Musings of the Lorekeeper

...on the effect of excessive mental stimulation, particularly of an academic or similar sort, on creativity.

This is becoming a pattern in my life. The more interesting cerebral stuff that gets thrown at me, the more I come up with ideas for stories. The stories are generally related in no way shape or form to my academic work, but I had SO many ideas while in college. Then after college they sort of faded out (and Japan wasn't the greatest time for them either, though I did have a few good ones and MADE myself work through discipline). But there's nothing like being in school for having INSPIRATION OVERLOAD.

You can see why this is not the idea set-up. Sigh.

Still, I have e-mailed myself notes on a potential GOOD FIX for Azilie's story (it's been bothering me since spring 2008!) AND I also want to get back into TS. (Okay, THAT part is maybe related to being in school because Celeste is in school at that point, but I think that's coincidental.)

For Azilie, I think one potential solution to my problem is to alter the POV model. I was sticking to just Azilie's for this story because her ultimate decision has to be made on her own to be significant enough to work for the story...BUT...that doesn't mean the READER can't see another story and how it works in. I think I may be able to solve the problem if I do that!

So I was scrawling down more notes about this in class in my assignment book because it was all I had on hand at the time.

I also want to note on a semi-digression that I saw the movie "Up" a couple weeks ago and it seemed a lot like my story, but not in any plagiarizy way. Awesome. I think anyone who liked that story will like Defying Gravity, and I'm not just saying so because of people flying through the air. Subtle but significant things about the characters are key here. Yay.

I have to go to a group project meeting now. Bother. Who wants to learn about Affinity Diagrams when I have stories oozing out of my brain? Oh well, at least I have a really good group.

swankivy sent me another song that she thought would fit my story, and it fits even better than she could have known! Thanks, Ivy!

I already knew this song and have the MP3 on my computer, but I hadn't even thought of it yet. But it fits REALLY well.


"Only If" by Enya

When there's a shadow, you follow the sun.
When there is love, then you look for the one.
And for the promises, there is the sky.
And for the heavens are those who can fly.

If you really want to, you can hear me say
Only if you want to will you find a way.
If you really want to you can seize the day.
Only if you want to will you fly away.
When there's a journey, you follow a star.
When there's an ocean, you sail from afar.
And for the broken heart, there is the sky.
And for tomorrow are those who can fly.

Pretty much everything gets bolded for being directly relevant. :D (Though not all in the first book.)

And I just realized that the drawing I'm almost done with now is a total spoiler pic so I REALLY NEED TO FINISH MY BOOK SOON so you can read it and I can show you the picture. :D

Also, I need more markers. (Seriously, I just spent how much on a set of 72 of them and I STILL don't have every color I need? Hahaha, craziness. But it came with only warm greys and I need cool! There's just no getting around that! Well, I'm going back to Otsu/Kyoto this Saturday so I'll pick some up in either of those places. ;)

I REALLY WANT TO GET BACK TO WRITING. I'm excited about finishing this story, and REALLY excited about starting either the next Azilie story or about doing TS (because, uh, that's a rather political story, truth be told...I think that's already starting to be evident in the parts that some of you guys have read already). The problem is that my thoughts are totally tangled up in my grad school situation. It's kind of like how the only time I played video games at college was during final exams, when I just couldn't do anything else with my free time because of mental exhaustion. But I'm going to try anyway. Or at least vow to have my grad school stuff as done as possible by Election Day, so both my political geekery and my grad school dilemma can be wrapped up and I can finish this stupid draft before the end of the year. Why has it taken a year to do draft 2 when I did draft 1 in a little over 90 days? Grrr.

It really is bedtime now, but I just had to add this next song to my soundtrack. I have quite a list of songs about flying people now. :D And other things that fit the story! I should make a list but that will have to wait until it's not so late at night.

I've got a new picture for Twilight Star!


(Click to enlarge)

Once I finish Azilie's story, I really want to get back into working on Twilight Star. I am full of ideas to make it more condensed, more interesting. I also am tired of staring at computer screens, so drawing is a good way to work on a different project while getting away from the computer.

The characters shown are of course Celeste in the middle, with Indigo, Gabriel, and Mikaela down in the left corner, Cozoqui in the lower right, Celeste's grandma, grandpa, and uncle to the right just above her (whom I've never drawn before! Older people and men? Whoa! A challenge!), Kymathece, Esti, Sorl, and Izick (whom no reader has met yet) up in the right corner, and a mysterious young woman whom I shall not even name yet in the upper left.

This drawing is noteworthy because it's done in a realistic style. Fotosearch.com is my new favorite site for finding source pictures! It really helped me a lot. I'm not the best when it comes to realism (not that I'm anything special with cartoon style either) but I am rather pleased with the way this came out, for someone who's rusty with the style and medium and all. The paper was also cheap 100 yen shop paper and kept pilling up when I tried to erase multiple times. So it does seem a great victory to have bent it to my will!

