BurningFist_EU

Phew! After two days of building up to the climax of this battle I finally got there, or at least halfway through the climax. If it reads half as well as it wrote I'll be a very happy man. It's insanely long though, that one chapter will be well over 6,000 words when its finished, although I know I'll be able to shave a thousand off when it comes to editing. I may also cut it into two chapters as there's a good place to end one and start another.

Altogether a productive day with a big decision made about the storyline and a nice chunk of verbiage about a battle that has been quite daunting. That story decision has made a big difference, I'm no longer worried about saving space for something that really deserved a story of its own.

22,156 words to go and finally it doesn't seem so far to go

Get typing Coile

Rolling along slowly at the moment. I want to finish this chapter before going onto the now much simpler bit ahead. In my admittedly rudimentary notes this battle didn't look too big, but its turned into a huge multi-chapter set piece. I'm still not happy about it having got so big but it does set things up for the rest of the story while at the same time expanding on a few characters.

Anyway, enough of the procrastination, time to see how my entrepid heroes get out of this pickle I've written them into.

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One of the things that's nagging me is that with the tight deadline I'm keeping more redundant text than I should be and, worse still, I'm actually adding to it to justify its presence. I'm not sure if I'd call it padding but it is taking away some of the focus.

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The good side of redundant text is that you get to experiment where that particular bit should actually fall and makes you think better what is really relevant. Both immensly helpful things when the editing starts.

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Absolutely, it also helps you get a better feel for a character when you let them wander about outside the confines of the story. I don't know where I read it or who said it but I recall one novelist saying that most of what he writes never makes it into the final novel. Whoever it was obviously never did NaNoWriMo

Anyway, after a long and hard procrastinate, I've decided to dispense with one of the cooler ideas I had for the story right from the beginning. There's no way I could do it justice in the space that I can give it and it frees me from having to manage a (even bigger) mood change once Stalingrad is over. I'm toying with the idea of doing more with the characters and (de-CoXed) universe of H Company once this is finished so it may get used anyway.

Ding halfway.

My pace seems to be slowing at the moment and I've only hit the minimum words-per-day twice over the past four days. I'm still on schedule but I've used up all of my slack now.

One of the things that's nagging me is that with the tight deadline I'm keeping more redundant text than I should be and, worse still, I'm actually adding to it to justify its presence. I'm not sure if I'd call it padding but it is taking away some of the focus. Everything I've written has been useful even if it turns out that some of it doesn't belong in the actual text but I think better (or some) planning would've helped keep things tighter. That's one of the lessons to take away from this NaNoWriMo thing I guess.

On the other hand the story is progressing as it should (only a bit slower) so I shouldn't really be worrying about the flab. The time for that should be when the story is finished and the grizzly task of editing begins, but that'll be after the month is over anyway, so losing thousands of words won't be so painful. Or counterproductive

24,874 words to go.

/blogmode

26,221 words to go.

Ended up getting distracted from my big push past the 1500 words from before but I managed to bring todays count up to the nominally on-quota 1700 words, although I suspect some of that last block of 200 may need a bit of rewriting in the cold light of day. Still, 25,000 is well in sight for tomorrow so all is well.

Now it's time to hit that sack.

That's another 1500 or so words chucked on and there'll be more to follow. I seem to be on fire at the moment and I don't mean in the bad way.

I thought it was time for a new excerpt too. This one's hot off the, erm, word processor.

I should be able to make my target of 25,000 words by the 14th. Still not sure whether I'll make the 50,000 though; the last week in November is looking dodgy for being able to write much.

My personal goal is to get the whole thing finished by the 20th December. Even if I make the 50k by the end of this month there's no way the story will be finished by then.

27,964 words to go.

Chapter 4 is finished (the 7th of 18 now) and Chapter 5 is going to be a lot of fun to write now it's underway. I've also made a start on Chapter 12 but that's only a sentence atm. Hey, it all counts

The tricky, and fun, part of Chapter 5 will be making it segue with Chapter 6 which has been written for a while. It has to live up to the situation presented in 6 & 7 which leads to the awful events in Chapters 8 to 10.

