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the online home of nathaniel payne

The re-colonization of like-minded gamersOctober 1

Yeah, I know, blogging moratorium, interrupting my writing flow, yadda yadda — but this is important.

I fled the Evil Avatar community a long time ago. Quietly, and under my own terms. There were a few reasons for this, not the least of which was the venom and disgust with which some members regarded any Nintendo fan, rational or otherwise. Other reasons include the more marketable answer of “the site is blocked at work”, which it IS, but is a minuscule fact that sidesteps the more anti-Nintendo community sentiment issue with a gait that is every bit as troubling as it is WIDE.

The other problem was the fact that visiting the site sank me into a deep timehole from which minutes and hours would never be regained, regardless of the amount of quantum math tossed at the equation. I couldn’t function. Hitting refresh was just too accessible a drug.

I was happy I left, but I missed some of the community terribly.

Then, sometime this summer, there was a strange bit of drama on the boards that I caught wind of through various channels. Evil Avatar (I’m referring to Philip Hansen, the site owner here, not the site itself) began a rampage of bans and thread deletions, all surrounding something to do with “magic PCs”. You can read a bit about it on PlayItReviewIt. I don’t fully understand all the details, but from what I DO

Derailed!September 26

My word count on my novel will be pathetically miniscule this week, as I have suffered a major setback. That setback was not medical, mental, or spiritual. It was merely a side-effect of my inability to focus on anything for any extended period of time.

Sometime this past weekend, I caught on a great (or so I thought) idea for a short story. And it wouldn’t leave my head, no matter how hard I shook it. It was bad enough, that I couldn’t concentrate on the novel, since the genres for the two concepts were diametrically opposed to each other. So, I told myself that I would take a day away from the novel to hammer out the short story, get it out of my head, and then carry on with the novel.

You can probably guess how that brilliant plan worked out.

Here I am, I haven’t touched the novel in three days, and I’ve been struggling to pull this threadbare short story concept together. I’ve pulled too much mental capacity away from the novel, and now even thinking about it makes me cringe.

Yep. I derailed myself.

All this situation does is serve as a gentle reminder to several great truths.

1) Writing is work. Let no one ever tell you any different.

2) Stopping one sort of writing to do another, different sort of writing does indeed kill motivation. Now I don’t just have someone’s word on it, I have personal experience to back me up.

3) The wife was right.

So, tomorrow I pull myself back up by th

Novel progress: week 1September 21

I’m not going to make this a habit because I don’t want to attempt to switch too often between “blog writer” and “fiction writer” hats. It doesn’t hurt, but it kills my motivation.

But I had to mark this occasion. Yesterday, I hit 4,300 words, which is just 50 words over my first week goal. It was slow going at first, but I punched out a ton of words Thursday and Friday evenings, and managed to make my goal this first week. I’m rewarding myself at 10,000 words by purchasing Mega Man 9 off the WiiWare channel. But I’ll likely hold the game hostage from myself until after I finish the novel. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve also finished the first two chapters of the novel. So far, I’m really happy with what I’ve created so far. I can see some spots already that I want to polish up, but I’m forcing myself to wait until after it’s all written to go back and edit.

Only fifteen weeks to go. Fifteen weeks which include holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and my birthday. Yikes.

I’ve moved my novel progress information to my new novel page. You can look it up there. The chart will be updated there, as it was in the previous post before.

Okay. Today includes a birthday party for my son, but then this evening it’s back to writing. Another week, another 4,250 word goal.

      

Track the progress of my novelSeptember 14

The outline is complete. I’ve now bolted down the first words in my second attempt at writing a novel (first attempt was for NaNoWriMo, and as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t actually count).

So now, I need to be held accountable for actually getting this sorry scrap-heap of nonsense into an actual, honest-to-goodness palatable work of fiction. And you can help! Or just sit there on the sidelines and watch as I go down in an all too-unremarkable blaze of pain and suffering.

If it worked correctly, there should be a chart embedded below. My goal is to write approximately 68-70K words in 16 weeks (roughly a full novel by the end of the year). This puts me at a weekly goal of about 4,250 words. I will update my count daily, and as each week passes, I hope to keep the blue line (my word count) at least marginally above the red line (my weekly goal). Fun, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Chart moved to novel page

If at the end of any week (for reference, my weeks are measured as Sunday through Saturday) I’m not at my goal for the week, shoot me an email (in the sidebar on the right), or leave a comment telling me to get off my sorry ass and get to writing. I swear I won’t get mad. Maybe.

See you in December!

John Scalzi is a genius and I hate him for itSeptember 10

(I’m still on my blogging moratorium - but I needed to get this out while it was still swimming around in my head)

I don’t really hate John Scalzi, but I do.

I just finished The Last Colony the other night, and it was - as expected - completely excellent in every conceivable way. Indeed, the entire Old Man’s War series has been nothing short of a marvelous masterwork of literary perfection. Scalzi has created an imaginative universe, with a truly original concept, and told the story with the skill of an accomplished narrative voice.

And that’s why I hate him.

Here I am, a wanna-be author. I’ve written several short stories, and I’m now attempting to begin work on my first novel. The outline is (mostly) complete, the notes are sufficiently scribbled, and the concept of the thing is nearly implacable in my mind. But I stare at it, unwilling to even write one single word. Why? Because nothing I will be able to write will match what other writers - especially John Scalzi - have been able to create.

I know, I know, I shouldn’t allow the quality of existing works or authors to influence whether or not I write myself. Who knows how many hundreds or thousands of great novels might never have been written if the author wearily claimed that they would never be