alexandraerin | Entries tagged with star harbor

As part of getting the logjam in my head unjammed, I spent a lot of time yesterday and today just writing whatever came into my head. It's a useful technique for getting past writer's block (and writer's overwhelming sense of self-doubt, a much more common and worrisome problem than writer's block), especially as it sometimes turns out usable stuff.

In my case, I got about 6,200 words of Star Harbor Nights stories in the past two days that I'm pretty pleased with. I've been planning on revisiting the Harborverse towards the end of this summer, but... well, plans, you know? Of all my plans that got derailed this month, my plan to not write new Star Harbor stuff right now is one I'm okay with failing.

Unfortunately those 6,200 words don't add up to anything finished, because they make up parts of two different things. But they're a good start on those things. The first one... what I wrote yesterday, when I was just basically spitballing, is part of a series of ~1,000 word vignettes that are meant to form a combination teaser/introduction/refresher for the Harborverse. It's a sort of round-robin mosaic story designed to get people up to speed. As with Tales of MU, I'm employing a bit of a time jump to give myself a cleaner slate for writing on (and allowing both old and new readers an easier starting point, given how much real world time has passed), so the vignettes will hopefully help people get the lay of the land.

It's a good reintroduction for me, too, since I haven't written much in that universe for almost two years now.

After that preliminary story, I'm going to be working in a very different format. Star Harbor Nights started off using a chapter/sub-chapter structure... six sequential or closely related stories forming a chapter. Given the sprawling nature of the setting and the expansive cast (SHN being my attempts to tell stories within the equivalent of a decades-old comic book universe), having this structure helped. But it also had its problems, so I abandoned it and then came back to it a few times.

I think ultimately the fact is that a completely open-ended serial is just a bad choice here. With no one main character and no single narrow setting to focus on, that's just too much openness. So the resurrected Star Harbor Nights is going to be more focused and self-contained. Sort of. I'm not permanently anointing one character or team as the main character, or focusing exclusively on one of the cities, or anything like that.

Instead, I'm going to be writing stories in what I'm calling an "episodic" format. I don't mean that in relationship to each other... one following another. I mean I'm going to be writing them in a format that somewhat mimics the act structure of an episode of a TV show. A brief scene to set things up (the before the credits teaser scene), threeish acts of things building, climaxing, and concluding, and then a brief after-the-last-break wrap-up. A more deliberately structured version of the chapter/sub-chapter thing, with the whole chapter being released all at once.

The individual episodes will fit into a larger "season" with a definite beginning and end. This way I can mix an ongoing story that builds through the episodes with one shots and side stories. I'm borrowing quite a lot from how TV shows that follow a mix of monster/villain/problem-of-the-week with a "myth arc" that builds through multiple episodes in how I approach this.

To extend the TV metaphor further, right now I've commissioned a pilot and if it works I'll put in an order with myself for a seven episode season. Start small and build, right? If it works I'll order more episodes.

I'm finding this approach has a lot of advantages. Like when I was writing the pilot episode (title: "MISRULE"), I realized that a scene with Clever Claire doing her own investigation didn't fit with the rest of the episode. It involves the same events and would be happening at the same time, but it has a very different tone and takes away from the rest. If I were doing this my old classic "fire-and-forget" serial posting style, I'd just be posting snippets with Claire in between the others and then the whole thing would get away from me because I'd be trying to tell two very different stories on top of each other. Now I can see how it doesn't fit and excise that scene... to put in its own Claire-centric episode later on, probably showing other events from throughout the season from her viewpoint.

Doing things this way is a little more demanding, but it's also pretty rewarding. It also makes it a lot easier to tell a superhero story the way I tend to tell it, with dialogue used more frequently than action. And just as a note of clarification because I know somebody will ask this if I don't specify, these will still be prose stories... I'm not going to be writing them in script format or dropping in gratuitous stage directions.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/282161.html

A few months back I posted some construction posts for Star Harbor Nights. They haven't really gone anywhere because I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to develop them. While a lot of my sleeping projects seem like they're better suited for books than serials, SHN was born out of my adolescent desire to participate in a serial medium (comic books) and it's hard for me to breathe in that universe within the confines of a book.

But it's not easy to write as a serial, necessarily. One of the problems with writing Star Harbor Nights has always been that it's even more sprawling than Tales of MU. In both universes I have the problem of having too many characters who are fascinating and fun to write, but in Tales of MU I can prioritize such things because I have anchor/viewpoint characters that I need to tie things to.

I think this is why I've always done best with SHN when I used the chapter/sub-chapter (or arc/chapter, or whatever you want to call it) structure I started out with: 1-1, 1-2, etc., for five or six chapters in a row. It keeps my attention focused in one place.

