lizvogel

Cookies have been made. And believe me, coming up with cookies that fit the theme of "a dark and stormy night" that aren't all gray-to-black was an interesting challenge.

For my future reference:

3 batches of dough: 2 hours
making all of it* into cookies: ~5 hours
  plus about half an hour of setup
decorating: 5.5+3.0+4.0+6.0+8.0+5.5 = 32 hours
photographing & packing: ~1.5 hours

So about 41 hours total.

I only ended up decorating about half the cookies; fortunately, largely by chance, I started with the most thematic ones, so when I ran out of me, I could stop without much loss of effect. The rest will wait until I get back, and get done for the household. (These cookies last just short of forever.) Since membership's low this year, I'm hoping:

44 lightning bolts (3 sizes)
~60 clouds (3 sizes)
12 moons
39 candles
15 creepy houses
23 ravens

will prove to be plenty.

*I always make more dough than I need, because when I first started doing these, I would invariably burn several trays, and depending on the shapes, also break quite a few. But I've been getting better; this time I didn't burn a single one, and broke very very few. So there's an awful damn lot of cookies around here.

Had a productive day yesterday, with lots of small tasks & errands accomplished, culminating with actually making dinner! I seared the little round roast in a frying pan, then opened the preheated oven and grabbed the rack to lower it.

With my bare hand.

We ate dinner (it was yummy), then finished the evening at the nearest 24-hour urgent care, because while the damage wasn't too bad, burns hurt. Surprisingly, they did actually supply effective pain relief. Fortunately the 2nd-degree burn on the pad of the ring finger is small, and the burn on the webbing between finger & thumb is only 1st degree. Still, that was 2 seconds of stupid that's going to cost me 2 weeks of raging inconvenience.

So if I'm slower than usual replying to folks, that's why.

Any remaining typos brought to you by my amazing one-handed touch-typing.

I've been slogging along on Apocollapse, and I finally got to a scene I was looking forward to, that I've been using as a carrot to get me to write some tedious stuff I didn't want to do. And I started writing the carrot scene, and it landed way harder than I expected it to, emotionally. Like, I don't see how these two characters, who are supposed to be friends, could ever come back from it.

I think I broke the book.

Obviously the choice is either tone down the emotion (which would be a fairly simple edit, just take out the references to Chicago and the MC's family), or else lean into it and spend a lot more time and page-real-estate on them dealing with it than I intended or have room for. Well, or let it land like the bomb it is and stop the book there, the emotional equivalent of rocks-fall-everybody-dies. Which is appealing to the author, because the book's at That Point in my process, but not really an option.

Of course the correct answer is almost never to tone down the emotion. So after a long discussion with the housemate over pie, I am leaning into it. Part of that will involve an assumption the housemate kept making which is not only unfounded in the text but explicitly countered in the text, but the fact that she kept making it, and I can reasonably expect a lot of other readers to make it, is something I can use. Having my MC make that assumption too, and having Other Character have to correct him, gives them something to talk about that is more objective-philosophy and less intensely-personal-trauma. Which at least gets them talking again.

None of this makes it easy, of course. And it's still going to take more time and real-estate than I have to spare, and on some level I am fundamentally annoyed that my nice philosophical-discussion carrot-scene has turned into another Hard Part. (Most of the other philosophy discussions have been fun and relatively easy to write.) But at least it gives me a way to keep going and not drop the book right there.

I'm sure eventually I'll come to view that as a good thing. ;-)

Went for my first run of the season (for sufficiently flexible definitions of "run"). This established that (a) I am pathetically out of shape, and (b) it felt really good to be out and moving, even if I am pathetically out of shape. I got sun and fresh air and sniffed by a dog, and it was way more interesting than yet another batch of calisthenics. Go, me.

I finally cowboyed up, picked a web host, and got myself an author website. lizavogel.com exists!

It is very much just a placeholder right now (though I am rather proud of the construction sheep).

I went with Namecheap; it seemed to have pretty good pricing, whois privacy included free, useful and easy-to-find how-to docs, and actually acknowledged the possibility of someone wanting to code their own pages. When I had a question, their live chat responded promptly with a clear answer from a real human.

Unfortunately, the shine wore off a little when I had to spend half an hour on the phone with my credit card company to get the payment to go through (and jumped through about a dozen security hoops with them). But I eventually got it cleared, and went through all the purchasing process again, and got my new account. Whee!

And then an hour later, got an email from Namecheap's "risk management" department that my brand new account was frozen, and I had 24 hours to tell them the "payment descriptor from your statement" -- meaning my credit card statement, apparently, which I'll get in the mail in about a month. They have absolutely no facility for any other verification, and no acknowledgement that, yes, there are some people who don't do all their financial stuff online. So there went another twenty minutes of my life on the phone with the credit card again, jumping through all their ridiculous security hoops again, to finally fight through to a very confused rep with limited English who tried to tell me that since the charge was still "pending" they couldn't tell me anything but the amount. Like who the charge is from, maybe?! Oh, yes, they can do that. And then, finally, got that to the account-lockers, and got my shiny new account back -- rather tarnished from being driven to screaming frustration for hours.

