dragonlady7

I use these posts to get my thoughts together, and I haven't been, lately.
First, a cool link. I think it was from

fileg.
Actors, older now, pose as characters they played. Of course I'm pumped at Bean and Viggo with the sword, but there are some really great ones in here. I think the last one made me laugh out loud. The best part is how amused the actors in question all seem to be-- they are pleased, and proud, to think of these characters they made immortal, even as their bodies aren't.
Of course, I don't know any of that-- all of the text on the page is in Cyrillic, which I can only read if I puzzle through phonetically with a heavy hint of what it's supposed to say. Виго Мортинсен? Yessir!

Other things: I hate the suburbs. I took the bus to work yesterday, since Z wanted the car, for novelty I suppose. The iPhone Maps app let me down in an enormous way-- you can ask for directions by bus, and it gives you the buses and connections that get you there, but it does it somewhat poorly. It's worked great for Z, but his route is straightforward. Mine isn't, and involves transfers, and it shows very, very strongly that the app is very limited.
I could explain, with details, but I doubt anyone's interested; suffice to say, I spent the whole bus ride trying frantically to work around the app and figure out where the fuck I was supposed to be.
And then I got to my destination, which ends with an easy half-mile walk on level ground on a broad well-paved sidewalk.
Which had not been plowed.
In fact it had been reverse-plowed. All the snow from the road had been put onto it.
We had an inch at home, and I foolishly assumed the same to be true at work, but no. They had four inches. They plowed it onto the sidewalk. I was wearing sneakers. There were about twelve inches of slush, more at every corner and intersection and driveway. I had to cross-country hike, leaping over things, dodging inattentive cars-- I even almost got hit by a plow as some cowboy in a pickup plowed a driveway onto the sidewalk. I got splattered by an SUV. I had to climb immense walls of snow that had been neatly stacked directly across the sidewalk.
It took me fifteen minutes to climb, struggle, leap, sprint, dodge, weave, and, mostly, slog, half a mile. I arrived at work soaked to the knees and furious.

I fucking hate you, Williamsville. In fact I may go compose a nice ranty poem about how much I fucking hate Williamsville. (For the non-local, it is an affluent suburb of Buffalo, and that's where I work. The 14221. Buffalo is a fairly unpretentious blue-collar city whose ethos I enjoy. Amherst/Wmsville/Clarence is the inevitable white-collar district, full of foreign SUVs and wives who don't have to work and overachieving kids and petty, petty assholes. And strip malls and subdivisions.)

Anyway, then I had a horridly busy day with stuff going wrong, and then I had to slog back and get the bus home, and there was no time for dinner but I had to go to practice, and at practice I discovered I'd just missed a committee meeting I really ought to have attended (I would have just been getting off the bus as it started). So, boo. Practice was OK, except the part where I was putting my gear on. I got my kneepads on first, then my skates, in the time-honored fashion. I stood up and got my elbow pads and wristguards out of my bag. I paused to chat with someone. And suddenly I fell-- WHOOP-- right on my ass, with my hand down. So I jammed my whole arm, lost feeling in my hand and hurt my wrist, as well as totally pounding my poor ass. I sat in total shock for a moment, and considered not skating, but I'd made it that far and I know now from experience that when I feel that shitty, the only thing that is going to fix it is to skate. So I did.
And I felt better.
But man was I exhausted when I got home.

None of this is that interesting, I just seem to need to chronicle these things. But writing news is somewhat interesting. To me, anyway. I sat down Monday and wrote out, really truly, an outline of Barbarians_Novel, as I see it now that I have all of the pieces put together in Scrivener, and have reviewed all of them and seen everything I've done and remembered all that I wanted to achieve. I have, in the past, done this, and I have gotten to the various climaxes of the plot, including the finale, and not known what to do.
I compose in a very character-driven way, which is to say, my scenes are always, always told from a tight POV (I don't know how not to, at this point), and events unfold as a character perceives them. The problem with this is that this means that characters, who are notoriously fickle, must react in a consistent fashion. And sometimes, as I am telling the story, I am a bit put-out when the POV character's only possible reaction is expressly NOT what the plot demands. So I have learned, by dint of much battering of my head into immovable objects, that I absolutely cannot outline the plot the way a history book would. I can't say, This happened, then that, then that, and this builds to that. It doesn't work for me. Maybe it works for other people and I'm not knocking it-- I wouldn't have tried it if it didn't seem to make sense. But what happens is that I just wind up wasting tons of time coming up with things that I want to happen, which the POV character totally ignores and goes off and does something else entirely.
So I always have the major, major problem that I get to the end of the book and the characters' reactions have gone off so wackily helter-skelter that there is just no possible way to bring the thing together. Because of course, a big, big, huge limitation of tight POV is that you can't discuss something that the POV character didn't witness, except through the filter of however they learned about the event. This novel was exclusively from one POV for a long time, but I disliked the corners that painted me into, so I branched out, and immediately beached myself on the fact that more POVs mean more unpredictable character reactions and oh Christ, I've got four hundred thousand tangents and the fucking thing's a million words long and doesn't GO ANYWHERE.

So Monday I managed to sit down, distill the story down to the POV characters, discover all the major sidelines that must be addressed, and tie them all to one another with baling twine. I have an outline, though it's not a normal one exactly. But all the loose ends now are tied to things. And there's an ending. There's an antagonist! (I can't make villains to save myself. As it happens, this book doesn't have one at all, which is where I was getting stuck-- I kept inventing one to stick in. There isn't one, there isn't room for one; the antagonist is a reasonably decent person stuck in an untenable position, which is the only convincing villain I can ever come up with.) There's a build-up, several conflicts, a clearly set-up premise, a climax, and a resolution, with a reasonable finale. Everyone's arc seems to work, everyone's actions serve them and not the plot.

So far, anyway. We'll see how I feel once I get it more filled-in. But I couldn't progress without this; I can't write the end without finishing the beginning and the middle, but if I don't have a goal I can easily spend 100,000 words just on establishing the characters.

So I'm very pleased with that. We'll see if I can continue.