Tag Archives: 3dWorlder

09.03.10 [Tuesday]
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writing

into the coal mine under the city

After many fits and starts 3dWorlder is at a point where to move forward I have to make up new things. I’ve been cleaning things up and getting mad at how much they suck for the last couple of months, but now I’ve done that to the parts of the book that were finished and I have to come to terms with the ending. The book has an ending right now, but it’s a bit of a fall off the cliff kind of thing. Not quite a Deus Ex but uncomfortably close. Kind of abrupt.

Before the month is done it’s going to get turned into a real ending. And then I will be done with this thing for a while. Will move on to something new. It’s been way too much time on this slight little story already. I think that the only good part of it as it stands now is the first chunk, which is both too long and too short to sell on its own. But I’m going to finish it for real before April.

It’s so hard to work on something when you have no deadline at all.

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09.02.14 [Saturday]
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books

book review: shaping things

I finished reading Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling today. My review of it today is basically the fact that I finished it. I include less substance than usual (but not much less; I realize these are never more than a couple of impressions) because um well, you know the book I’m working on? Yeah that’s going to need to be overhauled intensely because of reading this little manifesto. Many things that were sort of fuzzy are now sharp. So you could think of 3dWorlder as a 70,000 word review of this one.

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08.12.13 [Saturday]
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books, writing

book review: singularity sky

Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky touches on a bunch of things I’m interested in that are probably more fantasy than science but fuck it I like em. There’s FTL communication, wildly diverging technologies and technologically powered anarchism. The pain in the ass about reading this particular book (about a technologically advanced pseudoculture meeting up with/declaring war on a culture more like something you’d see in Star Wars) is how close some of the ideas/plot-points were to 3dWorlder. So I need to work on my characters, making them more than playing pieces so the plot is less important that it’s got similar elements.

Yes this is less a review than a lamentation that my book needs a lot more work. That’s the sort of mood I am in.

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08.11.09 [Sunday]
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writing

ding! save point

It seems last week was the random week in which people wanted to know what was up with my novel, but I reached a milestone this morning, so I’ll talk a bit about it.

The milestone is that the whole second draft is done. The second draft wasn’t a major reworking kind of draft, just a “get this out of the notebooks and onto a computer for the real editing” kind of thing. One would think that wouldn’t take a long time, but I let myself get distracted this summer with moving and going to the Redwoods and trying to work on a couple of different projects as a break from this. But once I realized the Amerrica trip wasn’t inspiring stuff that needed to get written down right away, I shifted back to 3DWorlder and did some plugging away at it in between working a pile of hours at work.

So. In its current form the book is 53000 words long. That is too short to be sellable, but that’s okay right now because the third draft is going to rip this apart and completely restructure it and in the end it’ll bear very little resemblance to what it is now. I should be able to make up the 17000 words that get it into the right zone. I mean, the story is all there, but now I’m going to tell it better. I’ll go through everything and decide which character is best suited for telling which section. I’ll flesh out the sense of things in all those places I just have dialogue driving everything forward. I’ll get things more consistent and start scrambling up the structure. By the time it’s done (which will be a long while yet) I’ll have something pretty cool, I think. I’d started some of the third draft stuff already on some of the early bits and those bits are already much better than they were, so Hope! Progress!

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08.09.21 [Sunday]
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travel, writing

ass in chair

I’m back on my 10 pages/day regimen, which feels good, feels important to return to. Before leaving on the Amerrica trip I’d had this notion in my head that I’d be able to do maybe 5-8/day while on the road. I had visions of all the great roadishness I’d be able to capture. That didn’t happen. I think by the end of actual travelling I had a little over 1 page/day but even that wasn’t comprehensive or interesting. When we camped outside Denver in the rain I was really unhappy with the amount and quality of writing I’d gotten done. I’d thought this trip would be like going to China last March, where I did lots of writing (not all of it great but not all shitty either), but I got stuck out there just writing down what happened in our days. Nothing interesting, nothing essential even. Just lists of facts.

Then in North Platte, Nebraska, I hit my hook and the writing, the how this little book was going to work, clicked into place. Of course that was our last night in the states so it stayed in my head as plans. Yesterday I started getting the real writing about this trip down. The notebook has completely lost any semblance of chronology now, but it’s for the best.

Thankfully my table works beautifully as a writing spot. I was a little worried, but it’s got the stability it needs and the light and the heater is right next to it. Signs point to yes for filling up notebooks here. I still can’t do real work on the computer yet because of the boxes in my study. And the mess on that desk. So the 3dWorlder editing is on hiatus for a while as I get the Amerrica trip scrawled out.

