foxinthestars

Yup, I made it! The badge is significantly uglier than the one I got in '05, but still.

Of course, the crucial question is "Now what?" I got through probably half or less of the plan I have to finish the story, and in '05, I broke down quickly after NaNo was over, so this time I must try to do better. If you all want me to continue blogging drafts, let me know, although I might (or might not) do it anyway. When I started back to work on the FY Mirrorverse here, my plan was actually to draft it all the way to the end before polishing it up for FF.net and such (I also got on the waiting list for Ao3), and I haven't quite decided if I'll hold to that or not.

But anyway, one last time...



(Actually the NaNo site gives my count as 50,031, but here I used the RoughDraft word count for the sake of consistency.)

( And one last Daily Cut leaves off with Mitsukake in mid-angst... )

Today was not such a good day. The trip to church kind of wore me out, and I think I'm also coming up to some scenes I feel intimidated by, which is slowing me down, and with one thing and another I barely made over a thousand words today. I had built up enough slack that I'm still ahead of schedule, though, and I just need to knuckle down in the next two days...



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I wanted to get to 44k today, and I did. If I can keep up 2k per day, I can finish a day early.

Today was Genbu Chapter denouement, which I plan to do some more of tomorrow. Hiro also kind of sort of gets his own scene for I think the first time since restarting, and it includes this: "Inside the closed book, words inscribed themselves, unobserved by anyone." That line strikes me as vaguely creepy in a way that I just love.



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Can I just say w00t! I'm here a little earlier than usual, and despite yesterday's setback, I didn't want to give up my goal of eliminating the shortfall for the second time, so today I just took it in hand, wrote about 2500 words, and am back on track!

I did finish Umiyame's test and get Keisuke off his butt finally (there are things that will happen), but there is also a long, talky scene that I might want to restructure in revisions (ideally some flashbacks might be better than the Genbu Seishi just talking, but today I couldn't get my head together to do the mental work they would require), but for now, it does the job. If all goes according to plan, we'll hear more about Takiko later when we meet Suzuno, but, never having read Genbu Kaden, I of course was designing her from scratch. I did Google Image Search what she looked like, but frankly I thought it was pretty nondescript, and I wanted to give her something in the way of a period hairstyle, so I was doodling and came up with this:



But anyway, back on track and only 6 days to go! Of course, once I get past the Genbu Seishi's bit, it'll get harder---wah, action set-piece coming up, hard!---but it would be a shame to get this far and not see it through, right?



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Another day, another little bite out of my shortfall; it's not gone but it has gotten quite small. (I probably should have just killed it today, but I got lazy as it got late...)

It's a fun scene here, getting to play with the ghostly Genbu Seishi. It might be kind of out of control, like no coherent progression of mood, but for now, forging ahead.



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Today was a good day, even if I did suffer the usual mood swings and indulge in a long talky scene; I didn't quite make up my shortfall, but I took a big chunk out of it. On a whim, I took the laptop down to my former church (right next door to the house; we still know the people there and have keys to it) and worked there for awhile, then I was able to get more done this evening, got to a point of productively gaming myself with the stats the NaNo site shows (I'm so close to 1800 for today, just a little more... Now can I do 1900... That kind of thing.), and ended up with good progress; I had wanted to make it to 33k today, so doing that made me happy.

And now, in lieu of pithy comments, allow me to share a song that I have associated with FY and particularly Mirrorverse Yui ever since back in the day:





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Again, made the daily goal, and took just a little bite out of my shortfall. Sadly that means I didn't make it to 30k on time, but it'll be okay. I think the problem was a crisis of confidence about the plot point I'm doing here (it's lame! it's transparent!), but I think today I finally committed to it and am forging ahead more effectively. Hemming and hawing your way into something like that makes for some flabby prose, but NaNo is not the time to start trimming fat...

I also keep forgetting that Tama exists; when I get to revisions, I'll have to make him more of a consistent presence.

