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bedlamsbardI have lost the ability to read dates, even when I myself write them down -- normally I write Month/Day, but I'm so used to reading them as Day/Month that I always just end up staring blankly at the numbers trying to figure out what order they're supposed to go in.
Put that on the list of things they don't warn you about living in a foreign country.
*
Slipping into pre-paper panic mode. AWESOME. Also pre-dissertation panic mode -- my proposal's due next week and I really need to sit down and write the damn thing and e-mail it to my supervisor, because I keep forgetting to talk to him. I swear I have lost the ability to brain. Also I always miss his office/surgery hours.
Also my reading recently has involved a lot more cannibalism than I expected. There was not actually any cannibalism going on in ancient Rome, just accusations of cannibalism being flung around, but I hadn't actually expected any cannibalism, so it came as a surprise. My superpower is apparently being able to open any book to the one page where the author talks about cannibalism or incest. MAD SKILLS.
(I'm not watching Hannibal, but I am reading recaps of it, and this led to me getting distracted reading about cannibalism by reading about Hannibal, but not even the Hannibal I'm obsessed with or the relevant cannibalism. You can see that there may be some hilarious problems inherent in this system.)
*
Without spoilers: I saw Iron Man 3 and I liked it more than I liked any of the previous Iron Man movies and possibly more than any of the previous Marvel movies.
Apparently, when I don't knit or wind yarn in the theatre, I'm the kind of person who makes a lot of gestures with their hands at the screen. Which means I kept making finger-guns at the screen when Miguel Ferrer showed up, trying to remember where I'd seen him before. (NCIS: LA. English Flatmate N. looked it up for me on her smartphone during the credits.) I did actually take my knitting, but I kept it in the ziploc baggy in my lap, so I could take it out if I felt like my wrists were up to it. (They weren't. They hurt the entire time. When I wasn't making finger-guns at the screen I was mostly sitting there with my hands clasped together.)
*
I'm on Tumblr now. I'd say it's unfiltered me, but that's what I use Twitter for. And mostly unfiltered nonfannish visual me is Pinterest, so...yeah.
*
I've been having thinky thoughts about writing, mostly as relates to Dust and Revelations. Like, how I think of the master plot for Revelations as more typically high fantasy and Dust's master plot as more typically sci-fi. Which got me thinking about phrasing (because 'master plot' seems like a weird way to put it) -- I always say plot lines, I very seldom say subplot. And I guess that has to do with how I think of Dust.
The closer I get to endgame, the more I'm concerned with how the different plot lines line up or interweave -- to confuse this metaphor even further, I think of the plot lines as a multi-strand braid, though it doesn't usually work out as equally as I'd like. Rather than dividing the plot lines up by character, they're divided up by setting: Archenland, Cair Paravel, the High Reaches, and Arn Abedin & the Vale of Bracken. The ongoing catalog for Dust II looks like this, for example (showing POV character and location):
Interlude: High Reaches
Interlude: Archenland
18: Jill - Archenland
19: Eustace - High Reaches/diamond mines
20: Elizar - Cair Paravel
21: Lucy - High Reaches/diamond mines
22: Susan - Archenland
23: Elizar - Cair Paravel
24: Edmund - Cair Paravel/Arn Abedin
Interlude: Cair Paravel (Marcia Bracken)
25: Tirian - Arn Abedin
26: Jill - Archenland
27: Jill - Archenland
28: Leocadia - Arn Abedin/High Reaches/Vale of Bracken
29: Peter - High Reaches
30: Susan - Archenland
31: Elizar - Cair Paravel
32: Athan - Cair Paravel
33: Edmund - Cair Paravel
34: Leocadia - Vale of Bracken[/diamond mines]
35: {Jill - Archenland}
(34 is in edits and 35 is in progress; it's in brackets because it might be moved around later, depending on when I finish it and what my beta says and if I've gotten around to writing the next Murder Island chapter by then. If I'd written this a month or two ago the catalog would have been different.)
Various characters pass in and out of the plot lines as they move through the story. I don't necessarily have a conscious plot arc for each character, but I know roughly where each plot line is going.1 This close to endgame, I also know where (physically, at least) all four plot lines are going to end.2 *g* And more or less where all the major characters are going to end up. Or end.3
Dust III, at least so far as I've tentatively plotted ahead (it's affected by where some of the plot lines in Dust II end) functions the same way. (There are three plot lines that I know details of, which split off from two of the Dust II plot lines; there are others that I haven't worked out because I'm not positive how their predecessors will shake out in Dust II.) So does Revelations, which has four interconnected plot lines. (And this is why I don't write short stories, y'all.)
