Writing

Shortly after the end of spring semester, I started getting the fantasy itch - after all of the nonfiction reading I’d been doing, I needed something with orcs, elves, and swords. Along with installing Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 on my PC^[1], I picked up some books that take place in the Forgotten Realms setting^[2]. I picked up all three books of the Dark Elf Trilogy, by R. A. Salvatore, as well as the Annotated Elminster, by Ed Greenwood.

I’ve thus far finished the first book of the Dark Elf Trilogy, Homeland. It was a fun read, but it could have been better; there were some things in it that drove me a bit bonkers, to be honest. One in particular? Salvatore’s (over)usage of varied tag lines in dialogue. In a short guide for writing dialogue, the guide at fictionwriting.about.com wrote:

6. Don’t try too hard to vary your tag lines when writing dialogue.
Veering too much beyond “he said/she said” only draws attention to the tags. Readers tend to read over these phrases anyway, whereas obvious efforts to insert variety, through words such as “interjected,” “counseled,” or “conceded,” draw the reader out of the action. If the writer is doing his or her work, the reader is already aware that the speaker is interjecting, counseling, or conceding. The writer won’t have to say it again in the tag.

I’ve seen this advice elsewhere on the ‘net, and it’s true - while you’d think “he / she said” over and over would get old, it really doesn’t. We’re used to it, we see it, we skim it, it’s gone - all we’re really taking in are the words that the characters are speaking. This is infinitely better than the reader stumbling over different (and at times peculiar!) tag words repeatedly.

Salvatore’s evil dark elf characters “said” a lot, but they also “grumbled” and “mumbled” a good deal. The two tag words that topped the charts, though? Snapped and growled. While I’m sure my perception of them was exaggerated due to some mild frustration on my part, I would have swore that one of these words adorned every single page of the book. Had they been used once or twice in the whole book, they would have caught my attention and given weight to the dialogue. Instead, due to how often I saw them, I started to think - do dark elves have a bit of canine DNA in them or something? They sure do growl and snap a lot…

I’m 15 pages or so into Exile, book 2 of the trilogy; we’ll see if the growls and snaps scare me away. Please, future fiction writers - go easy on such things.

1. Yes, I’ve played these before. No, my love affair with them will never truly end [↩]
2. The Forgotten Realms is one of the Dungeons and Dragons settings. More info can be had here. [↩]

It’s that time of the semester again - that is, close to its end. I think just about anyone who’s done the whole college thing would say that the end of the semester, the last few weeks, are the worst. Even if you stay on top of things the rest of the time, things start falling apart near the end - more and more things are due, more and more studying has to be done. That’s been my experience, anyway.

At the end of last semester, I actually said I’d be away from the blog for a week or two, due to lack of time. I’m not at that stage yet, but it may be quickly approaching.

Like last semester, I’ve got to write a term paper. 8-10 pages long, on anything I want, as long as it ties in with the American Revolution. Compared to the last term paper I had to do, which was about the American South, I figured doing one about the Revolution would be a piece of cake; I mean, it’s the Revolution, there should be plenty of articles about it!

Sort of.

There are indeed masses of articles about the period. However, I’m having a really hard time finding 3 good articles about the same thing. I’ve gone through hundreds of search results in research databases, probably having spent 8 or 9 hours on it at this point, and I’ve just not come up with anything solid. The first topic I wanted to tackle was how the American Revolution was received in European countries, and how the Revolution influenced conditions there (besides the obvious “It helped lead to the French Revolution!”). This ended up being a total flop. While I was able to find some books on Spain’s involvement, they didn’t lead me to any usable articles; I simply didn’t find anything at all in the research databases on the topic.

The next topic I chose, which I’m still fighting with, is espionage during the war. I’d prefer to focus in on one facet of it, such as military intelligence or political espionage, but again, I’ve not found enough on either of those to prop a paper on. I’ve found one excellent article on the development of the British military intelligence; one article about Britain intercepting letters from the colonies and creating extracts to see what colonial opinion was (not very suitable for what I’m trying to do); and one article that, while I thought it was going to be excellent, is ultimately, I think, not going to work. It had no abstract, but was entitled British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance. Well, hey, the title sounded great… Unfortunately, when I received it through interlibrary loan, I discovered that it’s an examination of a few people in London who were double agents. The extreme focus on these people, rather than a wider view, is not going to work, I’m afraid.

