Jonathan Lovelace's Blog, page 3

Second Collection: Title Announcement, Betas Wanted

As most readers of this blog surely know by now, back in 2014 I published a collection of my poetry, both in paperback and on Kindle. Some of you may also be aware that I’m currently working on a second collection. I have one item of news about this project, and there is one part of it with which I would like the help of some of my readers.

First, my news. After consulting and brainstorming with a friend of mine and other writerly acquaintances, I’ve decided on a title for this collection. My second collection of my poetry will be called Dreams and Prayers: Verses From a Wandering Mind.

Second, I would like your help. When I was preparing A Year in Verse, I intended and hoped to release it on or just before the beginning of the liturgical year, and rushed my editing, revising, and proofreading to try to meet that deadline. (Only to have delays in proofing the cover make me miss it. But that’s another story.) With this second collection, I can take the time to do it right. I’ve gone over the poems carefully, and in the process I discovered and fixed a few typos, adjusted a few awkward wordings, and in a few cases even replaced several lines at a time—but I’m still too close to the poems to come at them fresh, so I’d like some of you to read a draft of the collection and give me your feedback.

As you may know, my poetry is nearly all blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), and on average is around 10-15 lines. This collection is currently planned to include about 70 poems—each paired with a public-domain drawing or illustration in the final collection, but to save paper if you print the draft out, I’ll omit the illustrations from the “beta version”—divided into three sections.

While any thoughts readers may have are valuable, in particular I’m looking for help improving

The order of the poems. Unlike my first collection, where I had the concept of the multiple simultaneous calendars guiding my choices of which poems came first and which poems followed which, here I have had to just make arbitrary decisions. If you think a poem would work well as the first or last poem in a section, or two poems should or shouldn’t be next to each other, or one poem should be after another instead of before it, that would be tremendously helpful.
The details of the poems themselves. If a word, a line, or a section of a poem “sounds” odd, I’d like to be able to try to improve it.

(Anything else, such as ideas for titles for any of the poems, suggestions of poems I didn’t include but you think I should, links to suitable artwork, or anything else, would be most welcome, but those two areas are what I’m most looking for.)

If anyone would be willing to read my draft and give me your feedback, please comment below or get in touch with me some other way.

Filed under: Poetry Book

Writing status update (#51)

It’s now been two months, instead of the one I intended, since I last reported on my progress in developing the Shine Cycle, so I’m long overdue. And while this neglect is all too typical of both the last few weeks and the last several years, these last weeks have shown some definite improvement.

Two months ago, in my quarterly check of my goals for the year, I also set out goals for the next month.

Make consistent progress: I’ll count this as a success if each week I accomplish 17 “points” in my task tracker.

For July, I fell far short of this. But I’ve met and exceeded it throughout August so far.

Finish “snowflake step 6” for The Invasion: expanding the “one-page synopsis” into a “multi-page synopsis.”

I finished this in early July.

For “snowflake step 7′ for The Invasion, create “character charts” for at least five characters.

In the two months, I’ve managed six, but I hadn’t finished the second by the end of July. So I’m making good progress, but not as much as I’d hoped.

Create at least one character history.

I’ve “sketched out” one character’s history, but haven’t pinned down dates and written the story into my more-permanent notes yet. So this is, two months on, finally “in progress.” I expect to finish this one character history this week.

In my other writing, I finally finished a poem I’ve been working on for months (which will appear in this space later this week), and I’m making good progress on my preparations for a second poetry collection (about which more, also later this week). But other than the above, I’ve accomplished very little.

Now, for the coming month, here’s what I hope to accomplish for the Shine Cycle, God willing:

Remember to write a quarterly goals check at the end of September
For “snowflake step 7” for The Invasion, create “character charts” for all remaining major characters.
Make consistent progress: I’ll count this as a success if each week I accomplish 21 “points” in my task tracker, though I’m hoping to average more like twice that.
Get at least a quarter of the way into my by-scene outline (six of the 24 “sequences” or equivalent currently identified)
Write at least three character histories.

But God alone knows what will happen over the next month.

Filed under: Status updates

Shine Cycle Character Profile: Elaine

This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.

Elaine – Great-mage and a senior analyst in the Queen’s service in the Imperial Service. While she proved her courage and good sense on the battlefield more than once in the Fifth War of the Dragon, after the war her analysis of the events made her even more valuable and caused the Service to request that she not go onto the battlefield again. She agreed to their request, which was coupled to a job offer with an unusual immediate promotion, but took an immediate leave of absence to go to the Academy. In her studies there she discovered an affinity for the academic aspects of the Power, and a respectable (though not unusual) practical aptitude.

Elaine might best be described as a “Renaissance woman,” with wide interests in a variety of academic subjects (and not merely “academic interest”), but only ordinary “practical skill” in the “experimental” side of the various disciplines. As an instructor and tutor at the Academy, she spends much of her time meeting with and teaching students, mostly in her book-lined office.