I feel like I need to keep checking it to make sure it's still there, and not frozen again. Oh yes, and apparently they're going to make me get a verification code every single f'ing time I sign in.

Swear to ghu, between the credit card and the hosting company, if this crap gets any more secure I won't be able to use it at all.

But. I have a website! And soon I will make it both pretty and informative. This is only about six years past when I first said I ought to do it, so I'm feeling pretty good about getting this far.

Of interest to no one but me....

In a desperate attempt to get my reading list under control, I've attempted to clean out some duplicate feeds. I've kept:
   patwrede_blog_feed
   pcwrede_comments_feed
which seem to be the fastest blog and comments feed, respectively.
I've dropped:
   pat_wrede_pcw_wp_feed (https://pat-wrede-pcw-wp-feed.dreamwidth.org/, source = https://pcwrede.com/pcw-wp)
   pat_wrede_pcw_wpcmt_feed (https://pat-wrede-pcw-wpcmt-feed.dreamwidth.org/, source = https://pcwrede.com/pcw-wp)
   pcwrede_feed (https://pcwrede-feed.dreamwidth.org/, source = http://pcwrede.com/)
Given that the sources aren't the actual RSS links (and that that last one was inactive as a feed), I don't know if I can get them back should the ones I'm keeping fail. But I'd rather risk having to dig up new links than keep shoveling through all the duplicates.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled dial tone....

Apocollapse has been badly stalled for a while now. Partly that's because middles are like that; I usually hit a point of being bored to death with my own story right around this point, and it's not a function of quality, just of being in the middle-to-two-thirds. Partly that's because I needed some vital research, which involved wandering around a truck stop convenience store last Sunday taking notes until the manager came over to make sure I wasn't a stray, unattended vendor. ;-) Partly I've got a couple chunks of just-get-words-down that are in the way and will have to go. :-( But part of it is something else, and yes, an old Pat Wrede post was the key to what:

To my way of thinking, what the middle part of a story needs is the sense that we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a physical journey involved; “getting somewhere” can just as easily mean slowly whittling down the list of suspects in a murder mystery, or the deepening relationship between the main characters of a Romance novel, or any number of other things that make the reader feel as if something important is coming closer and closer.
[...]
Most often, the sense of progress in the middle of the story is expressed as an increase in tension – as time and the story go on, the situation keeps getting worse despite all the main characters’ efforts – but there are other ways to keep the middle moving. Increasing apprehension (where the actual physical situation is not any worse, but the characters are finding out more and more reasons to be worried) is one; increasing urgency is another (where there’s some sort of time limit: the cure must be found before the patient deteriorates past a certain point, the bomb must be disarmed before the countdown timer reaches zero, the dress must be finished by the afternoon before prom night). The main character’s emotional involvement with the problem, or with some other character, can increase over the middle of the story; his/her self-knowledge can grow; the amount of information the character (and thus the reader) has about the central story problem and/or its solution can grow.

Right now, my characters have come to a resting point. They've achieved food and water; neither is a permanent solution, but it's long-term enough that they can catch their breath and start thinking beyond the next five minutes. They've established a functional means of working together. There's another major threat coming soon, but they don't know about it yet, and there's some day-to-day life stuff (apocalypse-style) that has to happen before it puts in an appearance (and that will actually trigger it, so I can't skip it). Basically, there's an interlude of wax-on-wax-off-paint-fence where the characters aren't making visible progress. It's brief, and it shouldn't be boring to read because I'll gloss over most of it and dress up what remains, but it's boring as hell to write.

Oddly enough, I was thinking recently about season 6 of Lucifer, which we're halfway through watching, and ( Spoiler )

I can't skip the not-getting-somewhere part, but now that I know that's what it is, it feels like I can brush through it and get on to the next development. Which is what I was trying to do anyway, but knowing why it's boring the snot out of me makes it easier to deal with.

Came across this whilst back-reading Pat Wrede blogs that I missed last year:

All stories start from some sort of seed: an idea (what if the moon exploded?), a character, a setting, a plot, a theme, an opening line, a closing line, etc. That seed needs to grow before it is ready to produce story-fruit. For some writers, the growth process is fast, methodical, and/or deliberate; for others it takes place mostly under the surface, over geologic time periods. However it goes, the first things the story-seed grows are usually related to the type of story-seed—an idea-based seed will sprout more ideas, a character-based seed will sprout more characters and/or their life stories, and so on.

This is normal. Trying to force a story-seed to grow in a different direction is like trying to make a just-sprouted pumpkin vine immediately produce rose flowers.

