#talysnovel: snow to ashes

[talysalankil]

making a minor character like

[talysalankil]

have 3k words to write today for nanowrimo and tbh i’m like

on the positive side: i think i had a breakthrough like ten minutes ago in terms of defining character motivation! that’s neat. i just need to find a way to execute that well. no biggie. no pressure. cool cool cool

[talysalankil]

ayyyy look at that, i might actually salvage this nanowrimo yet, crazy how much easier it goes when i’m not constantly being told to redo my class preps. i mean it’s not exactly a certainty that i’ll hit 50k yet but it feels feasible at least.

also yeah, still on the nonlinear writing train. i don’t know why it’s suddenly working for me when i’ve been reticent to it for so long. I’ll take it. i’m not going to question it. or what it’ll mean for the future of my writing.

[talysalankil]

nano update:

i’m slowly crawling my way back up to my “good” average of ~1.5k/hour, and also today was my best day words-wise, so, neat

also I managed to sneak in the “protagonist and love interest’s first interaction is a duel” trope. i have no regrets. also alex is basically insta-smitten with emi when she kicks his ass because he’s a disaster bi* who just needs someone to step on him

*emi is genderfluid and at that point presenting as…let’s say male-adjacent. i considered having her switch pronouns too but honestly I think that’s just confusing for the reader especially for one of my protags and PoV, so i’ve been sticking with she/her pronouns.

[talysalankil]

nanowrimo update: i did 1717 words today, which isn’t great considering i should have done 1 or 2 sprints during the afternoon but didn’t so I should have done a lot more.

But on the optimistic side I got some cool character stuff going there with one of my protags and her supporting cast. Which is totally not influenced by heartsong at all (which I just finished a couple days ago and I’m still heartbroken by, btw).

Anyway I think I’ll keep going on my momentum for a tiiiiny bit longer

[talysalankil]

i do wish i could have outlined more. this is a story with two protagonists and so far i’ve only gotten half of one’s intro scene while the other has gotten a lot more. it’s annoying. but…oh well, I guess.

[talysalankil]

so.

I chose my project for nanowrimo.

it’s gonna be snow to ashes.

whoo.

i’ll probably make some blogging about it later because i ended up starting at like, fifteen to midnight and it’s now 2am.

[talysalankil]

i guess they removed the validation step? neat

[talysalankil]

i feel like at some point post-nanowrimo i’ll have to face the fact that I should basically rebuild one half of this story from the ground up because if i feel bored with that protagonist’s storyline while writing it it’s probably not great to read about either

[talysalankil]

i can’t believe-

seriously i’m so tired i didn’t think i’d make 3k today. if i keep this up i can actually still win nanowrimo? holy shit that would be crazy though.

what happened was, I had a random urge to write nonlinearly, so i did a bunch of drafts of scenes later in the story and it worked really well. plus, doing that helps in an unexpected way since now I have a clearer idea where i’m going and i can basically reverse engineering how to get from point A to point B. i mean, it’s still hard, but still.

on an unrelated note: the curse of “confusing characters whose name starts with the same letter” strikes again, and this time, the characters are the protagonist’s brother and her love interest, so that’s kind of unfortunate lmao

[talysalankil]

got my best sprint yet, 1257 words in 35 minutes. I almost forgot that i actually really like emotional talks? even if i’m more used to do it with angsty gays. which, i guess they are angsty gays, but of the found family type, not the “want to bang” type. anyway. it was good.

so sad I can’t carry on this momentum because i have more internship shit to deal with and then classes

[talysalankil]

i’m gonna have to write romantic tension tomorrow! wish me luck i have no idea if i can manage this

[talysalankil]

day 3 update: wrote a bunch more (more than either day before), cool cool. hopefully i don’t lose that headstart now that the work week is starting.

i'm actually developing a bit of an outline as I go, which is neat because it allowed me to write a liiiittle bit nonlinearly as my two protags haven't met yet. I don't generally like nonlinearity but it works in this case, and i can write faster when my focus is on one of them

also yeah i should at some point talk about, like, plot or characters, but i’d like to do that when i’m not exhausted, and it’s midnight and i have to be up in like 6 hours, so today is not that day.

[talysalankil]

No word count update because i forgot to take a screenshot before i manually hit reset on scrivener but it went well basically, except for the aforementioned “i need to rewrite a solid 30% of what i have right now” thing

[talysalankil]

okay well 3.8k at midnight is my final count for today. I kinda wanted a little more to catch up to par but i needed the rest and this is still good

hopefully i can keep this up? i absolutely need to if i want any chance of catching up especially with my internship looming over me soon. on the optimistic side: i have some idea where i want the next few scenes to go. on the pessimistic side: after that I’ll only have some very high level ideas again and i’ll be back to building the tracks right in front of the train. wish me luck.

[talysalankil]

talys’s great nanowrimo 2019 debacle: the post

i felt like being grandiose, just not grandiose enough that I’d properly capitalize things. bear with me.

So I’ve had a bit of a time figuring out what to do for NaNoWriMo this year. So it’s venting time.

I’m also using this to do like, a status report on all my writing endeavors.

Okay so I haven’t had any new novel idea in a while now. I mean, that’s fine. I have a massive pile of WIPs anyway. But (and I think I already made a post about it earlier) the problem for nanowrimo was this:

I didn’t want to do a rewrite of any of the existing drafts:

FEITS v3 was paused at about halfway done in 2017, and while I’ve had a bunch of ideas for it, I haven’t really taken the time to work on them.

