More distractions
Nov. 9th, 2009 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoGood thing I have that rug on the loom. I can go pound it for a few picks to empty out some frustration. Not exactly writer's block, because I know what I want to be writing. The problem is too many threads at once, and (unusual for me) I'm having trouble focusing on one at a time.
There's also a need to get into the head of a real villain, since he's writing a journal that will be found and read later so the content is visible to the reader. This is not easy for me at all.
I know I can do this thing. Progress is slow, though, and things are not coming out in the order in which they will finally be presented to the reader. That's why I haven't been uploading anything much yet.
There are fiddly details too. Probably don't matter to many readers, but they do to me. For instance, dates. OK, it all happens in the city of Chatton, so we can assume chronology based from the supposed "founding" of the city, three or four centuries earlier. But there are two timestreams, separated by somewhat more than a century. The lunar calendar in use has been "reformed" in the intervening century. This is part of the actual plotline, but it necessitates two dating systems. The old system used an intercalary month just before the spring equinox to adjust new moons to the solar seasons. This month was a second Wolf Moon, so in years when it was used, the Wolf Moons were designated as First Wolf and Second Wolf. The new system eliminated the intercalary month for political and social reasons, and switched to an intercalary period of varying length, inserted every year after the fall equinox, and called "The Stag's Leap." This is a festival time treated as a holiday outside of any regular month or week and featuring celebrations to cross between and level the economic and social classes of the city. It runs from 16-18 days, depending on the lunar cycle in the given year, and has no weekdays at all. So if the last day of the Harvest Moon was a Sunday, the first day of the Beaver Moon is a Monday, and the festival between them is literally "outside" calendar time.
This may all seem like pointless detail, but since we have characters who believe they are transformed into wolves at the full of the moon, the lunar cycles matter quite a lot. The murders in the earlier timestream took place during the double wolf moons, while the crimes in the second timestream happen during Stag's Leap.
Anyway, I find myself getting bogged down in calculating this calendar stuff, which slows the actual writing. I suppose I should just stick in dummy dates and work them out later, but I'm afraid of messing up some key detail that way.
Perfectionism is sometimes a curse.
There's also a need to get into the head of a real villain, since he's writing a journal that will be found and read later so the content is visible to the reader. This is not easy for me at all.
I know I can do this thing. Progress is slow, though, and things are not coming out in the order in which they will finally be presented to the reader. That's why I haven't been uploading anything much yet.
There are fiddly details too. Probably don't matter to many readers, but they do to me. For instance, dates. OK, it all happens in the city of Chatton, so we can assume chronology based from the supposed "founding" of the city, three or four centuries earlier. But there are two timestreams, separated by somewhat more than a century. The lunar calendar in use has been "reformed" in the intervening century. This is part of the actual plotline, but it necessitates two dating systems. The old system used an intercalary month just before the spring equinox to adjust new moons to the solar seasons. This month was a second Wolf Moon, so in years when it was used, the Wolf Moons were designated as First Wolf and Second Wolf. The new system eliminated the intercalary month for political and social reasons, and switched to an intercalary period of varying length, inserted every year after the fall equinox, and called "The Stag's Leap." This is a festival time treated as a holiday outside of any regular month or week and featuring celebrations to cross between and level the economic and social classes of the city. It runs from 16-18 days, depending on the lunar cycle in the given year, and has no weekdays at all. So if the last day of the Harvest Moon was a Sunday, the first day of the Beaver Moon is a Monday, and the festival between them is literally "outside" calendar time.
This may all seem like pointless detail, but since we have characters who believe they are transformed into wolves at the full of the moon, the lunar cycles matter quite a lot. The murders in the earlier timestream took place during the double wolf moons, while the crimes in the second timestream happen during Stag's Leap.
Anyway, I find myself getting bogged down in calculating this calendar stuff, which slows the actual writing. I suppose I should just stick in dummy dates and work them out later, but I'm afraid of messing up some key detail that way.
Perfectionism is sometimes a curse.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 05:08 am (UTC)Easy for me to say, I'm not doing NaNoWriMo. (Almost did, but I counted six days where no writing could've been done, and I only had a tenuous idea to write. Maybe next year (he says, again).)
Good luck. I read the sample on your NaNo profile. It looks like it'll be very much worth reading when it's done.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 08:01 pm (UTC)I haven't read a lot of your writing, but I got the idea that you usually don't get quite as dark as you seem to be getting this time. Of course, that's good, because it makes it a growth experience. (No! Anything but that! :) I wonder if this sort of thing happens to authors like Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy when they start working with dark, even evil characters.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 08:16 pm (UTC)Clancy though... He seems so far right himself that probably what would bother him would be my kind of hero. ;p
Stefan's "evil nature" is not evil by all standards. He violates my conscience and values badly, but it's obvious that we have lots of people here in the US who would support and agree with him if it were presented to them in the right context. Evil comes of his goals, and part of it was his intention, at least in his own era, though he considers that evil to be good.
He would never have been able to grasp or imagine the society a century later in which his dark thoughts produce an intense echo, though.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 08:56 pm (UTC)I fear you're right, comparing your Stefan with the sort of people in the US you're thinking of. We like to think we're a shining beacon, and that would apply in all things, yet darkness occasionally comes through -- not just during the G.W. Bush years, but from time to time since the early 1800s, really. And rarely are the long-term consequences counted and weighed, except by those who suffer them.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-10 08:22 pm (UTC)I didn't originally intend this to get so dark, but a couple of ugly images popped out of it early on and I can't get rid of them. This one has violence and genuine wickedness, but even so I will not be presenting it "live, on stage." Like Poirot or Lord Peter, we will analyze the events from the evidence, after they have already taken place. And of course, the key to any double timestream mystery: a century old puzzle that was never solved will be resolved in the re-examination.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 04:02 pm (UTC)