A somewhat tall, slender woman with short brown hair swept back and tied behind her head. She favors an academic gown in an informal cut, but in wartime wears more-concealing formal robes with light armor underneath. Her brown eyes “somehow hold severity and fun at the same time.”

Soon after her arrival in the Empire, Elaine was struck by a strong inclination for adventure, and with no better ideas leaping to mind, she joins an army artillery unit as a spotter after seeing a recruiting poster. The company didn’t see much action, but in the few key battles that they did take part in, they performed with unusual effectiveness and efficiency. In after-action reports, her comrades credited her on-the-spot tactical suggestions and prior strategic-analysis comments as a principal cause of their success.

After the war, her commanders praised her so highly that the General Staff invited her to join a committee tasked with writing a strategic retrospective report on the war. As the meetings proceeded, she spoke moderately often, asking penetrating questions and offering insightful suggestions, so much that the veteran and senior commanders who led that committee were astounded even having read her earlier reports.

When that committee was dissolved, the army’s administrators offered her a senior analysis position. Because she wanted a better grounding in the Empire and its history and surroundings before taking up that responsibility, however, she negotiated a deferral to allow her to attend the Academy.

While at the Academy, she took courses in nearly every department, and well over a majority of the subjects, though she focused on courses to improve her understanding of the background of the present and the recent past. In addition to shining in the literature classes, and soaking up as much history and strategy as she could absorb, she discovered that she had a remarkable potential for the Power, and even a strong and generally correct intution for its theoretical aspects.

As agreed, after finishing her whirlwind tour of the history and literature curriculum, she began working for the Imperial Service. She continued to further her education in the rest of her time, however; after a few more years poking into the various corners of the Academy’s offerings, she began studying at the College of Mages.

Her career there took longer than some of her peers, as she was working nearly full-time for the Imperial Service, but she still advanced quickly through the initial levels. After she passed the tests that recognized her as a journeyman mage, she was invited to join the Academy faculty as a tutor and lecturer in Earth literature; her superiors in the Imperial Service, fearing that she would leave their department if they did not accomodate this opportunity, reduced her duties to allow her to take the position.

She continued studying the Power in the evenings, but did not advance to the level of master for over a decade, and it took her another decade to become a great-mage.

Filed under: Character Profiles

2017 Goals Second Quarter Report: Shine Cycle

Another three months have flown by, and 2017 is now nearly half gone. Since one of my goals for this year was to “After each quarter, assess progress and note any necessary amendments to goals in a blog post,” it’s time to check myself again, as I did back in April. I’ll also look over last month’s monthly goals, rather than making a separate and redundant “writing status update” post.

The second quarter went much better than the first. (Not that it could really have been worse.) I don’t think I”m anywhere near caught up to where I’d hoped to be, but I’ve made definite progress, and while the end is not yet in sight, “the end of the beginning” may be.

Monthly Goals

Before I get to the year-long objectives and goals, here are the goals I set last month for the past four weeks:

Make consistent progress: I’ll count this as a success if each week I accomplish 15 “points” in my task tracker.

Not quite. One week I only reached 5 “points,” though the other weeks I managed enough that the average stands at 19.

Finish “snowflake step 5” for The Invasion, which means (by the current plan) creating “character synopses” for eight more characters.

Done.

As a good start on “snowflake step 6,” get through the first paragraph of the “one-page” synopsis that I will be expanding into a “multi-page” synopsis.

Done, and I (barely) got through the second paragraph as well.

Create “motivation summaries” for at least two characters.

Hmm! For some reason, none of these came up in the task queue in the last four weeks! So I didn’t accomplish this, but only because I shouldn’t have put it on the list of goals in the first place.

Write personal histories of at least two characters.

Done, and both are the last missing pieces for character profiles; one is already scheduled to appear in this space in two weeks, and the other will follow a month later once I collate the sections together.

Yearly Goals: So Far

Next, here are the goals I set for the Shine Cycle for the year. For each one, I’ll comment as to how I’m doing on it so far and how likely I think I am to accomplish it by the end of the year. (I’ll omit the one goal that was accomplished in January.)

Outlining

Objective: Finish a complete and detailed outline of my chosen story.

Goal: In my iterative outlining, outline that story by scene

I’m not to the point of resuming the outline as such yet, but I think I’m on track to be at least well into the scene-level outline by year end.

Goal: Follow the “snowflake method” to at least Step 7 for that story.

I’ve recently started “step 6,” which is the “multi-page synopsis”; “step 7,” the “character charts,” is looming (and scheduled before the scene-by-scene outline in my task tracker), so even if something disrupts my schedule I should be able to accomplish this before year’s end.

Character Development

Objective: Have a biography, history, description, and “character logline” or “motivation summary” for every named character.

Goal: Write at least fifteen character biographies or histories.

