Three stories, five books and not enough time

I realized today that I have actually started three separate books. I’m stunned. And worse, I don’t know what to write.

• Mermaids: This story revolves around a political turmoil in a mermaid world. Nessa is the youngest daughter of the king but wants to be queen. Under their government, she can be elected as queen.  However, it is only through the Adamahs, humans who have been changed to mermaids, that she can do this.  In this I have the election, and the result afterwards, and it’s really awesome. :)
• Intentional Accidents: This story revolves around two characters, a pirate and an assassin. They’re stories  interweaves into smiliar threads and storylines but I only know about the pirate. She is feeling lonely, hurt and wants off the pirate ship but doesn’t see a way to get off. A police man unknowingly gets on the pirate ship and encourages her to find her own way. The assassin is also tired of her life, wants out, but doesn’t know how to leave. I haven’t dealt with the assassin much, focusing on developing the pirate story, then the assassin, then merging them at the end.
• Mindskill: In mindskill, a doctor develops telepathy as an implant. He implanted his daughter without her knowledge, understanding that soon it would be a necessary skill to survive. He dies though before he can tell her, in an “accident” and she must discover the truth for herself, along with a plot to take over the world and a plan to keep those with this skill safe. This was going to be my shot at writing a trilogy (Which is a huge task, let me tell you.)

I’ve written 36 words of Intentional Accidents (9,455 words), 93 pages of mindskill (25,000) and 61 pages (16,000 words) of mermaids.

Here’s the problem: I like them all. I stopped mindskill because I needed to develop it more. I stopped Intentional Accidents because I needed to skim and I didn’t know how to. (I’m playing around writing the ending scene to that.) And I’m currently writing mermaids (which may not end up being mermaids, which makes me sad, but that is fact.)

I have every intention of finishing all of these. All of them are probably good. But how? I’m mean, seriously, I probably have enough to write about for three years (at least), not to mention that I  need to write synopses to send these books out, and I want to write Sagi’s tragedy (short story), and I’d really like to write one of the stories my friend and I write out (novel), and I’d like to edit Hope (or at least make a logical decision whether to toss it), and edit Giant’s Wife and–

*stops for breath*

I just have too many ideas I think. How do I choose?

 

role playing again

I know. I’m suppose to be doing other things. But I’m am so happy.

See,  I have this friend that I talked about a while ago, the one I role played with online for forever. We both went to college and we are both very busy. (I have homework, she has work and homework, and she is a better student than myself.) So, we had to stop role playing.

Well, we mentioned last semester (around November I think) that it’d be fun to rewrite some of our old stories and maybe write some of them into books. And I mentioned it again to her and we talked about it and so we’re actually going to do it.

We’re actually going to write four of our old stories as a role play (meaning they aren’t actually on paper. It’s like a script and we have to add emotion and description and such.) and then we’re going to do another one that is new. (Which, I’m really wanted to do my alternative arranged marriage plot, to be quite honest.)

Now, I don’t think that is going to matter to anything here. Depending on what we write and such, I only might or might not post what I write with her. But I’m excited not only because we get to spend time together again, but because I love doing this. It’s so much more fun to write something when you have a friend writing with you and plotting with you and giving you input.

That is why I want writing friends where I live. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.

I WANT TO WRITE A LOVE STORY!

After finishing Giant’s Wife, I said that I swore off love stories until I’m at least engaged. Why? To summarize, because I haven’t even dated yet, so I don’t know how to exactly write about it.

This morning I came up with a brilliant plot  though.

Guy, we’ll say a lord, gets maimed in an accident. Very badly maimed where his whole side is at best useless. He lost part of his arm and can barely walk. But he doesn’t want anyone to know because he’s slightly ashamed and he used to be really athletic and now he’s lucky if he can make it from his room to his office. He’s getting better but it’s slow. This is a recent accident though

Girl was married earlier to him by proxy, had been postponed in coming to him for some unexplained reason on his part, and then finally arrives. That’s all I know. They get married shortly afterwards.

They get married.

But guy acts weird. Things like, he doesn’t ever rise or walk much in her presence. He always has a cane with him, which could be an ornament but it’s still weird for normal, everyday life. He also doesn’t show his hand/arm much (because he wears a prothesis) or uses it.  He also keeps to himself and never once sleeps with her.

Now, I don’t know where this would go much. My obvious solution would be that the girl starts to love the guy and then finds out and then is like, “Oh well,” but that’s so cliché.

The next idea was something along the lines of a servant of some kind who has been helping him recover for the last six months has basically fallen in love with him. He wouldn’t notice because he’s a nice, strong, lord, she’s just a common, and they are technically already married.

Then, the girl finds out, declares that she didn’t bargain to marry a maimed husband and wants out and he, because he’s feel all miserable, agrees and lets her go back.  At some point in time, the servant girl comes out that she loves him and he finds out that he loves her and–tada!–everything’s happy.

