A bit of a progress report.

This week, I’ve made progress. Reading-wise; I finished Martian Chronicles, and have picked up Pygmy (which I’ll hopefully be done with by the end of the weekend). Pygmy’s another Palahniuk novel, and while the narrative style is nothing at all like any of what I’m writing, there are sections of description (mostly chemistry and structural engineering) which I want to observe the style of.

            Speaking/listening-wise, I read and gave some edits on some sections of Kristin, Kacey, and Connor’s projects. I’m not sure my commentary’s been any kind of helpful, or whether any of my advice has made it into their final drafts, but being able to read, compare, and contrast the styles of the authors I’ve been reading and what my peers have produced has made for an interesting exercise, at the very least.

            Writing wise, the going has been slower over the last week. I’m drudging through the middle of the story, the bits which I’d always just handwaved away as “something happens before this next plot point”, and I’ve found that filling in that space with something that actually adds to the story in a concrete way is challenging, at the very least. I’ve got all the important bits done, or rather, all of what I’ve written has been “important bits”, and I suppose my current challenge is making the bits in between them also important/interesting. Squeezing bits of symbolism and plot in where I hadn’t initially planned for them, just because I think I need more material in between. I’ve been able to get work done at nights, and have been doing my reading and note work at school still. Writing at school has yielded almost no fruit whenever I’ve brought my laptop in. One of my saving graces, writer’s block wise has been the inclusion of the hexagrams in the plot. Whenever I’ve written enough and start to get tired, I just toss a few lines and see what they come up as, then let the story go in that direction. It makes sense that bibliomancy contributes well to storytelling.

            Habits of mind wise, it’s all been sitting in bed, background music (something with strings, or a good low end baseline, or both). At school I’ve been getting reading done and I’ve been taking notes constantly, so as to have plenty of “truth” to build off of. I’ve been stealing bits from my classmates, or from people watching, and fictionalizing them into character traits. It’s a lot of fun.

Log bits

This week, I’ve written up two possible openings, one involving Marcus’ childhood, and one involving his death. Still choosing which one of those I’m going to put first, and which one I’ll save for later. I’m spending a lot of my time just writing scenes that otherwise aren’t related to the story but transition into them well. This gives it a nice, layered storytelling feel, and allows for subtle insertion of meaning that the audience actually has to do some amount of close reading to find (connections which are otherwise loose or insubstantial). It lets me do a lot of showing rather than telling, because the stories simply being told in parallel makes for a metaphoric structure. I felt particularly inspired early this week, working a good deal of Monday and Tuesday nights on some of the less interesting bits, social interactions between major plot points, setting up paragraphs of description and foreshadowing. I’m definitely not writing this in order. I write as scenes come to me, and I’ll probably end up gluing them all together in the end to get some kind of cohesive manuscript. I’ve only been getting real substantial storywriting done in bed, at home. Whenever I try to work in school on actually writing the story, it comes out a little bit trite, kinda forced. I’ve taken to working more on the side parts of the project, necessary research, coding, storyboarding, et cetera et alius. I’ve got a few scenes written into a few of my notebooks, or just character details that i want to include. They’ve still worked as fonts of inspiration when I need them, but when it comes to writing more than a paragraph or so or actually getting story material down, I prefer to type it than to put it in the notebooks, still. That’s just a habits of mind nitpicky bit, but it’s been significant in how I’ve been making progress, or rather where and when I can. The goal for this next week is to get a really solid opening or climax down, enough that it could make a short story in and of itself, maybe 20-ish pages now.

Shift

The narrative was feeling stale. I was only a few solid pages of text in and the style was just dragging. So I'm changing it up a bit, making the world a bit darker. A more cynical, pessimistic view, let things be a bit more strongly juxtaposed in the story. If I can get the reader to suspend their disbelief for just a little bit, buy into this new world a bit more, I should be able to bend the rules more often in the story without seeming ridiculous.

Additional Reading

I'm tearing through Hemmingway's commentaries on writing (lent to me by Mrs. Moore), and am starting a new book "Apathy and Other Small Victories", because I think that narratively (read as: in footnotes) I want Marcus to be somewhere between a Chuck Palahniuk and a Neal Stephenson.

NOTEnote

I wrote a page today that had more footnotes than it did normal text. I may be abusing footnotes.

I'm Ok with this.

