Wow

Jesus Christ, 1,407 words from me at this time of night. There has got to be something wrong with my internal clock.

Sigh, Titles...

So, there are already two books called, verbatim, The Dollmaker.

This depresses me.

An Update

I'm still outlining - my schedule got away from me a little bit, so I'm not quite finished (but of course outlining is never really finished, per se).

I'm also trying, rather desperately, not to let myself go back and edit everything I've already done. This shooting through to the end thing is not what I'm used to, and it's HARD. But I know it's necessary, and I have to do it if I ever want to complete anything, ever, in my life, so I'll push through to the end. I just wish I could somehow lock up all previously worked on files until the end of July, to keep my pesky editor-brain from poking at them.

The Candlestick-maker

Because I feel like doing something OTHER than outlining for a few minutes...

You get a list of the characters I have, so far, made up for this story. This is mostly so I can see it laid out in front of me. Because I like to see all my hard work laid out in front of me. Call me egomaniacal if you like.

Characters:

- Matt (protagonist) (don't know if he has a last name or not, but I got Borrilius as a middle name today, which my Muse loves despite my Me being very skeptical about the entire business)

- The Dollmaker (whose first name is Simon, but my Muse apparently hates surnames for this story so he doesn't have one either)

- Kirin (real name Kiruss)

- Kinai (real name Kaisuss) (no surnames for either of them either)

- Miss Pan (who probably has a first name but I don't know what it is)

- Micajah (who definitively DOESN'T have a surname, so HA)

- The crazy man who dies (whose name I don't know and it isn't important anyway)

- His daughter (whose name I don't know, which may or may not be important)

- The tomato man (who is in one scene and then goes away)

- Sister Bertha (who needs a name change but my muse is horribly irritating about picking ugly names today so I'm waiting until it's in a better mood)

- Various nuns (who will probably, you know, develop personalities at some point but until then...)

- Various street urchins (who may develop names but aren't really important enough to have personalities outside of obnoxious)

- The butcher (who doesn't have name)

- The baker

- The candlestick-maker

Aaaaaaand my subconscious has ceased being amused with this and needs to move on to something else, apparently.

Pre-Plotting Day 1

I did most of the pre-plotting on Dollmaker today. And get this - I actually got something from asking my characters questions and having them answer in first-person for the FIRST TIME EVER, which was very exciting. I quite like this villain - he's much better developed and more sympathetic than any other villain I've ever written or thought about writing, while still being... well, y'know, evil. This is rather nice.

Since I said I'd talk more about this project... here goes: The Dollmaker is shaping up to be a 40,000 word dark fantasy short novel. The idea originated months ago, but when I found out that Holly Lisle, one of my favorite writers of books about writing (though I've never read any of her actual novels beyond samples), was going to start an e-zine... well, I wanted to submit something, and I had this idea that wasn't quite complex enough to make a full novel, but a short novel? Well. Everyone needs a summer project, right?

Eheh.

So, here's my summary sentence of this project:

"An adolescent orphan boy becomes apprentice to his city's Dollmaker, unknowing of his master's specialty: making human dolls."

I've done all the pre-plotting. Generating scenes and outlining comes tomorrow.

And so it begins...

Hey, you know that "dark fantasy with almost horror-ish undertones"?

I'm writing it. It's tentatively titled "The Dollmaker," and I'm 3318 words in - and that's before I've done any real plotting on the thing (which I hope to work on over the weekend). Up until now I've just been typing out scenes as they occurred to me and playing around a bit with character ideas and motivations.

Seriously, though, I've been getting some good stuff. And, despite having a horrible, disgusting sinus infection plaguing my respiratory system, I was really quite productive today. I had a net gain of around two thousand words on Dollmaker, and I went through a two-hour long character workshop in which I got some really excellent character sketches for another story.

I also did some "story spirals" last night and got a lot of okay bits mixed with some truly excellent material, including a fleshed out, thoughtful, and somewhat whimsical idea for a novel - maybe a children's novel, maybe something more adult. And that's all I think I'm going to say for now. I should explain what a "story spiral" is in a later post sometime; I think it's something I'll be using when I'm low on ideas (...which, lately, is never, but you never know).

Expect more info on the Dollmaker project later. For now, sleep.