I created four character histories this last quarter, for a total of six this year; as my task tracker thinks I’ll get through eight more by the end of December, I think it’s still possible, but not likely I’ll quite accomplish this goal this year. But the odds are shortening.

Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least five characters.

In addition to the three I managed in the first quarter, I apparently wrote five more of these this quarter, for a total of eight. So reaching nine, as I suggested three months ago, now looks almost trivial, and fifteen looks possible.

Worldbuilding

Objective: Create sufficiently-complete, sufficiently-detailed, maps of the worlds and areas with which the Shine Cycle is concerned.
Objective: Develop each race and culture that the Shine Cycle is concerned with sufficiently to portray it distinctly and excite potential readers’ interest.

As I mentioned last quarter, I keep plugging away at adding tasks for specific details required for these objectives to my task tracker … just near the bottom of the queue, so there’s no progress to report.

Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the “race fractalling system” for elves.

When I set this, I hadn’t rearranged my task tracker to put developing The Invasion from start to finish at the top; when I did that, I also took the opportunity to put pretty much all the worldbuilding “create tasks for …” tasks at the top of the queue, so that once I get through them I’ll have more reliable estimates. (I also had to pull everything out and put it back, because formerly “snowflake outlining” had been filed as “worldbuilding”.) So my task tracker now doesn’t think I’ll get to starting the “race fractalling system” on the elves until January 2019.

On the other hand, I think I’m going to “double-up” some of the simpler “create tasks for …” tasks (that only need me to schedule five or so tasks, not a dozen or more), which will (once the “velocity” adjusts to this change) make me get to this somewhat sooner.

Actual Prose

Goal: Get at least a quarter of the way through the first draft of the story I decide to focus on this year, or 25,000 words in, whichever comes first.
Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the first draft, or 50,000 words in the story I’m focusing on this year.

As I said three months ago, giving the state of the outlining, I consider these unlikely, but given my progress this quarter the odds are shortening somewhat.

Blogging

Objective: Regularly post substantive Shine Cycle-related content here, as an incentive to continued progress and to attract interested future readers.

Goal: Post at least twelve Shine Cycle-related posts (not including writing status updates, year-end retrospectives, and the like) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least eighteen Shine Cycle-related posts (with the same exclusions) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post (with the same exclusions) to this blog every month.

The total count of posts that have appeared so far and what I’ve already written and scheduled for the future stands at twelve so far. So, goal accomplished, and if I can keep up on character histories eighteen seems well within my reach.

One a month is trickier, as the last précis is scheduled to run next week.

Objective: Create blog posts using “worldbuilding” material created using the various “systems” and question sets.

Goal: In the process of transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” to “background essays,” reduce the length of (the temporary copy of) the former by at least half. It currently stands at about 1500 lines and 36,000 words.
Stretch Goal: Finish transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” into “background essays” and schedule the first post using that material to run on this blog.

I don’t think I even touched this material in the last quarter.

Next Month

The year, so far, has been nowhere near what I had hoped, but this last quarter was also far better than I had feared after the first quarter. So I have hope that, God willing, I can make significant headway on my long-term objectives in the rest of the year, and that any disruption of my plans will be to the good. More immediately, however, here are my goals for the next month:

Make consistent progress: I’ll count this as a success if each week I accomplish 17 “points” in my task tracker.
Finish “snowflake step 6” for The Invasion: expanding the “one-page synopsis” into a “multi-page synopsis.”
For “snowflake step 7′ for The Invasion, create “character charts” for at least five characters.
Create at least one character history.

We’ll see.

Writer friends, how are your goals for the year going?

Filed under: Status updates

Shine Cycle Character Profile: Miranda

This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.

Miranda – Knight and journeyman mage. She is primarily known among the common people of the Empire for her keen literary analysis – when she reviews a work, no matter how obscure, she is carried without question in nearly every newspaper in the Empire – but the same quickness of mind that has made her beloved by the literati of the Empire has given her a keen grasp of Power theory that far outshines her strength in practical usage. To make up for that weakness she went through the most rigorous courses of study in the Academy that she could find and earned knighthood.

A tall, slender woman with straight dark brown hair falling past her shoulders. After her knighthood she wears a light chain mail shirt under her robes and carries a sword at her belt, but she prefers simple robes, most commonly in a deep red but also often in other bright colors, to armor. Her expression is usually some kind of smile, but that varies from a wry grin, to a friendly and welcoming smile, to a mischievous smirk.

Being of a gregarious and somewhat vigorous bent, Miranda is not well-suited to a “contemplative life.” But her interests in academic, and obscure, topics led her inexorably to a “life of letters,” despite the detour into the arts of war. She spends most of her time reading, writing, or in thought, but makes a point of walking about the city for at least an hour a day, both for exercise and to talk with the people around her. She also posts and holds formal office hours most days.