I’m at a standstill right now. I’ve one more article on the way via interlibrary loan which I hope will give me enough overall to work with. I’ve a long list of other articles I can request through interlibrary loan, but I’d really prefer to see if the one that’s (supposedly!) on the way will allow me to get to writing or not. The paper is due on the 2nd, so I’m running out of time, and ILLs take time. Furthermore, I have to pay for every article I get through interlibrary loan, and if I start requesting things willy nilly, I’ll soon have $50+ in my paper, which I’m not exactly keen on doing (at all). The articles are only $.10 per page, but those dimes add up quickly.

I’m meeting with the professor of the class Friday to essentially show him the articles I have and say “help!” Hopefully he can help me get things going. This is driving me nuts, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably noticed.

I’m still working my way through The Pale Horseman by Cornwell, and am now about halfway through it. (As can probably be guessed, the Potter series has been consuming a large amount of my reading time!)

I’m enjoying The Pale Horseman well enough: the setting is interesting (Anglo-Saxon England), the characters are decent. But, as I’ve mentioned before in my posts about other Cornwell books, his writing could be better. A lot better. In particular, the man has a terrible problem with run on sentences. I’m truly surprised that many of his monstrous bits of prose haven’t been caught by editors.

While reading some of the book a few nights ago before going to sleep, I ran into an enormous construction. See how long you can hang on. Also, if you’re going to read it out loud - take a deep breath! Okay, here we go:

I let him drive me, then dodged to my right where my left foot slipped and I went down on that knee and the crowd, close behind me now, took in a great breath and a woman screamed because Steapa’s huge sword was swinging like an ax onto my neck, only I had not slipped, merely pretended to, and I pushed off with my right foot, came out from under the blow and around his right flank, and he thrust the shield out, catching my shoulder with the rim, and I knew I would have a bruise there, but I also had a heartbeat of opportunity and I darted Serpent-Breath forward and her point punctured his mail again to scrape against the ribs of his back and he roared as he turned, wrenching my blade free of his mail, but I was already going backward.

One sentence! My, my.  I don’t know what Cornwell was after there. Perhaps he was trying to catch the speed and tenseness of a one-on-one sword fight, but if that was his goal, I think he failed. All the sentence did for me was give me a bit of a headache. I doubt it truly is the longest sentence ever, but it’s still pretty damn long. Someone mail that man some periods.

Well, when the NaNoWriMo month started, I had a lot of energy and momentum in writing my novel. However, when Week Two was well under way, exactly what No Plot? No Problem! predicted had happened: my steam disappeared. The “wow!” factor of the whole thing had disappeared. Now what I see, instead of long expanses of happy writing, is 40,000+ words to go. And that’s a lot of words, especially when it’s the 20th of November, leaving me with 10 days to finish my novel in. When you break it down, that’s 4,000 words per day. That’s not too much writing, really, but it’s far more than I’ve been able to punch out so far (obviously!) When the month of November started and I signed up for NaNoWriMo, I honestly hadn’t though much about what was already on my plate. More specifically, I hadn’t taken into consideration that this month is the end of the quarter at college for me; meaning, I have finals.

A lot of my time lately has been eaten up by studying, particularly for my history exam (which is today, coincidentally). My math exam is tomorrow which, ironically, I think I’m better prepared for than I am for the history one.

And, truthfully, a lot of my time has been eaten up just doing things other than working on my novel. I’ve fallen victim, in a way, to Newton’s first law of motion:

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force . An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.

I stopped writing for a few days due to being swamped with other things. Essentially, my novel writing stopped. Then I took another day off. Then I took another. And then, I let me being behind affect me in a dumb way: I put off my writing some more. And now, I find myself at close to the end of the month with 8,300 words instead of 35,000. I haven’t given up though - there are plenty of NaNoWriMo tales of people who were dreadfully behind catching up in the last few days. Maybe I’ll be one of those people. Maybe I won’t. We’ll see.

(Oh, and for those who are keen discerners of truth: yes, I know. I could have been writing some more of my novel instead of writing this blog post. Shhh…)

So I was thinking… a picture is worth 1000 words, right? In my novel, there’s a lot of different places that readers* will need to be able to see on a map, to help them make sense of the story**. To help me write the novel, I started making a very, very rough map of the continent last night in Photoshop, with geographic features and cities on it. Since it’ll basically be required in the book for the usage of readers, can I put my little scribblings map at the beginning of the novel and add 1000 words to my  word-count?

Yeah, I didn’t think so either…

* By saying that readers will need to be able to see the lay of the land on a map, I’m not implying that this terrible, horribly written piece of fiction, which is full of plot holes and stiff characters novel will ever come even close to seeing the light of day. In all likelihood it will be burned and then buried in an atomic waste facility.

** I use the term ’story’ very loosely here. It’s probably more similar to taking fifteen dictionaries, cutting out all of the words, and then arranging them randomly. Yes, it’s that bad.