deathslogging to 50K

Remember back at the beginning of May, when I was stuck on the 15K treadmill? I had to replace some of Eliza's scenes, so I would put in a full day's work of writing, then paste it into place and discover my wordcount had essentially not changed.

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder, a little bit worse.

Dead Rick also needed a lot of scene replacements. (This is apparently my New Method of novel-writing. I want my Old Method back.) I could't really afford to stop dead on forward progress, so my plan lately has been to hit the book from both ends, writing substitute material for him, while also adding new material for Eliza. But for a while there every scene I swapped in turned out to be a few hundred words shorter than what had been there before, so despite doing a thousand or eleven hundred or twelve hundred words of forward progress, my total wordcount was only inching along. Yesterday I wrote three thousand words for a gain of about five hundred. It's felt a lot like running up the down escalator: a hell of effort for slower-than-average progress.

Which is why it feels like such a victory that I finally have fifty thousand words of book. And I'm almost done with the replacements; just one more thing needs swapping out, and then there's one new scene I'm going to write for Part One. Okay, I just lied through my teeth: I still have to go back and redo that pair of scenes for Eliza, that I've been meaning to do ever since I got back from London. But I've got those clear enough in my head that I've been able to write her side of Part Two just fine without having backtracked first, so there's less pressure there. (As opposed to Dead Rick, whose plot had gone so badly astray that I'm only just now starting to see what he'll be doing in Part Two.)

I'm just hoping I don't have to keep doing this scene-replacement thing, because man, as writing processes go, this one kind of sucks. But as long as it turns out a good book in the end, I'll live.


Word count: 50,640
LBR quota: Tonight's Dead Rick work was mostly blood. Louisa got some love, though.
Authorial sadism: The Goodemeades are good at subtly applying guilt trips.

Now on Goodreads!

I've just set myself up on Goodreads, including a syndication of my LJ here. It's something I've meant to do for a while, and now I've got it up and rolling, so I'm pretty happy.

for the gamers reading this

If you're a fan of White Wolf's Scion game, I just discovered they've put out a new supplement, covering the Yazata, the Persian gods. So far it's only a .pdf, though it looks like there are plans to do a print edition early next year.

What interests me about this is that, according to the place where I first saw it mentioned, the supplement is based on fan-created material. Scion's original books covered a wide range of polytheistic religions (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Norse, Aztec/Mayan, Japanese, Voudoun, Celtic, Chinese, and Hindu), but there are still parts of the world they missed, and so there seems to be a small but energetic base of people designing additions to the system. (I'm using a fan-created supplement as the basis for my own handling of native North American religions; with my game set in the 19th-century frontier, I needed something to address that question.)

A quick glance at the original Yazata writeup, that I downloaded when I first began looking at fan supplements, shows there's been a non-trivial amount of revision. For example, the pantheon-specific purview -- which is probably the biggest hurdle for pantheon design -- appears to have been completely replaced. Also, the new purview of Time has been renamed as Stars and changed on various points, though it still mostly has to do with the manipulation of time. So this tells me that White Wolf didn't just grab the old pdf, typeset it to look like the rest of the books, and fling it out there; somebody, somewhere along the line, sat down and reworked things. I don't know if that was the original designer, someone at White Wolf, or what, but they put some effort into it.

Which really pleases me. This is potentially the ideal way to handle Scion expansions, at least of the "pantheon module" sort: it's a small enough addition that it doesn't really justify putting out a big expensive hardcover book, but vital enough that it's worth picking the good ones out of the mass of stuff on the internet and distributing them in an organized fashion.

Of course, one big concern is accuracy. I've been very pleased by the quality of the White Wolf-produced material; I'm enough of a mythology geek that I would have been put off by shoddy research, but everywhere I know the material, their work looks solid. (And this goes beyond the familiar grounds of Greek and Norse mythology. When the first book came out, my litmus test was to look at the Mesoamerican gods. They listed three alternate names for Quetzalcoatl, two of which I recognized, the third being something I'd never seen in my life. Which told me they'd done more research than I had, which was basically my minimum requirement for the game.) Is the fan-created Persian material accurate? I have no idea. I know that there are (at least) two Native American supplements out there, one of which calls the pantheon the "Anasazi" and boils the entire thing down to archetypes like "the Trickster" or "Mother Earth;" that is NOT the one I'm using. If you open the door to fan-created material, you may end up trusting that whoever wrote that supplement knows what they're talking about, and you may be wrong. So I hope there's still a degree of quality control happening on the White Wolf end, before they put their stamp of approval on something. The changes to the Yazata writeup make me hope that it's so, even though I can't judge them for myself.

I'm also a bit curious as to how White Wolf is handling rights and compensation, but that's probably private information I'm not likely to get. If they're paying a fair price and not exploiting their fans, though, this is potentially a very cool way to approach the question of expansion.