The only problem is I can’t write it because I refuse to write a love story like this. I would like to pursue this idea more or less and see where it goes, because it sounds interesting. (It actually sounds like something that my friend and I would roleplay if we still did.) It would be a blast. But I can’t because I am not going to write a love story.

Why does love have to be such a difficult topic anyway?

Maybe I’ll try to convince my friend to roleplay this summer.

On a different note, I’m trying to think of short stories to write for the characters in mindskill (besides Isaiah) because then I would get to know the characters better and I like that idea.

role playing

A long, long time ago, (well, in 2003),  I met someone named Alyssa on a message board. We started doing silly stuff on there with exchanging a “story” because the message board had a glitch where if you previewed the message, you could place whatever name there you wished. (This was before we have the now-traditional message board layout.)

This little exchange evolved into a story over the next six months and then over the next year to two, it become a four book series (which we never wrote up, except for the first one.) This story became known as ETOLT, based off of my username when we began (lizard tongue) and my evil twin causing chaos for her.

From the spring of 2004 until she went to collage in 2009, we wrote so many stories. We role played them. She would take some of the characters and I’d take some and we would just exchange back and forth between the two. We had some awesome stories, everything from an arranged marriage between a girl who previous eloped, was sold as a slave a month later by her husband, and then was rescued by the person she was arranged to marry and told that they would live completely separate lives, to a man who decided that being a torturer was too much and too stressful on his family, so he ran away to another country.

If we were to actually write all of our decent stories, we’d probably have close to 20 to 30 books. Obviously, we won’t, because we both write our own stories as well. We did however write the first one ETOLT story, but never got around to doing an incredibly serious edit. (We wrote it over three years or something like that and our writing skills developed a lot during that time, mine particularly.) If you really wanted to buy them, she actually self-published them for her graduation as two separate books: For Isrian, Breaking Dawn and then a conglomeration of various other stories. from that same series.

Anyway, I learned some very valuable skills from role playing for that time and if you can figure out how to do it and a friend who can, I highly recommend it. And… I was going to make a post about what I learned (which I might add) but I think that I’m going to first say how to start this.

First of all, obviously, you need a friend who can exchange posts with you. I found it perfectly fine just to do it with just one friend. If you have a lot of friends involved, it will go much slower and you can’t plot as much.

So we now have a friend. Next, you need a place to exchange posts. If you want to at all save these messages (You do, trust me. I just spent two days reread a lot of our stories.), you want to use a message board. I highly recommend proboards We’ve had only slight issues with them once, and they fixed that problem. Compared to MSN (which forced me to reset safari every couple months and went so slow sometimes that we’re talking minutes to load a page) and any of the other places, this one is by far the best and easiest to use.  And it’s free too. Always a bonus.

So, we now have a friend and a place to write. Next, you probably what a story. Sometimes, we just started writing, let the characters figure themselves out. and go from there. So long as you can plot at the spur of the moment, it might not be a bad idea. Just have a clue about what kind of plots work best.  We knew that we could never just do a general girl falling in love with guy story. We always had some other complication, like, their marriage arranged; he thinks she’s flakey and stupid; he thinks he’s married to someone else who he loves but who is dead; he doesn’t want to be married at all, she’s had bad situations with her last marriage; he’s a criminal; she killed his sister as a spy, ect.

Sometimes, we would have a situation that the character just found themselves in, like in one of our stories the character just found herself without a family, her house sold because of debts, and completely alone. We then decided after one scene that she should be married spontaneous (We usually had our stories take place in fantasy lands, so spontaneous and arranged marriages worked well for us.) and my friend plotted him, I had her, and everything went rather well.

Finding the story is the hardest part. I will admit that right out. Some of the best parts about finding a story is that you get to keep secrets/plots from your friend, anything from something little to something huge. Plotting is the best for these, because you don’t always know how the other person’s characters will react, whereas with your own writing, you pretty much do.

After that, you just start writing. We wrote it like this:

*puts out the food* So? Who is she?
Sue

Mary is her name.
Jonathan

And who is she? How’d you meet her?
Sue

She’s a maid at the palace. I met her at work.
Jonathan

In this, I was Sue, she was Jonathan. Each of the different dialogue exchanges was a different post.

Obviously, a huge drawback about writing like this is you can’t change much of anything. Once it happened, it happened, and you have to just keep going.

You also probably want to have a certain time to write this back and forth. Without having a set time, the story will go very slowly unless you are together for some amount of time. In high-school, we wrote it for hours at a time, from about four until nine or ten at night.

I will admit, I miss doing it with her. We’re talking about this summer writing one of our stories out for real. (Which, I’m not fully sure how that is going to work out, considering that I have summer school and work (hopefully).) I can’t wait. It was really awesome to do.

Probably in the next real post, I’ll mention some about characters and why this helped me so much.

One more bit of advise. When choosing a friend to do this with, find someone with similar values and morals as you. We only went so far with some things, where as someone with less stringent morals might have done much worse than we did.