I used my artist's set of pencils to draw it -- that is, not No. 2 lead, but F, H, HB, B, and 2-9B. This is the most ambitious piece I've made with those, so yay! Even though I got the pencils back in 2000 for Christmas, I still thought to bring them to Japan with me. I'm used to drawing in color, so having to represent color in black and white -- and even more than that, to represent light, since that's a big part of this picture! -- was a fun challenge for me.

The picture is now on the wall above my computer desk, near my glowing star curtains and aurora poster. I think it fits there quite nicely. It's about 15"x10" in real life. This was much too big to fit on my school's scanner, so I had to scan it in halves. Stiching it together was a bit of a pain since the scanner did the greyscale differently for both pictures, but thanks to some creative cutting and the dodge and burn tools, I think I mostly made up for that. Yay! I'm annoyed that you can still see the stitching on the right side (I guess I scanned it at a slightly different angle each time -- I didn't flush it to the corner of the scanner because that was doing some weird thing where it cut off the edge of the piece) but oh well, considering the trouble it took to scan this, I'm happy it worked at all.

If you have comments about the drawing or story I would of course love to hear them! :)



Speaking of artwork, I just thought I'd share that I got gift art from a 12 year old Septuplet fan on Monday! It really made my day. I love getting art from my friends who are experienced artists, but it's a different kind of special to get something from a kid learning how to use a paint program and enjoyed my stories enough to draw the characters. I had never heard from this reader before, either. Really, really cool. :)


(Click to enlarge)

Or click here to go to the picture page and scroll down to the gift art section to see the new pic, the Group Shot by Micha. I set something up to forbid direct linking to JPGs by people who were stealing my images and bandwidth, but now I can't seem to unset it. It was supposed to let me specifically allow linking from LJ, too, but that doesn't seem to be working and I have no energy left to fight computer battles right now. But it's cute and makes me happy and I want to share it so I hope you'll go take a look!)


Editing update: I'm on page 42 of 120 on draft two of Azilie's story. (Which really needs a better title one of these days. Usually titles come to me somewhat easily, but not this time.) Actually, I did a fair bit of work on it (writing a new scene that it really needed) and yet that change the page count since yesterday, since it just filled in empty space at the ends of chapters. Hmph. Oh well. I really hope to be done with this draft of it by my birthday. Unfortunately, the second half of the editing will be harder than the first, since the end basically needs to be rewritten. But then, I have lots of time during the summer vacation to work on it, so I'm optimistic. (For most of July and all of August, I have no class, but I still have to go to work. I'll be taking my computer to work on my novel in the 職員室 [teachers' room].)


Okay, that's all, but if anyone feels like chatting about writing or drawing, please do feel free to strike up a conversation via e-mail or comments because I'm all excited about this subject right now. ^__^

Writing any story--but especially THIS story--is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, with a general idea of what the bigger picture looks like, but no concrete picture of it to study. It's harder the more pieces you have, but complicating the matter, your story puzzle has extra pieces that might not fit anywhere at all.

This is exactly how I feel with this current part of TS. But I'm getting so much closer! I can tell I'll finish soon! But wow, I've spent SO long on this. I'll feel such triumph when I'm done with this draft. It's come closer than I ever have before with getting the pieces together right. It's just that there are SO many pieces, and I've still got more that I might have to throw out, and I hope I didn't throw out the wrong ones.

We'll see when I'm done with this part, I guess. It's the first three chapters, or possibly four if chapter three gets too long. I have to lay SO much stuff down here.

Okay, getting back to that...!

Hmm. I think I just killed a proverbial darling. I liked that sentence, but it wasn't working there. It was redundant. I deleted it. Bye-bye, nice sounding sentence.

--

I am going to have to really have some help keeping the grandparents' and Uncle Oliver's characters (and Celeste's too, but that one's not as flimsy in my head) in check. Her grandfather has dropped suddenly into a submissive position, and that may be unbelievable. Someone can tell me how it reads. I can fix it if only someone tells me how much it needs to be fixed. But that's for a later draft. Right. Don't get hung up now. But yeah, here's a guy who's so used to being in charge and calling all the shots and thinks he should be protecting everyone beneath him, but who then realizes that the situation is out of his control -- both on the mundane level because he knows that Celeste can find a way to sneak around him (and he wouldn't go as far as locking her in her room, if only because he realizes that is impractical) and on a larger scale, that things are happening in the Great Scheme of the World that are beyond his knowledge. He's a smart enough man to know that, and he can be humbled, but he won't be HAPPY about being humbled.

That's a tricky situation to convey well. At least, I'm finding it so.