I've been trying to work out why I call them plot lines rather than subplots. Maybe because they all more or less stand on their own, and my general impression of a subplot is that it wouldn't?4
Probably the major plotting parent source for Dust is GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire novels (Dust predates the TV series by a couple of years), which also divides up by setting- and POV character- based plot lines. I play around with structure here and there in my fic -- in the two Terebinthia stories, the Scott Lynch influences are self-evident both in content and structure. Because Dust has been in progress for so long, it borrows from a lot of sources -- BSG is a major one, structurally and thematically, but I didn't start watching BSG until after I'd been working on Dust for about a year. (I'd blame LotR, because it does something similar, but I haven't reread the novels in about ten years so Tolkien's probably off the hook here except as a general influence.)
I mentioned this back at the top, but one thing that I have in Dust that holds everything together is a master plot, which, ha, I won't actually reveal because it spoils the end of Dust, but it's what Dust has been working towards from day one.5 I was thinking about this today because I was thinking about Revelations, which has (what I think of as) a typically fantasy master plot: a ~great power from the past is coming back (LotR, the Obsidian Mountain trilogy). Which is fitting! Because Revelations came about because I've wanted to write a story with high fantasy tropes but with a modern or sci-fi setting for a while now, and that works even better with a fantasy master plot.
1. Writing Dust is very linear for me; this is why, even though I initially thought I was writing chapters out of order (with 32 and 33), they actually ended up getting posted more or less in the order that I wrote them -- technically, IIRC, I wrote about half of Dust 33, freaked out, wrote Dust 32, freaked out -- it was still being called an interlude at that point -- wrote the other half of Dust 33, and then did extensive rewrites and edits with those two next to each other to make sure they lined up.↩
2. THANK GODS. I don't know this when I start, normally -- well, I've known how the Archenland plot line was going to end since I started writing Dust back in autumn 2008; it's one of the keynote images for Dust. Actually, I think it might be the only keynote image that hasn't occurred yet; the others got tossed off pretty quickly at the beginning.↩
3. I'm killing someone off. I'm pretty thrilled about this. Weirdly, when I was plotting out who lived and who died and who was going to end Dust II as worse than dead I was listening to What Doesn't Kill You (Makes You Stronger), because I'm a crazy human being.↩
4. Do I even have any subplots in Dust? To be honest: I think that if I wrote Dust fast and linearly, rather than slowly, intermittently, and over a period of five years, I think I would. I suspect that I have a habit of seeding things that could turn into subplots, and then forgetting about them the next time I come back to that plotline. If Dust wasn't so freaking long, if I wasn't posting it as a WIP, if I wasn't writing it in between degrees, etc. The closest thing to a subplot in Dust -- and if there's something you think counts, please let me know, I am curious! -- that I can think of is some of what's going on with Leocadia in the Vale chapters, but that's a very self-contained plot line, while the others aren't so much.
Huh, on a related note, thinking about some of my fic that isn't as grandiose as Dust, I'd argue that Dirt in the Machine and Bad Moon Rising both do have subplots -- the (sort of) romance in Dirt and the Dooku bits in Rising. But both of those have a distinct main character, while Dust doesn't.
Wow, this is fascinating. I know I'm damn good as a writer, it's the one thing I never doubt myself on. But I'm looking back at my writing now and wondering about subplots -- although what I should be doing is looking at published novels and trying to pick out what I'd call subplots rather than plot lines. (I don't know what it says about me that my first thought for any subplot is "the romance." I wonder if that says more about how I read books, what books I read, or how books are marketed?) Wait, how do you even define subplot? Good to see that English lit minor paid off.↩
5. You might think the master plot of Dust is "dang, how do we get the Calormenes out of Narnia and Tirian back on the throne?" It is not. That is a red herring. Well, it is an overarching plot too, but it's not the master plot of Dust.↩
*
In conclusion: I still don't know where I picked the term "plot line" up from. I can't recall ever having seen it anywhere else. Also it's 2:30 in the morning and I don't know why I spent two hours writing about writing instead of actually writing, boo.
