Being Peta

Okay....

With the a time management schedual in place to balance my work mum responsibilities without burning out I've commenced my first nanowrimo at the start of the month.  I've been absent from the web ways for quite some time trying to organise RL to free up this month as much as humanly possible for the tast.  All emails will be answered eventually I promise.  (Sorry for being such a rotten snob.)

With the first week drawing to a close I'm pretty pleased with my literary effort.  Over 23,000 words logged so far.  On the other hand, as I'm working off a synopsis, I can already forsee a huge run over of words before this story is finished.  Which isn't such a bad think except that it means more time will be needed to complete it.

Story wise, I'm lovin' getting to play in  an (almost) new sand pit.  This story is based in the Terinu universe but set a centuary into the future and so involves a whole new cast.  I've enjoyed learning about these new characters and seeing how they handle the stauff I'm throwing at them.  Also getting to write a purely word based story of a decent length has been good excercise for my muse.

In keeping with the need to focus on my novel I'm limiting my own line time to almost nothing... it's too big a distraction... until I've atleast hit the 50k mark.

On the other hand, after a prod from kiki, I've decided to go ahead and post this evolving story as I write it to anyone else interested.  I'm opening up another livejournal account as it's the most brain dead way I can think of to do it.  This journal will only be made available by invitation only as I don't want it available to the general publ;ic just yet.  It's going to be raw and choc full of ambiguities, creative use of grammer and spelling errors that would make an eight year old laugh.

Moving along with plotting my nanowrimo novel I suddenly realized that, though i loved what i had so far, I've only enough story for 25,000 words, unless I want to pump it full of filler fluff (eck).  On the other hand i still don't know how I'm going to resolve the main crisis although I'm pretty confident I know how to build up to it.  I'm going to play around with not resolving the crisis but letting it build to even worse things.  (Falling back to one of my old tricks... if you get at a brick wall of creativity then think about what could happen to make things so much worse and then write that.  My only worry is ending up with an apocalypse... lol.)

I'm finally starting to get to know and like my protagonist.  Suxs when you've got some really interesting and fun support characters and your main is just  blah.  I've changed some of his personality traits and interests and he's so much better for it.

In other news I have to work out how to transfer moneys from my bank account to paypal.  never done it b4 and don't know where to start.  Off now to ring my banks customer service.  Wish me luck.

I have spent a good chunk of this evening developing characters for my nanowrimo story plan.  I forgot how much fun it was starting a story from almost scratch with  brand spanky new characters forming right under my fingers.  Having more creative fun then I've had in a LOOOONG time! :)

Am loving Mindmap... so easy to inset stuff and juggle it all around.  I'm using it to note down any old idea that pops into my head and to flesh out my characters in point form.  I've spent the last hour or so moving these newly minted beings onto the character sheets on Ywriter and fleshing them out even further.  I am going to finish loading these in before I start trying to order the actual story events into a comprehensive chain.  I'm being very strict about keeping the cast to a manageable level.  Only working on characters that are essentual to the plot.

It's early days yet, but I'm still concerned that my main protagonist feels a bit bland to me.  Have to find a way to make him more interesting.  My other main characters are coming along nicely though.  Lots of juicy idosincrisies to play with.

I had a general idea for the basis of the story in my head for the last couple of months.  It's wicked fun working on expanding it.

Just to recap, this one is set in the Terinu universe but close to century in the future.

My trolling the net has lead me to rwo pieces of interesting software which I'm going to trial to help me build the stories. 

One is called 'Ywriter' which is a way to break down the story into it's charcater, plot, chapter, scene components.  It's got lots of versatility and an intelligent organisational system.  Google it, it's a tiny download and easy to install, and then jump onto Youtube for a tutorial.  that's all i did to get started with it.  It also seems to have a very comprehensive built in set of instructions..  Going to give it a thourough test run tomorrow with a dummy project after I've done the house cleaning.  I'll let you know how it went.

The second which I've been having fun with for the past hour is a program called 'Freemind', which is basically a fairly straightforward mind mapping software to explore ideas with in a fluid enviroment... it is EXACTLY what i do on paper when I'm planning a story.  Once again I found the download through googling, then Youtubed to find a tutorial.  (After a string of night shifts I need to see and hear and not just read the instructions to learn.)  I've played around with a dummy mindmap on it and had a ball.  my advice is just screw around with it for a couple of hours, it's really quite powerful.

Both of these apps are FREEWARE.

I'm going to do a dummy run of planning a short story on Freemind and then using Ywriter to expand it into a full fledged writing plan.  You can use Ywriter as a word processor and write the whole thing on it, but I'll see how I go.

I've gone and done it.

I've registered for this years Nanowrimo.

I've wanted to do a nanowrimo for the last three years, and would have done it last year if Vegout hadn't been unemployed and trying to set up his own business at the time.  This year there are no excuses.  Conditions are as good as they're ever going to get.

I'm going to apply for two more weeks leave for the second half od November, seeing as I was knocked back on my request for four weeks over August/September (only had two weeks of it approved.)

Right now I'm trying to plan a time table of time allotments over the month for when I have time available to work on the story and strategies for getting away from the family on weekends and evenings.  I have spanky new little netbook ( a Toshiba NB200, replacing my poor little ASUS which really wasn't powerful enough in the end to handle what I needed it of it.) and i intend to carry around with me.  Must make it a carry case.

Next problem: what to write.  I have two possible ideas in mind.  One using my Terinu cast and the other set in the same universe but in the future with a differnet character set.  plenty of time to play with both.  i hope to be sold on one by the time November rocks around.

I don't trust myself to be able to wing it from nothing on Nov. 1.  So I'll be spending time over the next two months putting together a plot, charcaters and researching what i need so I have no excuses to procrastinate.  i also intend to use Write or Die for speed to stop myself from getting stuck making perfect prose... something I'm terrrible for.

Anyone else doing Nanowrimo this year.  I could do with a writing buddy.

I'm registered at the Nanowrimo site as Chaypeta, (of course :) ).