Oh yeah, I got my video working this morning which means I can now run my collection of war films in the background for the ambience. Somehow it was easier writing about Stalingrad when fireworks were going off constantly.

/blogmode

Yesterday's blocked and bruised brainache has gone (yay for Oban's fine single malt ) and another chapter is well on the way. I may even have to split this chapter into two, mainly because the battle is turning out to be bigger than anticipated and partly because it would provide a nice bit of symmetry with the earlier battle scene.

The halfway mark is in sight now and I'm only on the 7th chapter of a projected 17. Either the story won't finish in 50,000 words or the pacing will go weird and the second half will be horribly stunted. I'm not going to worry too much about it, the story will tell itself and as long as I get as close to 50k as I can and get to the end of the story that's good enough for me, even if the two things don't happen at the same time.

28,631 words to go and more to come later.

/blogmode

Wrapped up another chapter today (that's 6 down, 11 to go) but the word count hasn't moved on much. The part of my brain that makes words come out in the order of a story actually feels painful, like its got sore from all the neurons running around in it.

BTW I too went to see the Prestige today. Not as good as I'd hoped but David Bowie was great as my favourite inventor.

As hoped, last night's scrappy chapter doesn't look so bad and I think I've managed to plaster over the cracks that were there. That chapter is getting close to done now, just a bit more writing to do and then some tidying up and then I'll be onto the next battle scene. I still need to figure out the general sweep of that one and, ideally, get another couple of chapters sketched out.

30,655 words to go.

31,392 words to go.

I think I'll take it a little easier on the writing tomorrow, I've not got as much done today as I'd hoped. The chapter I'm doing at the moment feels a bit scrappy and disjointed but its one of those where several unconnected things happen at the same time. Maybe it won't look so bad tomorrow and maybe what to do with it will seem clearer.

An easier day of it tomorrow will also give me chance to work out the new battle scene and some of the showdown scenes towards the end of the Stalingrad bit. There's a lot of uncharted territory very close now so I need to do some staring out of the window to get the details figured out. It's the uncharted territory that slows me down the most.

It's looking increasingly likely that I'm going to lose 3 or 4 days out of the last week of November which may be a problem for hitting the 50k. I am almost certain that the full story won't fit in 50k, I reckon it'll be more like 65k words. That said, the pace of the story should pick up in the second half.

/blogmode

Wrapped up another two chapters today which accounts for another 900 words. I've only got one chapter open at the moment which means I'm going to have to start thinking up some stuff to kick start another couple just so I've got something else to write when I stall on the bit I'm doing. I'm due another battle scene and I've just thought of the place to set it.

Ooh that's a good idea.

32,970 words to go. Thank the lord for verbose Nazi scientists with long monologues

Having decided that the Stalingrad section needed more room to breath, my new plan calls for a larger proportion of the story to be devoted to it. This makes me happier, plus it means I've just finished the 3rd of the projected 9 chapters set there with two more on the way to completion.

33,903 words to go with more due before bedtime. Hopefully another 903 or so.

Footnote:
I seem to be displaying strange, Chief Inspector Dreyfuss type symptoms when MS Word opens. This is only partially normal.

/blogmode

EDIT: and because I've managed to keep it, here's the bit I don't have to chop out now.

I got that email this morning and it came at exactly the right time. My original plan was to have 3 roughly equal size parts, the first set in Stalingrad, the last in Berlin and the middle one following H Company's adventures as they advance west.

Trouble is the Stalingrad section is heading somewhere other than I intended, leaving me with the uncomfortable choice of chopping a wodge out of what I've got so far and leaving a few key characters hanging, or running with it and see how it pans out. Happily, getting that email made the choice for me

34,992 words to go

Chapter 5 is proving problematic so I ended up provisionally cutting a wedge out of it and writing a chunk of chapter 3 instead.

And now, sleep.