Put that on the list of things they don't warn you about living in a foreign country.
*
Slipping into pre-paper panic mode. AWESOME. Also pre-dissertation panic mode -- my proposal's due next week and I really need to sit down and write the damn thing and e-mail it to my supervisor, because I keep forgetting to talk to him. I swear I have lost the ability to brain. Also I always miss his office/surgery hours.
Also my reading recently has involved a lot more cannibalism than I expected. There was not actually any cannibalism going on in ancient Rome, just accusations of cannibalism being flung around, but I hadn't actually expected any cannibalism, so it came as a surprise. My superpower is apparently being able to open any book to the one page where the author talks about cannibalism or incest. MAD SKILLS.
(I'm not watching Hannibal, but I am reading recaps of it, and this led to me getting distracted reading about cannibalism by reading about Hannibal, but not even the Hannibal I'm obsessed with or the relevant cannibalism. You can see that there may be some hilarious problems inherent in this system.)
*
Without spoilers: I saw Iron Man 3 and I liked it more than I liked any of the previous Iron Man movies and possibly more than any of the previous Marvel movies.
Apparently, when I don't knit or wind yarn in the theatre, I'm the kind of person who makes a lot of gestures with their hands at the screen. Which means I kept making finger-guns at the screen when Miguel Ferrer showed up, trying to remember where I'd seen him before. (NCIS: LA. English Flatmate N. looked it up for me on her smartphone during the credits.) I did actually take my knitting, but I kept it in the ziploc baggy in my lap, so I could take it out if I felt like my wrists were up to it. (They weren't. They hurt the entire time. When I wasn't making finger-guns at the screen I was mostly sitting there with my hands clasped together.)
*
I'm on Tumblr now. I'd say it's unfiltered me, but that's what I use Twitter for. And mostly unfiltered nonfannish visual me is Pinterest, so...yeah.
*
I've been having thinky thoughts about writing, mostly as relates to Dust and Revelations. Like, how I think of the master plot for Revelations as more typically high fantasy and Dust's master plot as more typically sci-fi. Which got me thinking about phrasing (because 'master plot' seems like a weird way to put it) -- I always say plot lines, I very seldom say subplot. And I guess that has to do with how I think of Dust.
The closer I get to endgame, the more I'm concerned with how the different plot lines line up or interweave -- to confuse this metaphor even further, I think of the plot lines as a multi-strand braid, though it doesn't usually work out as equally as I'd like. Rather than dividing the plot lines up by character, they're divided up by setting: Archenland, Cair Paravel, the High Reaches, and Arn Abedin & the Vale of Bracken. The ongoing catalog for Dust II looks like this, for example (showing POV character and location):
Interlude: High Reaches
Interlude: Archenland
18: Jill - Archenland
19: Eustace - High Reaches/diamond mines
20: Elizar - Cair Paravel
21: Lucy - High Reaches/diamond mines
22: Susan - Archenland
23: Elizar - Cair Paravel
24: Edmund - Cair Paravel/Arn Abedin
Interlude: Cair Paravel (Marcia Bracken)
25: Tirian - Arn Abedin
26: Jill - Archenland
27: Jill - Archenland
28: Leocadia - Arn Abedin/High Reaches/Vale of Bracken
29: Peter - High Reaches
30: Susan - Archenland
31: Elizar - Cair Paravel
32: Athan - Cair Paravel
33: Edmund - Cair Paravel
34: Leocadia - Vale of Bracken[/diamond mines]
35: {Jill - Archenland}
(34 is in edits and 35 is in progress; it's in brackets because it might be moved around later, depending on when I finish it and what my beta says and if I've gotten around to writing the next Murder Island chapter by then. If I'd written this a month or two ago the catalog would have been different.)
Various characters pass in and out of the plot lines as they move through the story. I don't necessarily have a conscious plot arc for each character, but I know roughly where each plot line is going.1 This close to endgame, I also know where (physically, at least) all four plot lines are going to end.2 *g* And more or less where all the major characters are going to end up. Or end.3
Dust III, at least so far as I've tentatively plotted ahead (it's affected by where some of the plot lines in Dust II end) functions the same way. (There are three plot lines that I know details of, which split off from two of the Dust II plot lines; there are others that I haven't worked out because I'm not positive how their predecessors will shake out in Dust II.) So does Revelations, which has four interconnected plot lines. (And this is why I don't write short stories, y'all.)
