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Feeling a little burnt out on drawing after working on a long visual arts pet project, so I decided to shift gears to prose writing and give nanowrimo a shot this year. https://nanowrimo.org/participants/plum-night I've had an idea milling about in my notebook for about a year now that can basically be summed up as "queer Fire Emblem about a trans boy who self-actualizes through his found family, but the group risks being torn apart by their obligations to family and country when open conflict arises and a century-old injustice comes to light." Toss in a Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind kind of setting, with mysterious ecological magic, all of which is still barely sketched out yet. I love fantasy comics, movies, and video games, but I almost never read fantasy novels, so this is kind of an exercise in seeing what will come out when I try to synthesize my normal reading habits with some of my other interests. Definitely not going to count all the outlining and character sketching notes toward my wordcount. The whole sketching ideas out in a notebook thing is something I started doing a while ago, and it's gotten me a ton of raw material, but I'm really curious to see how well that actually enables me to write the story itself.
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Oct 28, 2021 04:18
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:50 |
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Not sure if this is the best place to ask, but anyone have recommendations for resources on medieval combat techniques and tactics? The characters in my story are training to become knights, but I don't really know very much about ancient warfare lol. I know a little bit of kendo technique, and vanishingly little about spear, shield, archery, or western swordsmanship techniques, and I'd love to remedy that for the good of my creative output. The first thing that comes to mind for me is just youtubing HEMA videos and things like naginata-do tournaments and using those for inspiration, but I'm sure there must be some good books or other resources out there that are handy for creatives.
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Nov 1, 2021 21:02
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Thanks for the feedback! I'll be sure to check out that channel. I think the nearby university has a HEMA club too, so maybe in the future I can try to chat with them. I got a bit of a head start, but on the other hand I'm also mostly working on a typewriter for fun so I don't know what the actual word count is yet. Finished page 9. Introduced some queer fantasy teens, showed off their magic powers (protagonist can control wind from his hands and feet, another character has power over biomineralization and can create crystallized forms of minerals found in the human body), and quickly got them to a position where they have to enter a military skirmish against a band of bandits holed up in the nearby village. Right now I'm mostly operating under the presumption of "if I'm not bored by what's going on, then maybe the reader won't be bored either" and just trying to keep the momentum going. I have a loose sketch of where the story will go eventually, but it's kind of like working from the beginning and the end to try to fill in the middle.
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Nov 2, 2021 06:04
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Finished page 12. In an act of supreme silliness, I'm writing entirely analog--either with a notebook and pen or with a manual typewriter. It's definitely not efficient to use a typewriter (it might actually be even slower than handwriting?), but there's something about having a stack of A4 paper, all numbered at the top right corner, gradually accumulating in size each day. It really makes each page feel like a tangible accomplishment. My newbie knight-in-training trans boy, Sorrel, just plunged a spear into a bandit archer and killed someone for the first time. He has no time to feel bad about it, because his squad has several more bandits to contend with first. I'm starting to see why not many people actually try NaNoWriMo. Between work, exercise, and writing, I'm lucky to get to bed at 2 in the morning.
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Nov 4, 2021 07:08
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Leng posted:I need to know: how are you avoiding hand cramps? by being a slow af writer! when I was transcribing my handwritten pages to typeface (to later transcribe again to computer, I know), I noticed just how clunky and laborious a typewriter can be. But when i'm writing one word at a time, i'm not typing nearly as fast. Plus I've been contending with things like "okay, if I said the squad of 9 trainees is squaring off against a dozen bandits, and two of them have bows, then that would mean spacially, the spearmen would be around here, and the hatchetmen would be here, and the biggest threat would be..." So there's no risk of overworking my hands lol.
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Nov 4, 2021 15:44
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This is my little writing buddy. He grumpily tolerates the sound of me clacking away on a typewriter in the middle of the night. I finished chapter 1 of my rough draft at around 23 pages. Set up a ton of plot hooks, realized I might have too many characters, and took a story about magic knights-in-training and made the protagonist immediately repulsed by violence after killing his first bandit. I feel like the conventional storytelling logic says that I should let him actually get some training in first, THEN have to fight someone and kill them, and then realize the weight of what he's been practicing for. But in a way just immediately diving into "i thought this was a job for the pure of heart, but actually it's really horrible" feels pretty exciting. who knows what direction things will go in? It's pretty fun. I got burnt out so bad doing creative writing in college, I thought it was maybe impossible for me to actually enjoy writing anything. Just the act of finding joy in writing again is really liberating.
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Nov 17, 2021 02:49
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it's 1 AM, I'm on page 29, and I spent over an hour writing a single page describing a dead gay prince's secret painting hanging on his knight's wall i think i'm probably living the truest version of myself. GJ to everyone who can actually keep to a deadline!
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Nov 29, 2021 07:08
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:50 |
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I typed the first few pages into my word processor and multiplied that by the number of pages I've written, and I'm in the ballpark of 11,000 words. More than anything else, it's given me the writing bug again after being burnt out for like 5 years. So I have to consider it a rousing success on a personal level, even if it's not the standard NaNoWriMo victory. I'm now in the conundrum that I've been studying drawing for the past few years in my spare time, but now I'm all-in on my queer fantasy novel. The joys and sorrows of having too many interests. Once again, congrats to everyone!
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Dec 1, 2021 05:36
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