And if I can just digress about FY for a little, one of the (many) places where problems come up if you think about it too hard is that for as huge a deal as this whole Seishi-gathering God-summoning thing seems to be to the people of this world --- I mean it's only the incarnation phase of their religion, and I seem to recall at least in the nonsense OVA some suggestion that it was a cyclical thing (which in the Mirrorverse we took and ran with). But anyway, for something that important, the people of that world seem stunningly ignorant about how the whole thing works. For the Seishi to go around addressing each other by their constellation names should really just be a dead giveaway on the order of flashing neon. IIRC there was something about Tamahome being teased as a child for having the character on his head, which would be a lot less believable without this massive ignorance. You would half expect even the ubiquitous street thugs to realize that if you encounter a young woman in really weird clothes suffering from profound culture shock, there are more advantageous things to do than attempt to violate her (thus opening yourself up to the near certainty of someone with super powers showing up and beating the stuffing out of you). In the Mirrorverse, Konan actually has an excuse because they were conquered and occupied by Kutou for centuries and just regained their independence in the last hundred years (yes, that was the first phase of our/my ongoing quest to make this war about something), so there you could assume that the cultural institutions that would normally transmit the knowledge were disrupted or destroyed. Barring that, though, it just comes across as not thinking through the worldbuilding worth a damn, but if we open that can of worms regarding FY, we might never see the bottom of it...

But anyway!



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Synchronicity happens; one day after I said I was hungry for Tempura Sushi, we went to Midway, a favorite Chinese restaurant of mine that serves a little bit of Sushi, and there on their blackboard of "Sushi Specials" was "Shrimp Tempura Roll." It was tasty.

On the NaNo front, however, after dragging myself through yesterday, I hit a wall today (of tired-brain and lack of confidence) and am throwing in the towel for the evening a thousand words short. I don't think it will stay this bad, though, and I'll just have to work to make it up in the next several days, wanting to do so by Sunday night at the very latest. (I might even skip church this week; I think it's the children's program or something like that...)

Among other things, Internal Critic has been getting onto me about overutilizing Hotohori, but I could always remind it about the original FY as best I remember it, how large stretches of Season 2 made you wonder why the hell anybody but Miaka and Tamahome was even there...

But anyway, my embarrassing daily accounting:



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Today my weekly trip to Jefferson City wore me out, so I ended up getting a late start and was all bracing myself to fall short, but no, I pulled it out. I'll definitely have to stick with it tomorrow so I can reach the halfway point on schedule.

BTW, little PSA in case anyone else is using the NaNoWriMo site: when I signed up I set my time zone, and it didn't automatically adjust for the end of Daylight Savings Time. Since I tend to get my daily bit done and submit the new word count between 11 and midnight, it was counting me as a day late. I will try not to let it get that down to the wire on the 30th, but if it came to that and I hadn't caught the problem, yeah...

Anyway, in today's installment, Tamahome is depressed because Miboshi is a bastard. And you might know from the beginning how this is going to end, but when Internal Critic tried to say that made it a useless exercise, I didn't think so anyway. (Characterization and stuff! Tamahome deserved to get a scene.)



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PS: The way Chichiri talks is another thing I wouldn't do again, at least not without some ground rules that could keep it both reasonably consistent and moderated to a manageable level (say, only simple declarative sentences), but it was already so well established, I'm stuck with it.

On LJ, I got friended by what appears to be a spambot today.

But NaNo! I am still on schedule and over the 20k mark!

Worldbuilding fluff continues and includes the realization that the moral valence of the whole Kutou/Konan thing is so skewed in FY that yes, the other empires would be crazy not to have a preference, whether they feel like they can act on it or not. For the first time this NaNo, the Miaka/Nakago contingent gets camera time, and I did have fun hitting up the internet for a mid-'90's hit J-Pop song. I know Miaka actually dropped some names in the original; danged if I can remember what they were a decade later, but B'z maybe rang a bell...? (For your entertainment, this is Love Phantom.)

I played Miaka a bit softer (for now), but when I was rereading the old stuff (and finding that it wasn’t that good), I wouldn’t say she was well-realized, mind, but looking back on it, our crazy evil Miaka might have been the most interesting character, because she was driven by this tangle of internal contradictions. She doesn’t want to be evil, but she wants to win at all costs and has convinced herself that the collateral damage isn’t real, but then if push comes to shove she doesn’t exactly believe that, either. She doesn’t want to be like she is, but perceives every offer of help as a threat and throws it aside. That's not such a stretch, if I can manage to write it reasonably well...

But anyway!



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