What's up with me and what I'm doing.
Nov. 16th, 2010 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI'm realizing it's been a few days since I've done on actual blog post.
It's weird how freeing it can be to decide to make a change. I'm not actually going to be doing that much different in Tales of MU, in terms of the format... but the mere act of evaluating what I'm doing with it and deciding to make a change has got me thinking about my other projects, the ones that have fizzled out or never caught fire.
So Star Harbor Nights is going to be undergoing a similar facelift/relaunch, complete with a time skip and some retrospective storytelling. It's still going to be a serial, more or less, but it's going to have a slightly different format, a focus on keeping things moving forward, and a stronger embrace of the "mosaic" concept... more of an anthology of intertwining stories sharing the same universe and timeline, less of a soap opera.
I'm not going to be updating content to the SHN website for a while, though, both because I need some time flesh out my new format concept and because I need some time to work on its layout. I love the parchment draft theme I found and adapted for Tales of MU and Fantasy In Miniature, but that's not quite going to fit the setting for Star Harbor Nights. So I'm working on modernizing it a bit. Making it a sheet of white paper seems like the obvious thing to do, but a lot of people don't like looking at black words on a white screen.
I hope to show some substantial progress on A Wilder World before the end of the month. My attempt at writing out the "bare bones" combat rules was kind of a flop... it took too long and the results were too muddled, in my opinion. I feel I was doing better when I was trying to write closer to finished copy as a rough draft. Conciseness is simply not among my natural virtues. I've started writing another section of the rules in a more conversational style. Oh, look at that... it's a A Wilder World website. There's not much there and the theme needs some readability tweaks, but it's not actually ready for wide public consumption yet. Think of this as a sneak preview.
My idea is to eventually have the whole core rules available for free there, along with playable sample characters. The business model for the game is going to be that the modular character content is available for a small price. That's my plan right now, anyway.
My NaNo novel has encountered a bit of a stumbling block in that I realized I'm writing a very different novel than I set out to. See, originally, Dustball Ramblers was going to be a wacky science fantasy story (less explicitly fantasy than Void Dogs, but you can only get so "soft" and still legitimately call it science fiction or even sci-fi, in my mind) set on the already colonized planet of Erebus. But in my first attempt to write it (pre-NaNo) I found myself referring back to the exploration and colonization so much that I decided a prelude describing that would be easier, so when I started writing again for NaNo I started there. And I ended up writing what would work better as a moderately hard science fiction prequel to the book I want to be writing.
So tomorrow I'm going to start writing Dustball Ramblers. Again. From the point I originally intended. Will I "win" NaNoWriMo with it? Probably not. Honestly, the NaNo thing just doesn't agree with me... I'm remembering why I only ever did it once before. The things that serve to motivate so many others just sort of grate at me. So I'm going to be following the NaNo ethos, more or less, in writing DBR, but I'm not going to be actively participating in NaNoWriMo.
I'm not abandoning the story of Dr. Monica Raven... I'm going to be postponing any further work on it, though, because it really deserves to be fleshed out more. What I've been writing so far reads to me like a bad abridgment of a good story.
It's weird how freeing it can be to decide to make a change. I'm not actually going to be doing that much different in Tales of MU, in terms of the format... but the mere act of evaluating what I'm doing with it and deciding to make a change has got me thinking about my other projects, the ones that have fizzled out or never caught fire.
So Star Harbor Nights is going to be undergoing a similar facelift/relaunch, complete with a time skip and some retrospective storytelling. It's still going to be a serial, more or less, but it's going to have a slightly different format, a focus on keeping things moving forward, and a stronger embrace of the "mosaic" concept... more of an anthology of intertwining stories sharing the same universe and timeline, less of a soap opera.
I'm not going to be updating content to the SHN website for a while, though, both because I need some time flesh out my new format concept and because I need some time to work on its layout. I love the parchment draft theme I found and adapted for Tales of MU and Fantasy In Miniature, but that's not quite going to fit the setting for Star Harbor Nights. So I'm working on modernizing it a bit. Making it a sheet of white paper seems like the obvious thing to do, but a lot of people don't like looking at black words on a white screen.
I hope to show some substantial progress on A Wilder World before the end of the month. My attempt at writing out the "bare bones" combat rules was kind of a flop... it took too long and the results were too muddled, in my opinion. I feel I was doing better when I was trying to write closer to finished copy as a rough draft. Conciseness is simply not among my natural virtues. I've started writing another section of the rules in a more conversational style. Oh, look at that... it's a A Wilder World website. There's not much there and the theme needs some readability tweaks, but it's not actually ready for wide public consumption yet. Think of this as a sneak preview.
My idea is to eventually have the whole core rules available for free there, along with playable sample characters. The business model for the game is going to be that the modular character content is available for a small price. That's my plan right now, anyway.
My NaNo novel has encountered a bit of a stumbling block in that I realized I'm writing a very different novel than I set out to. See, originally, Dustball Ramblers was going to be a wacky science fantasy story (less explicitly fantasy than Void Dogs, but you can only get so "soft" and still legitimately call it science fiction or even sci-fi, in my mind) set on the already colonized planet of Erebus. But in my first attempt to write it (pre-NaNo) I found myself referring back to the exploration and colonization so much that I decided a prelude describing that would be easier, so when I started writing again for NaNo I started there. And I ended up writing what would work better as a moderately hard science fiction prequel to the book I want to be writing.
So tomorrow I'm going to start writing Dustball Ramblers. Again. From the point I originally intended. Will I "win" NaNoWriMo with it? Probably not. Honestly, the NaNo thing just doesn't agree with me... I'm remembering why I only ever did it once before. The things that serve to motivate so many others just sort of grate at me. So I'm going to be following the NaNo ethos, more or less, in writing DBR, but I'm not going to be actively participating in NaNoWriMo.
I'm not abandoning the story of Dr. Monica Raven... I'm going to be postponing any further work on it, though, because it really deserves to be fleshed out more. What I've been writing so far reads to me like a bad abridgment of a good story.
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on 2010-11-17 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-11-17 06:21 am (UTC)