I've been trying to work out why I call them plot lines rather than subplots. Maybe because they all more or less stand on their own, and my general impression of a subplot is that it wouldn't?4
Probably the major plotting parent source for Dust is GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire novels (Dust predates the TV series by a couple of years), which also divides up by setting- and POV character- based plot lines. I play around with structure here and there in my fic -- in the two Terebinthia stories, the Scott Lynch influences are self-evident both in content and structure. Because Dust has been in progress for so long, it borrows from a lot of sources -- BSG is a major one, structurally and thematically, but I didn't start watching BSG until after I'd been working on Dust for about a year. (I'd blame LotR, because it does something similar, but I haven't reread the novels in about ten years so Tolkien's probably off the hook here except as a general influence.)
I mentioned this back at the top, but one thing that I have in Dust that holds everything together is a master plot, which, ha, I won't actually reveal because it spoils the end of Dust, but it's what Dust has been working towards from day one.5 I was thinking about this today because I was thinking about Revelations, which has (what I think of as) a typically fantasy master plot: a ~great power from the past is coming back (LotR, the Obsidian Mountain trilogy). Which is fitting! Because Revelations came about because I've wanted to write a story with high fantasy tropes but with a modern or sci-fi setting for a while now, and that works even better with a fantasy master plot.
1. Writing Dust is very linear for me; this is why, even though I initially thought I was writing chapters out of order (with 32 and 33), they actually ended up getting posted more or less in the order that I wrote them -- technically, IIRC, I wrote about half of Dust 33, freaked out, wrote Dust 32, freaked out -- it was still being called an interlude at that point -- wrote the other half of Dust 33, and then did extensive rewrites and edits with those two next to each other to make sure they lined up.↩
2. THANK GODS. I don't know this when I start, normally -- well, I've known how the Archenland plot line was going to end since I started writing Dust back in autumn 2008; it's one of the keynote images for Dust. Actually, I think it might be the only keynote image that hasn't occurred yet; the others got tossed off pretty quickly at the beginning.↩
3. I'm killing someone off. I'm pretty thrilled about this. Weirdly, when I was plotting out who lived and who died and who was going to end Dust II as worse than dead I was listening to What Doesn't Kill You (Makes You Stronger), because I'm a crazy human being.↩
4. Do I even have any subplots in Dust? To be honest: I think that if I wrote Dust fast and linearly, rather than slowly, intermittently, and over a period of five years, I think I would. I suspect that I have a habit of seeding things that could turn into subplots, and then forgetting about them the next time I come back to that plotline. If Dust wasn't so freaking long, if I wasn't posting it as a WIP, if I wasn't writing it in between degrees, etc. The closest thing to a subplot in Dust -- and if there's something you think counts, please let me know, I am curious! -- that I can think of is some of what's going on with Leocadia in the Vale chapters, but that's a very self-contained plot line, while the others aren't so much.
Huh, on a related note, thinking about some of my fic that isn't as grandiose as Dust, I'd argue that Dirt in the Machine and Bad Moon Rising both do have subplots -- the (sort of) romance in Dirt and the Dooku bits in Rising. But both of those have a distinct main character, while Dust doesn't.
Wow, this is fascinating. I know I'm damn good as a writer, it's the one thing I never doubt myself on. But I'm looking back at my writing now and wondering about subplots -- although what I should be doing is looking at published novels and trying to pick out what I'd call subplots rather than plot lines. (I don't know what it says about me that my first thought for any subplot is "the romance." I wonder if that says more about how I read books, what books I read, or how books are marketed?) Wait, how do you even define subplot? Good to see that English lit minor paid off.↩
5. You might think the master plot of Dust is "dang, how do we get the Calormenes out of Narnia and Tirian back on the throne?" It is not. That is a red herring. Well, it is an overarching plot too, but it's not the master plot of Dust.↩
*
In conclusion: I still don't know where I picked the term "plot line" up from. I can't recall ever having seen it anywhere else. Also it's 2:30 in the morning and I don't know why I spent two hours writing about writing instead of actually writing, boo.
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Date: 2013-05-08 01:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
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