Cruise Control
There's a point in which things simply fall into place. The point where you no longer are writing a story, natural progression is allowing the story to write itself. You still have to organize it, translate it to paper, and format it so it can make sense, but it's not written so much from direct intention, simply the different pieces of the framework you have built come to play, and it simply makes sense so you go with it, though you may not have ever thought of it before.
This is the way I write, the way I compose stories. I sit back and let my imagination run free with the story, guiding the story along piece by piece with its characters. The characters have no out of character knowledge, so the story builds itself as they learn what is going on, and react to it. This doesn't mean of course that the progression of the story necessarily is halted if your characters can't solve a puzzle, or no longer have clues to move forward. The story is told in one line, but it doesn't necessarily need to be written that way. Non-linear, fourth-dimensional thought can be incredibly helpful, because you can work around something, and then later have a spark of inspiration come to you to complete the puzzle at an earlier time. And it could be much later, years, but the moment it comes to you everything else makes sense.
To be a little more specific, but vague, I found two of such pieces last night, while thinking over some minor script details for Spiral Island. A simple conversation between a couple of the characters led to me filling in a large detail relating to Spiral Island 3's storyline, but it was nothing at all more then naturally connecting dots that had been there for over 5 years, and merely passed over without prior connection. All the pieces were in place, simply the single move had not yet been made that would have set off that chain. But now that it has been made, it is irreversible, because it fits absolutely perfectly in the story.
Tags: spiral_island writing
Weird Dream
As I've mentioned several times in the past, I get a lot of my ideas from various dreams. I haven't really had many dreams lately that were very interesting, so I could remember few details from them as the day went on. But I had one this morning that was just so random, and so I am going to post it here.
I had this dream that my mom was complaining about her new computer crashing and getting bluescreens, so i went over to my parents place to seee what was going on, where she had one of the ultra small Dell Optiplexes, and so I ran some diagnostics on it and found it had bad RAM. There was no other computer there for me to chat in to get replacement RAM with, and I didnt want to call in and talk to someone, so I had to go back to my place to get my XPS 1530 to chat in. By that point, though, I had to go to work, so I grabbed both machines, hopped on my matress, and drove to work.
I ended up crashing the matress on the far side of the freeway in front of my work, so I picked it up and jumped over the fence and went in. In this world my building was actually a middle school, instead of the call center I work at, and parts of the building were frozen because the AC was not functioning properly that day. Ithen had to hunt around the building for a monitor to connect to the computer so I could see the error code to give over the chat, and ended up arguing with Doc Brown or Bill Nye (cant remember which) about processor architecture for a while while searching. Then somenoe else finally found me a monitor, and so I sat down to start up the chat. However, in the room I was working in to chat in from, several of the junior hgh kids were playing the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game, and a girl with dyed green hair challenged me to a game, but the voice wasn't a girls. As I sat down to play the game, I discovered that the girl was posessed by the spirit of the Graverobber from the Millenium Ring, who had to look for another host after Bakura had died in an accident, and the girl was the best he most compatible host he could posess, though he was trying to find a better host, and had picked up the ability to temporarily take over the minds of other people besides the person he was posessing.
As we were playing the game we were both blatantly breaking the rules pertaining to number of monsters on the field, and so I called him on it and we both got rid of the extra cards so we were within the rules. That left the game field all in my favor and I was able to defeat him in one turn, which caused the girl who he was posessing to take over and start crying from the swift loss. The graverobber then took over another kid there and used him to smack the girl in the back of the neck, which caused the hand to pass right through in an ethereal fashion and she lost conciousness. He then did it to all the other kids in the room, so that none of them would remember the swift loss or the cheating, since he was using the girl to be top class tournament winner while searching for a better host. With that all resolved for the moment, I went back to my chatting in about replacement RAM, only to discover that the monitor someone had gotten me was dead, so I had to go find another one.
And I woke up at that point. Not really much in there that could really be used, but it was so outlandishly off the wall that it's stuck with me all day.
Tags: cars computer dream
Naming Conventions: Dry Well
I resort to using those generic names because I have so much difficulty coming up with names for characters. In cases where I do have names for specific charactes, I usually have borrowed them.
We'll start with the main character of Spiral Island, Amy Carter. As a corolary to my inability to name characters, if you as me on the spot for a girl's name I will almost always get stuck at the very beginning of the alphabet, with names starting with the letter A. I have other haracters suffering from this as well, named Ann, Amanda, Alliso, and so forth. The last name I borrowed from a friend of mine in elementary school, Joshua Carter.
Continuing from there we have Xedre Jennifer Kopta. Xedre was a name I got from a random name generator. The last name I borrowed from a classmate in my AP Computer Science class, and the middle name was also probably borrowed from a classmate, though I can't think of a specific one at the moment. Another character that is introduced early into the game, Marcus Tilden, is borrowed as well. The first name from a classmate that I was talking to one day about the Spiral Island storyline early in my work on it. The last name I just grabbed from the first thing that was handy, which was a name I saw in the credits playing Pokemon Blue, namely Gail Tilden of Nintendo of America.
