Spinwork Blog

Inspiration is a weird thing–weirder than anything I think I’d experience if I was in any other field. I’ve always had the issue of “project hopping,” but lately it seems to be getting back into that phase where I want to shoot myself everytime the hamster like voice in me goes “IT’S A.D.D. TIME!” and throws me back at another project. Realistically, I have a backlog of about five projects not counting short stories, three of which I keep close to me at any one time. By “close” I mean I’ve  been making notes here and there, not actually writing. I’ve done very little of that lately.

As far as plans, I really only cater to my interests unless  I either have a finished draft or severe writers block. My plan has always been, “write a draft, work on something else for a while, come back to it, edit” so I don’t have to worry about burn out. That’ll be all well and good while I’m doing this semi-professionally, but when I actually start going in for publishing stuff, I’ll need to really rehash the way I work.

Lately, Hellion has been driving me bonkers. There’s a whole swath of plot in my head that makes perfect sense, but the road to that plot is very indecisive and incomplete. Its not writers block in the respect that I don’t know what to write, but that I have to kind of stop dusting the crap off fossils with a brush and grab myself a pick axe. Antagonistic elements are getting the scrutiny now, especially since for the first whatever portion I’ve written, it’s the environment itself that acts as the antagonist. What I need to decide if this will suffice, or if I need to give it a more singular face.

I guess I’ll figure it out.

Spinner Daily Blogging, Hellion

After what could be described as some epic fails testing some Twitter crap out for the blog, I’ve decided that for the moment, I’m going to keep this blog set-up as is, if not change the skin to reflect the overall design of the site (I hate having a different design here than on site).

The new site’s been up nearly a week now, and I’m still puttering about ideas with how I want everything to work, whether or not the site needs a forum and what work I want to get up here. I’m still working hard on Pennies and And the Silence Screamed to post, but with the way Endoflux Theory is going, I think it’ll be some time before we see any of the two shorter works.

I’ve been getting IMs from people for the past few days asking what Endoflux Theory is and the plot. I’ve always been really bad about explaining plot lines, especially when I have to do it nine or ten times a week, because the plot changes so much that I find myself telling two entirely different stories to some people. I’m going to hold off on describing the plot at the moment, since I’m just reaching the point where I’m laying out plot lines and figuring out where my vision and the story are going to meet. In reality, when I write a story like this, plot lines are the last thing I worry about since so much of the story relies on the characters and their chemistry.  That’s not to say I don’t have ideas–but they’re still in that phase where everything’s a big ball of multiple threads of yarn all tied together that I’ve yet to unravel and work out the knots and stuff.

The one clear thing is that in many ways, ET is a bit of a departure from my other attempts. It’s a lot lighter and a lot darker in many ways than Hellion is (if I were to describe Hellion as neutral colors, its a light is more of a muddy yellow and dark is a mucky dark brown, where ET to me feels like various shades of ground up chrome and ball barings swirling around in light and dark vortexes), and a lot more open in terms of possibilities. Since this is going to be published online in a serialized format, it gives me a lot more freedom to explore from installment to installment. All in all, ET is an experiment and I’m not planning on judging very quickly.

Besides that, I’ve got some people who have agreed to help me along with the site when it comes time to get things rolling. My roommates Dan and Mike have agreed to help me out with design and coding respectively so I can keep things rolling more efficiently. For those of you who frequented SE, Dan was Knowyourenemy. You can check out Mike at Over the Pond, his blog.

That’s all I’ll say on that for now.

In other news, I’m finally out in California on vacation. Since 2006, this has really been the time where I’ve taken what I’m working on, whether its a concept or actual manuscript and ran away with it. This is where I really hit stride with Salamander and wrote the concepts that made going forward with Hellion possible. Sitting in a place where I can stare out at the Pacific Ocean whenever I get a block is more than a help . As an aside, since I work for Starbucks now, I get a 30% discount on all my purchase. Cross that with drinking the much-cheaper iced shaken green teas, and getting free refills for them, I pay as little as a dollar-forty for the first go, and thirty-five cents per refill.

In short, I am a happy writer

Spinner Daily Blogging, Endoflux Theory

For those of you who are familiar with me and my sites will know that today I closed Seventh-Element, the writing community I’ve been running since May 2006. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said on the site already: the site was eating up way too much of my time, and with a job and school coming up, I need any free time I can get to focus on my writing.

Part of me is sad. SE was my baby, and I’ve got a lot of fond memories from that site. But in the end, the site became an albatross–members were more obsessed with it’s laxity and the fact that it wasn’t the forums they’d originally come from more than it’s purpose as a writing site (although as my friend Clayne has pointed out, the Poetry section was doing awesome towards the end, there).

I’m not going to take any time to dwell on what SE was, and intend to dive back into my projects. I timed SE’s closing with the completion of my new, albiet simplistic portfolio site, which you’re now viewing. Things are a bit minimalistic right now, but I intend to fill things in over the coming weeks as I work to finish Pennies and get enough dev’ on Endoflux Theory done so I can get it rolling in the autumn.

Besides that, there’s not much else to say. See you all around! =)

Spinner Daily Blogging