Elves should have mathematicians, too

I have been playing far too much Battle for Wesnoth lately. I'm tempted to start writing my own scenarios, but do I really have any idea how to balance difficulty? No, I do not. (But the two-player campaign, which tells the tale of the forbidden love between an elf ninja (er, sorceress) and an orcish ninja (er, assassin)! Or the revisionist history in which you learn Queen Asheviere's not as evil as she looks! It's just the circumstances*!)

My Camp Nano novel has been rather diverted from the story I was actually intending to write (an adventure story about mind control devices posing as party toys) into revisions for New Trenham story one -- I'm still producing words, so I'm counting them, but it's not the story I expected. (Also, the revisions are rather more in depth than I expected, as in multiple full scene rewrites.)

The second month of what I've been reading will show up eventually.


*There are a lot of circumstances to play with, as revealed in Delfador's Memoirs, although designing the final mission so that the objective is for Asheviere to get killed would be all sorts of interesting (but we know it happens in Heir to the Throne, and there's a limit to how far this revisionist stuff should go. Motives, yes. Actual things that happen in-scenario, harder).

The title is Geoffrey's fault, but very little of the content is.

We cannot get out. Outside is equally a disaster, hot and humid and waterless so you sweat and it does nothing and you've no way to replace it. There's no water on the train.

There's not much of anything – no juice, no chips, a choice of one kind of soda or one kind of beer or something stronger but smaller and still more dehydrating. They restocked in New York, they said, but it's all gone now. And the train isn't moving.

We see the other trains inch by, and even their inching seems enviable. The only mercies are that it grows late and we sit in shadows; we can no longer say for sure that the air is gone.

We hoard water – well, soda and ice, what's left of them. We cannot tell how long they will need to last, and we would rather not chance the restrooms. I haven't gone back there since I saw the man lurking.

Understand, the restrooms have long since ceased to be a location one would occupy by choice, if indeed they ever were. Small, disordered – seat covers shoved into the trash can, blue flush-water starting to back up – they begin to smell like portapotties. And he's waiting there.

He keeps the door ajar, light and odor filtering through that slit into the hallway, into the rest of the car. We do not walk by there – without food, without water, covered in sweat, excretion will become unnecessary. Or so we tell ourselves.

Thought shuts down in this endless sea of heat. We endure, but we make no progress. We will never make progress.

There is no exit. There is no way out. But when we tire of this which is no longer life, he will still be there, in the restroom, waiting.

Er, this is the obligatory* 10000 words into NaNoWriMo whine that I'm writing garbage.

I think the problem is that I am very well acquainted with the global plot of It's Still Desertion but have only the vaguest notion what the local plot is. I'd try to make an analogy with the definition of differentiable manifolds, but 1) it would be a bad analogy, the sort that get tangled somewhere in the middle and stop making any coherent sense, and 2) differentiable manifolds would probably just make some of you more confused even if the analogy itself didn't.

Suffice it to say that I know the big events, the transitions between sections of the story, but I have only a general outline of what happens between these things (Emeryis and his family travel around the Peninsula being a theater troupe, as per usual. Diolene is caught with suspicious people once or twice, and spends a lot of time at the post office. Eater attacks become more frequent. Diolene leaves.) Unfortunately, that's not a lot of information for several years of in-story time, and I haven't figured out my minor characters enough (at least the ones who are currently around) to let them carry the local plot.

So the current plan is to write a vague sketch of the local plot and focus on the bits I do know, which will hopefully make more sense than they did last year. And then sometime I'll get around to figuring out the details of the local plot. But probably not during Nano, because time for planning one's story is not in abundance.

At least I'm pretty sure I have enough story that I can get away with skipping the local plot and not run out of words.



*Where by obligatory I don't mean that one must always write such a whine at such a point in November, only that my current feelings towards my story suggested that such a whine was necessary. . . . Fine, mostly I just wanted to use the word obligatory.

"Guard my back" \neq "Jeopardize my negotiations with the cannibals by randomly shooting me". In case anyone besides Harmonia was wondering. End part three.

(Um, technically the above sentences are going to refer to stuff that won't make it into the wordcount until tomorrow morning, since I think I'll get it written more efficiently if I turn the computer off and switch to paper. But still.)

And I've reached part three, and Harmonia is actually a character. I'm not sure how much of part three I'm actually going to write properly in this draft, since this would be one of the sections that would probably benefit from some sort of outline that I never actually made (etc, etc, etc). Maybe I'll aim to hit part four on Friday or Saturday. Goals are nice.

But somehow I haven't managed to actually get into it in the last ~hour (in which I've theoretically been writing, by which we really mean putting laundry in the wash and reading the internet). And now I'm starting to write this entry rather than settling down and writing properly.

Not that this is improper writing. (Edith: I should hope not!) But it's not helping my wordcount.

Last night we had gratuitous tree description. Tonight we have gratuitous cloth description. I think I'm going to resort to Write or Die, because I am getting nowhere fast.

And another thing that is totally not my Nano: Click the appallingly pink dragon egg and its friends, please!


Also, this place? Seems pretty thoroughly amazing. As I may or may not have mentioned to some of you, I'm in search of Ace boots, because I am in desperate need of new shoes and her boots are AMAZING. They don't really seem to exist anywhere, though. But there's something on that site that might work, and I figured I'd look around and see what else they had, too. And that's how I was wasting time before the dragon thing.

I suppose I should think about sleeping now. More words can happen tomorrow. After I get my algebra exam done.

22,054 / 50,000 (44.1%)

I'm stopping for the night at least partially because I reached a palindromic wordcount at the end of a sentence, so clearly that's a good stopping point. Today's writing featured an incredibly incoherent midnight gunfight in the mountains between two groups of people wearing white (this will be very high on my list of things to edit once November is over), and the end of Part I. My prose was even more incoherent than usual (although perhaps produced more efficiently) thanks to this site, the link to which was included in yesterday's jolly writing club email.

17,071 / 50,000 (34.1%)

If I can manage to actually get some writing done before school tomorrow, that would be awesome, although it's probably highly unlikely.

7,008 / 50,000 (14.0%)

Emeryis is trying to avoid a shopping trip.

I think (since I clearly have far too much time on my hands and no idea what to do with it) I will try to rewrite and lengthen Good Cleric, Bad Cleric during July. And make it actually make sense.

And all those things that stories are supposed to do.