have this

In ALex's dream there was a flashforward, narrative technique we don't think about just accpe it as we accpet most dream logics and evne when we don't accpet something our dream logic comes up wit h a more dreiculous explainaiton and we accpte that one. When black and white tv was invented, a whole generation just dreamed in black and white. And now we dream in cinematic techniuqe. I wonded hoe a preicnudstirnalized civiliaztion mucst dream, whatt nattratiove technigcuwe anre neing used there; somethimes i think we're too mhonomiziniginiazed,

TRANSLATED: In Alex's dream there was a flashforward, narrative technique we don't think about, just accept it, as we accept most dream logics; and even when we don't accept something our dream logic comes up with a more ridiculous explanation and we accept that one. When black and white tv was invented, a whole generation just dreamed in black and white. And now we dream in cinematic technique. I wonder how a pre industrialized civilization must dream, what narrative techniques are being used there; sometimes I think we're too homiginized.

 There are probably mind blowingly creative cinematic techniques in the dreams of those who don't know what cinema is.

(Can you believe that spellcheck correctly guessed every word I'd meant to say? Except for "pre industrialized" it just wanted to render as "industrialized," so I had to split off the "pre" there. And also it had no idea what to do with my rapid-type spelling of "homogenized." It's not even marked with red underline.)

a toad man is a man who tells the future by throwing toad bones into a stream and reading the portents

the "fig" and the "bird" are signs against the evil eye. A sheela na gig is a carving of a (heavily stylized) woman exposing her privates as a ward against evil.

writing like mad

cool so don't have much time but I think I may seriously make it? wish me luck woo

Great Big Boney Fingers

I know I've already shown you this video, but it was like a year ago and HOLY HECK this is still a GREAT song.

That "work their fingers to the bone" part, that part randomly came to me at some point a while ago, and I was all "that's a great line, what song is that?" so I tried looking it up but couldn't find it and, surprise, it's this song. Though it is how I discovered the song "Boney Fingers" by Hoyt Axton.

I know it was a while ago, my trying to track down A Great Big Sled, because I sang Boney Fingers at Camp Fleischmann this summer! So, you know, it had to have been before that. So, you know. A while ago.

Not Much Today, Either; Have You Been Reading My Writing Blog?

The films I'm excited for next year. SHAZAM, Artemis Fowl (I just realized Artemis is a chick's name, what the heck Eoin,) The Kid Who Would Be King. All about 12-ish year old boys who gain extraordinary powers or else fight against the supernatural in some way.

I forgot to paste a day's worth of work into my official NaNoWriMo '18 doc, so I have a thousandish more words than I thought I did? Alright!

Dance Rita, Dance!

9imagine rita is dnacing here alreighT?)

The Origins of A Few Witch Icons

Researching magic stuff for NaNoWriMo. I've mentioned some of this before, but it's really neat stuff.

Witches float because the water is allegedly rejecting their satanic butts from baptism, making it impossible for them to be submerged.

Witches have boils and warts because the warts act as teats allowing their familiars to feed off of their blood.

Broomsticks, cauldrons, and pointy hats were all symbols of "alewives," women who brewed ale. It was one of the few respectable occupations that women were allowed to hold down on their own. Alewives, spinstresses, maybe nuns of course, although nuns live together and not alone, and charges of witchcraft tended to come against women who lived alone, such as alewives and spinstresses...

"Cunning folk" were "good" practitioners of folk magic whose job it was to guard against evil witch powers. That's something just so cool and we don't discuss it nearly enough, in the witch dialogues.

November Vlog Up!

Delighting in Fatness

I weighed myself before Thanksgiving. I was at the lowest I've been, all year, as far as I know.

Weighing myself today, I'm about the heaviest I've been all year.

Yaayy.