This may explain a lot about why some story ideas never take off for me, and why most how-to-develop-your-story advice bounces off me so hard. Because I will get story-seeds that are concepts, or world-building, or what-ifs, or even themes, and they may generate more of the same, but what they don't generate is characters. And I've long since figured out that while all that other stuff is important, if I don't have characters, I don't have a story.

(Also, that "under the surface, over geologic time periods" bit? I feel seen.)

Example: I have a title, "Love and Non-Transparency". The title was inspired by my cat placing herself between my eyes and my laptop screen, but what could it really be about? Obviously, it's a romance with a ghost, who becomes solid but still dead. This to me is a cool idea. I'd like to do something with it. As an experiment, I tried kicking it around with the housemate to try to develop it enough to write. There's a very dark direction it could go, but that seems too easy; I'd rather do something else with it, even though dark fantasy seems to have more markets these days. I got that the ghost is probably from the 1920s or '30s: Prohibition and pin-stripe suits, because that sounds like fun. But beyond that... the answer to far too many questions was “I don’t know; that’ll come with character, and I don’t have characters yet.” Trying to force-develop the characters stopped everything cold. I think somebody's name is Claire/Clare, but whether that's his last name or the first name of the living woman, (or the Matt Pond PA song to play while writing it), or someone else entirely, I've no idea.

And that makes sense, because I'm trying to force roses from this pumpkin. Perhaps at some point it'll mutate, but for now I guess I’ll just have to shove this one into the back-brain and hope someone materializes out of the mist to carry it back to me.

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shout rang out.

"Registration is open!"

"Finally!" chorused the crowd of writers, musicians, and other story geeks, as they charged off to www.narrativity.fun to get their 2025 memberships!


Yes, reg is finally open. We're trying some fun new stuff for Thursday this year, plus the usual awesome people and intriguing panels. You know you want to....

There are many problems with NaNo, some of which I've rambled about here. But I'm realizing there's another one, and it's fundamentally baked into the structure of NaNo itself:

It gets you halfway, then stops.

Many writers bog down halfway through a book, so many that phrases like "the miserable middle" are common vernacular in writing circles. It makes sense: you're past the fun part at the beginning where you get to meet the main characters and screw up their lives, throw in cool stuff just because it's cool with the assurance that you'll do something with it later, and perhaps lose sight of what you've learned from every other book you've written, which is that this exciting vision in your head has a hell of a lot of work attached to it. But you haven't yet got inertia on your side, where the weight of all that clever stuff you've built up keeps that rock rolling downhill and your job as a writer is to keep running just ahead of it, where you get to cackle with evil glee as all that set-up starts to pay off. The middle is where you have to slog through making sure that all those threads keep pointing in the right direction to tie up later*, where the foreshadowing seems obvious and the reader can just figure it out for themselves from here (it's not and they can't), where you start to wonder if you can pull off that clever dovetailing of two disparate tracks (you can), and where the sheer amount of heavy lifting yet to be done is an inescapable cliff face in your path, not yet counterbalanced by all the heavy lifting you've done so far. Middles are where the fire of ambition tends to peter out and the fire of accomplishment hasn't yet been lit. It doesn't work that way for all writers, of course, but it's pretty common.

50,000 words is, approximately depending on genre and so forth, the middle of a novel.

So NaNo gets you going with a framework that prioritizes writing, encourages a breakneck pace, and (if you're lucky) has a supportive community to help you keep at it. You barrel along, not always happily but at least productively, with that 50K target in mind and the promise that you can *rest* when you get there. And you get to your 50K, and you cheer "Yay! I can stop now!"

And you stop. Right at the worst possible point.

Post-NaNo, you sleep, you catch up on the housework/reading/friends/whatever that you put off for a month, and, if you're like me anyway, drop that book like a very hot rock. And all of that support structure drops you, too. And then days or weeks or hopefully not months later, you try to pick the book up again, and discover that you are mired in the Slough of Despond with no momentum whatsoever, the beginnings of forgetfulness about what you were going to do next (you remember it was clever, but not exactly how), and as much hard work ahead to slog through as you have accomplishment behind. And most if not all of that encouraging framework has disappeared, because everybody else is exhausted from November, too.

This is a major failure point, and it's baked into what NaNo is.

I'm thinking there needs to be an alternative. I do like the rush of NaNo; that ridiculous challenge is very motivating for me, in the years I choose to accept it. But it's also not sustainable at that level. Is there a lesser challenge that would still be invigorating, but that could be kept up until a book is actually *finished*, say in four months instead of one? That would carry the writer through the miserable middle and out the other side, without having to abandon all of real life for longer than most of us realistically can? Something with the framework and the *participation* that made NaNo at its heyday effective? (Not through the official NaNo organization, which is all kinds of broken. But something more than just me setting a deadline for myself, which can sometimes work but is not what I'm looking for here.)

And most of all, something that doesn't stop right at the point where it's hardest to get going again.



*For the current book, this is also where I start having to do more front-brain planning to make sure things happen in the right order, both for practicality and for pacing. This is not the fun part.