I’m still yakking about Outlaws, which still stands the test of time as #2 in the Top Two Western Video Games That Have Ever Been Made. Seriously, game industry, I’m pretty sure people would buy more of these. This video does a quick tour of Levels 1 and 2 and sums up Level 3 with the words “Ah, fuck, a train level.”
Journal
Thanks to my brother and his wife for their Christmas/birthday gift of Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley, he of Scott Pilgrim fame. It’s not nearly as epic a read (in the sense of length), but it had things to say that resonated with me. Sometimes you need that more than another paperback about dragons and magic. (Which I’m also currently reading, guiltily.)
I needed a break from writing about stuff for the past month, since it has been pretty crazy. I have work-coming-to-an-end-stress, family stress, holiday stress, and creative stress, so the blog just needed to not happen for a bit. I plan to unveil a bit more about what I wrote about my grandfather in the near future, but for right now, I am much more excited to be embarking upon a new project with somebody who has been a great help to me in crafting a keepsake for friends. I have to mention something about it here, because it is just plain ludicrous the degree of labor I’ve put into it.
A great long while ago, I ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with some good friends downstate. We had a ridiculous amount of fun, and I even met several new people through it. Since it came to an end a couple of years ago, I have felt nostalgia like no other. In part to give a keepsake to my badass party members and in part to assuage these yearnings, I slowly set about creating a book of the campaign. Key to this was the addition of some art. Sadly, none of our players really drew any of us while we were playing, so in addition to sketches of maps and notes I’d made about the adventure already, I figured I should commission some art revealing our characters.
I’d love to reveal some of the art I used, but the fact is I paid for single-use for it and I don’t want to make it available to anybody on the internet who can Google Image search. The point, however, is that I partnered with a few great artists to illustrate the work, including one who I am pleased to say I will be working with on an upcoming project.
It has been a trying past couple of weeks. I plan to write a bit more about it very soon, but my grandmother passed away last week. It set me on a long period of rushing back and forth, which was compounded by the wedding I then had to go to the day after her funeral and a looming medical procedure. Through it all, writing has fallen to the wayside, but I’m hoping to find the endurance to get back into it this weekend. More updates to come.
And so, it is complete. I have defeated NaNoWriMo for only the second time in my life. Yesterday I rather fittingly decided to hunker down at the same Panera Bread where I beat it a day early all the way back in 2008, though this was one of the few times when I could have done so over the past few years – I’ve been all over the place since then. Last November found me in Colombia, the several before that found me in Central Illinois as a reporter. The very first one I defeated happened just as Barack Obama won election to the presidency the first time, and now here we are miles into his second term.
I have a few observations about this go-round. Firstly, I feel okay about what it is I wrote. I have the distinct feeling some things will ultimately be done away with, but I also feel as if the greater majority will remain. This writing also helped me get through a deeply muddy time in the book, when literally every character is moving in concert and it becomes difficult to keep them all straight. That is going to be a major difficulty moving forward, but it’s also important that it be done: The story is partly one of a town, and not just the three main characters. Some advice a girlfriend (at the time) told me was that I should peel back the other stuff, and she’s right. I think I overdid it in some scenes, but cutting is easier than producing, and if we must cut later, then we will.
Writing this in concert with reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub was also weirdly instructive in a few ways:
I had a truly grueling writing experience last night, literally lying in bed with my eyes closed and composing 2,000 words I am truly surprised make any sense at all.
This was after a flurry of activity at work and a long train ride home. Those scenes were mainly filling in earlier parts that have only now come clear to me as the writing begins to shape this prolonged second act of the story. So the result was, I squeezed scenes into the middle rather than tacked more stuff onto the end. This lead to truly perilous situations where I was scrolling through past sections adding stuff that had never been there before. Somehow, it made sense when I opened my eyes to look at it.
I am now imperiling my 200-word goal lead, which I only won by writing above goal for three straight days, by going to a writer’s workshop. I have never been to it and know only one person there, and there is a long train ride ahead of me at the end of the evening and it sure would be nice to play Diablo III.
Sigh…
It had been a girl once, not yet quite a woman. The little white choir gown it wore was fouled with stains; Winters could not tell if they were from the rusted chains that encircled its body and ran through the pitons driven into the back wall and floor of its cramped little cell, or if they were long-dried blood or filth. The hands and feet were desiccated, the flesh drawn back so far that the nails looked like claws, the individual bones of the hand and foot glared out under the patchwork light the cell let in.
Over its head it wore a shredded canvas bag, but holes in it let out two matted cascades of tawny, malnourished hair.
“Rhonda?” Winters whispered into the cell. “Rhonda Younge?”
It had been looking downward, but as it raised its bagged head, Winters realized the bottom had been clawed at, frayed away enough to expose the chin. It opened a black mouth filled with shattered teeth – but no tongue, Winters would remember later as she tried to sleep in her savage triumph. The scream that came out was the scream of one for whom words have never held meaning, a wretched howl that beat against the walls of its cell.
Don’t worry, I’m still writing. I did completely screw off on Day 10 and wrote barely 900 words on Day 9, but it is still all right, since I was more than a day ahead to begin with and the last couple of days have kept me just barely ahead of prescribed word count. That video up there is sort of the cultural “it” thing of the moment, and you’ll notice it is incredibly disturbing after a certain point.
That sort of ties in with what I’m writing about now: A weird place that occupies the ideal of something but is in fact a creepy backdrop for a total psycho killer. In my current storyline, the woman a shady group of people have sent to track down this creepy killer has reached that killer’s hiding place. I’m not sure if it came through or not, but I wanted to invest in her just a little bit of the heroic as she tries to navigate this sinister, dark place and is finally shaken by the terrible things she finds inside. Of course, that wouldn’t make for a good rest of the book, though. What will happen next is a treacherous alliance between the two of them, as he offers her the secrets of the townspeople, who are more important than she’s realized. This is a big turning point in the story, and I’m nearly coming to the end of it, thankfully.
I spent too long writing and I fear a great deal of it will get cut. But that’s how it goes. I gave some more time to the weird old detective character who is a part of this book, too. I am trying to look at this as not wasted time for writing too much, but we’ll see how I feel when I edit it later.
Here’s today’s stats:
NaNoWriMo Day 7
START: 151,577
END: 153,652
WORDS TODAY: 2,075
GOAL: 14,144/50,000
I continue to shove myself ahead of goal, something I realize I’m going to need as I’m looking at a few busy days on the road in Springfield later this month. Let’s hope it doesn’t derail anything. Too tired even to post up a picture on this one. Oy.