Thnksgvn n wrtng

Maybe doing things other than writing has fueled me. Not with prompts and ideas or anything (though shoot going into the Thanksgiving day feast I had several good ideas I'd wanted to write down, I think I remember them,) but just with, like, life or something. There was something of an empty hole, but that's just the feeling of having something you need to do but not doing it. (Maybe that sentiment was one of the ideas that came to me for me to write down, I don't know. Wouldn't doubt it.)

Also I realized today I may have a very mild peanut allergy; I always thought that the scratchiness at the back of my throat after eating peanuts sometimes was just like peanut crumbs getting stuck back there somehow, but I only realized today it might be like a rash or something. I'm still gonna eat peanuts, of course; eating thanksgiving trail mix later on in the day with peanuts in it, my throat was totally fine. Allergies are for the weak.

27 Topics (here they are)

I didn't write at all today, except for this list. And misc non NaNoWriMo stuff (I have a new IG post up, and my latest YouTube vid is now transcribed.) I won't write much tomorrow. But I think I'll be able to write some. I made it easy for myself, now that I have Writing Prompts!™ Seriously my biggest ocstable.

And hopefully more than enough prompts to get me through 27 thousand words. Yesterday I said 27 prompts needed, with 1,000 words per prompt; it could also easily be just 18 prompts seeing as how I stretch 1,000 words into 1,500 getting it readable after the write or die logorrhea. shawty.

But it turns out I need 60,000 words and not 30,000. Which is weird because I only need 50,000 words at the end of the month, which means with all this time I've been writing, I've written -10k words. And that is a lot of words to have negative of.

Hold on  let me do the math again...

Alright, so I still need less than 3,000 words a day in order to make it, and everything's fine as long as I continue consistently.

I do not know how that happened, with the, 60k words thing. There's 26,000 words to go. More than half a month's writing if we're going a steady pace, but, eh. I've got 27 prompts for a thousand words each; that's more than enough.