For a while I was trying to write it page-a-day style, thinking that would keep the story moving. It had the opposite effect. I spent months writing Rhyme running around Webmistress's underground hideout. It was a fun story but it didn't build momentum. I knew that when I revived SHN I wanted to do it with longer story segments but I wasn't sure how much longer. I also felt like I wanted to bring more of a cinematic scope to it. Above all, I knew that I needed something distinct from the Tales of MU format, because they are such very different projects and it needed something that works as well for it as the thing that became my default approach worked for Tales of MU.

A few days ago I think I hit upon the right idea. It was while I was thinking about Doctor Who, and the way the series is structured. You have your individual episodes, which have a story built the way an episode of a TV show is built. You have two-parter stories, and you have arcs that spread across episodes (and sometimes seasons), and then you have the seasons themselves. This sort of thing has been adapted across medium in things like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics for "Season 8" of the TV show.

I think that's what I need for SHN. I have the big stories I want to tell... the Big Bads, the world-threatening and world-shattering events... and then I have the small, intimate stories I want to tell about the characters who make us care about the world in the first place. This seems like the way to do it. Writing a season's worth of television seems to operate under similar lines to the way I work: you have a basic plan, you need to get from point A at the beginning to point B, but then what happens in between is often a lot of making things up as you go, taking advantage of opportunities that come up and working around obstacles as they occur.

So SHN is going to be coming back. Probably during the summer. I need time to plan out a season, and I have good luck with starting things in the summer. Both Tales of MU and SHN were first launched in the middle of the summer. I don't know if I'm going to be starting from the same point I was looking at with the construction posts. I'm loathe to do a whole reboot (the universe has been rebooted enough times already, comic book universe or not) but I might want to start from a cleaner slate than the one I was looking at just so that new people have an easier time getting on board.

Abandoning SHN was never in the cards. The Harborverse and the MUniverse are tied together way too deeply. Not in a way that matters too much to the story of either, but the little crossovers are canon to both. Also, I doubt very much I would be a writer at all if not for comic books, and the long summer nights I spent with my older brother spinning whole worlds' worth of stories about them.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/263767.html

I'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.

So it's been almost a year since I posted new material for Star Harbor Nights. While my other story sites have been a similar length of time since I've had any sustained output on many of my other story sites. In the case of Star Harbor and Void Dogs, the story universes lost a big chunk of their charm for me for personal reasons quite a while ago, and I've tried to get past that and sort of fake it and push through but it's just never caught fire for me the way they did at the beginning. And 3 Seas never caught fire for me, despite the enthusiasm I have for the concepts at an intellectual level.

It's sad to admit that, especially since Star Harbor was the start of my e writing career dot com, but it's the truth and it's better to admit it. The effort I've been putting into trying to dwell in these worlds that are no longer welcoming for me... it's just not worth it. It's been diffusing me. Any day I spend working, I'm spending a lot of time trying to push myself in directions that I don't want to go and ignoring more fruitful directions. When I put these things on my task lists I end up pushing and straining and getting dispirited. I leave them off my task lists and I feel like I'm avoiding them. So then I start dreading the task list. The bottom line is it's just not going to work out.

Or rather, it isn't working out. It's been not working out for a long time. I wish I'd realized sooner, but I'm stubborn like that. And more than a little bit oblivious. It took that post I made the other day of instructions for myself and the bolded one about not trying to do what doesn't workI'm grateful to the groups of people who supported these stories, and I wish that I could produce the works that such support deserves, but creativity is not guided by desert.

I'm sure that a small number of the people who follow my work are reading this and rolling their eyes at the idea that I can't just write the stories anyway without them "catching fire", or at the notion that not writing them could be eating into my time and life, but... well, I just spent more words than such thoughts merit so I'll say nothing more about that. Suffice it to say that spinning your wheels gets you nowhere but it still costs gas. There are other, more fruitful ideas I've been neglecting... more fertile grounds with seeds falling all over them. It's time to explore other pastures.

So, I'm going to be converting the Void Dogs, 3 Seas, and Star Harbor Nights sites into "archive format". I might work to fill in the gaps in the Star Harbor archive once I feel a little more distance from the project. I might (might, might, might... there is no "will" here, no ETA, no promises) write some stand-alone stories in the Harborverse in the future, as I think I generally preferred those to the serial. I might (see same caveats) write non-serialized extensions or conclusions of the other stories at some point. But maintaining the blog-style sites for them and accepting paid support for them is just becoming increasingly hollow and disingenuous.

