1. I finally made it all of the way through the new Florence and the Machine album, Ceremonials. This took a while not because I dislike it, but because I have been thinking out novel plot points while driving, and I can’t do that while listening to music with words. But on the way to the Y I finished it.
I’m glad I did. Frequently I like somewhere between two and four songs on an album — the iTunes model of buying singles is a boon to me, coming of age as I have in the “buy a whole album on cd what do you want a single for are you some kind of weirdo” era. Frequently, half of those songs are from the first six tracks. In this case, though, the songs that grabbed me were “Seven Devils,” “Heartlines,” “Leave My Body,” and “Remain Nameless,” all from the album’s second half. And “What the Water Gave Me,” of course, which had the advantage of being a single and therefore I’ve heard it more often.
So far none of the tracks have grabbed me the way “Drumming Song” or “Rabbit Heart {Raise It Up)” did, but there’s time.
2. Still behind on NaNo word count. But I keep writing, and eventually this becomes a novel. Things I have done so far:
Changed from first person to third person 4000 words in.
Decided to add more than one pov character because I couldn’t figure out what happened next.
Made my main character really unlikable.
All of these things will be fixed later.
3. In pondering character motivations and how those motivations are expressed, I look both to the fiction I admire and to people I know, including myself. It’s safer to do this with fictional characters, because, well, they can’t get horrifically offended at what you say about them. (Their writers might, certainly. But that’s a smaller risk.) This leads me, in a navel-gazey sort of way, to ponder the various things people do and say, and to ponder how I have a, a catalog of Fictional Characters Doing Things that I use to label the things real people do.
Okay, that got obtuse. For instance:
There is a sequence of activities and motivations in my head labeled “Pulling a Miles.” This is named after Miles Vorkosigan from the Bujold books. To be pulling a Miles, you must be in a situation rapidly spiraling out of control, over which you have a tenuous power to effect change, and you must out of fear and arrogance convince everyone involved to do things your way, and have it come out mostly okay. A real-life Pulling a Miles that I might see a friend do would be to take on a project at their job that is beyond their previously demonstrated knowledge or ability. Or one might Pull a Miles to get a convention costume contest or masquerade started.
With a head that works like this, there is no way that anything I write could ever be anything but derivative. But that’s no real problem. Everything has its sources, its inspirations, its influences. It’s how you refract those influences through your own life and mind that makes the difference.
To wit, I need my main character in this next scene to demonstrate the talent that the other characters keep saying she has. She has them, she’s just in a depressed bit right now and has spent 13000 words being morose. In the revision, I, in fact, need to have her demonstrate her awesome MUCH SOONER, but in this first draft I’m going to plunk the scene down where I am. She has the skills, it’s not hubris, she just is a little self-absorbed at the moment. Given my current reading this is being called “The Harriet Vane.”
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