1. Moone exposed to the magical elements, attacked by Kissifer. Awesome fight! Use geography! Moone realizes how to defeat Kissifer, and they fight their way over to MacBeth.
2. flashback to the Dreaded Eye
3. College thing. Usenet as it stood in 1992. There is no cabal. The Jewish Pogroms had allowed sectors of the Cabal to grow- give broader historical overview of trend, maybe tie into broader theme of like-minded people get together, all setting up internet stuff.
4. Infiltrate base. Framing the action on a rival paramilitary org.
5. Flashback: Gef pees on MacBeth. Motorcycle. SUV. Maybe this leads up to the storming of the base? Or a different mission.
6. Portal scenes: Unwin transports everyone to Babel. (Moone and SEAMUS going to Djinn world?)
7. Goon squad sweeps in- in confusion, though, Moone's boon can activate, and he and Pontifex sweep out of the room, Pontifex grabbing the Mothman suit. They fly away. 
8. Goon squad, seeing that Unwin had granted Moone some part of his aura, burns Unwin and his entire cell...? But then why would they let Mothman into the summit, if he's burned by this point? Maybe he doesn't get burned???
9. How MacBeth did it. The bomb, the gunshot. Framing on Gef was deliberate, Moone would think Gef, everyone else would think Moone. Separates Moone from his entire team when Cloud dies. Does MacBeth not see Moone enlisting Pontifex coming?
10. Moone makes his way up the stairs, but is spotted on the mezzanine floor. The suit gets damaged further- he tries to fly in it, down toward the lobby floor off of the balcony, but gets shot down maybe, gliding the rest of the way and ducking away again.
11. Runs into Lovecraft somehow. maybe Gef-related; on elevators, goes down shaft instead of going up at first; grabs car, SUV-type maybe Jeep of some form, established from earlier mission, and starts it up.
12. SUV drives, crashes, Moone escapes on motorcycle, drives that. Shoots motorcycle at guards, ducks back into the elevator shaft.
13. Unwin Pontifex powerup moment. Uses one of his boons to defeat the assassin, who probably flies off of the hovercraft and dies spectacularly.Establish during hovercraft action scene that you can bestow Pontifex's gift off onto others if you have it, though Pontifex had to gift it himself though Moone could have. Pontifex going against Moone's wishes, real inkling that Pontifex is a danger.
14. Give the pontifex more lengthy lectures on mythology as part of his character. Scene of Pontifex telling Moone the truth of a particular human myth to show his connection to world, prior to sexy werewolf scene where the truth about werewolves is revealed.
15. Some solid scene of the Pontifex actually having to fight himself to keep himself from destroying Moone. Pontifex tricksterizes.
16. The Poker Game!
17. Team making their way through the labyrinth. Unwin's men have part in it, but not in heist itself. Maybe have a few close calls with guards down in these depths. Come up with a way to solve the guard problem.
18. Two groups' heist plans: explain each.
19. Maybe something about the tooth fairy himself coming down into the vault now. Maybe just a guard. They must surely realize that the air circulation is down as well. Gef has to reinstate it briefly? That would start kicking up the cold iron again...
20. Two assassins; Slice hangs back while Slit attacks. Shapeshifter and everyone are pushed back (MacBeth's plans working against Brotherhood?), Moone fights assassin one-on-one.Boon torn off, Moone seeing more into the mechanics of how it works. Weird interaction between the team members' boons and the antimagical properties of the cold iron still swirling in the air in the sanctum sanctorum. Everyone's auras come into play, even Xemf's, which is surprisingly powerful. 
21. Fight against Xemf: Moone has Gef reinstate the security system, fighting above the pressure sensitive floor; Kissifer comes back into play and Xemf levitates over the floor, fighting, the walls beginning to bleed, Kissifer's strength combining with that of Xemf's. Exorcism plan B, there's that trap activated from the pressure sensitive floor, trapping Kissifer, allowing something. Xemf and Moone now fight on level, upper area of vault, in front of vault doors, perhaps teammates also trying to assist.
22. NOC list's backstory, or what Xemf is planning on doing with the list, Athena powers with NOC list equals not good. Moone explains the whole thing. And how he figured it out (there'd be forshadowing.)
23. Characterization with Unwin's men. Each gets some, even Larry.
24. Highway fight, swarms of baddies, turn them against each other to take out Slice. With boon back, dodges Kissifer himself. Demon dealt with (trapped back in phylactery?) Moone is victorious, and maybe uses Slice's spring-heels to travel back quickly to the Acropolis.
25. Dreaming: climactic battle, or something more cloak-and-dagger? Xemf is defeated; Moone makes out with the NOC list. Something about Gaia, tie to Cloud.
26. More weird dreamtime stuff. Whatever gets the pacing of the book to work, after so many climactic fights in a row like that.
27. FBI (Unwin) investigating Moone for Iran-Contra work flashback, Moone learning Unwin's tradecraft. History with djinn brought up? Or is that a secret which Moone uses? 

If TETRAGRAMMATON and DoD are different, why is their SUV in the parking garage of a different agency entirely? URGH the whole sitch there is messed up.

27 Topics

I need a list of, there's 9 days left, three sessions a day, 27 topics each to write 1,000 words on. Usually I can get 800ish, tease it out to 1000. Had a spot of trouble getting 3,000 words in today, with my birthday and all. Thanksgiving is probably going to be tougher. But I'll be more prepared for it.

I have a Doc comprised entirely of the bracketed portions from last year, all 4,455 words of them. Expanding those 4,455 words to 50,000, I wondered over on my writing blog the technicalities of the word count there, whether they do or don't count and whatever. I already asked that question, so I'm going to ask a different one now.

What will those 27 topics be? 

There's a lot that needs to be done in the dreaming at the end; I've figured some of that stuff out. But I really want to read Gormenghast to see how that handles action, because I've got a very specific writing style in my head for how the dreamtime goes...

Also, need to do my vlog this month. And one more video. Though I've already filmed much for that, actually.