I'm going to continue Tribe for the time being, because I think once I shed the encumberance of the other sites I'll be able to regain some momentum there, but I'm going to ditch the illusion of it as an ongoing story. It'll be sporadic. Or rather, it'll have steady updates when I have a story for it, and I won't try to force it when I don't.

If you've been supporting any of those stories, thank you. I hope you'll consider continuing your support for Tales of MU or for my writing in general, which in the future might be a little more diverse and less "universe-specific", though for the next little bit it's going to be focused laser-like on the MUniverse. There are a lot of stories I want to tell in that world, and a lot of stories people have asked to hear. It's always been the crowd pleaser and the money maker, and if I'm honest... and I should be honest... it's my favorite, too. It's time to acknowledge that and give it its due.

On that subject: the next update for MU has been inching its way towards completion. Having come to this decision and written this post, I feel like I could probably press on and finish it pretty quickly now, but I've also been awake all night and was getting ready to collapse when the need to write this post overtook me. So... I don't think the results would necessarily be good if I pushed on now.

To sum up: Tales of MU is going to continue. Tribe will continue sporadically. Star Harbor Nights, Void Dogs, and The 3 Seas are going to be officially dropped. I might write stuff in those worlds in the future, but assume they won't. I'll be canceling the sponsorships that are explicitly tied to those stories, though I'll leave all the names up on the archive sites.

~~Sign the diplomas.~~
~~Put up Tribe 6.1~~
Put up some more SHN reruns.
~~Get start on Tales of MU for tomorrow.~~

There's not a lot there. I don't know how much energy I'll have today. I've resumed taking my supplements and vitamins since everything seems to be going okay with my mouth. If I do end up with a surplus of spoons I'll spend it getting ready for Saturday (moving day), so I'll have more time later in the week.

I think last year I said something about taking April 15th off this year... I was marginally better prepared for it this year, so I didn't, but it still would've been a good idea to avoid having anything else to do that day. I'd already been falling farther and farther out of sync with the cycle of day and night and now I'm not quite sure what day I'm putting up stories for... but when the week's over there should still be the right number of updates.

Tomorrow we're supposed to have contractors in here to finish up the unfinished spots left in the bathroom from when they put the new tub in. After that, it's *supposed* to be done completely. Yay.

Random "Inside The Writer's Studio" tidbit, since some of the people I've talked to in real life who are also readers have said I should share this stuff more often: the character of Baron Von Stahl, who has been alluded to a few times in Star Harbor Nights, is... as is probably transparently obvious... meant to be in the same general mold as Marvel's Victor Von Doom. I'd been avoiding using him more directly because I wasn't sure how he fit into the universe, literally.

For the uninitiated, Dr. Doom (note: not an actual doctor) is traditionally depicted as the ruler of Latveria, a Ruritanian nation-state somewhere in Europe. I wasn't sure I wanted to wedge a whole country (even a small one) into the map like that, though... and I also felt that in the modern age of pre-emptive wars and regime changes and such that I needed better reasons for a nation run by a supervillain to not be wiped out by a coalition of the willing than things like "it's a sovereign nation" (that should actually make it easier to deal with him than most evil organizations, as you can declare war on a nation) and "he has supertech" (so do other people.)

Then I remembered how the Ultimate Marvel universe had initially tried to handle Doctor Doom's sovereignity... by making him the ruler of a bunch of squatters and bums in a Denmark shantytown. Yeah. They gave up on that pretty quickly and gave him Latveria. But his "Keep", as it was called, has been described as a micronation, so I decided to explore that a little bit. One of the best known real-life micronations was Sealand, which consisted of an abandoned radar tower just outside of British territorial waters.

Putting Von Stahl's domain in internatioal waters solved the map-crowding problem, though since actual nations are usually not too respectful of self-declared micronations, it only seemed to exacerbate the whole "somebody would just wipe the bastard off the face the map" problem. (Note that rickety towers in the middle of the ocean are also easier to wipe off of maps than mountainous eastern European states).

But then I started thinking about larger structures than a radar tower... and hit upon the idea of an oil platform. An enormous oil platform. Why not? They already house people. And steadily flowing oil == money and political clout. It also makes a sort of hostage, since you couldn't bomb the place without wasting a lot of petroleum and causing untold environmental damage. Other people would want to take it over if they could, not just destroy it.

The North Sea had the right kind of image in my mind, it's got oil and gas reserves, and the countries that border it give me all sorts of more interesting options for the Baron's heritage and history than GenericNotQuiteTransylvania would.

So that's why the Baron rules the North Sea from an island of steel, as revealed in a recent SHN update... now that I've solved some of the background details, I wanted to throw that in to "canonize" it so I have him available for use in the future.