--

Wow, that scene ended abruptly. Maybe too much so. Well, I can fix that later. If it needs to be fixed. Maybe it's better this way! Can't make that call until my mind is fresh.

--

Oh, cool. I just realized a new theme in my story. Activity vs. passivity. Action vs. reaction. Initiative vs. just being pulled along. I'm excited about that. ^_^ Actually I've sort of thought about that for a while, ever since Kristin (not you, Snow Wolf; Sketchinartist, rather) commented that Celeste was really passive and that wasn't cool. Well, she has a lot to learn, as most protagonists do in Chapter Ones. I knew that then, but I didn't realize until then that it was part of the actual theme. But it is. I think it has been all along, but now that I know that consciously, maybe I can do some fun stuff with it.

It's tied in with the concept of Light all along, after all. And it fits in my larger theme! Ooooh, exciting! This is one of the most fun things to happen when I'm writing, I think.

'Course, I'll have to tone down some of the blatant Stating of that theme, but for this draft it's fine because I was figuring it out as I went. *nods*

--

HAHAHAHA I made it to the end of The Scene! I WIN!

Aaaaaand...(a bit later) I made it to the end of The Chapter! I WIN MORE!!!

And I'm going right on to Chapter Four! Becuase Chapter Three ended very abruptly, again. I always surprise myself when I realize can just end it. I don't need to keep rambling on. (You are not surprised to hear this.) But I think it works for the effect, and makes you want to keep reading into Chapter Four. Yaaaaay!

I like days when it works like this. XD

But okay, I think I have to stop now before I burn out. Better to leave a little bit of inspiration for the next time.

At least I'm writing at all, but I have to post the same gripe again to get it out of my head.

My prose is still flat and icky. (By my standards at least, but I expect even by those of people with lower ones.)

My plot is moving along much faster than I'm used to. This may be a good thing. But I'm not used to such fast-moving plots. I'm only on page 5 and so much has already happened. I'm not stopping to reflect on its significance. Yeah, that probably IS a good thing, but it's unnerving me just the same until I get used to it. I'll need feedback to confirm that this is a good thing.

Details are still all over the place. I have to keep reminding myself that this is JUST A SKETCH. It's better to write this way, but it's still really hard to get used to!

Okay, let's try this writing journal thing! Because I always have things to say about writing while I write, and then I stop to think about them, but I think it helps more if I just write them down and send them off to journal-land and then get back to the more important writing at hand! So here are thoughts from today's writing session. I've skipped ahead in TS, still feeling overwhelmed by the hospital scene and all the backstory that needs to be so carefully woven, and now am starting the part where she starts on her actual adventure. :D

It's at an airport, too, which is a good thing for me to write about right about now. ^^

~*~*~

Details, details! I get so overwhelmed with details. I don't need to tell people what the terminal is called! Or do I? For that sense of authenticity? I like those kind of details -- but you can't have so many you get distracted. I guess that's what feedback is for.

What does it say about this world if only ticketed passengers can go through security at the airport? I want it to be LIKE our world, so that all the places she goes after leaving home have an extra sense of foreignness and so that readers will be feeling that foreignness along with Celeste rather than having the whole world be new to them. But it is a political statement to have them unable to go through security. Very post-September-11. Well, as I always say, this story could easily be called post-Sept. 11 literature, even though I've been working on it since 1998.

I still don't know what to call Celeste's grandparents. Should I refer to them as Richard and Isadora? "Her grandmother" and "her grandfather"? Grandma and grandpa? But she doesn't call them that! At least I don't think she does. I still don't have that relationship down well enough to know what she calls them. I mean, maybe she does call them Grandma and Grandpa, but that looks too affectionate in print. But then, maybe in adjusting the relationship, I do need to have them a little closer. I'm going to be tweaking their relationship (and it doens't even matter much after she goes to school in, like, Chapter 4) so maybe this will be part of the tweaking. But for now it makes me stop in confusion every single time I have to type a name. And if I call them Grandpa and Grandma in the actual narration and dialogue tags and such, that makes it 3rd person limited, doesn't it? I mean, a 3rd person omniscient narrator wouldn't be calling them that, would it?

I wish I could write as easily in fiction as I can in journals. Just that flow of thoughts! But I've developed a bad, bad, BAD habit over the years of stopping to pick at every single word I write. Argghhhhhhhh. "Am I overdoing the feeling? The metaphoric description? Wait, no, I'm writing it too plainly now, aren't I?" THIS IS MY MAJOR PROBLEM. I can't get into the bloody story because I keep getting hung up on each sentence. *bangs head against wall* Anyone else ever had this problem? How did you fix it? I know I can come back and fix it later, but...but...arghhh. I need to re-learn how to draft, or just to write for fun! Yes, that's the problem: OMG I'm gonna try to publish this and get it critiqued and all and it has to SHINE aaaaaahhhh! Yes. Must stop that.