay synopsis!

Kur sits on the border of the Jhin Kingdom, a last outpost against the Long Empire. Skirmishes in Kur's forests are frequent. Outlaws preying on both Long and Jhin citizens are common. Only the spirits of ancestors hold back the worst of war, as their vengeance can be vicious.

Lin Fang, third daughter of the new warrior lord in charge of the Kur principality, expects it'll be a while yet before she's to be married off, especially in these restless times. Until then, she tends to the shrines left behind by families past, placating lost spirits violently torn from life.

An Ren has been wandering for two hundred years, having reached a state of immortality that grants him powers so long as he detaches himself from mortal matters. Yet filial piety calls him home to put to rest a grandfather who still remains in the bordertown now called Kur. Grandfather Soon has been waiting a very long time for his grandson to come home.

The timing couldn't have been better for the patriarch's spirit: he sees no reason why An Ren and Lin Fang should resist each other. And to their mutual dismay, neither can they.


Thanks [livejournal.com profile] moniquill for not laughing at me when I showed her the first drafts XD
jhameia: ME! (Totes Me!)
Werd up.

2005: hit 52,363 on Day 13.

2009: 50,251 on Day 9.

Now to finish the actual story, and move on to another draft that desperately needs my attention.
jhameia: ME! (Default)
I have 41k words.

Within today, the following has happened:

I has pirates in the story, which kickstarts my couple to run away in his airship.

My heroine has eaten fruit. Which made her glow.

My hero has fallen into a pit, in which he ignored offers for help because he was busy studying the walls and drawing connections for what happens next.

My protags have realized they like each other without saying it out loud.

Yays. THINGS ARE HAPPENING.

Tomorrow, I am going to totally vege out. Have lunch with a friend. GO SEE CANADIAN CARNAGE. BE COMPLETELY HEARTBROKEN THAT THE MEGADETH CONCERT HAS BEEN POSTPONED.

Haih

Nov. 7th, 2009 12:43 am
jhameia: ME! (Default)
ONLY 27K TODAY.

WTF?

Hitting 30k tomorrow. No ifs, no buts, whatever it takes.

OFFS

Nov. 5th, 2009 11:20 pm
jhameia: ME! (Default)
Only 4k accomplished in the last couple of days. Ridiculous.

I'm going to sleep early tonight (I was reading Buck Godot last night) so yeah.
jhameia: ME! (Call To Arms)
This is what Western literature has done to me. )

Now that I am done being depressed and teary about this fucking bullshit, I AM ANGRY.

And I am going to FINISH THIS FUCKING NOVEL FOR SURE NOW.
jhameia: ME! (Plot Bunny)
Back, plot bunnies, back! Confound me no more!!

I just thought it would be a fine idea to write a story whimsically called, "Deathrays and Doom". Or rather, "Deathrays and DOOM."

I also just tweeted the following:

"Deathrays! Dirigibles! Dashing daredevil damsels! Dastardly deathtraps! Deadly dominions! Dreamy dramas! Diva demigoddesses!"

Oh MAN. (I had to check thesaurus.com for the last two.) This is actually sounding good.

SOMEONE TALK ME OUT OF THIS, STAT!!!!!!

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