Psychopomp’s first draft is complete, but it could use a rewrite

Tangled Stars and Dragged to the Underworld are about 50k each with a missing third act

Eloped in the Night is a 15k word mess that needs major rewriting because it was still Brooding Lust when I wrote those)

Of these five books, four have planned sequels, but: I didn’t want to write a sequel, since none of them anywhere near a final stage. That being

FTEITS (for which I wrote like 30k of a first draft of book 2, most of which is good for the trash what with all the changes I’ve made), 

Psychopomp, whose sequel would have been the best candidate in this category honestly because I don’t think the rewrites would be super structural

Eloped/Dragged are part of the same universe though mostly standalones, but each of the subsequent books in that series would draw from one or both of these, and like I said, neither are even a complete first draft.

While I have a bunch of fic ideas, I didn’t want to do a fic for nanowrimo because it felt like cheating.

Which left me with um…like, nothing. Well, not quite.

So you may or may not know this (I kind of forget where I put information online) but my first draw to storytelling was actually video games. In broad strokes, here’s a quick history of that:

As a very young child (we’re talking 4-8 years old here), I’d play pretend with my plushies

When I got Crash Bandicoot 2 (one of my first video games I was really into), I started to imagine various games where my plushies would be the protagonists. Inspired by Crash, Zelda, other games…I remember once outlining a 15-part series of games around my favorite plushy, each of which was basically subdivided into chunks of different genres. I even invented a “dark age of the franchise”.

When I got Final Fantasy X and then got another gaming magazine with a walkthrough of Final Fantasy X, I started inventing a self-insert game based heavily on it, and wrote most of my ideas in the format of a walkthrough. I even parroted the editing style because I was like nine.

That story was iterated upon several times, and eventually yielded the character of Talys Alankil (well, sort of—the name actually originated in Guild Wars and was then repurposed. Somewhere in the lore, the two of them are like, extremely distant relatives, or were until I decided all copyrighted works were purged from canon). Thanks for creating my brand, 13 and 15-year-old mes.

I actually got into computer engineering because of games, except I then realized the storytelling was what interested me. Oops. I mean I like programming but I’d never want to work as a programmer in a game.

That tangent was completely pointless but whatever, this is the state of the talys post.

Anyway. Point is. I got a new idea for a game earlier this year. Life Is Strange 2 meets Octopath Traveler by way of Vanitas from Kingdom Hearts as the protagonist. This is the first time I have an idea that I can phrase in this kind of pitch so I’ll indulge. Fight me.

Working title is just “The Road” though obviously it needs some work, and over the past few months I’ve actually done some pretty good prep work, so I thought, hey, why not challenge myself this nanowrimo and write a script for a game instead of a novel!

And like, there’s no reason why not. I’m actually feeling pretty attached to the protagonist already, I’ve been wanting to try scrivener’s script writing tool, it could be fun. Of course, the problem is that a script for a game (especially this one) is inerently nonlinear and requires thorough planning, which I have not done. And nanowrimo starts…technically tomorrow night if I can still stay up past midnight.

[Second tangent time: I’ve been going for a teaching degree, which has forced me to reset my sleep schedule extremely hard and I hate it]

So that brings me option 2. Well, technically there are two options here, but only one that’s remotely viable.

I may have mentioned it before but in FTEITS, Adam and Cell bond over (among other things) a shared favorite book/author. Well, mostly a book. There is also a scene of Adam finding that author’s new book and experiencing nostalgia over his lost life, which may or may not survive the rewrites. The author, incidentally, is my self-insert in that world, and will also not be an active character in the plot of the books, but I just felt like mentioning it. And yes, that means my protagonists are fans of my work. Sue me.

The one they’re both a fan of is titled Snow to Ashes (I remember way way back, when I randomly picked a title “The Brain is Out”, before I had any idea what it was about). It is, incidentally, a chance to analyze Adam and Cell’s character arc by proxy and in a microcosm, which is good because I feel that sometimes their arcs are still kind of ill-defined. Basically the story has two protagonist and it is canon that Adam and Cell each relate more to one of them.

The problem with that is that now I’m getting a lot of ideas for Snow to Ashes, and I don’t know if I have the time to work all of these ideas and iron them out before nanowrimo starts.

So that’s where I’m at. Either way I will be pantsing it. I was hoping to get to do some outlining this week before Friday, but it turns out that being tired, having a pretty big spike of executive dysfunction, final fantasy 14, and my parents deciding to watch the TV again after years of not doing it (thus making noise at the time of day that would be perfect for me to write), is not fertile grounds for productivity. I am, incidentally, out of a FF14 subscription in four days, which is very fine by me since that game would also ruin nanowrimo itself, not just the pre-nano prep.

This isn’t really a request for feedback tbh, just, like I said, venting. Hoping to straighten my thoughts and figure out which choice is best.

As a PS i should mention that yes, the Talys Alankil game is also technically a writing option, and I could write a script for that. I mean it’s almost a rewrite because that one has a pretty rigid outline already, but. Yeah. It’s an option too.

Edited: I didn’t mention Malefacta. I didn’t forget about malefacta. I just don’t know what to do with Malefacta. It’s annoying.

Edited2: Remember when I almost wrote a superhero book for nanowrimo 2017? yeah that’s still a project I have somewhere. I’m no feeling it though. Sorry, superhero project. You were never meant to be, I guess.