This is something I've been wondering about.

I usually write on paper and then type up my work. That's just how I work best. However, for the past couple weeks, I've been writing at most, a page a day (400-500 words), and when typing up my last chapter rough draft, all of the characters seemed like they had mood disorders.

That's the problem I find when I write in short chunks -- I forget what I'm actually trying to do. While the glorious days of NaNoWriMo create manuscripts with many problems, this is not one of them. It makes me wonder if I should set aside more and more time for writing to bang out a manuscript in a month or less and worry about the editing later, or if I should actually respect my other obligations.

Discuss.

It's time for the fifteenth annual Teaser Tuesday!

...It's supposed to be weekly, but, you know, scheduling slips.

This is the Wizard Story, which is terrible. It requires a lot of work.

Without further ado.


( Aida always supposed that it would end like this. )

It really is, but I'm muddling along.

If anyone is reading, would anyone care for some... teaser tuesday?

I just feel like there's no prod for me to continue.

I should really probably be doing something more productive than this, like, you know, homework, but I figure that if I work really hard on this really fast this won't actually take long.

I've been doing sorting and shit for the story. Too much if you ask me, and it will probably all come to nothing, but I guess that's all right.

Right now the story has a Greek, Hindu, and Tarot motif going on with the way the gods work. First of all there's a Creator, Preserver, Destroyer motif in the form of the First, the Royal, and the Heir, and there's a Greek or Roman motif because in Roman times there were only allowed to be 12 major gods, and they even kicked out Hestia (Vesta) for Dionysus because wine was more important than the house! Which is stupid, but whatever. In this case I guess we also have mashing so that there can be 'twelve,' even though everyone acknowledges that there are actually thirteen, but what happens is that the Gray is counted as the zeroth god, so in counting you have twelve instead of thirteen. I wonder if there's a superstition about that or not in this world. Probably not, or not nearly as much as us, because if you count the Gray as one, the thirteenth is the Heir, Vagrant, or Janitor, which, even though he fills the 'destroyer' role of the pantheon he's not exactly considered a bad guy, and is definitely not even considered the worst of them. In fact, he's rather nice, if a bit lazy, or at least that's what the stories say.

In this case, there are also 22 names for the gods total (21 if you count the zeroth), like the major Arcana in the tarot. These names are: The Gray, The First, The Lost, The Witch, The Lich, The Farmer, The Dividing, The Warrior, The Traitor, The Sheperdess, The Widow, The Virgin, The Huntress, The Feline, The Judge, The Lame, The Guard, The Heiress, The Royal, The Vagrant, The Janitor, and The Heir, not necessarily in that order. Because there are fewer than two times twelve (or two times thirteen), their roles don't all change. In some cases, the roles of the god stays completely constant, like in the case of the Virgin goddess or the Lame god, or even in the case of the Gray god, who is forever unchanging, but the Destroyer role ends up taking up three roles. I guess he's kind of complicated.

And anyway... I guess I should match up the major arcana to these roles. Or perhaps it is not a good idea, I'm not sure. I can do whatever, I guess. and the more I work on this stuff is the more I delay writing, which I suppose is just as well. Writing is just so hard, you know? To actually do the writing parts are really hard.

I'm also supposing that Irving and Gracie will be in this story too, as monster hunters or something, with Irving being the sleeper and Gracie being the hunter, but in this case they would also need a surgeon, and I'm not  sure who from those stories I should kidnap to fill that role. Anthony? Probably, they were like the main three characters, and Anthony might be the most level headed of them, but I'm not sure what to do with his religious connotations then. Dany has a lot of religious connotations, and I'm not sure about his name, and I'm not really sure about Soren's name, either. I might have to change a lot of names before the day is through.

Who are all these people, anyway? They seem to come from terrible places, and everyone just keeps getting cannibalized and cannibalized. Like, I wonder if July and Lafayette will end up showing their ugly heads. I guess the main problem is that to get anything done in the dreamlands there needs to be at least three people involved. And perhaps July is not actually a lucid. Maybe he's still a dreamer, and Lafayette is a monster. And maybe strange things keep happening.

Really, I could just add in everyone. There could be lots and lots and lots of characters. There will be so many characters. I'm wondering about symmetry though. I'm wondering if symmetry in this case is important. Probably not, considering I have thirteen gods and am not caring to make them equal in sex or whatever. Well, they sort of are anyway, but not through any special effort. And that's just the wa it is, and people will just have to deal with it.

Today I'm going to talk about writing, and watch as all of the solluxes pile up on my screen. I will reset them to one right now, and say when they multiply.

Okay, he is reset.

Time to begin.

I was thinking about reworking this murder mystery into something kind of like Bruce Almighty only in a crazy whacked-up alternate universe. Well, I don't know how crazy and whacked-up it would be, but it would be different enough to our own that I would have a lot of explaining to do.

So this was the basic plot.

There's an eldritch abomination god dude hanging out in the psychic plane. Apparently there are a lot of them hanging around there, but he's the one that the main character happens to meet. Also, he's the only one who's not really bound by the estate he has, so he's going to be the one most likely to be wandering around anyway.