After she arrived in the Empire, when considering possible directions for her life there, Miranda was at first drawn toward the Church. She was deterred, however, by attitudes among its leadership that she, at that point, considered to vary between “traditional” and “archaic” (with some justice, as this was also some years before the Council of Capitol), and also by advice she received that she would be wasted on a purely contemplative life.

After a period of some months, she found a small publishing house in a town near the capital that offered her the position of its slush-pile editor. She remained there, using her little remaining time to build a her background knowledge of the Empire’s history, literature, and culture, until the publisher closed about five years later.

From there, she moved to a small literary magazine. At first she served primarily in an editorial capacity, correcting others’ articles and helping to determine what material to publish, but after a couple of years she began writing book reviews for the magazine.

A few years later, a series of chance conversations sparked an academic interest in the Power. She began researching it, and wrote an article on it for the magazine, but in the course of her investigation discovered that she had some slight potential as a mage herself.

After moving back to the capital, she took a partial leave of absence from the magazine to study at the College of Mages. Her individual ability was not strong by any means, which significantly limited what workings she could personally perform or take part in, but she found herself able to intuitively grasp and logically analyze the theoretical principles far better than her more-powerful peers. She continued in both theoretical and practical studies there up to the point where her power limited her, and then audited all the courses up to the journeyman level to round out her understanding of the theory, before returning her full attention to the magazine.

The following year, she stood for election to the city council. The margin by which she was defeated made it clear to her that her political views were still far enough out of the Imperial “mainstream” that she was unlikely to win an election herself anytime soon, but enough of her neighbors had been willing to read pamphlets and articles by and about her that she thought she might be able to change those “mainstream” opinions another way: she began a political column in the magazine, of which she was by then a senior and executive editor.

For about another year nearly all of her attention focused on her magazine and on other articles she was writing for other publications, she suddenly realized that her habits put her in danger of forgetting about the world outside “the literati bubble”; she hadn’t even spoken to her next-door neighbor in months. To counteract this, and to help keep her in good health, she began walking through the city every day, stopping to talk to friends and strangers alike.

A few years later, a reference in a book she was reviewing piqued her interest, and when she consulted a friend who worked in the Palace library, that friend recommended she look in the Academy library. When she did so, she happened to meet Elaine, whom she knew well under her former name before their arrival and whom she had come to know and respect by letters since coming to work on the magazine, though Miranda had not known that her professional peer and her old friend were one and the same. After helping her find the book she was looking for, Elaine encouraged her to take classes at the Academy in any subject that interested her. She began taking one class at a time, following her own interests and chance suggestions more than any of the official curricula.

About five years later, in a conversation with another friend, Miranda suddenly realized that she was feeling a growing ennui in her life. Initially prompted by that friend’s suggestion, she decided to invest some time in athletic pursuits beyond a mere daily walk. After a year of that, one of her instructors at the Academy suggests she try the more-challenging “knighthood training” curriculum at the Academy, so she began that, while still continuing to probe the recesses of knowledge in other courses.

Once she reached the peak of physical conditioning needed, she found that she had a knack for the weapons she is training with, and her keen insight and logical mind gave a similar advantage in the courses on strategy and tactics. When war begins not five years after she began her training, she hurried through the remainder of her Academy training, found a knight-master, and somewhat reluctantly headed for the war. At the front, she and her knight-master took a fairly minor part in several battles, but when her knight-master sustained a light but lingering wound, they were transferred to the rear for him to recover, which took nearly the remainder of that campaign.

On her return, she was knighted, and returned to her work with her magazine. Her experiences in the war left her with a more serious disposition, and some of her political opinions had gradually changed to be closer to those held by most people in the Empire. As these differences became apparent in her writing, her columns, which were already popular and carried in several other periodicals across the Empire, began to gain a yet wider and increasing circulation.

Five years after she returned from the war, she began holding regular public office hours.

Filed under: Character Profiles

Writing status update (#49)

Because of the way the calendar has fallen it hasn’t been a month since my last report on my progress developing the Shine Cycle, but it’s been four weeks, so it’s time to give an update.

In the past weeks, I have, as I had hoped, managed steady and consistent progress, if not as much as I had wished. And, consistent with that general sense of the period, I met some but not all of the goals I set for the period:

Make consistent progress: I’ll count this as a success if each week I accomplish 15 “points” in my task tracker.

Success. 21, 23, 18, and 20.

Finish “snowflake step 5” for The Invasion, which means (by the current plan) creating “character synopses” for eight more characters.
As a good start on “snowflake step 6,” get through the first paragraph of the “one-page” synopsis that I will be expanding into a “multi-page” synopsis.

These, on the other hand, remained stubbornly out of reach. I finished “character synopses” for all but two of the characters, but didn’t get to those two yet, and thus haven’t even started on the multi-page synopsis.

Create “motivation summaries” for at least two characters.

