So, Writing A Novel
So as I mentioned before, I'm going to spend this month writing a novel since I'm traveling around a bunch. Simply because its easier to do that then to try and focus on a programming task for a little bit, procede to travel somewhere, then have to remember what I was doing and work on getting back to speed and continuing the cycle again and again.
So the novel I'm working on. The Wristwatch. As I mentioned before, itis a sequel to The Pocketwatch, and a bridge to tie together the two stories and the Grand Game storyline with Spiral Island. It takes place in 2011, during as I mentioned the Cube story and four years after the 'present' events of The Pocketwatch. It will follow the life of a man named Eric Duncan as he gets drawn from the events of the normal world into the paranormal of the Objects and the Grand Game, and cover what's been going on with Medea, David Raynor, and Fiole's Apprentice since the end of the Pocketwatch, as well as what Fiole had done with herself in the mean time since the Apprentice never returned to 1600.
So will I finish it in a month? Who knows. I type at a good rate, and I have the entire story outlined from beginning to end so I know everything that's happening in a general sense. Making all the specifics is something where I just have to Do It Live, so who knows. If I get it done most definitely it will just be a rough draft that I'll have to then go through and revise, but I'm hoping to get it done in the time. If I do get done early and have some extra time I'll work more on Red Ice for the remaining part of the month before returning to mainly programming. We'll see what happens.
Since I never am in the right position to participate in NaNoWriMo, I think I'll consider August from now on as my personal NoWriMo.
Date posted: 04 August, 2012Tags: novels regularspelling the_grand_game travel writing
A Quick Thought Exercise
Children often think that their parents can't relate to them. They think that the parent doesn't know what things are like for them, not realizing that things really don't change as much as they think, and the parents know what things were like because they were the same when they were that age.
But what if they don't? What if the parents really can't relate to how the kids were at that age? Because what if the child is in fact older than their own parents, how could the parents know what it's like to be their child's age if they haven't yet reached that age themselves?
Date posted: 18 June, 2012Tags: writing
Reboot
So it's been a while. A long while. Six months in fact since I last posted on here. Not dead, obviously, given how active I've been on Twitter. But this had been put on the back burner for a while for two reasons: the last part of the Cube story (as The Orb didn't end up finishing the story as I was planning), and I wanted to scrap and rebuild the layout.
First, the Cube story. That's the end of it, as it is there. I'm not going to write the end of it for here. Because it won't be a happy ending. I thought about it for a while, and I came to a realization. There is no way to for me to resolve it as a happy ending. I'm not going to leave it completely unresolved, though. At the beginning of the last part there's a conversation between David Raynor and Medea, and that - and the whole Cube story - is taking place at the same time as a novel I've been working on, and the aftermath of what happened there will be covered in that novel. More about that later.
So the second was the redesign. I had started thinking about doing it while working on the Cube story, and was going to wait until that was finished to put it in. So that was part of the delay behind it, the lengh it took working on that and the time it took before I decided to give up on a happy ending. So when I got rid of that I started slowly working on that when I remembered to. As can be seen I decided to go with a Metro-esque design, greatly simplifying the complicated templates I was using before. There's still a few glitches and a few things missing that I just couldn't match in my dev environment that I'll get put in as I can, but its at least usable now. I also plan on bringing my own photo blog onto here instead of having it on Blogger, but there's a few things I have to hook up for that still so that's not here yet.
So where am I going from here? Well, there's a few things. After a lot of failed experiments, I've come to the conclusion that for the most part I can't even think in the right mode to make the next "Angry Birds killer" sort of game. I'm an author, I'm a bard, I live for the story, it's simply not in my capacity to come up with some simple time waster that doesn't have that. I've tried and failed many times last year to come up with something that worked, and never could. So I gave up, and went back to games with story. Going back to Spiral Island and redoing that to be a 2D/3D hybrid instead of straight 2D tiles. And I started working on a new text adventure platform, which I'll use for telling the story of The Grand Game. This month though I'm working on a cross-phone networked Shogi game, because something like that doesn't exist and I want other people to play against.