The main character, Aida, is currently trapped in the psychic plane. She knows that running around in the psychic plane to try to grab power for her wizard friends to use is dangerous, and now that danger is finally paying off, and she's trapped and she's going to die. The eldritch god decides to set her free (for whatever reason -- perhaps he's just curious) and then they stick around and talk for a while because, well, when you just get rescued, stuff like that goes down.

Gods are unable to reach the physical realm, where most of humans live, unless they take on a human body. After much convincing, the god convinces the human to let him borrow her body for a little while. Not too long, not even in human time. Just a few months. And for those few months, she would have to take his place in the psychic plane. In exchange for her body's rental (he promises no damages, though I guess he can't really be insured), she gets the resiliency to survive in the psychic plane for long enough to do whatever.

And then I guess what happens is we have two fish out of water. We have the girl who's suddenly among gods and the god whose suddenly among humans. I'm not sure what the girl would do, considering she's new and the whole exchange was pretty sudden, but she would be under the protection of the Traitor, (another god) because that's the one she knew in her life in the physical plane.

Sollux multiplied.

Yes, her friend had been possessed by the Traitor and still has links so they know each other. I guess then that the god would be in the favor of this person

Sollux multiplied. 3 Solluxes.

so the god would be in the favor of this person, or this person would be around all the time, and they would have to communicate about those things and things. But it would be like meeting an entirely new person for each of them, and in this case the other would still feel an obligation to the other, either because they feel that the other had been tricked, or out of religious dedication.

Or something like that.

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. It seems like something that would require a lot of worldbuilding and I'm not sure if I have the chops to do it.

I kind of do like the idea of it, though. I kind of like it better than the idea that I had earlier, even though there's a lot less murder this time.

I don't know, maybe the girl's body gets murdered and she's just stuck there. That would kind of suck.

I would like to write something with a lot of killing but it's very difficult to write about things where there's a lot of killing and few consequences. Which is strange, because that's a lot of what I read. Perhaps it is just that I'm a wimp. Well, then again, there's a difference between accidental death and manslaughter and then actual murder. I have not read too many books with a whole lot of murder recently. Perhaps it is just that I believe too much in the law. Or perhaps it is just that I'm not creative enough to know where to hide a body.

Perhaps I should do more research on that.

And perhaps I need to look for more audibooks tonight. I'm almost finished with Ethan of Athos. It's really, really good. I really like Lois McMaster Bujold. I should get more of her stuff on tape!

So instead of going on about my boring, wretched life, I'm actually going to do some productive worldbuilding today. Whoo!!!

Anyway.

I'm writing a story that has wizards. yay, wizards. I like wizards. I also like wizardmurder, but that's another story for another day. Or, rather this story for another day. Anyway we're not going to talk about wizard murder right now. We're going to talk about proper worldbuilding.

However, a lot of these wizards can't really do that much. This is because wizards in this universe whatever need to cooperate to get anything done. They require at least four roles to do anything magical, which is very difficult because usually the people with magic tend to be the type of people who do not really like cooperating. So, finding four people with magic ability who are willing to trust their lives to each other is really difficult. In fact, doing it with normal people is difficult enough already, and finding four wizards to do it is nearly impossible.

Either way. Any basic magic requires four roles. These roles are (pending) the sleeper, the surgeon, the seeker, and the spellcaster. The sleeper sleeps, as the name says, so that the other four can have a gateway into the psychic realm. This is nearly impossible to do while waking, or probably extremely painful to do while waking, or some other limiting factor, so the person does have to be asleep for this. They do have some conscious knowledge of what's going on when there's magic going on, but they often forget exactly what happened afterward like it was a dream. The actual duties of the sleeper while sleeping -- being an entryway and a beacon -- in the psychic plane are actually extremely boring and tedious, so the memories one has, if one has any at all, while being a sleeper are not usually that great. Thus, nobody really wants to be a sleeper, even compared to the other roles, which no wizard wants to be, really, because no wizard wants to cooperate.

The surgeon is the next role, as the surgeon is the one who cuts the way into the psychic realm. This is done through the sleeper, which is probably why it's done while the sleeper is sleeping. Sleep helps minds recover, so it's probably much less noticeable when the sleeper is sleeping if any damage is done at all. The surgeon then has to hold the gateway open for the seeker and the spellcaster. This role also kind of sucks, as it's less glamorous than the role of the seeker or the spellcaster, but it's an important role, not quite as boring as the sleeper's role, and more memorable, so finding wizards to play this role is slightly less difficult than finding role of the sleepers. This is probably because this role actually requires skill, rather than just focus and a tolerance for tedium.