Done. But only two, not more.

Write personal histories of at least two characters.

I counted it something of a victory to finally finish the one character history this past week. But one is still fewer than two.

Now, for the next month or so, here’s what I think that, God willing, I can accomplish:

Maintain consistent progress, at least 18 “points” every week in my task tracker, and at the point I’m checking my progress a four-week average of at least 21.
Finish “snowflake step 5” for The Invasion by creating the last two “character synopses.”
Do “snowflake step 6” for The Invasion: convert each of the four paragraphs of the “one-page” synopsis” into “a page.”
For “snowflake step 7” of The Invasion, create a “character chart” for at least one character.
Write personal histories of at least two characters.

We shall see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#48)

Another month has flown by since the quarterly goals check that functioned as my last monthly report on my progress developing the Shine Cycle, so it’s time for an update on the last few weeks, which have seen a near-return to what I consider normal progress.

The demands of classwork have abated, and perhaps for the first time this year I managed almost consistent forward progress on Shine Cycle development these past weeks. Not quite as much as I had hoped, let alone as much as I would like, but unlike far too many months, this was not a period with one quite-productive week and three in which I accomplished nothing.

Of the three fairly-minimal goals I set at the beginning of April, I managed to meet two and get half-way to the third.

Finish “snowflake step 4” for The Invasion.

Done, in the first week, as I expected.

For “snowflake step 5” for The Invasion, create “character synopses” of at least two characters.

I completed one, and made a good start but did not finish a second.

Write at least one character history.

And done, but only the one. (Though I also created two characters’ “motivation summaries.”)

For the next few weeks, I expect less of my time and creativity will be drained by other things, so I’ll set less-minimal goals. However, I again shouldn’t spend too much time on the Shine Cycle, so I’ll restrain my ambition for the time being. Here’s what I hope to accomplish in the next four weeks, God willing:

Make consistent progress: I’ll count this as a success if each week I accomplish 15 “points” in my task tracker.
Finish “snowflake step 5” for The Invasion, which means (by the current plan) creating “character synopses” for eight more characters.
As a good start on “snowflake step 6,” get through the first paragraph of the “one-page” synopsis that I will be expanding into a “multi-page” synopsis.
Create “motivation summaries” for at least two characters.
Write personal histories of at least two characters.

We shall see.

Filed under: Uncategorized

2017 Goals First Quarter Report: Shine Cycle

2017 is now a quarter gone, as short a time as the past three months have felt, and since one of my goals for the year was to “After each quarter, assess progress and note any necessary amendments to goals in a blog post,” it’s time to do just that. I’ll begin with my goals for developing the Shine Cycle today, and go on to the others over the course of this week. Since I haven’t managed a “writing status update” since the end of January, I’ll include those “monthly” goals today as well.

The past few months have not been good ones. In my end-of-January “monthly status” report, I mentioned “being laid somewhat low by a cold last week.” That condition lingered at nearly full strength for something like another week more, and then it took me several more weeks to get back to anything like full energy and strength. There was also a several-day power outage (which was a hindrance mostly because it also left my family without heat) early last month, and the stress of classwork sapped my motivation. Lately, however, I’ve begun making progress (in general, not just here).

Monthly Goals

Looking at goals, first, here were my goals for Shine Cycle development “for the month” that I set at the end of January:

Write at least three character histories.

In all that time, I only managed two.

Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least four characters.

Similarly, I only managed three of these.

For “snowflake step 4” of The Invasion, expand each sentence of my single-paragraph plot summary into at least a paragraph.

In the past week or so, I finally made good progress on this, to the point that I now think it likely I’ll finish this section this week, but that’s again less than I wanted to have gotten done a month ago …

For “snowflake step 5” of The Invasion, write “character synopses” of at least three of the principal characters.

Since I didn’t finish the previous step, there was no chance I could have made such progress on this step, of course.

Yearly Goals: So Far

Next, here are the goals I set for the Shine Cycle for the year. For each one, I’ll comment as to how I’m doing on it so far and how likely I think I am to accomplish it by the end of the year.

Outlining

Objective: Finish a complete and detailed outline of my chosen story.

Goal: Choose the story to focus on by the end of January.

The one real bright spot this quarter was that I did make a firm decision to focus on The Invasion.

Goal: In my iterative outlining, outline that story by scene

Based on my limited progress the last four weeks, my task tracker thinks I’ll finish the last “outlining” task for this story in October of next year. If I recalculate with a slightly more optimistic rate, that improves to next February. So I’d call this possible, but not exactly likely—especially since there are several tasks that are still only represented as “create tasks for such-and-such,” which will push the later tasks back even further.

Goal: Follow the “snowflake method” to at least Step 7 for that story.

Even at “the current rate” (the average of the last four weeks) my task tracker thinks I’ll get to the last piece of “snowflake step 7” in November of this year. There are a lot of tasks that aren’t accounted for between now and then, as I just mentioned, but I’d still say that meeting this goal before the end of December is likely if I can keep up a good pace.

