Gotcha! I would actually be okay with the year-round school schedule where you still get July off and two-week breaks every quarter. That's awesome that you've been writing consistently for almost a whole year. I was just thinking this time last year is also when I got going on my burst of pandemic productivity with Heroic Measures and Road to Bethlehem. It's been a prolific writing year!
I wish we got all of July off. I keep suggesting it, lol. It's about a week or so. I haven't taken a vacation since last March and I was only gone a day. I may use some of that in July. Live a little... And by that, I mean absolutely hang out at home an extra week, relax, write, and do chores/run errands, lol.
Yup! November would be the start of my almost every day writing, but October is really when I started writing again, so I'm looking forward to it. The fact that I'll have most likely finished a novel by then is exciting too.
That's the fastest I've ever written something except back in my middle school/early high school days.
I'm excited that you finished up two stories in the past year and are now writing a third! That's great consistency!
Well, I ended up watching Titanic instead LOL. I've been wanting to watch Titanic for weeks (probably from all that listening to the soundtrack as my writing music), and this evening felt like a good time to do it. I may still go put on Unbreakable before the night is over, especially if I can't get any more written, but we'll see. I wrote like half a paragraph this morning, so I'm hoping to at least finish that before I get off the computer.
I think a Titanic night is well deserved! I'm glad you finally got to watch it; I know you wanted to when Tracy was finishing up If I Knew Then. As long as the streak's even a little bit alive, I'd say do what you want with your evening.
Whether that's writing or Unbreakable or Titanic again.
Hm... pick his nose? Make pancakes? Pick his nose and then make pancakes without washing his hands? I'm not sure what you're going for... just trying to think of Nickish things to do LOL.
LOL! Those are more along the lines of what I was trying to come up with, yes. He needs to wash his hands. This is why he's always sick. It just needs to be something that's enough for a little scene that would be funny to AJ and the audience... And I've drawn a blank. I finished the rest of that chapter, but yeah, I give up on that.
LOL! I love how fanfic research gives us so much knowledge to share. That kind of thing bugs me, too.
Don't even get me started on how much I hated Gods of Egypt, lol. Here are my thoughts on Thor: Ragnarok versus Radnarok the myth, in case anyone was curious:
Okay, now that I've slept, I'm ready to discuss Norse mythology with y'all. Admittedly, I don't know a lot on the details of Norse mythology; you wanna talk Ancient Egyptian mythology (or Greek), we could be here for days! So I did have to refresh myself on the details, but it did immediately strike me as "fast and loose," as I said. Of course I know that mythologies change over time, they're basically continuity stew, but there's one major reason for this that I will discuss in this essay, lol.
So we can obviously ignore that all our main characters would be dead, because if Marvel's Thor dies, well... then there's no more Marvel's Thor (or at least, Chris Hemsworth as Marvel's Thor...). And I am willing to accept suspension of disbelief for this aspect. The fight on the rainbow bridge is right, Loki getting/"teaming with" the fire devourer is right (though there should be several of them, not one, and we can call it a technical loophole on whether he's allied with them here), the giant wolf is right (though again, there's at least two of them).
Now my big issue here is the same one with most mythologies' portrayals in modern (or at least, non-contemporary to their time) media: Hela. Hel as a place is more ancient than Hel (not Hela) as a goddess -- similar to most mythologies' portrayals of death/the afterlife, though I'm not sure where Scandinavia falls on the scale of "creeped out by death" (like the Greeks were very creeped out by it; Egypt less so, but then again, most of the surviving artifacts we have are funerary in nature, so... who can say for sure).
Death is a natural part of life (albeit unknown and scary), but none of the ancient underworlds were all bad. They definitely had their horrifying parts (ask me to tell you some time about "he who dances in blood" from Ancient Egypt), but on a whole, they were pretty neutral. Everybody dies, they need a place to go, enter the underworld and someone to manage its day-to-day operations. But to a modern audience, "Lord of the Dead" automatically sounds horrifying because we mostly moved on from polytheistic religions, so it's very easy to make the leap from "Lord of the Dead" to "fire and brimstone Satan" (it's the same reason Hades gets a bad rap, when he's arguably the least problematic of the Greek gods; though again, death freaked the Greeks out, so he's also the least talked about in surviving texts).
And these "Satan analogues" make an easy, but cheap, villain for a modern audience. Realistically, all these Lords/Ladies of the Dead and psychopomps were neutral beings who happened to be underworld gods and goddesses that were just doing their job. Some of them have scarier aspects (and definitely don't make them mad because you're in for endless torment; luckily their hot buttons are often few), but on a whole, I'd call them pretty decent. And as I said, demonizing them for an easy analogue is cheap. Especially when there are plenty more problematic beings in mythology and even among the pantheons themselves.
Realistically, Thor's good versus evil thing is snakes (which is fairly common among mythologies, actually), ergo, the villain should have been a giant snake (and it was in the actual myth, for Thor specifically at least). This has been my diatribe on Ragnarok (the myth), I will now take questions if there are any. I am still also happy to discuss why a polearm (such as Hela's spears) is actually a great and accurate weapon for combat. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
But then again, y'all knew this type of thing was something I could discuss for a very long time, lol (though, as I mentioned, my off-hand knowledge of Norse mythology is much weaker).
Hahaha, I replied to your first post before I saw this one... but yeah... definitely did get distracted by an old movie as well. Forrest Gump is another great one! Long live the 90s!
Long live the 90's! I am not much better this evening; our dinner came and while we were eating, I ended up getting sucked into the 30 for 30 on the 1983 Draft, which is fine... except I've already seen it at least twice, lol.
I did get almost 700 words down this afternoon after spending an hour making myself an outline!
I kept thinking how you would be so proud.
(Although, this is around the same point in the novel where I ended up making a chapter-by-chapter outline for PBox too, and we all know how well that went as far as amount of detail, lol. Oh "Kevin's power to heal is awesome, also there's plants" you remain infamous.) I ultimately decided I probably do need to take the time to write one of the arcs fully before going back and forth to the other one because it has more clear events that need to happen. I want to make sure I give them all adequate chapter time based on what the story needs, rather than having to rush through them for the other arc, which has less events, so it feels more flexible in the number of chapters it could take up (even though they're ideally both about equal length arcs). My only real goal this weekend is to write bout 1,000 more words, because then I'll be a week ahead on my word count goal.
All this said, I have eleven chapters to go, plus that mundanely funny Nick scene I can't come up with, but that chapter is done otherwise, so I'm calling it done. That one was on the four days per chapter schedule, so I guess we'll see how quickly it goes sticking with one arc versus going between them. I wonder if I'll feel like writing the other one when I get to the parts I marked as cliffhangers. Not quite sure how I feel having an outline yet, lol.
Edited to Add (because I didn't want to make a new post):
Oh! I also found this compilation of twitter/tumblr jokes for writers today:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/alliehayes/writer-jokes-for-writers-who-write-sometimes?origin=web-hfI laughed so hard at the first one with Charlie and the string board because that's totally me. Also reacting to my own writing and the ones about character reactions to things I write and describing settings.
Author
Topic: The Writing Thread: Orlando Passaggio (aka The Writing Thread 3) (Read 452356 times)