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08.08.20 [Wednesday]
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music, writing

gallagher avec roller derby

Last night at this time I was still waiting for the band to go on at The Albert. White Cowbell Oklahoma they were called. There were a couple of good bits, though most of them were in the introduction. As promised, there was a chainsaw, though it was basically used to make a mess of some watermelons and the people who were up close as opposed to anything to make you go “Awesome!” The evening was a lot of standing around being hot. My legs don’t agree with standing for too long. They’ll walk forever, but if I’m going to be stationary I want me a damned chair.

I just read William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties and there was a line in there about how if you got enough people who were into a type of music, it didn’t really matter if you liked it or not, you could have a good time. I kept on thinking about that and really there were a lot of people who seemed really into that rockabilly stuff. But it didn’t osmose its way to me. Or I didn’t let it or whatever.

All Tomorrow’s Parties was a great book for me to read though. It gave me a new perspective on 3dWorlder and how I can solve some of the things that are stabbing me in the eyes about it. The more I think about this goddamned book the further I get from that first draft being anything resembling complete.

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08.06.13 [Friday]
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writing

done (but not really)

I’ve written a goddamned novel.

I wonder how long the rewriting will take.

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08.06.08 [Sunday]
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books, writing

just a flesh wound

I’ve been away from the bloggery since realizing you don’t really need to read about my writing insecurities. But since that’s the only thing I do apart from read, watch baseball and go to work anymore, there hasn’t been a lot of good fodder for typing about going on. I’ve got about 10 days worth of work left and then I relax a bit before making it good. Maybe then the blog’ll get more interesting.

Though I guess I’ve been reading and could talk a bit about that. V remains good and I’m not done yet. I got a bit bogged down again in Mondaugen’s story. There’s only so much decadent sjambokking I can read about in a sitting. But today I read Fausto’s Confession while the Jays finally beat the Orioles and it was fine.

When I got bogged down I turned to a couple of other books. I read The Picture of Dorian Grey and got sick real quick of the “wit” of saying that things are their opposite. In much the way that future generations will look on our sarcasm, I imagine. And I’ve been reading Walden which I think I should leave to its own post.

But yeah. I’m just rolling along, manufacturing things to be looking forward to.

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08.05.29 [Thursday]
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writing

here’s a deja vu post for you

It’s silly how much difference a day makes. Today my pages were super smooth and everything went fine. No abandoning the book, not when it’s two thirds done. I can’t wait for this first draft to be over, mind you. I want to start typing it up and actually doing the work on it to make it good. Because it can be. This is basically just a really really detailed outline version of What Happens. Once it’s done then I can get into the styley cool bits.

That’s the difference between doing fiction and my normal blogging/travel journalling. In those things (which I find way easier than what I’m doing now) I’m describing something that’s already happened. Picking the interesting things to highlight and the way to say it and stuff. Right now I’m still in the process of finding out what’s happening. Which is pretty good on its own. Today a mob of disgruntled slovenly people began throwing rocks while traffic diverged around them unnoticing. I didn’t know that was going to happen when I woke up.

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08.05.28 [Wednesday]
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books, whining, writing

the good and the bad

I’m rereading V right now and it’s making me angry. Not at the book, because it’s great like I remember it, maybe better now that I’ve got Pynchon-reading hanging a bit more where I can grab it in my skull than five years ago (and it’s the copy I bought in Dharamsala so I’m getting these waves of road nostalgia reading it). But V has completely ruined my morning writing.

I sit down at the notebook and say “All right let’s get our ten pages done” and then I look down after a couple of paragraphs and realize all I’m doing is moving people around. There’s nothing meaningful happening. I’m trying to write action scenes because that’s the kind of story it is but I hate action scenes. I’m stuck at a point where it’s not just a couple of characters bouncing ideas off each other, and even back in those points my dialogue has been pretty shit for weeks. Basically this whole “Write shitty horrible first drafts and don’t worry about it” thing is getting to me. I hate doing things really crappily (part of why Japan might be falling off my radar for next year). I want to finish it but I want it to be something I like. I don’t know.

What V is doing is making me want to get serious on the China book, the one that isn’t just bullshit SF with nothing interesting to say. The problem with that of course is that it won’t be quick. That thing is going to take a long time. And if I break off this thing to go work on that well then I’m still just bouncing off of different things in a completely unserious manner. I’d like to have something to show for myself. Something to say “I did this” about. Or maybe I should just buy a video game.

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