Chamomile Has A Blog

Fictional characters aren’t real. So it seems weird that they can be uncooperative or surprising to their writers. How can it be difficult to write about a character doing anything, anything at all, when no matter what you do it’s always just words on a page, fingers on a keyboard? Sure, some options might be more compelling than others, but why can it be difficult to write in the first place? How can characters possibly rebel against their writers and take over the story?

Here’s a question that will provide an answer: What is the answer to x+y=z? Well, it can be anything. All of the variables are undefined. So let’s put in 2,588 for x and say that z is 7,986. Off the top of your head, what’s y? I can’t tell, even though I was the one in charge of the variables from beginning to end. By filling in x and z, I’ve already determined what y is, but I can only make a vague guess that it’s in the neighborhood of 5,000-6,000 before I actually bust out a calculator and solve the problem (turns out: 5,398). Or I could’ve done it by hand, if I wanted to be masochistic about it.

The important thing is, characters can be the same way. Sometimes you’ll be writing a character having planned on them doing one thing, and then when you get there you’ll realize that doesn’t fit the character you’ve established at all. When a character “rebels,” what’s really happening is the literary equivalent of needing y to be over 5,500 and realizing when you actually punch the numbers in that it’s not, and that while you are physically capable of writing down “2,588+5,501=7,986,” that’s wrong and you know it and that’s uncomfortable. You can go back and change x so that it actually will equal z when you add it up with y. You can change y so that you reach your original intended ending of z through a new method. Or you can stick with the x and y you have and just figure out what z you end up with at the end. What you can’t do is write down the wrong answer. Unless, I guess, you’re a hack. Then it probably won’t bother you as much.

Normally I set aside Sundays for releases of Thar adventures. As anticipated, however, I haven’t been able to get one ready the week before Christmas but I’m still committed to my “post a day for a year” thing, so instead we’re going to talk about my word count in December.

To catch up anyone who isn’t a regular reader of the blog (this category includes all people), my current goal in writing is to reach one million words, and to that end I’m trying to write at least 25,000 words a month every month. As of my successful NaNoWriMo this year I had 825,000 lifetime words, so at that rate I’ll hit one million on June 30th of next year.

I’m currently at 14,270 out of 16,935, though in my defense I’m also writing this early in the morning, so the real number to compare to is December 20th’s goal of 16,129. Those of you who are good at math will have noticed that this number is still bigger than 14,270, though, which means I still have a problem. I had this kind of problem multiple times in NaNoWriMo, though, and I was consistently able to overcome it just as soon as I had an outline sorted. Most of December’s writing has been discovery writing random plot bunnies as they occur to me, usually for 2k-5k at a stretch before tying up the story (often only one or two scenes long) and moving on to something else. I’ve also been building an outline in the back of my head, but I’ve been consistently dissatisfied with that outline, which is why it took me three weeks to settle on one that I liked. I’m now about 70% confident that I’ll follow my current outline through to the end of December and be able to finish on time using it, and hopefully continue relying on it into January.

Either way, my immediate plan is for sure to follow that outline to the tune of 2k words per day until I catch up, and maybe even build a bit of a buffer. That approach worked out for me pretty well in November, and that’s when my word quota per day was 1,667 rather than 806.

I’m beginning to fear I may have bitten off more than I can chew for my Imbolc goals (like I do), but I’m nothing if not stubborn. You’ll read this a few days from now, but for me, it’s Yule. The deepest night of the year. As per tradition, it is here, in the iciest grip of winter, that I defy the darkness.

So there’s this story that goes around about the origins of Codex Alera, a fantasy series by Jim Butcher. The story goes that someone was arguing that some ideas were just bad, and couldn’t have good novels wrung out of them. Jim Butcher said he could write a good novel out of any idea, because what mattered was storytelling and craft, not big ideas. So the other guy challenged him to write a book about the lost Roman legion and Pokemon, the two worst ideas he could come up with, and Jim Butcher did, and it was Codex Alera.

I hate how popular this story is, because even though I agree with the ultimate point, this is a really weak way of defending it, and being so weak implies that it’s the best defense the idea has. The fact is, Jim Butcher half-assed the inclusion of both the lost Roman legion and Pokemon in the actual end result of Codex Alera, and neither of those two things were particularly lame ideas in the first place.

Continue reading “Codex Alera: A Lame Answer To A Dumb Bet” →

I’ll admit the title is not-fully-accurate clickbait, but in my defense it was out of laziness rather than malice. I’m not sure how to cram the thesis statement, which is that webforums have a significant but oft-overlooked advantage over modern social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.) in that aspiring creators of any kind of media can discreetly advertise their work in such a way that it will still actually reach board members. Specifically, a creator can put a one-line pitch for their work in their signature, turn that one line into a hyperlink, and an unobtrusive ad for their stuff will appear in every post they ever make. At that point, they can advertise their work by being an active and constructive member of the community. Every post they make is advertising for their work, and every good post they make is advertising that other forum-goers might actually like or care about. People who don’t want to be advertised to barely even have to notice.

This is about the only thing that worries me about how gaming communities are beginning to congregate more and more around Discord. Discord is generally speaking a very good communication platform that doesn’t suffer the serious problems that sites like, for my most loathed example, Reddit are plagued by, but there is no means of unobtrusive advertising like this. Your only two options are 1) maintain a small enough community that someone can be all “hey guys, I wrote a book” and people will check it out purely on basis of knowing that guy and being curious what he’s up to – although that’s still way less effective than the way a forum user reminds people of their work every time they post, because someone who doesn’t care enough to check it out the first time might get curious eventually, or else 2) you can have a dedicated advertising channel and let people post their stuff there on a weekly basis or however often they update, but generally speaking these channels are used exclusively by other creators, which is a tiny market compared to the community as a whole. Very few people intentionally go to advertising channels to see what the community members are up to.

Unlike Reddit’s flaws, which I consider debilitating (and most other social media have similar if not worse “features” that hold attention but produce terrible communities), I don’t think Discord is particularly negatively impacted by this, but it does make me worry about the future of indie creation, real bottom rung “slapped together in my garage for $50 or less” style indie creation, when its creators can’t rely on being sincere and productive members of a community to advertise their stuff, and instead have to resort to either spending lots of money for proper ad campaigns or annoying sales tactics like finding any excuse to reference their work while dropping a shameless plug.