Tag: Excolo

Tagging

Been trying to write tags for Excolo on the phone. The fact that Swype changes “Excolo” to “Wiki” makes posting in the OOC a bit awkward.

Had a bit of a shock when I went to edit this post and remembered the draft was stored *locally* in my phone, not on the Dashboard I can get to by Internet.

I wrote a post about Glass having… I suppose that at seven months it’s not a miscarriage, but the phrase “having a stillbirth” sounds *entirely* wrong. It went over pretty well, I think; reaction posts that show you’ve hit the note you were aiming for are always satisfying.  (Earned a !caution tag, which I was hoping for but which I honestly wasn’t sure it merited.)  Next up I need to write something bouncy and cheerful, and then a couple of comfortable and mildly curious tags.

I think collaborative writing (and I do think it merits being called that) can actually really help you switch gears, especially when you’re working on more than one scene at once.  On the other hand, it can really leave you high and dry when it comes to practicing plotting.  Genuinely not knowing exactly what the other person is going to do, and trusting them to give you something to react to, doesn’t exactly give you a lot of practice in Getting An Idea.

And I honestly twitch when I hear people talking about their characters as if they were real people.  I understand that it can be a perfectly useful shorthand for “I have constructed an idea of a personality that, while I haven’t exactly sat down and analyzed it to death, is resiliant enough that I have a (sometimes unconcsious) idea of what the character in question will naturally tend to do.”  And that’s fine.

But the “I totally didn’t want to do this, $CHARACTER just screamed at me until I typed it, and hey maybe they will do my housework later if you bribe them” lines?  I… would call that not so fine.  I really would.  There’s a level of responsibility for conscious action that I get a bit uncomfortable over when I see it being eschewed.

Ugh.  That sentence needs editing.  Very badly.  I may come back to this later.

Marking time.

Light of my life appears to have gotten my Kobo working, which is wonderful.  My favourite short story on it came off Smashwords, and I was getting really frustrated with not having it handy.

(Oh, there’s a word count on this!  Handy.)

Taking advice on practicing time management; seeing if I can get down 200 words a day, reliably, until the end of October.

Other concerns ATM: very much behind on Excolo roundup, not enough sleep, top-to-bottom housecleaning due by Thursday night, work screw-up, general failure to write.

Writing a story with a friend, and between our schedules it’s bogging down.  Need to talk to her to find out how she feels about my writing pieces of it alone, or stories that use the set-up we’ve created.  I can see her disliking the idea, although I don’t think it’s likely.  I cannot see being comfortable with just going ahead with it without asking her.

Also for consideration: am I using this as an excuse to procrastinate?

I have a handful of ideas for Iolace, and two stories.  Unsurprisingly enough, neither of them is written yet.

Trying to coordinate my various journals, accounts, feeds, and any other ways that I track what people are doing online.  I like having them, but having them all over the place is not useful.  Not entirely sure how or if this will fit in with that; I’m hoping that if I organize everything else, this will naturally settle into its own niche.