Tuesday, Nano Warning!

Today starts Nanowrimo and, as you may have guessed, I’m making a stab at it this year.

That means all other writing will slow down for the next 45 days.

Also, I may be asking for brainstorming help. If you’d like me to filter that one to a “nano-only” filter, I can do so, just speak up.

And speaking of that, I’m looking for 2-4 readers as I go along.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/165102.html. You can comment here or there.

28 thoughts on “Tuesday, Nano Warning!

  1. Well, if you’re looking for a limited number of readers, I’m probably the wrong person to include, because I can’t promise I’ll be able to give commentary and keep up.

      • Female, yes, will answer to Ms., yes. It’s surprisingly disconcerting not to know when one goes grabbing for a gendered word, though I call myself a silly girl often enough that you likely have grounds for that conclusion. 🙂

        • I *thought* you’d used a gendered word for yourself, but I hadn’t been certain I hadn’t just made it up. So. Stranded likely has a lot of holes in the worldbuilding…

          • Does it? It seems to be set mostly here-and-now, with a masked subsociety of people who can manipulate the strands. So far — or at least, the bits I’ve read — people have mostly been dealing with day-to-day problems and personal or networking or communication issues. There’s lots of room for dark conspiracies of strand-workers, but so far they haven’t shown up. My impression thus far is that you are on the improvisational side of the spectrum rather than the mad planning side, and would be unhappy to be have everything all pinned into place. Do you want to run around figuring out who all the players are and what they’re trying to do?

            • Hrrm… you have a point. I’m doing Stranded as my nano novella, is all, and while I don’t really want everything to be hammered in place, I’m starting to worry it’s not going ot make sense.

              • How epic a story are you planning to tell? If this is the story of one haunting, you don’t need to know what the world-shaping conspiracies out there are. If it ties into big stuff, you might want to have some idea of what your antagonists are trying to do so that their plans and motivations are reasonably consistent. Addergoole has a very long plot arc. How did you lay that out?

                • It’s a quest story, involving a world-shaping conspiracy (well, okay, a small conspiracy trying to shape the world, not one that’s actually succeeding yet). Um. *embarrassed* I totally pants’d Addergoole. Once Elasmo started writing with me, we started (he started) storyboarding books, and I sketched out, around Book Six, some 4-to-five book arcs, but mostly I’d be driving and say “hey, that would be cool,” and in it went.

                  • So you already know who one antagonist group is, and what they’re trying to do? And I assume Autumn is the protagonist, perhaps along with the fellow who’s getting her to check out that haunting, though perhaps he has ulterior motives. Autumn appears to have a large but loose network of contacts, and personal opinions about them; I think there’ve also been some hints of organizations, which didn’t seem hostile to her at the time. Are there going to be more major players? Open threads leading off to other stories? If you can keep a story that spans several generations straight across multiple novels with minimal outlining, it seems to work for you. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke?

                    • Loosely (I’m still working on my tiered/venn diagram extremists( Yes, Autumn is a protagonist. With the guy in Meek’s drawing. Ooh, open threads!!

                    • I’m still working on my tiered/venn diagram extremists That sounds like it will cover conspiracy planning nicely? Ooh, open threads!! I don’t know why I bothered asking. 🙂 Will windblown Autumn come out of this with new goals and resolve setting her up for the next conflict, or will she meander through a series of stories where people (know of her by reputation and) ask her for help, or …?

                    • That sounds like it will cover conspiracy planning nicely? It gives me a bad Guy du jour that I can probably come back to for something else later, at least. I don’t know why I bothered asking. 🙂 I was teasing, mostly. I know it’s a bad habit for me. Windblown Autumn. <3<3 Hrrm. I think a little of A, she'll decide that she can and should/will help, and a little of B, later in coming.

                    • It gives me a bad Guy du jour that I can probably come back to for something else later, at least. It could provide a lot more than that, depending on how big and/or detailed this diagram is. You could start up a graph of some sort of all the connections among strand-workers, just to keep track of them as you invent them, not just the antagonists. I think a little of A, she’ll decide that she can and should/will help, and a little of B, later in coming. Is there an existing side that she is helping, or do the protagonists need to coalesce into opposition to the antagonists, or …? (edited to fix tags)

          • Or I suppose you might mean figuring out how strand-working works and what it can do and what happens when strand-workers are working in opposition to varying degrees, but I think we’ve only seen people do unopposed small stuff, so far (except for Spring and the star-reader, but I think he was only reading, not changing, so opposed isn’t quite the right phrase) so I really have no idea …

              • So, (how) do you want to poke at that? Start with what’s already out there? Think about what you’re going to want for the big fight and work backwards from there? Lay out the cosmology of what the strands are and how people interact with them, deliberately or not?

                • Hrrm… either B or C. I think C might serve better. So far, I know that I have people who want to cut strands, and that cutting strands is considered bad by Autumn’s people.

                  • What *is* a strand? Are they actual things, or is it an extended metaphor that humans use to understand and execute “magic”? (Is there magic/weirdshit/… in this ‘verse that is not about strands?)

                    • Ooh, that’s a good one. there seem to be ghosts, but I believe that’s spirits interacting with the way the worlds join/meet/bend. So in general, the weirdshit in this setting is Strand-related. And… I picture it very clearly and real-like in my head, an overlay of magical connection tying everything together.

                    • And… I picture it very clearly and real-like in my head, an overlay of magical connection tying everything together. Annoying Force references go here. 🙂 What do individual strands represent? Is the idea just that everything is magically interconnected in ways that can be manipulated — if you move three steps to the left now, you won’t run into that other fellow at the party, which has futher fallout in that … — or do strands represent (or are strands) specific things — my fate, the novel you’re writing, this gust of wind …? The most specific thing I can think of off-hand that you’ve said about strand-working was the woman at the library who took in a soggy Autumn, who was pulling water out of the air and warming it up. Are there strands that are “about” temperature and humidity? Are there lots of generic strands, and if you move them so, you add energy and cause condensation? Was she tweaking some aspect of the library? Her own hospitality?

                    • Stands represent specific things – pretty much every “thing” in life has a strand or several, depending on complexity, but the strand for, say, a wooden pencil wouldn’t be that strong.

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