Hogwarts Is Messed Up

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Hogwarts is technically a school and from the students’ perspective it’s run like one. From the administration’s perspective, it’s a front for a vigilante counter-terrorist organization, a magical research laboratory, and a vault for containing dangerous magical artifacts. Hogwarts is the most secure place in magical Britain, which means organizations like the Order of the Phoenix use it as a stronghold and lock up their deadliest magical superweapons there to keep them out of the wrong hands while paying so little attention to the professors that Slugworth can found magical prodigy conspiracies complete with handing out powerful magical elixirs and the secrets of fucking horcruxes and Lockheart can totally abandon his students to deal with potentially injurious or even deadly magical creatures on their own, and in neither case are either of them fired. Sure, the Defense Against the Dark Arts position was literally cursed and that made teachers slim pickings, but the death eater infiltrator was a more responsible teacher than Lockheart, so they clearly had some options.

Hogwarts teachers are held to basically no standards at all for student safety and injuries requiring hospitalization are commonplace. For the love of God, each year has about eight-ish students per house for a total population well under 250, and yet they have a hospital ward with enough beds to handle one or two dozen kids. They have magical supermedicine that can heal nearly any injury overnight, and yet they’re all ready to have 5-10% of their student body incapacitated in the hospital at any given time. Hogsmeade must have a comparable population (you can hardly get much lower) and they don’t even have a clinic!

Hogwarts has recognized the threat to student health represented by using their school as a fortress/safehouse and consistently failing to discipline teachers who endanger children, and their answer was to expand the medical facilities. They do not give a fuck if students are in danger. “Professor Dumbledore, St. Mungo’s has sent another letter of complaint. They say they’ve had to dedicate an entire ward of the hospital just to Hogwarts injuries. Should we maybe stop harboring retired aurors who are secretly still pursuing unresolved cases and have dozens if not hundreds of old dark magical enemies seeking revenge?” “Nah, we’ve got some room in the south tower, just set up a medical ward there, problem solved.”

Ensemble Outlines

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Plot outlines are a thing that people do sometimes. What I’ve discovered in November, however, is that character outlines are also an important part of my process. I’d been doing them on autopilot as part of the standard idea percolation process preceding a novel that I didn’t notice how damaging they were until I forced a first draft on a very specific schedule for the sake of the NaNoWriMo creative writing challenge. So if nothing else, that writing has taught me the importance of these outlines.

So, you’re probably wondering how a character outline can even work, and if you have any idea at all, you’re probably expecting some kind of template or form that you fill out. That’s not how I do it (although apparently the Snowflake Method works for some people, and it involves doing that). I do ensemble outlines, and not in a Five Man Band “make all characters fit into this kinda loose formula” kind of way. I’ll explain below the break.

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Sky Wolves: Day Two

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“Come on, Commander,” Kermit was pleading, “put me on the flight! I can take it! I’m as cool as a cucumber!”

“We’re all full up, kid, take a breather,” Wedge said.

“What about that laboratory mission? Are we just going to leave that lab functioning?” Kermit asked, “they could be making chemical weapons or something!”

“It’s a secondary objective, kid, and way too far inland. You couldn’t carry enough bombs to blow it up,” Wedge said.

“What about Hunter? Load him up with the bombs. It’ll be good for him! Prove that he can bomb things just as well as Cowboy!” Kermit pleaded.

“Hunter is still convinced that the missiles have followed him back to the Coolidge and are hiding in the lower decks waiting to strike,” Wedge said, “just let it die, kid. There’ll be other missions.”

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Sky Wolves: Day One

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Raven is leading the first flight off the Calvin Coolidge and into Libya. Launching just behind are Hunter and Cowboy with their state of the art F/A-18C Hornets, their Eyes in the sky in the AWACS, Dirk Hardpeck flying support in the EA-6B Prowler ECM plane, and air-to-air expert Waldo in the F-14 Tomcat. Their objective: To blow up Libya’s oil. The plan is to fly in from the west, where reconnaissance shows that Libyan air defenses are entirely low-altitude. The oil field is extensive. Cowboy is an air-to-ground specialist, so it goes without saying that he’ll be loaded down with high-yield guided munitions, but the field is too extensive for him to bomb on his own, so Hunter gets loaded up alongside him. It will be Waldo’s job to keep the bandits off their back while Rip Steakface keeps their radar signatures covered up with his Prowler’s ECM field. Raven’s ancient A-7 Corsair II can hardly hold onto two relatively close range AIM-9 sidewinders, while Waldo’s more modern Tomcat can carry not only a full load of eight missiles, but is also capable of mounting the longer range, radar-guided AIM-7 sparrow model. As such, Raven will be carrying some cheap unguided munitions on his Corsair II to finish any targets that Hunter and Cowboy miss. The weight of the munitions will make him a poor dogfighter on the approach, so Waldo’s going to have to keep them busy on his own.

On the same day, Wedge and Wolf are taking Kermit out to get his feet wet with a quick fighter sweep. There are 3 Mig-25s and 4 Mig-23s in the targeted squadron. Since the Sky Wolves are dumping tons of money into all the guided munitions used in the oil rig attack, Wolf decides to forego any hyper long range AIM-54 phoenix missiles and instead equip Kermit’s F-14 Tomcat with only AIM-7 sparrows and AIM-9 sidewinders, the same armament as Wedge and Wolf’s F/A-18C Hornets. They also each bring an ECM pod to keep the long range Mig-25s from downing any of them while they move into range.