I haven't watched a single movie all month. I've seen one episode of the Office, and one episode of Burn Notice, but other than that, I haven't really had the time to invest in many other non-writing things.

I mean, I played a lot of Overwatch today. I lost 101 points playing ranked, just kept losing and losing and losing. I'm sure Blizzard would just, give those points back to me, if I explained it was my birthday, but I think my gift today is learning to live with the consequences, even if it's not your fault and it's your teammates who just suck and don't know how to group up and push the point, group up and push the point, it shouldn't be that difficult, and what the heck don't switch up the team comp now, we were balanced, we need another healer, dangit! Some people.

features over bugs

I realized in bed this morning, past midnight but before I went to sleep, that I'm turning, 27, tomorrow. It could be discouraging, to make it this far without really having accomplished anything. But that's not the way I see it, I mean, I've learned to see this as a positive.

Apparently I'm just so complex and awesome that it's going to take a while for even me to figure myself out, and I should be proud for even having made it this far. For example: I only realized last night, tossing in that Chilean Sea Bass thing, that those random tangents I go on to show off all the research I've done or whatever, maybe that's an intrinsic part of my writing style, or at the very least are a feature and not a bug. Maybe some of this information is actually new to people, I don't know. That doesn't mean they have to be structured as random tangents, sticking out as abruptly as they do, but that doesn't mean I have to get rid of them in order for the story to flow better. This month is about rounding things out anyway, and showing not telling. (which totally justifies all the telling I'm thus doing with the random research shoved in.)

Anyway cheerio

New Writing Plan

It occurred to me only last night that I might not succeed this year's NaNoWriMo. Good news, I can still well over make it if I do put into effect that 3,000-word-a-day thing. I want to write, but I don't want to write that much.

Just charging ahead making up words on the fly like I'm doing right now, without any breaks except for like tiny little ones, maybe going back and correcting a mistype, I can fit in 50 words a minute easily. 50 words a minute, that's 3,000 words by the end of the hour, since 3,000 is 50 times 60. It's so convenient, the math just works out. All I have to do is free write for an hour each day, which is like totally possible. And terrifying. There's such a thing as INERTIA and it KEEPS YOU FROM SHIFTING GEARS.

Alright I'm back! I did one half-hour session, and yeah it worked out, but I should have done another... the day's not over yet, but I think we're good for now, just punch in 167 more words onto my 1500. Here's what I observed for the last few minutes of the writing session, going off the rails and writing about the process of writing instead:

I sort of ran out of juice. 20 minutes is good, 3 20 minute sessions instead of 2 30 minute sessions. Oh boy. But man, if I only needed to do like 1667 words a day instead of 3,000, that'd be dope, this'd be so easy, like you don't even. Because I just sat down, and raced, and fi I'd actually had a direction instead of just rambling freewrite, that's 1,500 words right there, well 1,400 right now, but just 267 more to go past that, and, the whole day's writing cranked out in half an hour! They design these to be easy. The goals to be reachable. All we need is the momentum to get going. 55 seconds until time's up; it won't get mad at me that I'm a little under my goal, right? I've gone past the time before, let's see. 25 seconds left.

 Moone thought, no, he spoke aloud! And then he read

here we go. Verbs. Well. 1500 words, right there, my goal was a little higher than that that's right. Only like a third of this is usable. That's the end.

I cut out the unusable stuff, and spent some time adding and shifting sentences and clarifying things, and it's awesome and it looks great, and it's definitely going to work with miminal hassle and guys, this is totally possible!

Raccoon Merch Time!

https://youtube.com/video/RiOHvPL13HE/

That link's never gonna be one; it's what I had for my video before I realized that like three seconds of audio were missing and I had to cancel that upload, fix the file, recompile it and reupload.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLlhioQ0LT8

This is the link to the complete video and I am literally the only person who's ever watched it; makes me feel special. But I did so five times! Apparently. And I still couldn't get the closed captioning to come out the way that I wanted.