Switching over to Skewed we have some more borrowed names for major characters, not counting the minor characters that are direct copies of characters from other anime. Miku Maeda and his father Kyojiro (a character borrowed from the Spiral Island series) have the last name of the Konami music director Naoki Maeda. Ian Mikuri plays off of the names of the friend of mine I based him on, namely Mikuri being the japanese name for the gym leader Wallace in Ruby and Sapphire, which is my friend's last name. Leanne, whom I've only mentioned once so far in the story but will go into more later, is taken from a girl that sat next to me through most of my first year Japanese class in High School.
Tags: names skewed spiral_island writing
Naming Conventions: Self-Referencing
I am not very good with names. I never have been, even my close friends I'll cycle through different names until I get the correct one. It's something my father and grandmother on my father's side did as well, some weird family trait or something.
This presents a real problem when I'm trying to name characters. That's the primary reason for my chacter The Anaconda in the Spiral Island series having my name, it's not so much a self-insertion job as it is a story that began being told in the first person, and I could not come up with any different name for the character. I am utterly horrible with coming up with names, often leading me to resort to using random name generators for different tasks.
In stories that I think of in the first person, usually stories that branch off different dreams, I've ended up with more or less 3 different core personailities for the character, and give them general purpose names if I don't expect the story to go very far. For characters that more or less fit me, computer apt being the main thing, I just use my normal name. If the character's not specifically computer oriented, I switch to my alternate alias, James Millen, which I have used in Celebration and Dreams of Reality. The name James comes from my middle name. The last name came from some website I found during an English class in high school where we were researching urban legends, from a site that was supposed to generate your "writer name". If I recall it might have actually generated James Miller and not Millen, but then I changed it.
The third profile I use is named Jacob White, Jacob being the Hebrew form of the name James. I use that one usually for characters dealing with conflicts beyond themselves. The character for the Project L storyline, Jacob Moon, was the prototype for this character, before I came up with the final name. I never intended to call him that, actually, and never actually called him that until he was introduced to Miku in Skewed, however that name just stuck with him and I couldn't bring myself to properly call him Jacob White. That name ended up getting borrowed from the first thing that stuck in my head for the name Jacob, a character in the LDS fiction novel series Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites, particularly after a character named "Jacob of the Moon" from the 2nd book in the series.
The White last name that the subsequent characters using that profile own comes from another dream I had which I turned into a storyline for a game, listed on the AnacondaSoftware site as Project WBY. This dream consisted of only 3 characters, myself and two others. The other two were college girls guest-starred in the dream by Blue and Yellow from the Pokemon Special manga. Based on this I decided to refer to another dream I had a week before: a dream where AnacondaSoftware was contracted to make some Pokemon games for the GBA, which we titled White and Black versions, and then when Game Freak came out with their DS game that they were working on, they made homage to those games by putting in sprites of me and my friends and naming the characters in there after the names of of our games, in homage to the tradition of having characters named after he game names. Particularly, the chracter based on me was put in as currently dating Misty, and both of them were visitnging the region on vacation. My character was named White if you got into a double battle with Misty and her boyfriend. (Interestingly enough, Diamond and Pearl ended up having a visiting Gym Leader, with Jasmine visiting Sunyshore City. Sunyshore looks a lot like the town in my dream where Misty and White were in in my dream, though in my dream there was a seaport there as well). I ended up putting these things together, renaming the two girls with names that meant the color of their original character, and then officially assigning Jacob's last name to be White. The project name ended up reflecting this, Project WBY simply standing for "White-Blue-Yellow".
Tags: anacondasoftware celebration j_millen names novels spiral_island writing
Third Shift
Our flights start leaving early tomorrow morning, so we have to be to the airport early. I decided to just stay up and sleep on the flight, so I'm going to be here for the next few hours until we leave. It's currently 1:30 here in Florida, so overall I probably wouldn't be asleep yet if I were at home. I'm behind on the work I planned on doing this trip, though that was because I got stuck with a problem for this map editor that took me a long time to solve. I had planned on starting making some maps for Spiral Island, and getting up an update for Skewed while I was here. I've also realized in the process of the week that my Japanese is continuing to slip, so I need to start studying the language again.
While reading through some old posts on Notebook Forums last week, I remembered a story I want to write, but had forgotten about because I never wrote any cornerstone fragments to remind myself of the whole thing. Once PivotX goes final that will probably be the first short story I will write and host on here. But so far this month there hasn't been any new updates to PivotX, so who knows how long off it will be.
At the moment I need to go to get another soda to drink so I can stay awake. When I get back I will be working on an entry that I've tried starting a couple times this last week but never had the time to do when I have actually sat down to write it. I won't be posting it this late hour, because I'm going to want to read over it when I am well rested, but I'll get it out now at least since I don't have much else to do.
Tags: internet japanese travel website_design writing