It was a solid plan, a strong start to the Libyan incursion. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Moon Moon Hover

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Sky Wolves: Hornet Leader

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Hornet Leader is a solitaire tabletop game about a squadron of fighters stationed on a US carrier from 1983, the introduction of the eponymous F/A-18 Hornet, to the present, carrying out missions to defend freedom, eliminate the enemies of democracy, and liberate the shit out of the oppressed peoples of the world. This is the story of the USS Calvin Coolidge, flagship of Carrier Strike Group Thirteen, and its famous fighter squadron VA‽-101, aka the Sky Wolves.

The year is 1984 and president Ronald Reagan has decided to launch punitive strikes on Libya because of terrorism or something. Strike Group Thirteen is moving in to execute this series of surgical strikes, aerial engagements, and carpet bombings that shall under no circumstances be called a war because otherwise we’d have to talk to Congress about it and nobody wants that. Our hero goes by the callsign Kermit, fresh from training and assigned to the Sky Wolves as a pilot of an F-14 Tomcat, an older plane, but one capable of extreme long range engagements as compared to the more modern multirole F/A-18s. In this, he is paired with one of the squadron’s best pilots, Waldo, famous for being practically impossible to track on radar, especially when there’s a lot of red-and-white striped things around.

F-14

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A Second Invocation

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Fifty thousand words complete,
A sparrow spreads his wings,
Kindled, now, with newfound heat,
A power that softly sings,

Far now from my heart’s desire,
Much distance from here to there,
To win I must yet fly much higher,
A sparrow can’t save a bear,

Time now to spread newfound wings,
I’ve never outflown this doom,
But I’ve got precious little choice,
‘Lest my friend find a rav’nous tomb,

Clio give me patience,
Urania give me sight,
Erato give me passion,
Calliope help me fight,

Terpsichore make me agile,
Euterpe help me rhyme,
Klaus and Jullianne stay with me,
Polyhymnia give me time,

To win this day I must ascend,
To the plane of much larger birds,
Goddesses please guide my flight,
I must first reach one million words.

Twenty-Nine of Thirty

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So, I’ve cracked the secret to winning NaNoWriMo.

Step one, invoke pagan deities, specifically the muses. I can’t guarantee results if you pray to other gods.

Step two, write an outline that doesn’t cover the first scene of your novel, so you still end up staring at a blank page for hours trying to figure out where to start. While you’re writing that outline, make sure that it’ll only last you for ten or twenty thousand words.

In step three, your cunning planning back in step two comes back into play, as you stare helplessly into the void that is your first page. So far, so good!

In step four, you go to a write-in to build up a good head of steam right at the beginning.

In step five, you squander that steam and spend the whole day playing Hornet Leader instead. I think other solitaire board games work, too, but video games don’t seem to do the trick. In fact, I’m getting ahead of myself a little here, but some games actually seem to produce more words, which isn’t going to help at all in the squandering phase of the month.

Step six is to spend a full day doing almost nothing but writing a new outline because you ran out of the old one. So, advance planning is again critical.

Now that you’re way behind, step seven is to attend a family member’s funeral in order to lag even further. You may have to arrange an accident for someone if nobody dies of natural causes – that wasn’t an issue for me this year.

You wanna follow the same basic theme over the next few days. Maybe write something completely unrelated to your actual project, or recycle the outline issues you faced earlier, or if you’re really out of ideas for ways to fall behind, just write no words the whole day for no reason at all. That last one might feel like cheating for the “floundering and falling behind” portion of the plan, but it’s not against the rules, so go for it.

On step nine, let go of your feelings and start writing random junk you can’t possibly publish because fuck it, words are words.

Now that you’re way the Hell behind, take the opportunity to reflect on your writing style, how you best work as a writer, and how squeezing the planning stages of a 50,000 word novel into two days because you decided to do NaNo at the last second was really dumb, and is also making you look kind of ridiculous for earlier saying that outline writers had an inherent advantage in the challenge.

Going into the home stretch, use up your final outline to get yourself back on target and with so little time left to spare that you can’t safely sink another day into outlining, then try to go back to your roots and write some absurd fantasy comedy like you did in high school. Realize quickly that you are a completely different and far less light-hearted person.

Right before you enter into your very home stretch, wrest superpowers from the unforgiving maw of Cuphead and use them to finish a day ahead of schedule. I think Dark Souls will also work for these purposes.

Now all that’s left to do is to write a dumb, sarcastic blog post that sounded like a good idea at the start but probably would’ve been better off as a more sincere recap of the month rather than a lame “fake advice” gag that overstays its welcome by like eight paragraphs. But look, the point here wasn’t to write good words, it was to overcome winter blues so strong they may actually be diagnosable by punching a keyboard until 50,000 words come out.

NaNo 2017 Winner banner

So. Got that all squared away.

Twenty-Eight of Thirty

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So I definitely like my writing less without an outline, but it’s happening at all, and in November I’ll take that. I’m up to 47,516 out of 46,667 today, on target to be finished tomorrow (the 29th, so today by the time this actually goes live and anyone can read it). It was touch and go for a bit, but I think I’ve got this.

Also, today this happened:

Cuphead Fin

So I figure that basically makes me invincible.