Epilogue to today's A Real Thing

Starts here but I wasn't sure if the following I wrote was part of it or not; I'm a lot better at word count if it's unstructured idea generation.

She gets defeated somehow, from miles away, Moone possibly not even realizing it. It's amazing. Do we even need to show it? It's so inevitable that Moone come out on top that, like, it'd be so great if we didn't even show it, and leave it all up to the audience's imaginations. Anyway this is when they pull out the big guns with the time travelers, as was foreshadowed. Yay. 

The Brotherhood had hired Anyone, but it's MacBeth specifically who recruits Slice Slit and Slash, getting back into the Brotherhood's graces. Until they're defeated as well. And Xemf uses MacBeth to power the portal to Athena, to use the NOC list to... do something. 

He's a god here in myth, since every man is his ancestor in the dreaming, so which god has a special relationship with Athena? Hephaestus, obviously, but maybe that already happened (ie this is what's happening when Pontifex realizes someone's messing around in the Dreaming,) leaving half-snake Erichthonius to be the ancestor of the entire Brotherhood according to this version of myth; sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy (though not a time loop exactly; xemf just ensures that its ancestors are the gods, which is what allows it to go back as hephaestus in the first place... and hephaestus sprung from Athena's head in the first place?, so...? more time travel? maybe that portion of the myth would have counterpart in the lycaon thing, so that's what we see play out; oh heck Gaia is the one who brings back Lycaon's son and who is the technical "mother" of Erichthonius, it connects that way at least, but how to make that make sense?). 

How would xemf or whoever access the dreaming at that point, without having Pontifex's boon? 

Also if Pontifex gives up his entire boon to xemf, does that mean that xemf gets the associated bane as well, since the boon would have no counterpart in Pontifex?

tryna do action but i fall in love just a little ol little bit

I really need a prompt if I want to write, at least a vague vague understanding of how things are going to go. I hadn't been going to write at all today, finding it too tiring; writing anyway, because I'd set up an ambitious goal for myself, I found that the writing itself was rejuvenating; what was tiring was pantsing it, and as long as I had an outline of sorts I was good to go.

Which means that it's time to do action scenes, which I'd been holding off on because I felt unprepared, but I'm about as prepared as I'll ever be, and there's not really any research that can be put into them to stall them more. Finding new supernatural creatures with strange weaknesses that can be used to defeat them? Not today. I have beginnings and endings for the action scenes, but what I realized I needed to make them compelling are goals. An unspoken goal in action is survive, but Moone can do that, so what else is there? Also, solid geography, and, just writing about an action scene isn't writing a scene itself, this is more stalling, sorry.

Going chronologically through the book and finding the scenes that need to be blocked out, on the very first scene I hit a problem. A problem caused by, the research actually being important turns out.

In the first action scene, there's a character with a backup life, only they lose that life which leaves them without that lifeline. The way that suspense beat is set up, though, makes no sense with the research put in. The way that phylacteries would work is, when you die, your soul gets bounded to the phylactery, and that would act as an anchor to this world, so you could keep living? Essentially. But I'd had it, it's a backup life, already in there, which can be whipped out if you die. And thus things get dangerous when the phylactery breaks and there's no backup life. But the way they really would work wouldn't need that part, that's there to ratchet up the tension. So I can't write that action scene without totally restructuring the beats. Like, MacBeth is all, uh-oh, and gets made and there's that, but that doesn't make sense without the excuse to lose the phylactery.

Although the way those work does make using a phylactery to imprison a demon make more sense, over the, "oh it's cracked and it can't hold souls anymore, but I can still use it to hold a soul!" thing I'd had.

I wrote some non-action stuff instead.

Really I'm afraid of nailing down the geography, though. I don't want to make such decisions, and rather have it be vague...