667 words short of tonight's target atm and they won't be enough to close the last two chapters I wanted to finish. Not too bad a thing really, having read it over again my chapter 10 has a couple of possible starting points so I can leave that until chapter 9 has run its course. Chapter 5 needs a bit of a rewrite in one part so I'll basically be swapping out some wordage there for new stuff.

Chapter's 1 and 2 are done now and ahead of a small amount of keyhole surgery I can safely say I'm proud of them.

I'll take a break for cup of coffee and an episode of Monkey now then it's full steam to 15,000

I'm aiming to ding 15k before I hit the sack tonight. Hopefully that'll wrap up four of the five chapters I've been working on which'll clear the way to starting on a few others that desperately need to get underway.

So many threads so little time

There's no way I could write with a pad and pen these days. My old (old) English teacher would kill me if she saw me doing it but I tend to write the parts I have inspiration for and then cut and paste them in to the story where they belong. I find it a lot better than trying to write in order because if I get the block on one bit I can just switch to another bit later on in the story.

Maybe doing it this way will bite me in the bum later but it's working pretty good so far.

1,100 more words done tonight including a nice bit of dialogue that sets up one of the core relationships.

Glad I'm not the only one struggling at the moment. The only thing that kept me going tonight was knowing that if I didn't crack that dialogue today it would put a big dent in my motivation for tomorrow.

Keep at it guys, we'll get there in the end

36,709 words to go...

Slow going tonight, but I think I've finally managed to de-Gandalfise that character I was stuck on before.

I'll be glad to get out of Stalingrad; there are only so many ways that you can describe rubble, wreckage and ruin that's covered in snow. Two more battle scenes and a showdown and that'll be the meat of Part 1 done. Another thousand or so words to wrap it up then I can start thinking of ways to describe rubble, wreckage and ruin that's on fire for the Berlin chapters.

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My point: bases cost too much for what players think they deliver. What they currently deliver is the ability to create a social space for Super Groups that’s potentially customizable to the group’s theme/background/etc.

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Bases don't even feel like social spaces. The smallest plot has no room for social spaces if you want a functional base and the fact that you can't use it as an actual base by logging out and logging back in inside it kills any sense of it being social, a base or anything other than somewhere you occasionally go for minor QOL reasons when the loading/travel time to get to it doesn't render it redundant.

Pocket D is much more base like in so many respects. You can log out/in inside it, you can buy all the insps you will ever need there, with the update code you can get there from anywhere and it actually looks and feels like a real place rather than a grid of generic cubes with decorations scattered around.

Bases need to feel like they have a context. They need windowns, they need outdoor sections, they need irregularity and variation, they need NPC minions wandering around and operating the facilities, they need to feel like they're in the gameworld and they need to feel like they belong to the SG members. We are superheroes/villains. We should own skyscrapers, spacestations, underwater bases, tropical islands. Our bases should have monorails, arena-like training rooms, open spaces, Icon-like tailors, recreation rooms and members' quarters.

You really have to fight against the whole base system to get something that's not ugly and generic. I really enjoyed working on the NSA base (not that such a base or organisation exists) but, in the end, the amount of time you have to put in doesn't seem to warrant the results you get. And it only gets worse when the time comes to expand what you already crammed in the loathsome little square we were given to begin with.

We like our costumes because we can make them into just about anything we can think of and when we can't its fun trying to work around the limits. By comparison we have so little control over how our bases look and the whole design process is basically working around limits.

Wow. I didn't know bases disappointed me that much.

37,898 words to go and my brain is now blancmange.

On the plus side, I've got another battle scene done and this was a complicated one with loads things going on at once. I'm well ready to do a more sedate, character based chapter now.

And yes, it's pretty fun so far although I daresay it'll get painful toward the end of the month

EDIT: I just put up another excerpt, this one from the end of Chapter 2.

A productive day's procrastinating over a chunk of web updates I should be doing: 38,368 words to go with more to come later, all being well.

I think I've nailed my title too: The Heroes of H Company

It's got the word 'heroes' in it and it sounds like it could be a strip for one of those awesome war comics that got drowned in the bucket of mediocrity during 1980s by the fun-crushing doctrine of political correctness.