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Friday, 2 November 2012 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eighthphaseAnd then I finally hit four thousand words! About fucking time. So I actually secretly got to what's pretty much the end of chapter two, oops. I'd hoped it might shake out a bit longer, but since chapter one is a monster comparatively I guess it evens out.
Writing eighteen-year-old boy is not quite what I'd expected. Mostly my characters just swear more than I usually have characters swear, but I felt Jacob's reactions were a bit off. And then he kind of started snapping and that felt about right, so I guess there's that.
I realised belatedly that there are not nearly the usual amount of awesome ladies in this story so far, or even very many ladies at all. And the ladies that are there aren't exactly... awesome. Leesha's first two lines are about how eating a lot makes you fat (and in her next appearance she points out that there are times you should question free pizza, although she certainly doesn't turn it down). Estrella is okay, although she doesn't have any dialogue and is in fact only discussed. Maddie doesn't even technically show up, she just gets talked about. And then there's the unnamed lady who attacks Jacob and is subdued by Gareth with... surprisingly little effort. I know the whole plot centres around two ladies being awesome (well, three ladies technically, although Amelia is an antagonist) but so far I feel very bad about the lack of non-awesome ladies.
(I actually felt so bad that I went so far as to decide that the unnamed lady knight who attacks Jacob for his source is named Cordelia, the mage who she works for is Emily, and that Emily is a painter and she wants to use the soulcatcher to cure her boyfriend's cancer so that they can get married and be happy together. ...Shit, writing that down makes me feel worse, since it isn't going to happen at all ever. Fuck.)
I decided Jacob had an older brother. I had to come up with a name for that older brother and nearly called him Dirk, except that it felt 1) obvious and 2) not very fitting. Then I almost considered renaming Jacob to John and calling his brother Dave, but hell if I was going to do that. His brother's name is David, though.
I also had to come up with a synopsis for the NaNoWriMo site, and it was... not a very good synopsis. Of course, I couldn't exactly write "it's kind of like a magical girl story - the Card Captor Sakura kind of magical girl, not the Sailor Moon kind - except the protagonist is an eighteen-year-old boy" as a synopsis, since that describes the plot a bit but doesn't actually tell you much. (Actually... swap sources for Clow Cards and Eileen for Clow and it actually kind of describes the plot a lot.) I have pretty much settled on the name Soulcatcher for both title and magical device, however. So there's that.
This actually really is a lot like a magical girl story, though. The protagonist finds a thing and doesn't know what it is, then learns it's a magic thing that has a magic guardian and he has to collect more of them to make a magic device work. There's a bad guy who wants to use the magic device for evil purposes and there's a rival who doesn't want the bad guy to use the magic device but doesn't want the protagonist to use it, either, and the protagonist and the rival end up having to work together to defeat the bad guy.
Now did I just describe Card Captor Sakura or Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha? Actually, I think I also just described Dragon Ball Z, too. It's kind of a general description, really. (Yeah okay it's not a perfect fit for any of them but I think I made my point.)
It's late, so I think I'm just going to check on my dragons and then go to sleep. And then despair writing another 2k words tomorrow amongst research on Emily Dickinson and all the reading I have to do for that ten-paragraph essay I have to write for my midterm. (Both of those things are due on Monday and I have not started either of them.)
Writing eighteen-year-old boy is not quite what I'd expected. Mostly my characters just swear more than I usually have characters swear, but I felt Jacob's reactions were a bit off. And then he kind of started snapping and that felt about right, so I guess there's that.
I realised belatedly that there are not nearly the usual amount of awesome ladies in this story so far, or even very many ladies at all. And the ladies that are there aren't exactly... awesome. Leesha's first two lines are about how eating a lot makes you fat (and in her next appearance she points out that there are times you should question free pizza, although she certainly doesn't turn it down). Estrella is okay, although she doesn't have any dialogue and is in fact only discussed. Maddie doesn't even technically show up, she just gets talked about. And then there's the unnamed lady who attacks Jacob and is subdued by Gareth with... surprisingly little effort. I know the whole plot centres around two ladies being awesome (well, three ladies technically, although Amelia is an antagonist) but so far I feel very bad about the lack of non-awesome ladies.
(I actually felt so bad that I went so far as to decide that the unnamed lady knight who attacks Jacob for his source is named Cordelia, the mage who she works for is Emily, and that Emily is a painter and she wants to use the soulcatcher to cure her boyfriend's cancer so that they can get married and be happy together. ...Shit, writing that down makes me feel worse, since it isn't going to happen at all ever. Fuck.)
I decided Jacob had an older brother. I had to come up with a name for that older brother and nearly called him Dirk, except that it felt 1) obvious and 2) not very fitting. Then I almost considered renaming Jacob to John and calling his brother Dave, but hell if I was going to do that. His brother's name is David, though.
I also had to come up with a synopsis for the NaNoWriMo site, and it was... not a very good synopsis. Of course, I couldn't exactly write "it's kind of like a magical girl story - the Card Captor Sakura kind of magical girl, not the Sailor Moon kind - except the protagonist is an eighteen-year-old boy" as a synopsis, since that describes the plot a bit but doesn't actually tell you much. (Actually... swap sources for Clow Cards and Eileen for Clow and it actually kind of describes the plot a lot.) I have pretty much settled on the name Soulcatcher for both title and magical device, however. So there's that.
This actually really is a lot like a magical girl story, though. The protagonist finds a thing and doesn't know what it is, then learns it's a magic thing that has a magic guardian and he has to collect more of them to make a magic device work. There's a bad guy who wants to use the magic device for evil purposes and there's a rival who doesn't want the bad guy to use the magic device but doesn't want the protagonist to use it, either, and the protagonist and the rival end up having to work together to defeat the bad guy.
Now did I just describe Card Captor Sakura or Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha? Actually, I think I also just described Dragon Ball Z, too. It's kind of a general description, really. (Yeah okay it's not a perfect fit for any of them but I think I made my point.)
It's late, so I think I'm just going to check on my dragons and then go to sleep. And then despair writing another 2k words tomorrow amongst research on Emily Dickinson and all the reading I have to do for that ten-paragraph essay I have to write for my midterm. (Both of those things are due on Monday and I have not started either of them.)