Character Development

Objective: Have a biography, history, description, and “character logline” or “motivation summary” for every named character.
Goal: Write at least fifteen character biographies or histories.

“At the present rate,” according to my task tracker, I won’t get through thirteen more (having done two this quarter) until about November of next year, but if I adjust to a more optimistic view that shrinks only to next January. Since character histories have typically given me more trouble than any other part of the “character development” side of things, I will say that this, too, is possible but not likely.

Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least five characters.

I’ve done three of these so far, and there are at least three more scheduled not too far out in my task tracker, so I should most likely far exceed this goal. Those few are a cluster, which is then followed by others less often, but even so a “stretch goal” of nine this year would still be more than reasonable.

Worldbuilding

Objective: Create sufficiently-complete, sufficiently-detailed, maps of the worlds and areas with which the Shine Cycle is concerned.
Objective: Develop each race and culture that the Shine Cycle is concerned with sufficiently to portray it distinctly and excite potential readers’ interest.

In the weeks that I’ve done anything at all related to the Shine Cycle, I’ve kept plugging away at increasing the level of detail of my long-range plans on these topics (creating tasks for making sure the maps of each specific country include rivers, for example, where previously I’d only had “make sure that the physical map of the continents includes rivers.”

Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the “race fractalling system” for elves.

I’d consider getting to this unlikely, but conceivable if I manage sustained significant progress for much of the year.

Actual Prose

Goal: Get at least a quarter of the way through the first draft of the story I decide to focus on this year, or 25,000 words in, whichever comes first.
Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the first draft, or 50,000 words in the story I’m focusing on this year.

Given the state of my outlining, I doubt I’ll complete either of these goals by the end of the year, but they’re conceivable.

Blogging

Objective: Regularly post substantive Shine Cycle-related content here, as an incentive to continued progress and to attract interested future readers.
Goal: Post at least twelve Shine Cycle-related posts (not including writing status updates, year-end retrospectives, and the like) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least eighteen Shine Cycle-related posts (with the same exclusions) to this blog.

The total count of posts that have appeared so far and what I’ve already written and scheduled for the future stands at nine so far. If I make good progress on character histories and complete some that are the last remaining piece of a character profile, or if I take the time to plow through my notes from working through the Wrede questions, getting up to twelve shouldn’t be too hard. Eighteen would be harder.

Stretch Goal: Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post (with the same exclusions) to this blog every month.

I have précis scheduled once a month through July, but after that we’ll have to see.

Objective: Create blog posts using “worldbuilding” material created using the various “systems” and question sets.
Goal: In the process of transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” to “background essays,” reduce the length of (the temporary copy of) the former by at least half. It currently stands at about 1500 lines and 36,000 words.
Stretch Goal: Finish transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” into “background essays” and schedule the first post using that material to run on this blog.

I think I’ve made a wee bit of progress this quarter, but not much.

Next Month

So the past quarter has not been a good one, at all, but reaching the important goals by year-end still looks eminently possible. For the more immediate future, however, here are my goals for the coming month. I’m taking my task tracker’s current, I hope overly-pessimistic, estimate of my rate of progress as a guide, as usual, rather than guessing as to how much more optimistic to be.

Finish “snowflake step 4” for The Invasion.
For “snowflake step 5” for The Invasion, create “character synopses” of at least two characters.
Write at least one character history.

Very modest goals, but blowing through those and more would be an excellent start to the rest of the year. And I shouldn’t be spending too much time on the Shine Cycle anyway.

Writer friends, how are your goals for the year going?

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#46)

For all that it feels in some ways more like a week has passed than a month, it’s been four weeks since my last report (on the second day of Christmas) on recent progress on the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation. In that time, despite the busyness that always makes Christmastide hectic, and despite being laid somewhat low by a cold last week, I did get some Shine Cycle development work done.

As I said in my last report, and in my year-end goal-setting post, this year I’m changing my method; instead of working a little bit on each story in turn, I now plan to work on one story at a time. After soliciting advice from fellow writers in the Holy Worlds forum, I have decided to start with The Invasion. Rearranging my task tracker to reflect my new plan (and also my realization that “the snowflake method” is primarily “plotting,” not “worldbuilding”) was a significant effort in itself (mostly because pulling everything from the “backlog” into the “icebox” slowed my browser to a crawl at best and made it freeze entirely for minutes at a time until I had gotten things put back in the order I wanted), but now that it’s done I shouldn’t have to do anything of that scope to it for the foreseeable future.

In addition to that task, I had set modest goals for myself along the lines that I had been following:

As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, finish profiles of all major characters in The Invasion and create them for at least three of the five major characters of The Alliance.

Done. I had even finished the third Alliance character early enough last week that I could have moved on to the fourth and fifth, but I decided that other tasks (outside the scope of this report) would be a better use of my time.

