Month: April 2011

I’m still working on my monthly painting goals.  March’s goal was to finish my Cryx army.  You can’t see the details in this photo because the army’s so big, but I’m more pleased with the way they look as a force than the way they look individually.

Don’t be too impressed with my diligence, though.  It’s all been done for a year and a half except for two models.  Finally got those two painted in March, and for the first time in four years all of my Cryx models have paint on them.  This is my main faction, so I’ll be adding to it, but at least the backlog is gone.

April’s goal is my Malifaux force, and I’m almost done with it.  Five models down, one to go.

I was going through my blog today pulling some links to some posts, which caused me to re-read most of last year’s entries.

I had almost forgotten how busy last year was. There were just way too many things to accomplish in way too short a time. I’m happy to report that my efforts last August to slow our lives down have been successful. Drew has had a really busy couple of months, but it’s busy in the sane sense, as opposed to the insane pace of last year. I really just can’t do that again, and I’m glad that I know that and can set some boundaries for myself.

In my reading I ran across my post about our business starting to hold even. That put some things in perspective for me, since we’re now making quite a profit off Drew’s business–it pays almost all the bills, so that my writing money only has to supplement it a tiny bit. We have a healthier financial buffer these days, which is nice–especially when everything we own decides to fall apart over the course of a few months. Oh, and our bills have increased just a little since then, what with the whole mortgage and house-sized utilities thing. I really need to stop worrying about money, because while we still have to be really careful, we’re doing fine, and worrying about the future is just borrowing tomorrow’s trouble.

In the next few months, I intend to do some more posts about writing and self-employment, because, you know, that’s what’s going on in my life right now, so that’s what I have thoughts about. There are a bunch of things that I know I’ve said on the internet before, but are not in my archives, which means that I either said them in comments or they are somewhere in the recesses of my livejournal that I’m not going to import. So if you hear some repeats from me, sorry. Most of it should be new stuff, though, because a lot has changed in the last couple of years.

And on a completely random note, we finished Final Fantasy X-2 last night. The game was really bad, but it transformed into awesomeness when we started imagining that these weren’t the actual events, but Rikku’s spontaneous retelling of the game. The dialog is much better when Rikku says “and then shewas all,” or “and then I was all” before each line. We added Rikku’s other thoughts as our very own MST3K. I just wish they’d subtitled the game “Rikku’s Random Adventures,” because that would have made it all worth it. On the bright side, they didn’t really touch the story from X, so nothing was ruined, and we broke the mechanics halfway through the game, and didn’t have to fight another random encounter after that. I’m pretty sure we finished the game at about half the level we were supposed to be.

I tried this new outlining thing yesterday. I’ve been less and less satisfied with my old outlining process lately–it’s all well and good to get the plot down, but especially for my more character-centric books, it’s hard to keep track of what every character is supposed to be doing and thinking all the time. I end up leaving out side characters entirely, their motivations pop in and out in early drafts. The same is true of plot threads. Even though I write with an outline, I end up having to go back and re-outline before each revision.

The last re-outline I did involved a piece of paper with arcs drawn all over it in a sort of timeline. That was helpful, but doing these things on paper meant it was hard to move things around in a fluid way. And I haven’t found a computer program with the kind of free-moving elements I want when I’m outlining. I want to be able to draw arrows and write notes in margins, and that’s really more a by-hand kind of thing.

What I really wanted was to use a big wall-sized space. I had this idea of using post-its, but the post-its fall off and flutter away and are generally annoying. Taping them all to the wall was way too much work.

Enter my big wall of plastic. I went to Wal-mart (though any fabric store will do) and bought two yards of clear plastic sheeting, the kind one can use to cover tables. Then I tacked it to my laundry room wall and went at it with dry erase markers. (FYI, I discovered later that wet-erase markers are easier to erase on this surface, but they don’t write as well. Take your pick.)

For this outline, I wrote the plot events down the left side of the wall and the characters across the top. For each plot event, I filled in what each of the applicable characters are thinking, feeling, and doing. This way I haven’t forgotten anybody at any stage of the book. I can tell where I’ll need one scene for the actual plot event, containing the reactions and complications of the present characters, and where I’ll need to add additional scenes for the non-present characters to talk and react about what’s going on. I’ve got not just my plot arc outlined, but also a full arc for each character in the book, down to the very minor ones. I changed a lot of things as I went, but I could erase and move elements easily.

Since the wall-outline would by pretty unwieldy for actual writing, I typed it all into a spreadsheet today. I don’t like the spreadsheet for composing, because it’s so hard to look at the whole thing at once, but it’s a nice portable record now that I’ve got it all set.

It took some elbow grease getting the dry erase marker off the plastic (really, next time I’m using wet erase. I’m also going to be more intentional about my color coding–probably one color per character). I’m not sure how this would work for a book with multiple viewpoints. (I don’t write those.) Maybe one color per viewpoint? If anyone tries it, let me know how it goes.

This afternoon I started writing another novel outline up on my wall–one I’ve had outlined and tried to write, but wasn’t developed enough to be a successful first draft. For that one, I’ve written both the characters and the different plot threads along the top of the sheet, so I can keep track of not just the characters, but also the thematic elements. As I fill in the sheet, I can tell when certain characters or elements fall out of the story for chapters at a time, and make decisions about whether or not that’s what I want them to do.

The process helped me find the problem in my second outline: the first four characters are really fleshed out, but the rest of the arcs are all but empty. Guess I have some invention to do on that one. My wall may be staying up for a while, while the ideas percolate.

My tulips are blooming. I took this photo just an hour ago. Now the yard is covered in snow. Ah, Utah spring.