Welcome to the BURN CENTER!

Hey folks, Jonny Napalm here welcoming you to my charred little corner of the sky. Here I will be sharing views on all the things I love and adore and loathe with the burning passion of a thousand suns. Be aware.. my views tend to the nerdtastic, so... you are warned.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

NANOWRIMO Day 29..

So here we are at the end of November and NANOWRIMO is almost done.  How'd I do?  Pretty good if I do say so myself.  While I didn't have my 50k words set to go when they opened up finalization on Monday, I did manage to get there today.  I'm pretty proud of myself to be honest.  Now I just need to keep up the writing habit.  Now you may be asking where my story is at...and the funny thing is it's just getting started.

When I started this project my impulse when I first started writing was to go with a series of short stories all in a collective world to try and establish this environment that I wanted to write in.  Then I actually started writing the Characters, and the environment, and some of the events going on and I discovered that it wasn't going to be a series of short stories...unless I decided to make them all 100 pages.

So I now have a story I'm really enjoying writing, and want to re-visit.  But I'm feeling like writing something else for a bit.  And I feel like I can justify working on something else now that I don't have the finish of NANO looming.

Honestly I'm just looking forward to writing some more stuff.  I don't know if I'll ever manage enough material to publish or anything, but the fact that I finally feel like I got past my internal editor?  That's feeling like a step in the right direction.

I'm thinking I could use a bit more structure on my next big writing project though instead of letting the story grow on it's own like this one did.  I'll need to revisit some old writing lessons about plotlines, character development and stuff like that.  A fantastic writer named Frea O'Scanlin (at least that's what she's told me to call her), pointed out some web based lessons on Creative Writing by Brandon Sanderson.  I'm likely going to be spending the next week watching those and seeing what I can build with his advice.  Between him and Michael Stackpoles 'The Secrets' a wonderful podcast and newsletter all about writing, I think I'll be able to do some more to develop this habit into something more.

I hope anyhow.  Hope your days are as full as you want them to be.  With all the joy and good fortune you can find.
Til later

Thursday, November 8, 2012

NANOWRIMO Day 8

So...I've been hard at work...well hardly AT WORK but I've been trying to put some serious time in on writing my novel each day.  And coming from a REALLY rough start it's starting to shape itself into a story that I'm pretty excited about.  I keep finding myself focusing on a mantra for myself "Just keep writing into the next scene.  Just keep writing into the next scene."  And it feels like it's working pretty well.  As long as I manage to find some time each day to go somewhere I'm NOT comfortable and just sit down and WRITE for a while I manage to get some really solid material out.

I mean, I'm at 16000 words today.  Of my story.  And each day I look at it and find some more material to keep going on.  Granted most of the time I have to force myself away from my computer to not go back and EDIT bits and pieces.  (NO, bad Jonny.  Editing is for December.)  But if I can keep at this pace for EACH DAY.  Just manage 2000 words a day, maybe a few more, I'll have my 50,000 well before the end of the month.  I love that idea.  Having a good chunk of a novel finished before the end of a month.

Now, I just need to cement this as a habit for EVERY day and then I'll be making some serious progress.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Blitzing Badguys...in Borderlands 2.

Another day, another posting.  I really should be working on some original fiction of my own, but I'm having a hard time shutting off my internal editor to get more material out instead of going BACK to the stuff I've written.  It's much more challenging than you'd think.
Still, I've got ideas popping up anytime I'm doing ANYTHING else.  I really need to start keeping better notes.  Anyone know good ways to take them while in the shower?  My paper keeps getting soggy.
Anyway, onto the title material.
I loved the original Borderlands.  It was ridiculously easy to jump in and play, fun to barrel around in the zones with your friends and kill stuff.  It played a lot like Diablo in many ways, huge amounts of loot with varied looks and some really interesting variations in play.
Borderlands 2?  More of the same, all the great gunplay, all the ridiculous comedy.  The game plays like the craziest sci-fi western ever.  And all the guns?  There really doesn't seem to be ANY end to them.  Even the ones you get from quest drops see MASSIVE variation.  It's really quite impressive.
While the single player is the best way to get to all the great comedy in the story, but what really makes the game fun is the multiplayer.  Nothing is quite so much fun as running around the wilds of Pandora with your 3 friends blasting every Psycho, Bandit, Marauder and Elite out there.  It's bloody, fast, quick and fun.  All the things that we were looking for in a sequel.
Gotta say, the ability to sit down with a buddy in his basement and rock out blasting away at bad guys. It's very therapeutic for ANY kinds of stress.  Though I'm sure that getting a couple thousand more words done in my NANOWRIMO journal will work just as well.