Come Hither! Look!

I have just started a blog I hope will become collaborative. It won't have fiction on it.. but it will be a great resource.

The Anglo Saxon England Blog

I am a bit punch drunk from trying to share and learn on the Yahoogroup of a reenactment group where I was described, among other choice words, as unwilling to offer 50-50 or taking and not giving and so forth and so on.. no one ever told me quite what it was they thought I was not giving... I hope to have this be of interest to any and all enthusiasts, a place where they are as happy sharing as learning. Make sense?

Come see! And become involved!

Nan Hawthorne

hathorn@drizzle.com

It's turning into a novel!

I've been suspecting for some time now that the saga of Renard DuPrey and Lily Rose Silver was more than a tale to scheherazade on Ghostletters. Now I've stepped into the deep end of the swimming pool, and started turning it into a novel! I've joined a virtual writers' workshop (the venerable Internet Writing Workshop), and also a physical one, which meets once a month and discusses manuscripts in progress.

The first thing I had to do was decide how to change the sprawling storyline, with its multiple crossovers and guest appearances, into something that would fit within the confines of a novel. What, for instance, should I do with Maxine Chung? Renard's rape of Maxine is one of the pivotal episodes in the story. But I didn't think that including the whole Enceladus universe (even if Wendy would allow it) would work. My solution was to posit that Max Silver has a sister, Maxine Silver, who gave up the superhero life to be a wife and mother. She would be vulnerable to Renard's charms, and Renard would have an additional motive to rape her, because it would hurt Max Silver.

Of course the whole "massively braided storyline" with Sirius Gate, Lucia, the dragons, and the rest will have to go as well. I'm still working out the details, but I think the crisis of redemption will center on Renard's kidnapping Lily Rose, then defending her against their mutual enemies. Including, I think, the Master.

But it's early days yet. I'm still doing outlines, synopses, and concept maps. I'll post more on the mechanics of this as the project progresses!

When it takes a graph to keep it straight

As Lilia, Wendy and I launched our massively braided storyline, we found that a simple "to-do" list just wasn't cutting it. The intricacies of "who's doing what to whom" were just too deep, and we were horribly afraid of someone's neglecting to insert a critical bit of background. There's nothing worse than having to halt a roller-coaster storyline to say, "By the way, we neglected to tell you that the old priest was really the long-lost brother of the the aging madam, and the dog's name is Bazingo." And so we started The Graph.

The idea for The Graph came from J. K. Rowling, who uses one to plot her Harry Potter novels. On one axis is a list of the story threads, and on the other is a list of chapters. What happens in which chapter is thus nailed down, making it easier to see plot dependencies. It's sort of a Gantt chart of a novel.

Being wiki addicts, we have started our Graph on Wikispaces. Those of you who have attempted tables on Wikispaces know what a bitch this is. A few CSS tweaks, and embedded line-break tags help a bit, but still leave a rather blunt tool compared to, say, a Word document. However, having the thing on the wiki makes it accessible to all of us, from all locations. We'll do the best we can.

The Graph is here. However, it's full of really major spoilers, so don't look at it if you want to be surprised as the story unfolds.

The tag-team does a round-robin (Part 2)

(compiled and edited by SealWyf)

The team is discussing plot advancement through virtual parties.

SealWyf: I managed to get some plot-advancement in as well, even though I don't have a player character at the party, except for a walk-on by the demon Caterwampus.

Wendy Massey: Are you going to say how he got past all the anti-demon wards?

SealWyf: No. If it comes up, he'll just say that obscenities and dirty pictures don't bother him. (The wards are the names and face of God.)

Wendy Massey: I want to say here that I love what you are doing with the dragons! I was skeptical about them when we started outlining the intersection of the storylines. But you've won me over. These are... well, to use Nick's phrase, "muscular dragons".

SealWyf: That was my intention. I really, really wanted to rehabilitate the dragons, and to bring back my Lucia character. She's based directly on a character I created for a Dungeons and Dragons game I DM'ed some years ago, and indirectly on the Queen of the Night in Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute". The dragons were originally part of her universe, but I started realizing they were more than that. They not only could fly between the stars -- they built the roads. When Wendy and I started discussing the Sirius Gate storyline, I realized the dragons were going to play a role in it.

Nick Swann: I've been wondering, ladies: Sirius Gate, Serious Man. Coincidence?

Lily Rose: Coincidence.

Wendy Massey: We don't mind playing with it, though.

Lily Rose: Renard sort of becomes Sirius Man by the end of it. Sort of.

SealWyf: I just love what we are doing with this story. This is the best game in the universe.

Lily Rose: Much better than Barbie Dolls.

Nick Swann: Renard is a little more anatomically correct than Ken.

SealWyf: Heh!

The tag team does a round-robin (Part 1)

(compiled and edited by SealWyf)

SealWyf: I always found virtual parties annoying, because they had so much potential. Once in a while the medium worked and you got real magic. The presidential campaign on the old VAMPYRES was a case in point. But usually they were just random bumpings-into and smart-ass one-liners. I pretty much stopped attending virtual parties. Then I decided that if I did attend, I would use them as a springboard for something I was doing anyway, as a way to advance my own storylines.

Lily Rose: I know what you mean, Seal. I've been to a few of those myself. Too many. I really liked what you did with the Oprhidion story, using that vampire-prince party (that was way before I joined GL) to get the demon spider to the Surface and create some real tragedy when he killed Chauncey's fiancee Trudy. So when Renard got invited to this Tu B'Shevat party, my first reaction was "No way he would go!", but my second one was, "How can I use this?"

Nick Swann: Fortunately, she had also invited Santa Claus, my character. And Santa had just played a dirty trick on Renard, forging a charitable donation in his name, so there's bad blood between them. Lilia and I talked this out, and decided to use the invitation to let them duke it out. As it turned out, literally. I guess that part isn't posted yet, but it's been written. It's one hell of a fist fight.

Lily Rose: It also gave me a chance to show some more of Renard's character and drop some more hints about his background. He keeps referring to his parents as poor, but it's obvious they weren't poor, just terribly abusive. By the way, I love what you're doing with Santa Claus, Nick! He's human, but also sort of godlike. I almost wrote "Christ-like". Is that what you had in mind?

Nick Swann: Now that would be an ego trip, wouldn't it? But yes, Lilia, I'm drawing on the English tradition of "muscular Christianity", which is basically the kind of Christianity a masculine man would appreciate. This is a "muscular Santa", one with erotic secrets, who doesn't mind a bit of "fisticuffs" now and then. He's also a good enough student of human nature to be able to see through Renard's complexities, and find the man at the core of them. He's actually making some progress with Renard. Then the Fabulous Silver Family mucks it all up by jumping him in the parking lot...

Lily Rose: Which is why I have that happen. The Silvers, inept as they are, can be very useful, plot-wise.

(to be continued)