The seeker is the third role, and the seeker is the one who actually enters the psychic realm while conscious. The psychic realm is quite dangerous for humans to just run around in, so the seeker's role is pretty dangerous and not exactly the most prized, but it's more prized than the sleeper or the surgeon because the psychic realm is actually extremely interesting if one knows how to navigate it to a certain academic type, which is what a lot of wizards tend to be. Well, a significant chunk of them tend to be of the type that might like the seeker role. Seekers are really the only role that there is no cap on the number needed. Any group can have any number of seekers as long as the surgeon and sleeper can keep track of them all. The reason why there aren't usually more than one or two seekers on any given team though is because they still have to trust their lives completely to the surgeon and the sleeper, and despite a wizard's curiosity, many are still not willing to risk themselves like that. What a seeker actually does is navigates through the psychic plane to find a god's estate (more on this later) and siphon the power from there back through the sleeper and to the spellcaster.

The spellcaster is the fourth role and probably the most glamorous out of all of them. This is because, as written, the spellcaster is the one who actually casts the spell. That's pretty awesome. Doing magic is awesome. it feels awesome and looks awesome and it's not something many people get to experience. Of course, there's always the chance that being the conduit for so much raw power will cause you to spontaneously combust, but that's not really that important. The spellcaster takes the power brought back by the seeker, channels it properly, makes it take shape, and then casts the spell. It's really the most self-explanatory role, sort of. Occasionally groups can handle more than one spellcaster, but usually only for really large or difficult to control spells, and they would have to be synchronized, which is not easy. Also the number of spellcasters can't really exceed the number of seekers, so that's a cap.

So guess what guys

I read some Ayn Rand today. Well, not exactly read. I was at work and listening to audiobooks because that's what I do because otherwise it's quite soulcrushing.

Anyway. Anthem.

Anthem, I've heard, is kind of off-model compared to other Ayn Rand books. It doesn't take place in a time similar to today, and, most compellingly, it's very short. So short, indeed, that the audiobook was about two and a half hours long, and it felt like half of that was the foreward. I really hate forewards -- I usually skip them, so I was very frustrated about being unable to in this audio. So that was a downer, but really doesn't have anything to do with the book itself.

Because Ayn Rand is such a controversial person, I guess I'll say stuff that has nothing to do with her views.

The writing is very pretty. I will say that. It's short and pretty and stylish. I liked that it was stylish, and I liked that it was short enough to not have the style run stale. That doesn't happen very often, and it doesn't seem like a lot of people write like that anymore. This might have to do with the decline of novellas, if they were even a thing in the first place. A sad turn of events for society now, but nice to see.

I wish she would have given more development into Liberty/The Golden One/Gaea. I mean if this book is supposed to be all about individualism, where's her's? She just kind of accepts the name Gaea. That was... that was totally lame. She should have argued. If we're going to be all about individualism, she should have fought over it. If we're going to talk about individuality, then we're going to have to have all the individualists be individualists, not just the male characters.

And, an afterthought. At the end, the main character mentions that Gaea is pregnant with his child (son, he says). Never mind the fact that what if the child had not been born male -- what if the child had not been born healthy? I just wonder how the father would think. Then again, perhaps he would just go the infanticide route.

I'm not sure. Stylistically it holds up but there are a lot of obvious holes. I'm not sure if I'd read another Ayn Rand book, if only because I don't think I would want to stay with this author for too long -- as opposed to getting through Crime and Punishment,  for example over the span of many, many days, and was sad when it ended.

I am not doing well with writing things. Like, not well at all. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm still sort of working on the project of Joy and Wonder. I have been drawing. Which is not exactly that great. I will um. Continue to work on things. perhaps I will make some vingettes. Maybe make a lemony narrator. Or something.

My nook broke. This makes me very sad.

No, you don't have to worry about me losing all of my data because it's all saved to either B&N servers or my computer, so that's not the problem. The problem is that I had it for three months and it just kind of up and broke.

The problem, that the touchscreen stops working and it goes through cycling instead of turning off, is apparently a combination of a few problems that are weird glitches in a bad batch of nooks or something. Thank God it was still under warranty.

Stupid technology.

This is a really short one. Andrei and July are talking in the hotel.

( <p>“This is only if we have time,” said Andrei. )

Here's a bit of a teaser for yes, the same story, The Traveler Only, take 3. I am typing up the third chapter, but it's not done yet ^^; It might take a while, for those who are following all of this.

Anyway, without further ado. Andrei is going to take July to negotiations.

( "Why are clothes so important?" )

I am posting right now from my new phone. I would like to see if this works out. Though I am not exactly sure how often I would use such an app, it is still a nice capability to have.

Posted via LjBeetle

Here's some more writing from the same story. I know, I know, I haven't been keeping up with teasers, but because I was writing today I figured I'd better post.

Andrei's a PR guy and is trying to figure out what to get the spaceman (July) to say to the Texans. What he says is interesting yet useless.

( “Don’t worry about the tenses,” said Andrei. “I’m sure they’ll understand that time travel is very disorienting.” )

Here's Teaser Tuesday #11! Long overdue, huh? It's still The Traveler Only, but it's the... DUN DUN DUN 3rd incarnation.

I have no idea what's wrong with me.

I'll just keep working on it and working on it forever and ever until I'm dead, probably.

( Once More, With Feeling! )