I've also been working on novel planning. Of the novel projects I have going right now (the three parts of the Spiral Island trilogy, the one I mentioned earlier with Medea, and Red Ice), I've got everything except for Red Ice either completely planned sequence-by-sequence or mostly planned but need to determine the final sequence order. Since in August I will do a bunch of traveling for events, I plan on dedicating all of that month just to writing, and completing the entire first draft of the Medea novel. I'll share more on that later once I start into that marathon.
And that's where things stand right now. Now that the templates done I'll get back to more entries again, and I have a few things I've been holding onto that I need to write, but not a lot happens to me these days that is enough material to make an actual blog entry, so most of that I just post on Twitter instead. Once the photo blog stuff is integrated there will be that too, that is assuming I actually have stuff to photograph either. I'll have to start doing more dream journal stuff, that's usually an endless amount of material to work with in one way or another.
Date posted: 10 June, 2012Tags: personal regularspelling the_grand_game website_design writing
The Orb
"Raynor here," the man said as he answerd his phone. He listened to the report being given to him by the person on the other end of the line, and began to frown as he realized the gravity of the news being given to him. "Already," he said to the person on the other end of the line, and closed the notebook he was writing in and put it away in his jacket. After some more words from the person on the other line, he sighed, and replied, "understood, get in position but do not act until I get there." He ended the call and stood up, excusing himself from the conversation he was having. He looked at the woman, giving her one more chance. "Are you sure you do not wish to help?" The woman shook her head to confirm she did not want to be involved, and he shrugged and walked away from them.
*************************************
The four of them took a place, one on each side of the Pedestal, staring at the orb. "So, uhhh," Air said, voice trailing off for a second. "What are we supposed to do, exactly?" Earth and Fire gave her a puzzled look, and she held up her hands in defense. "You have to understand," she said, "when he and I were involved those fifteen years ago, we were removed from play before we ever got a chance to see the Pedestal and the Orb themselves. And our information said the real Pedestal had been destroyed, and you had a cheap replica of it to control the Cube. Our plans on destorying it were based on that, with the real thing here our plans are shot to the moon."
"Thing's haven't gone according to plan all day," Water said with a smile. "We just have to take things as they go, and do it live." He reached forward, and wrapped his hand around the Orb. A burst of energy came out from it, rippling up his arm, and as it engulfed him his eyes went wide and pupils dialated, and he suddenly fell to the floor. Panicked, the other three got down to help him, and, finding him unconscious, tried unsuccessfully to revive him.
"The lighter," Fire said to Air, and she hurriedly pulled it out of her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it up and lit it, and just as with the Bearer, the flame turned to a bright purple, showing the Orb was now telepathically influencing water. Fire flicked the lighter closed and reopened it, but the flame once again turned purple upon relighting it. Air took it back from him, repeating the action over and over again, but Water would not wake up.
"I don't understand," Air said angrily, tears building up in her eyes. "Why won't it work? It's supposed to abort telepathic connections when closing it and turn it off." Fed up with the object, she threw it in anger against the wall, and then stood up. "Maybe he had the right idea after all, forget the plan and just do it live," she said, wiping the tears from her eyes, and then she grabbed at the Orb as well. The other two stood quickly to catch her, as a wave of energy engulfed her as well and knocked her unconscious. They laid her gently to the ground, and stood up and looked at each other.
They stood there for a couple minutes, not doing anything. The energy field above the Pedestal hadn't changed, nothing about the setup had changed in any way since Water first grabbed at the orb. Fire went to grab at it himself, but Earth grabbed at his hand. "Stop," she said, a somber look in her eyes as she looked at him. "One of us needs to still be awake in case something else happens." Fire nodded in agreemend, and withdrew his hand for a moment. She reached into her pocket, and pulled out a coin, holding it up. He nodded in agreement, and she flipped it up into the air.
