Elysae Shar's Blog, page 2

Ready For Camp NaNo

If I had any doubt about letting Mist and its universe go, the past two or so days got rid of those. After finishing Lost and Found, I spent a while building a skeleton for Camp NaNo and I haven’t been so excited to write something probably since the first version of What Lies Within.

Granted, not wanting to work too far ahead before the first, I’m only about 4k words in but, considering I was barely eeking out 200 words a day before that…

I didn’t dare set my Camp goal any higher than 15k because at the rate I was going even that would have been a stretch. I’ll leave it there for now. It’s not like  I have to stop writing the moment I hit that goal.

In case anyone cares to follow my progress, I’ll be posting chapters of Of Heroes and Magic Mishaps as I finish them here.

In other news Lost and Found is now available on Amazon. Other vendors are still updating their listings.

[image error]As long as you don’t get lost, exploring caves is fun. Unfortunately, wannabe adventurer Sidr does get lost and ends up in a cavern deep underground. There he runs into a colony of weird creatures that don’t appreciate his presence. To make matters worse, the creatures’ battle cry brings down part of the ceiling, leaving Sidr with only one direction to go.

Can he find his way back to the surface before his lack of supplies catches up with him? And why is the ground shaking?

Find out in Lost and Found.

After a Week of Struggling my Laptop Decided to Live

About ten days ago, I came home from a quick grocery run to find the threaded BSOD gracing my screen. Rebooted and everything seemed fine. Until an hour later my laptop decided to crash again. I ran repairs and updated drivers in between hourly crashes.

Around Friday, it crashed while booting due to unmountable boot volume. And though, I loathe the thing, I’ve never been so glad, I kept my old desktop. At least, that allowed my to look up possible solutions (I’m a smartphone hater). Got it running again after about five hours.  Now featuring infernally long boot times.

After some looking around and for a bit, amidst several more crashes (now about once every twelve hours) I narrowed down to bad sectors on my C: drive. And as most of these occurred sometime after running Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition but never without or during, I figured the two were related. Then in a last ditch effort, because I won’t have

Then in a last ditch effort, because I won’t have time or opportunity to get a new drive until next week at the earliest, I moved the Documents folder to D: on Monday. It’s the only thing Baldur’s Gate accesses directly and might try to modify during or after shutdown.

Whether I was right or not, my boot times are back to normal and I haven’t had a crash since.

So, I Suck…

Since my last post here, I’ve managed to reset my browser to default a full three times. I’m still trying to recover all my sites and logins. The fact that I had a blog kind of got lost in the process and I only remembered now because I finished the rewrite of No Such Thing (now Lost and Found) and sent it through D2D to get the epub for Amazon. It’s up for pre-order on Amazon and all D2D vendors here, or you can read the pre-final edit version on fictionpress. Release date is the 31st.

On the writing front, I’ve come to realize that Mist has too much baggage attached to it for me to ever turn it into a decent story. It’s twenty years of story crammed into one and I can’t gain the distance to separate them. So, I’ve let it go. Maybe it was never meant to be or I’m just not ready for it but starting fresh’s been surprisingly freeing. Though I’ll likely filch the world at some point.

Never Realized How Important “You” is

I’m still trudging my way through Mist, though I’m starting to recover from my November push. But going slow has made me overly aware of how hard to handle the speech quirk of one of the main characters is. I figured omitting “you” would be unique enough and provide a few awkward situations. It fits with his background and all, but some sentences get so awkward or roundabout that I’m likely to drop it come revision. Shame. When it works, it does the job well, but I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle.

In comparison, the protagonist trying to communicate in a variation of a language he hasn’t heard or spoken since childhood has a far better payout and creates world depth at the same time. I really need to make a list of the “foreign” terms I used and what they mean before I start getting them confused

Guess I Don’t Get to Own a Working Mouse

After going through about three wireless mice this year (all suffering from malfunctioning wheels), I caved and bought a wired one a few months ago. And, thanks to me getting caught on the cable at least once a day, it lasted even shorter. On Saturday evening, it  split along the seams. It can’t click anymore, but the wheel still works… Good thing, I kept all the wireless ones. So, now  I’m being stubborn and using two mice: One that can’t click and one that can’t scroll. I’ll get sick of it eventually, but until then, this works.

On the writing front, I’m still working my way out of the post-November funk, but Mist is coming along nicely. My villains are actually behaving the part for once. That’s a massive victory right there. I did ditch a lot of what I wrote during NaNo because it no longer fit the story

Of Half-told Stories and Glaring Mistakes

While Mist still holds the majority of my attention, I’ve also been trying to come up with a more gripping blurb for What Lies Within. I failed, but it made me realize that WLW starts in the middle of the story rather than at the beginning. It should have started with Ash learning of the house’s imminent demolition and his decision to go there before it’s too late, not with him already there.

Not really sure what to do with that. A rewrite would turn it into a completely different, though deeper, story, but I’m not sure it’s worth doing. I might just write Ash Manor of as my “training wheels” series. At least I got a lot of time to decide. I’m not touching anything else until the first draft of Mist is done.

On a happier note, the “forced” NaNo break on  No Such Thing allowed me to realize that there’s a massive consistency error right on the first page.

The main character is lost deep inside a cave and carries that world’s version of a gaslamp. The lamp has been out of fuel for hours, yet, when he drops it, he sees the shards scatter. A little later, he also sees a path branch off from the main path.

I guess, distance really helps.

This is Why 10k Days are Bad for Me

Yes, I finished NaNoWriMo on day twelve but, it left me beyond drained. I spent almost a week puttering around at 100 to 200 words a day and am now slowly working my way back up. All in all, I’d probably be farther along with my project had I not pushed myself.

It’s not as bad as the 2014 hole, I guess. Back then, it took me almost six months to recover from my NaNo push.

It does set my schedule for the rest of the year, though. I’d thought of maybe squeezing Ash Manor IV and/or the rewrite of  No Such Thing into December but, I want to finish Mist before I even think of working on anything else. So, for now, my calendar is wiped off everything else.

Maybe next year, I’ll have learned my lesson…

Take That 50k

After two exhausting ~10k days, I hit 50k yesterday. I’m, of course, far from done with this rewrite but I’m taking today off and then I’ll continue at a far more comfortable pace for the rest of the month. Gonna have to see now which of the original scenes are salvageable enough to keep and copy them in.

Oddly enough, this is the first time I didn’t get hit by the 2nd week slump.

NaNoWriMo Day Four

Got almost 3k today. Broke my usual pattern though and skipped ahead to the final scenes. I just know that it’ll be completely useless when I get to that point, but today was one of those just-can’t-get-into-it days. Useless words are still better than no words.

The original version of this story featured a scene with two characters going completely off course to find some cinnamon. Wrote it with struck-out text, too because I never meant to keep it. Later on, it became the short story Cinnamon in John & Other Stories and it shattered that writer’s block.

NaNoWriMo Day Three and a Pleasant Surprise

Another 2.2k and the inciting incident in the bag. Everyone’s in place and the minor antagonists are finally on the move.

And Amazon finally price matched me. So, What Lies within is now free everywhere.