Oh! Spirits by Strumbellas, from a few days ago! No, I remember now, that wasn't the song I'd been trying to remember, that was just going back through all the bands I'd listened to recently and going, Strumbellas? Was this the one? It looks kinda right, I guess... 

It was actually Hozier!



Anyway, looking at it TTDEBCA has its type justified by default; why can't I figure out the way to do it here? I've been doing it manually because I didn't know it was possible to have it be part of the template, but looks like it can be...

tryna succeed but i cant even breaks

Breaks are essential, and them's the breaks. But today I wanted to break from EVERYTHING. Not my best day, but it was pretty solid in terms of productivity, since apparently I DIDN'T take today to break from everything. I need to Instagram. I'll do it tomorrow. And, heck, YouTube this weekend? Not having a job is turning out to be a fulltime job.

I was up to 16 IG subs again, then back to 15, and I'd meant to charge my phone but forgot so I can't check it right now. I'd thought my latest video jumped from like 12 views to like 18 in a short amount of time, but I'd just misread 13, and I haven't gotten any since then, and like the first 8 views are from me, adding closed captioning and stuff like they said to, in this "how to grow your youtube channel" video. I guess they never said results were guaranteed.

how do people even i mean i just don't

Greatest Fanfic Idea Ever and an Explanation of the Origins of *That* Aspect of the Moone/Pontifex Relationship

I structured the first book off of other story/ies, which featured mandatory romance elements, and there's a male part in the role that the female character had in the original, so that's where things went. Buddy cop movies have the same dramatic beats as romances, if you break it down, because it's all about two people getting together and learning to get along (hence the Zootopia Nick x Judy angle; hmm, I think I could very feasibly do a video on this,) and The Anachronominion very well could work as a buddy cop thing, but this NaNoWriMo getting into the characters' heads further, I'm like heck it, and that genie's out of the bottle now. Two dudes who are straight who happen to have the hots for each other. Like that movie Brokeback Mountain.

Also like that movie, French Connection? (no, Last Tango in Paris! Also like that movie Last Tango in Paris.) Which totally fits, right? Because this relationship is based structurally off of a heterosexual relationship in something else, and LTIP is the opposite. It's about a man and a woman and apparently umm a stick of butter, this heterosexual relationship, but the script was originally about a homosexual relationship and they just changed one of the genders is all, but the rest of the movie still totally plays like a homosexual relationship, permeating every other aspect of the film. Including and totally explaining, the stick of butter. I've not seen this nor Ghost, but I imagine the butter and the little clay pot should totally get together and hang out sometime? Oh my gosh, that is the greatest idea ever, and now I'm going to write a fanfic about those two, instead of doing my writing for the day in the form of NaNoWriMo stuff.

Mmm yes...

Pirates!

This new Thugs of Hindostan movie looks totally dope. Indian pirates fighting against East India Trading Company? And one of them is Aamir Khan? Yes please. Aamir Khan in everything, please. And another one of them is Amitabh Bachchan. Him too please. Looking at the film's IMDb page, it doesn't have a very high rating, like, at all, but that's just because for some reason Indian audiences aren't afraid to grade their movie scores on a curve. And also it's probably terrible. But it can't be any worse than, well you know.

But what I think we're all looking forward to is the return of Enthiran, in 2.0 coming out this month. Yeet.

WRITING WRITE WRITERLY

I am on a writing roll right now. I should probably head to bed soon, or before 4:00 at least, because we don't want a repeat of the 1st, finishing off my Halloween story for hours and hours, it getting longer and longer, but...

There's an article here! Jack Kirby was quite the creative, telling you that.

http://comicsalliance.com/jack-kirby-ten-most-amazingly-underused-concepts/

I'm down to 15 IG subscribers! Guess I need to post again soon. Down one from yesterday but that's still a lot for me.

I'm not sure how many views of my latest YouTube are just from me. At least one of them isn't; I know that much. Doing everything they say to do, and I'm still having a tough time of attracting like anybody. Ah well.