"Hea-" he started to say, but as soon as she flipped up, she herself grabbed at the Orb. He quickly stepped around to catch her, shaking his head. "You idiot," he said, as he lowered her to the ground. He stood up and looked back at the pedestal, just as the coin landed on it. It was heads-side up, and the energy field above it broke and rippled out like a wave on a pond, before reforming a few moments later. He was alone now, the odd one out, as he realized he had been from the beginning.
For an hour or so he stood there, waiting, hoping that something would happen. A few times he went to grab at the Orb himself, but he remembered that Earth was right, one of them had to be out here, just in case. But nothing was happening. Their bodies lay unconscious, the storms the Bearer had started had ceased without his influence, and the news stations were back to reporting regular dulldrums. Nothing was happening, until suddenly, something did.
A group of people suddenly burst into the room, from a door in the ceiling he hadn't noticed before. Seven people jumped down into the room in total, six of them wearing riot gear, the last one wearing a business suit. "Agent David Raynor," the man in the suit said to Fire, pulling out an ID card and showing him, "CIA. We're here to help." He looked down at the three on the floor and the exposed Orb, and then looking around the room noticed the lighter, which he went over to pick up.
"It's not working," Fire said, as the man picked up the lighter and flicked it open, lit it, closed it, and then lit it again. "They touched the Orb and went unconscious, and the Lighter isn't working to interrupt it like they said it should."
"Of course not," Raynor said, pocketing the object. "The Lighter interrupts telepathic connections. But their minds are inside the Orb right now." The man walked back over to the Pedestal, and motioned to Fire. "All four of you will need to be inside to break free. Go ahead, grab the Orb." Hesitant, Fire slowly grabbed at the Orb. Several of the other people grabbed at him and lowered him to the floor, where they were strapping all of them to stretchers. Raynor nodded, then grabbed at the Orb himself.
Date posted: 01 January, 2012Tags: the_grand_game the_pocketwatch writing
The Pedestal
The Bearer continued to laugh, as he held up the remote toward the wall and pressed another button. The walls came to life, revealing many large television screens, some of them showing various news reels, others showing different weather satellite and Doppler images of around the world. He then set down the Cube in the center of the Pedestal, and they all watch as it began to glow, then it's sides unfolded onto the grid of the pedestal, revealing a glowing multicolored orb in the center. Additional panels began to slide out of the sides, covering the pedestal.
"Now, watch," the Bearer said with a smile, and held the remote forward to the four of them, while raising his other hand over the orb. The bars of the cells then began to slide down slowly, from above, until they came just down below their eyes. He then put his hand on the orb, and energy rose up from the top of their heads, over the cell bars and flew toward the orb. After a few moments, it stopped, and he raised the bars back up again. "And just like that," he said, finally putting the remote into his messenger bag, "the disappointing players of this round of the game forefit their positions."
"So what now," Earth said with a sneer while trying to shake the bars loose. "You've taken the power from me, now what are you planning, giving the power to four new individuals?" The Bearer shook his head, and brought both hands over the orb. A wave of energy came out from it over the panels on the Pedestal, forming into a map off the coast of Florida, and another pattern appeared above it appeared that, based on the screens on the walls, appeared to match the cloud cover over the area.
He moved his hands in a pattern, and the clouds floating above the pedestal began to change, forming into a pattern appearing like a hurricane. The four simultaneously looked over at the wall, as the satellite and Doppler patterns shifted to match, and one of the news images changed to an emergency broadcast beginning to warn about the hurricane. "Now a hurricane is a pretty good start," the Bearer said, shrugging his shoulders, and waved his hands to clear the map above the Pedestal and reform it again. "But we can do better than that." He looked up at Water, and smiled. "How about we continue what you two started fifteen years ago?"
"You wouldn't," Air said with a sneer, and Water simply glared at him.