Create at least one character logline or motivation summary.

Done. But only one.

Write at least one character history.

I didn’t get to this, however.

Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.

Done.

Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)

I did work on this, but only reduced the line count by about 3%, to about 1460, and the word count by about 2%, to about 35,500.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

None.

Now, for the next month. All this task-rearranging has left my task tracker’s estimates of “velocity” even more unreliable than usual, and I’m also changing to a new methodology, so I will again state modest goals for the near term but hope to far exceed them.

Write at least three character histories.
Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least four characters.
For “snowflake step 4” of The Invasion, expand each sentence of my single-paragraph plot summary into at least a paragraph.
For “snowflake step 5” of The Invasion, write “character synopses” of at least three of the principal characters.

(The “worldbuilding” side is not forgotten, but all the tasks for the next while are of the form “create tasks for …”, which has to be done but I try to avoid mentioning in my goals.)

We’ll see how this goes. God willing, I’ll have some progress of some sort to report in mid-February.

Filed under: Status updates

Shine Cycle 2016 Review, 2017 Goals

At the beginning of another year, I again pause briefly to take stock of the past year and look forward to the next, specifically looking at how what I accomplished compared to the goals I had set and then setting new ones. I looked at my “miscellaneous” goals on Saturday; today, I’ll look back over how much I accomplished on the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation in the past year, and set new goals.

2016 Goals

First, let’s see how I did compared to the goals I set a year ago for the Shine Cycle.

At the time, I said

Because I forgot to check my “intermediate goals” for 2015 until it was time to check all the goals, I’ve decided against setting “intermediate goals.” However, if I remember I intend to briefly check how I’m doing midway through the year, perhaps in July.

I didn’t remember, so this is the first and only review for 2016.

Outlining

Goal: In my iterative outlining, get at least “super-sequence” or “pre-sequence” outlines for at least six Alternate Universes stories.

For once: Success! Not only six, but all the Alternate Universes stories (except for a few that I have decided to shelve indefinitely because I couldn’t think of a suitable story concept) are at the “pre-sequence” level.

Stretch Goal: Get at least sequence-level outlines for at least two Alternate Universes stories.

This, however, I didn’t get to.

Goal: Decide on point-of-view characters for at least six Alternate Universes stories.

Nor this, at least not “officially.” For most of them I suspect the Quester will be the point-of-view character, but I don’t haven’t given the question enough thought.

Goal: Get at least two of the Game of Life sub-series to at least the sequence level, and at least five more to the super-sequence level.

I don’t remember where things stood at the beginning of 2016, but four of the “Game of Life” stories’ outlines are at the “sequence” level, and all the rest are at the “pre-sequence” level. Success!

Stretch Goal: Get at least five Game of Life stories to at least the sequence level. (Including the two from the previous goal.)

Four, as I said, are there, so I nearly met this “stretch goal.”

Stretch Goal: Get at least one Game of Life story outlined to at least the scene level.

On the other hand, I didn’t get to this point.

Goal: Get at least eight other non-“main-line” planned stories outlined to at least the super-sequence level.
Stretch Goal: Get at least one of those stories outlined to at least the sequence level.

Again, I don’t remember where exactly things stood in January, but at the moment five non-“main-line” stories’ outlines are merely at the pre-sequence level, and two are at the sequence level, and there really aren’t any other stories that are in my file of story outlines as mere concepts. So while I may not have quite hit the target I set, I’m counting this as a success.

Goal: Decide on point-of-view characters for Anarchy and at least the first third of the Reignalmia sub-series
Stretch Goal: Decide on point-of-view characters for all of the Reignalmia series.

Done and done.

Goal: Have at least one “polished” logline.
Stretch Goal: Have at least three “polished” loglines.

With a great deal of help from my friend who writes under the name Aubrey Hansen, I revised and “polished” seven loglines this year. (Thank you!)

Goal: Get at least fifteen planned stories to at least step 2 (the first being the logline) of the “snowflake method”.
Stretch Goal: Get at least twenty planned stories to at least step 2 of the “snowflake method.”

Skimming through the version-control log of my “writing” repository, I count twenty-nine “snowflake step 2” additions in the last year. I haven’t done this for any of the “Alternate Universes” stories yet, but all of “the main line” and the “Game of Life” sub-series have “the snowflake method” at least to step 2.

Stretch Goal: Get to at least step 3 of the “snowflake method” for at least one story.

Done: I finished step 3 for two stories, and may yet finish it for a third before you read this.

Goal: Create précis for at least five planned novels that I don’t already have one for.

More than done: I wrote twenty-two précis this year, and except for the story ideas that I shelved indefinitely because I couldn’t think at all of how to develop them into a plot, every story currently planned for the Shine Cycle now has a précis. (Not all have appeared on this blog yet because I’m posting one a month; they’re scheduled to continue until the last of them has been posted in this coming July.) I am again deeply grateful to Aubrey for her help in developing my ideas from “concept spark” to “something resembling a plot,” and especially in coming up with titles.

