Sunday morning scribbling

Got up, went to church, had breakfast, now sipping good strong coffee (love my cheapie Melitta cone!) catching up on my journal, and working on a long-abandoned sci-fi story that got just a wee bit tangled up (read: the original plot got up and fled in protest).

Pencils. Plus coffee. Life is good.

Should work on the garden later, but waiting for warmth.

Made myself a story board!

As I mentioned a few posts back, I decided to go back and try to untangle and complete a sci-fi sort of story I started years ago. That story is, in short, a mess of epic proportions. It has multiple plot lines and narrative voices, and--just to make it all the more fun--the original plot line upon which all other plot lines were constructed...wrote itself out of the story. It doesn't fit anymore. Most of the characters that were a major part of that plot line don't fit. Which means the whole rest of the mess needs to be extricated from the grip of the dead plot line and rewritten to stand alone.

Now, as I've mentioned a time or two, I'm pretty much a seat-of-the-pants sort of writer. Planning would not have kept me from this mess. I end up in these sorts of situations every darned time, planning or no. But now, I need to redo time lines to make bits and pieces match up, and trying to hold it all in my head wasn't working. It's the primary reason I shelved the story to begin with. I need to visualize where people are supposed to be and when and where so all the narratives line up.

I've tried coming at this a few different ways: writing up a synopsis (I got lost), drawing up tables (I got lost), attempting to draw a time line on paper (I got lost, ran out of room, and kept remembering additional scenes I needed to cram in). I decided I needed something I could easily see all at once, *and* restructure until I have it all straight. A cork board seemed like a logical choice: something I could see and touch and move around to my heart's content.



Cork squares are on sale a lot of places this time of year--they're a cheap alternative to full bulletin boards. Not as nice looking, no, nor as sturdy...but you can make a four foot bulletin board for under ten bucks! Not bad. If I lived somewhere with really awesome thrift stores that had used cork boards in great condition, I'd probably do that instead, but I don't. These should work fine for just paper, though, which is all I really want them for. And it was nice to be able to define my own shape.

The squares I bought came with little foam mounting squares. Not knowing if they'd come with such a thing or not, I bought some Scotch brand mounting squares. I didn't buy quite enough of the Scotch squares to use all around, because I grabbed a pack *before* I decided to get two packages of cork squares. In retrospect, and for future reference...I should have bought more Scotch squares. The mounting foam thingies that came with the cork squares were eeeeeeeevil. Horribly, horribly evil. In particular, they had an absolutely maddening tendency to adhere to their own backing paper, so when you tried to peel it off to reveal the stickum, a whole layer of foam would peel away, revealing a completely not-sticky and useless interior layer.



I said some bad words in my head a few times on the squares where I used those. The Scotch squares, in contrast, were easy peasy--peel, stick, peel, stick. No drama. And they strike me as much sturdier as well. Worth the price of admittance.

I still have to play with this setup and figure out how best to make it work for me, but I have a good feeling about it. I'm going to mark some dates or at least year markers on the paper strips, and for the moment I'm using different colored cards for different characters--not really essential, but I like how bright it looks. Hopefully I can finally get this thing figured out so I can get back to writing!

Vignette #4 - Daybreak

I'm behind on these things, I think...had a bad cold/flu thing over the weekend that pretty much put me down for the count. For the record, reading peculiar sci-fi whilst feverish can lead to some interesting sorta waking dream type things. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. This has nothing to do with the vignette, however.



In other news, somewhere between the peculiar sci-fi and the waking dreams and some other reading, I'm really fired up about finally finishing my first sci-fi novel...not this past year's NaNoWriMo project, but an older story. It needs to be taken apart at the seams and completely and ruthlessly rewritten, so I'd shelved it for ages. But now...I think I have enough distance from the initial writing that I can carve it up and start again. Yay for a summer writing project!

Monday random excerpt

That day was pretty typical, the day we met. Typical for me, anyway. We’d just been let out for morning recess – the older kids on their side of the yard and we on ours. As usual, I started a ruckus. One of the littlest kids had taken out a candy bar, so I ran up, yanked it away and pushed him down. Then I ran off, and turned back to taunt him with my mouth full of chocolate. All seems pretty stupid, looking back. And a pretty rotten thing for me to do. Like I said, I was a rotten brat. And I knew the teacher who was supposed to be watching us wasn’t there and figured I could get away with it.

What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the little kid I was bullying happened to be the baby brother of the biggest guy in school. Don’t recall the guy’s name now, but I couldn’t forget his face. Or his fists, for that matter. He was a big hairy brute of a guy – one of those guys that had to start shaving before they were out of grade school – and built like a gorilla: thick-necked and broad-shouldered with long arms and fists like nine-pound hammers. He caught sight of me picking on his kid brother and rules or no rules he came charging over the fence between the yards like an enraged bull. Before I could run or duck out of the way – I was quick; it was my only defense considering what a puny runt I was – he had me flat on my back on the ground and those hammer-fists of his were coming down and coming down. I’d had the snot whupped out of me before, but I think that was the first time I actually had my life flash before me. For once I was actually sorry there wasn’t a teacher on watch. And being as how we were on the little kid side of the fence, no one else did anything but watch and snivel.

I don’t know how long the guy would have kept on. Until he busted my head in, I figure, and though I’ve got a good healthy skull, his fists were healthier. Luckily Alan risked getting in trouble himself, jumped the fence, and pulled the guy off me before he knocked the ever-loving tar out of me. Like everyone else, the big guy respected Alan – everyone did, even people who didn’t like him – so he grudgingly went back to where he belonged, glaring back over his shoulder as he climbed the fence.

Alan helped me up. I had a black eye and bloodied nose, which wasn’t so terrible considering, but I must have looked pretty bad. He said, “You OK, kid?” And I spit on his shoe. That’s the kind of ungrateful wretch I was – I spit on his shoe. He’d shown to everyone that I’d gotten myself into a mess I couldn’t get out of. He’d embarrassed me; that’s how I saw it.