"Ah," the Bearer said, beginning to chuckle, "but did you tell your new friends about then? About how the two of you, caught up in the excitement of having power, and the energy of a grade school crush, nearly paralyzed the entire Rocky Mountain region by turning the winter storm into flooded landslide?" Water looked over to his companions. Air was bowing her head in shame and embarrassment, while Earth looked upon him with bewilderment, as this was a detail the two had left out of their explanation of the events of the past. Fire, however, wasn't looking at him, just staring at the Bearer, while scratching an itch on his left forearm. Fire noticed, for the first time, a black tattoo on the man's left arm, running in a helix around his arm and up where he couldn't see it in the sleeve, which is what he was scratching at.
Could it be, Fire thought to himself as he thought back to the events of the past. "Yes," he said, turning to the Bearer, "Air and I did nearly cause some damage, we were troublesome little children back then. But we realized our mistake, and that's why we got back together later and resolved to take it down. We've spent years planning, preparing for this moment, just to take it out." Water then smiled a sinister smile. "And you've not only handed us the Cube, you've given us the Pedestal along with it, which is more than we were hoping for. You've handed the means to destroy you to us on a silver- excuse me - golden platter."
The Bearer frowned, and began to wave his hands over the sphere again, the energy turning into a series of mountains. "Once I've destroyed your home," the Bearer said with a chuckle, voice much more terse though than before. He stopped, lowering his eyebrows, appearing like he was surprised that he seemed more worried at what Water said than he should be. "You'll have to watch your home destroyed, and everyone and everything you love there wiped out with it. And then yes, I will give the power to four new people. Four new people who will lose their homes in my disasters, and be told that the others were the cause. A new war, a new game, and I will force you four to watch it before I kill you, to watch those with dark hearts destroy the world."
The sound that then filled the room was not the Bearer, but it was Water, filling the room with a low cynical laugh. "You certainly are full of yourself and your ability to control others as puppets." He reached into his pocket, and brought out a black lighter. Flicking it open, he held it up and out of the cage. "You know," he continued, "being a puppet yourself." The Bearer looked up to him, and his face went pale as Water lit the lighter, and its flame turned to a bright purple. He then clicked it closed and dropped it to the ground, and the Bearer suddenly fell to the ground. "Now, Fire!"
Fire nodded, and pulled up his left sleeve, and as the Bearer began to stand back up he ran a fingernail along his tattoo. A loud, high pitched whine filled the room, and the Bearer and the others fell to the ground grabbing their ears in pain to block it out. He then held forth his hand, and the tattoo around his arm began to glow, then darted out off of his arm to the ground, slithering along until it reached the Bearer's messenger bag. It disappeared into the bag, then with a flick of his wrist back toward himself, the bag lifted into the air, and the remote control, wrapped up in the energy coil, flew back to his hand. He then held forth his hand again and it went back out, and wrapped itself around the Bearer's legs, preventing him from getting to his feet again.
Fire pressed the button he had seen the Bearer press before, and the bars began to lower once again. "What was that lighter, anyway," he said to Water, turning to him while waiting for the bars to lower completely.
"An old relic of the Grand Game," he said simply, and walked toward the Bearer once he had enough clearance from the bars. He lifted him up by his jacket, then dragged him over to the cell he just vacated. Fire pressed the button on the remote, and the cells rose up to trap the old man in it.
"I'm surprised you still had it," Air said, picking it up and holding it up close to her eyes. "I thought it was taken away along with the other things." Water simply chuckled in response. "And that tattoo as well," she continued as she turned to look at Fire. "I remember that, someone else involved those years ago had it, not one of the four users though. How did you come across it?"
Fire recalled the tattoo back to his arm from around the Bearer's legs now that he was locked securely away, and then pulled his sleeve back down to cover it up. "It belonged to my uncle. Several years ago he gave me a card with the symbol, telling me a strange tale which I honestly didn't believe him, until after that man showed up at my apartment and involved me in all of this." He scratched at it a few more times, still itching. "I was going to use it to rescue Earth, to be honest with you."
"That's all fine and dandy you know," Earth said, drawing all of their attention, "but we're not out of the woods yet." They all turned, and looked at the Pedestal. "We still have one more thing to do. We have to stop the Orb."
Date posted: 28 December, 2011Tags: regularspelling the_grand_game writing