I have been told to blog. This I can do. I've been writing a lot of code in the past weekend, just trying to get a grip on how Neal would need to think in order to construct this AI. I've made what is essentially a choose your own adventure game that basically just acts as a logic machine.

Here's the code, the syntax is gonna be wrong since I'm bringing python in through HTML, but if any of you wanna put it into an interpreter and play it, feel free:

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def tester(
    print "A man with a revolver and a silver dollar approaches you out of the darkness. He draws a bead on your head and tells you to pick:"
    print "Alright, tough guy. Heads or tails?"
    answer = raw_input("Type 'Heads', 'Tails', 'Run' or 'Fight', and hit 'Enter'.")
    if answer == "Heads" or answer == "heads" or answer == "H" or answer == "h"
        print "Unlucky this time, mate *BANG*"
            print "The End"
    elif answer == "Tails" or answer == "tails" or answer == "T" or answer == "t"
        print "Alright, you go lucky this time. *The man disappears back into the darkness*"
            print "You won!"
    elif answer == "Run" or "run"
        print "The man shouts something at you in Russian as you dart around the corner, but you hear gunshots hit the wall behind you. You decide not to look back, but after about ten more paces you hear a sharp crack and everything below you neck goes icy cold"
        def death(
            print "You think this is what death feels like"
            print "Would you like to die?"
            answer2 = raw_input("Type 'Yes' or 'No'")
                if answer2 == "Yes" or answer2 == "yes" or answer2 == "y" or answer2 == "Y"
                    print "Everything feels...okay. Life is peaceful here"
                    print "The End"
                elif answer2 == "No" or answer2 == "no" or answer2 == "n" or answer2 == "N"
                    print "You struggle for a few minutes against the tendrils of darkness creeping in at the corners of your vision, but soon your sight leaves you, followed shortly by the sound of the man's heavy footfalls growing ever quieter in the distance"
                    print "The End"
                else:
                    print "Not an option, sorry"
                    death)
    elif answer == "Fight" or answer == "fight"
        print "You deliver a crushing karate chop to the man's gun hand and he drops the revolver."
        print "He shouts something at you in russian and raises his fists"
        answer3 == raw_input("Type 'Gun' to go for the gun, 'sweep' to try and sweep his legs, or 'face' to try punching the man in the face")
            if answer3 == "Gun" or answer3 == "gun"
                print "You both make a dive for the gun, but you're a little bit quicker. You level it on his chast and he backs away a few steps. You motion with the barrel for him to run away, and as he turns his back, you pull the trigger"
                print "You win...You monster"
            elif answer3 == "Sweep" or answer3 == "sweep"
                print "You crouch low and try to sweep his legs out from under him. Unfortunately that move only works in 80's movies starring asians or Chuch Norris, so your devastating blow ends up stopping you short at the man's feet, off balance. He lifts one of his heavy leather boots and brings it down on you skull."
                print "Again"
                print "And again.."
                def death
                    print "You think this is what death feels like"
                    print "Would you like to die?"
                answer2 = raw_input("Type 'Yes' or 'No'")
                        if answer2 == "Yes" or answer2 == "yes" or answer2 == "y" or answer2 == "Y"
                            print "Everything feels...okay. Life is peaceful here"
                            print "The End"
                        elif answer2 == "No" or answer2 == "no" or answer2 == "n" or answer2 == "N"
                            print "You struggle for a few minutes against the tendrils of darkness creeping in at the corners of your vision, but soon your sight leaves you, followed shortly by the sound of the man's heavy footfalls growing ever quieter in the distance"
                            print "The End"
                        else:
                            print "Not an option, sorry"
                            death()
            elif answer3 == "Face" or answer3 == "face"
                print "You wind up and hurl a right hook at the man's face, which makes devastating contact"
                print "The man doesn't flinch. He wipes a few drops of blood and spittle off on the back of his hand, and spits on the ground"
                print "The man winds up just like you did, a mocking grin on his face"
                print "Everything goes black"
                print "The End"
    else "Not an option, sorry"
tester)


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I've made a good amount of progress in the actual writing process. You guys will get to see some of that someday, if I'm feeling generous.

Learning the machine

The past week or so has been spent in research, reading the I-Ching in class and at night and getting an understanding of how the trigrams change.

I've spent the today coding, building small logical if/than true/false logic games in python, just so I can feel like i have an idea of what I'm talking about.

I've started the first few pages of raw story, but progress is slow on that front yet. That's fine, I've got piles of time.