#iced rambles

*crosses arms* So. Go ahead and ask something for me too, I guess.

- Iced 💝

“I read a lot about this phenomenon. I read about it in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, in Reason, in the Guardian, in Spiked, in the New Statesman, in THES etc etc etc. Without exception, the pieces condemn student radicals for hiding from ideas, for curtailing free speech and for being anti-intellectual. The authors are almost invariably older journalists, authors and academics, at the tops of their professions.

It is not accurate to call this a debate. That would suggest two roughly equal sides putting their points of view with comparable prominence and allowing the audience to judge which has more merit. This issue is almost entirely one-way. An unholy alliance of liberal-left establishment and libertarian ideologues are collectively shitting on student radicals without the barest hint of a right to reply.”

I do actually have Aya as really old in my canon.  But I don’t trust ZUN ages, or really anyone’s ages.  People are really terrible with ages over 100.  Add in storyteller’s natural inclination to make everything “the biggest and best” (compare the number of 9 tailed foxes in fiction to 2-8 tailed foxes) and you wind up with ridiculous ages all over.  When you sit down and consider what happened over that time period, those 200 and 300 year chunks start looking a lot more impressive.

A youkai over 200 years old saw the creation of the barrier and the Bakamatsu first hand.

A youkai over 400 years old saw the formation of the Tokugawa Shogunate.  And it’s end.

A youkai over 800 years old saw the creation of the first shogunate, and the end of direct imperial rule.

Nue is 1000 years old, from the Heian period.

A youkai over 1400 years old would have seen Miko before she “died” and watch Byakuren’s life from birth until she was unsealed.

Kanako is probably less then 3000 years old despite forming the empire of Japan.

Everyone who hasn't played Ace Combat 5 is probably wondering why I'm tossing up what is pretty much just a mediocre song.

Everyone who has played Ace Combat 5 is probably remembering fighting two carrier groups in a desperate attempt to save the brave souls defecting to your side in the hopes of gaining peace.

So confession time: I've been very dismissive of National Novel Writing Month in the past.  This has been for a whole lot of reasons.  One because it's always been at a terrible time for people to work on it.  (Finals time?  Thanksgiving?  Seriously?)  Two because it encourages people to start a massive project when the biggest issues most fanfic writers I know (including myself) have are taking projects that are too big, or allowing big projects they have to expand without limit.  This is the reasons I always tell newer writers to finish up 5 or 6 shorts before grabbing that totally awesome project they haven't thought through.  Three because it tends to lead to a writing crash immediately afterward.  It is a rather grueling pace.

However this last spring I kinda collapsed completely as a writer.  I'd been losing focus in Touhou for a while (fuck you SoPM), and words just weren't coming.  ESR was dead in the water, and my own projects weren't much better.  In addition when I did write, I didn't get much response.  I'd started to question my ability to make anything good.  (Still hung up about that of course, but less so.  Writer thing.)  So in November I decided to try to kill two birds with one stone.  I'd sit down and write the Mabinogi ideas I had (since those ideas were actually flowing) and then see where my writing stood.  If I could write 50k words in a month I'd feel like a real writer again.

So I started Nano, and after a lot of scribbling I won.

And now that I've done it myself I can see it's incredibly useful as a tool.  Forcing myself to write over 1666 words a day made me learn a lot of what works and what doesn't for keeping a steady flow of words going.  So I'm gonna have to eat my words and say that NaNoWriMo is an excellent tool for refining your writing.  Even if you aren't one of the people that finishes with a story you feel capable of showing off.

Writing of course is a very personal thing, and I've found my writing style doesn't match a lot of the other writers I know.  Still I figured I'd toss it down in case one of the things I learned was useful.

1 - Set a long term goal, subdivided into short term goals.  I'm setting a 15000 word a month goal, with 500 words a day as the short term.  This allows me to judge my progress and keep focused on my writing, while still giving me the ability to take days off and meet my goal.  I'm aiming low both to counteract writers block, and because I want to meet it every month and maybe work extra rather then fail early on and lose steam.

2 - Make outlines.  Lots of outlines.  You always need to know both what you're doing in a scene and where you're going to for the next scene.  Writers block seems to strike the hardest when you aren't sure where you're going.  Whenever I get hung up about what I want to do NOW the words seem to freeze.  When I figure out what's next, the words flow much easier.

3 - Don't write online.  This might be just me, but I find writing into a browser to be a constant distraction.  Opening up a word processor and typing away at that allows me a lot more focus.  And since I automatically check my word count before leaving, I find it keeps me on task until I'm done.

4 - Mix things up.  If you really really really want to write something, but feel a obligation to another story, wait a bit to let the story you want to write mature, then write it.  Don't try to force a story when another story is working.  Use your spare words to keep up with your obligations, and switch your goal to finishing the story that works.  (Unless your obligations are a student paper or something.  Don't fail out.)