Goal: Carefully check at least ten previously-posted précis against subsequent development.

This, on the other hand, I didn’t get to.

Character Development

Goal: Write at least fifteen character biographies or histories.
Stretch Goal: Write at least twenty character biographies or histories.

I wrote nearly seventy character biographies, but only one character history (to my surprise; I thought I had written at least five character histories this year). So a great success here.

Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least five characters.
Stretch Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least ten characters.

I wrote thirty of these.

Worldbuilding

Goal: Answer at least seven questions from the “worldbuilding questions” devised by Patricia Wrede
Stretch Goal: Finish this pass (which leaves some notes like “TODO: answer this in more detail,” but should give at least some answer to every question) through the Wrede questions.

I did finish this pass through the questions.

Actual Prose

Stretch Goal: Get at least halfway (probably about 50,000 words, but assessed using the outline if the story turns out to be significantly shorter than that would indicate) through a draft of one of the (intended-to-be-novel-length) stories I’ve done at least preliminary planning for.

Sigh. I got a couple of hundred words this fall, and no more.

Blogging

Goal: Post at least twelve Shine Cycle-related posts (not including writing status updates, year-end retrospectives, and the like) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least eighteen Shine Cycle-related posts (with the same exclusions) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post (with the same exclusions) to this blog every month.

Even setting aside posts that are already written and scheduled to run in 2017, I posted 23 Shine Cycle-related posts … very nearly two a month.

2017 Goals

Unlike previous years, I am not going to simply move the “interval under consideration” in my task tracker forward. In 2017, I want to focus on one story and get it as close to a “publishable” state as I can within the year. I still intend to work on worldbuilding and character development, but instead of making incremental “plotting” improvements to each story in turn, I want to apply my thought on that to just one story all year.

Outlining

Objective: Finish a complete and detailed outline of my chosen story.

Goal: Choose the story to focus on by the end of January.
Goal: In my iterative outlining, outline that story by scene
Goal: Follow the “snowflake method” to at least Step 7 for that story.

TODO: anything else here?

Character Development

Since I want to keep making at least some progress this year on filling out my character database, but want to spend most of my effort on whichever story I choose, I’m going to simply repeat my goals in this area from last year, but omit the “stretch goals.”

Objective: Have a biography, history, description, and “character logline” or “motivation summary” for every named character.

Goal: Write at least fifteen character biographies or histories.
Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least five characters.



Worldbuilding

My previously-usual worldbuilding objective, answering the “Wrede worldbuilding questions” for the setting of the Shine Cycle as a whole, is finally (all but) complete. Those answers could use another pass through them, to fix all the items I marked to come back to to add more detail, but that’s not worth making a whole-year goal.

On the other hand, unless I totally reorganize my task tracker again (after the tedious task of reordering the “plotting” tasks to focus on one story at a time), “at the current rate” all of my “worldbuilding” tasks for the next year and more will be planning tasks, making detailed lists of what needs to be done for creating maps and setting up tasks in my task tracker for “fractalling” secondary cultures. None of which really lends itself to a goal here either—though I may decide to schedule the tasks I create for some of those at the front, rather than the back, of the queue, so I’ll still list Objectives for those.

But on the gripping hand, after all those planning tasks come a series of tractable tasks for actual development, which will make a fine “stretch goal.”

Objective: Create sufficiently-complete, sufficiently-detailed, maps of the worlds and areas with which the Shine Cycle is concerned.
Objective: Develop each race and culture that the Shine Cycle is concerned with sufficiently to portray it distinctly and excite potential readers’ interest.

Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the “race fractalling system” for elves.



Actual Prose

Goal: Get at least a quarter of the way through the first draft of the story I decide to focus on this year, or 25,000 words in, whichever comes first.
Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the first draft, or 50,000 words in the story I’m focusing on this year.

Blogging

Objective: Regularly post substantive Shine Cycle-related content here, as an incentive to continued progress and to attract interested future readers.

Goal: Post at least twelve Shine Cycle-related posts (not including writing status updates, year-end retrospectives, and the like) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least eighteen Shine Cycle-related posts (with the same exclusions) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post (with the same exclusions) to this blog every month.


Objective: Create blog posts using “worldbuilding” material created using the various “systems” and question sets.

Goal: In the process of transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” to “background essays,” reduce the length of (the temporary copy of) the former by at least half. It currently stands at about 1500 lines and 36,000 words.
Stretch Goal: Finish transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” into “background essays” and schedule the first post using that material to run on this blog.

We’ll see how the year goes. Fellow writers, do you have any plans for the new year? And do any of my readers have any thoughts on which story I should focus on this year?

Filed under: Shine Cycle