Actually, I don't have any. Alvin's working at home today, not that I mind having him in the office, and my little corner of the world is fairly peaceful.

I've decided to develop a better attitude about this blasted business trip. It is, after all, what they hired me to do and much as I might wish we could get only non-stupid clients, the world doesn't work that way.

The mood-adjustment could well be connected to discovering that I just might be able to hook into our network while I'm traveling so that I can, at least intermittently, check my e-mail. I know, it's a sickness, but I can't help it. I can't be off-line for five days!

Now all I need to know is whether or not there's a coffee pot in my hotel room.

Related to writing

The NaNoWriMo project is over and I'm glad and sad.

Glad because I was spending far too much time not working at work.

Sad because it's the first time I've written in several years and it was kind of fun. I actually felt at loose ends on Sunday, wandering around aimlessly and not quite able to settle down to anything. It took me a couple of hours to realize that I've spent the last two Sundays writing madly and that I was missing it!

Along with the NaNoWriMo piece o'crap, I've been dabbling with a fanfiction story over the last couple of weeks but I can't really go any further with that until I get my OaT tapes back from the person I loaned them to a few months ago. It's not an easy fandom to write in under the best of circumstances, what with the crappy characterization in canon and all, and I wouldn't dare try it until I'd re-watched several episodes.

Until that point, I've amused myself over the past couple of days by going through the NaNo'crap and deleting the worst of the worst that I wrote. I've only managed to remove 6,000 words so far (mostly gratuitous sex scenes and one endless passage of interior monologue that served no purpose but to pad out the word count), but I'm sure I can get another 10,000 out of it easily. I have huge sections marked in blue (code: re-write) that should wind up substantially shortened.

Original fiction is an interesting problem and I'm beginning to get intrigued by this story. Unlike my fanfiction, I didn't immediately have "voices" for the characters so my main character didn't really develop a personality until about 25k into the process. Even now his personality isn't what I'd call well-defined or memorable. In fact, he's appallingly bland. In fact, most of the characters are essentially interchangeable.

That's what comes of not planning in advance.

I wasn’t in the habit of planning most of my fanfiction stories out ahead of time (What was there to plan? Characters yakked and then had sex. That's pretty straightforward.) You can't write OC fiction that way, though. (Well, you can if you're just writing porn, but I wasn't. At least not at first, even though it turned out that way.)

Must. Stop. Digressing.

As I was saying, you can't really write original fiction that way. Since you can't rely upon the reader's memory of the characters on-screen to fill in voice, personality, and diction, you have to work a lot harder to establish your characters. And in order to do that, you have to know yourself who they are.

If you begin, as I did, with the vague idea of a good-looking guy with brown hair, green eyes, and a nicely developed set of muscles from the scalp down, you don't wind up with much in the way of memorable characterization. (In retrospect, I should have made him smarter, but whatever.)

It's turning out to be sort of an attractive problem, though.

What do you do with a primary character of average intelligence but not much given to introspection who finds himself in the middle of a major confrontation with the Forces of Evil? He has a slew of intelligent assistance and will probably even wind up being the sidekick to the guy who does the real work, which makes it troublesome to decide just how to present the story and what is to be gained, if anything, by using such a traditional mythic structure but breaking with tradition by making a secondary character the eyes through which the reader sees the action. Sort of, "Dr. Watson meets Ulysses" I guess.

In my own defense, I never expected the NaNo'crap to develop anything resembling a plot in the first place. It wouldn't have happened if, 30,000 words into it, I hadn't gotten bored with my Hero and with writing huge, indigestible lumps of backstory and exposition.

The point of all of this babbling is that I've come to the conclusion that one thing that must go from the NaNo'crap is the only part of the novel that I really liked, the beginning, and that pisses me off. Not only because I liked it, and I almost never like anything I write, but because now I have to come up with a new beginning and a catchy opening scene is both vital and hard to come up with.

I love this blog/journal thing! Not even my nearest and dearest friends want to listen to me rambling on endlessly this way and I know it, but there's something about a forum like this.... Even if I'm just talking to myself, it feels like a conversation.

I get the benefits of discussing my problem "out loud" without actually having to inflict it on anyone and without anyone having to try and compose a coherent response that sounds like they care.

I have no idea if I'll be able to get on-line over the next five days or not. If not, you can always hope that my interest in the NaNo'crap will have waned by the time I get back to town.

Be good.

P.S. The Chipmunk just called and suggested that as long as I'm going to Louisiana, I might as well go to Alabama. What planet does this man live on, anyhow? I said no. I already have my tickets bought and I have a full schedule over the next five days. Sheesh.