Writing
I've been bouncing around a bit, trying to find the plot. After the last post, I finally managed out some plot arcs an start on writing. I got through the prologue, a really rough first chapter, and the third chapter before I realized two things: 1) My outline is too sparse, 2) I didn't have quite enough conflict. These are related. For this project, I had mostly thrown out the 3-act structure ideas, and just tried to break my story down into roughly 30 scenes. The plot arcs are much more closely tied than in Ariadne's Labyrinth, which I consider a good thing (the golem plot never quite fit into the rest of the story). The problem is that not every plot point has conflict, and so not every plot point is really strong enough to carry a 3000 word chapter. For example, chapter 3 that I wrote ended up combining 2 of the plot points, and still had about 5-600 extra words of drudgery inserted just to make the wordcount. My current plan is to look more closely at the 3-act structure again, add in a couple extra subplots to explore some themes, and try and line up the climaxes better. This might entail slight changes to the ending, since I realized I was missing the really dramatic climax.
I have sorted out more of the magic system, strangely enough by ignoring the issue I was having earlier. It's more cohesive, but there's a little thread of uncertainty as to how robust it is. I'll try and get up a dedicated post about it over the next few days.
I don't know how much I've talked about this project. The Kat Files came out of a conversation with a friend (strangely enough, named Kat). All she did was offer the working title though. I wrote the first few pages of a script, as part of a severely reduced Script Frenzy endeavor. Finding the plot for this piece has been a lot more difficult. After writing in one direction for the plot (making the plot about her friend finding out about the war and trying to get herself involved), I stumbled across a much more interesting plot involving blood. Because it's always about blood. The problem of course is that this plot really came out in the penultimate scene. The current plan is to revisit the first couple scenes, either compressing them severely, or cutting them entirely, and moving the penultimate scene to the beginning, and moving forward from there. The plus side here is that the plot is much more interesting. From a story structure perspective, I had originally planned on 7 scenes, but after discussion with the writing group, I'm not convinced that having a scene for each of the 7 plot points I'd laid out is a good thing. The piece has also been tentatively retitled as Dirty Angel for the time being. Whether this seems to lend itself more to a porn title than an animation remains to be seen.
I think my ties to the 7-point structure is becoming more of a hindrance. The idea is really meaningful, and I think it structures the vast majority of plots. The problem I seem to be having is that not every plot point stands on it's own as a chapter. And that's okay. This is a much too literal interpretation of the method. I think what really needs to happen is that these plot points should set out a skeleton for the plot. Some chapters can support multpile points, and sometimes multiple chapters are needed to support a single point. And so, instead of driving chapters, these events are things that need to happen during the course of the plot. The plot however, is going to be dancing around them and will become much more centered on interesting conflicts for the characters. Looking forward, I think I'm going to try two experiments. Hopefully by putting these out on the blog, I'm going to be held accountable for them. The first, I'm going to select one of my favorite books: Haunted, by Kelley Armstrong. I'm going to do a chapter-by-chapter structural analysis. Hopefully from there, I can try and extract these 7-points, scenes and sequels, and the three act structure, to see how they all fit together. If some are missing, then that's okay too. The second experiment is to try a scene-sequel outline holding the 7-point plots in my head (or on wiki, as it may become). With any luck, this will be informed by the first.
Depending on how the first experiment goes, I may also try a similar approach with Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear, both by Patrick Rothfuss. This has been kicking around in my head due to two things: 1) My marathon read of Wise Man's Fear (for those of you who hadn't heard, I read the entire 900+ page book in one, 13 hour, sitting.) 2) Mark Reads. If you haven't read him, I highly suggest it. The project started at buzznet, when he started reading Harry Potter and Twilight. He went through each story one chapter at a time, and blogged about his reactions. He's since bought his own domain (markreads.net) and has continued. The idea of a chapter-by-chapter reactionary blog post is really interesting, and it's fun to watch him rediscover books you love (or hate) and watch his reactions. I've thought about doing a similar review of the two Patrick Rothfuss books, but since there's 250+ chapters between them, this would take most of a year, even blogging daily. Still, a quicker pace might still be a meaningful experiment for the summer.
Art
I've been delayed in my art and modeling projects, mostly due to work, writing and reading. The reading challenge has taken up much more of my time than I originally anticipated, and so some of my other projects haven't gotten done. I may not do much more modeling this year. I hope to still finish the logo I've been working on, and will do some preliminary design work for my AetherCodex project, but the modeling for the Dirty Angel movie will be postponed.
Reading
I won't be doing a full dump of the books I've read recently in this blog post. I'll try and do a dedicated one in a couple of days. I'm slightly behind on the challenge, about 10 books (At 36/150). This can be fixed with a couple dedicated reading days, but that may not be possible until the summer.
