Quark – Page 4 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

FF6 Werewolf Tribute: game start

[NOTE: this is part one in a series of posts lifted from the quark message boards where I recently GM’d a game of Werewolf. The theme was Final Fantasy 6, one of my favorite RPGs of all time. To see all posts in the series, click here.

WARNING: there will be spoilers here, and lots of them, so if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 6, do yourself a favor and play the game before reading on!]

Long ago, the War of the Magi
reduced the world to a scorched wasteland,
and magic simply ceased to exist.

One thousand years have passed…
Iron, gunpowder and steam engines
have been rediscovered,
and high technology reigns.

But there are those who would enslave the world
by reviving the dread destructive force
known as “magic.”

Could it be that those in power
are on the verge of repeating
a senseless and deadly mistake?

PLAYING:

Avulsion
Baggins
Barigirl
Caysyka
CptSqweky
Drakon
Drek
Fredward
Jerle
Locke
Lunesar
Onlera
PharaohsQueen
sunstarr12
ZeroMoon17

Among them: 1 Detective (Terra), 1 Necromancer (Bannon), 1 Assassin (Shadow), 3 Mafia (Emperor Gestahl, General Leo, and Kefka).

We will use the modified standard rules. Each player starts with 5 GP which disappear after the round is over.

NIGHT

World Fantasy 2009 — second day

Friday was a long, awesome day at World Fantasy. I feel like I’m floating around on a sea full of big names and interesting people, and it’s surprisingly less intimidating than I thought it would be.

The day started with a number of panels. I attended “Writing human characters, whether or not they’re human” and “VaanderMeer on VanderMeer.”

The VanderMeer panel was very enjoyable–Ann and Jeff are down-to-Earth good people, and it was interesting hearing their stories, especially Ann on her experiences as an editor. At one point, she could have shared any number of slushpile horror stories, but she didn’t.

Took lunch at Lee’s Sandwiches, for no other reasons than price and nostalgia. I used to eat at Lee’s all the time when I lived in San Jose, because it was so cheap. It’s been so long, but it was exactly as I remembered it. Good times.

Met up with Daniel Alonso, another writer friend from LTUE/CONduit. It was good to see him. We wandered around the dealer’s room for a while and struck up conversations with various people, including David Drake. Talked with Drake about the difference between him and Haldeman–apparently, in Haldeman’s novels, nobody trusts anybody, whereas in David Drake’s novels, people mistrust everyone but the comrades in their unit. Interesting.

Let me just say, once again, that I am surprised how many people from the Utah scene are here at World Fantasy. On the “Writing non-conciliatory fantasy” panel, I recognized at least a dozen other Utah writers, and there were probably at least as many there that I didn’t recognize! Surprising, when you consider the panel was about anti-heroes.

Besides the “Writing non-conciliatory fantasy” panel, I attended “Invention vs. tradition” and “The last resort” in the afternoon. Both were very interesting, but unfortunately I was very tired after the last one, so didn’t catch as much from it. That’s what happens for late afternoon / early evening panels, generally.

Went to a book release party for Edge publishing. It was an interesting event. Barbara Galler-Smith and Josh Langston wrote Druids together long-distance, having only met over the internet. They both seem like pretty cool people, just from running into them. From the readings, the book reminded me a bit of David Gemmell.

Had dinner with some other writers from the Utah scene–Josh, Isaac, and Jancy. Talked with Jancy for quite a while–turns out she’s from Santa Clara, got a master’s degree from BYU with John Bennion as her advisor. It also turns out that she recently switched agents; she’s represented by Eddie now, Joshua Bilmes’s old assistant. We talked about my book and whether it’s YA or not, which went on to a very interesting discussion of YA themes. Jancy’s a way cool person.

The evening event was a giant mass autographing party in the ballroom. Everyone was there doing a signing. I hung out at Dan Wells’s booth and met Mary Robinette Kowal. She was way cool, easy to talk with, interesting and humble. Yet another down-to-Earth good person at this convention.

Met a lot more people from the Utah scene in the evening, such as J. Aleta Clegg, who was around when LTUE, The Leading Edge, and Quark were founded. Also talked with Julie Wright, found out that she’s an editor as well as a writer, talked about the blog she co-authors and Leading Edge. Yet more down-to-Earth good people.

After that, drifted from party to party, until everyone was so drunk that my attempts to make useful contacts started to become counterproductive. Had fun at the same time, though. Good people, good times.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow!

Thank you readers

I appreciate my first readers very much, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

Today I got the comments back from a longtime Quarkie friend on Genesis Earth, and she told me that, in her opinion, the book still needs a lot of work. However, she made it very clear when (and why) she was bored, when (and why) she was interested, and where (and why) she would stop reading. Thankfully, she kept reading and gave me useful feedback right up to the end.

My friend’s comments helped me to rethink several weak points of my novel. In particular, her anthropology experience helped her to pick up on some racist undertones that I didn’t intend and hadn’t realized were there. If my story would have appeared in print like that, I would have been flamed up and down the sf community! Without her feedback, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on that.

The feedback did more than point out problems, however; it helped me to rethink these problems and begin to find new, innovative solutions. Rather than getting me angered or depressed, the criticism stoked my creative engines by getting me to take a step back and rethink my story from the ground up. Though the feedback was harsh (basically, “I’d throw this book across the room at this point”) it was extremely helpful and got me more enthused than ever to write.

Receiving criticism and advice is a very delicate thing, especially for a budding writer. If you try to follow every peice of feedback you recieve, your book will inevitably tank. However, rejecting criticism is also tough because you don’t always know why you’re doing it. There is a fuzzy grey area between rejecting a comment because it’s not right for your story, and rejecting it because it rubbed your ego in the wrong way.

I don’t ever want to reject critical feedback because it hurts. After all, it’s not about me at all–it’s about the story.

Criticism is never “right” or “wrong,” “good” or “bad.” It is only “useful” or “not useful.” To pick out the useful feedback, you always have to listen to–and appreciate–every piece of feedback that you get. Only after you’ve done this can you can say (in private!) “no, this isn’t right for my work.”

In the meantime, thank everyone who takes the time and effort to read your work and comment on it. They’ve done you a huge service, and the last thing they deserve is to be attacked by an egocentric, peurile, self-righteous amateur. Honest criticism, no matter how much it hurts, is the best thing any writer can receive.

On that note, I want to thank all my first readers for helping me with my novel, Genesis Earth! I genuinely appreciate all of your comments. You’ve helped me to step back and see my work for what it is. You are helping me to make this novel a stronger, better book, and that means more to me than you know. So thank you!

CSS magic

Dude! Check out the new header for this blog! Isn’t it the awesomest header image you’ve ever seen?

A few days ago, I got my hands on this cd full of cool arabesque patterns for graphic design. I saved them to my flash drive, figuring I could use them to make a way cool blog header.

Then, earlier tonight, I was chatting with my friend Danke from Quark–she’s the one who helped me with the other header (the font, btw, is from the game Alpha Centauri). She’s a CS major and a whiz with css.

Two hours later…behold!

Danke’s official nickname is now The Sourceress. I’m off to bed–all this magic is addictively tiring, especially at 2am. Once you start down the dark path…

The end of an era

Today was my last writing meeting as Quark writing vp. :'(

It’s been a good run, two years as leader of the Quark Writing Group at BYU. I remember how it was when I started–I was still just a hobby writer, with a nebulous interest in getting published someday but without any real goals or plans. I heard about the group from some friends, but didn’t really start going until winter of ’07, as Reigheena and Aneeka were graduating. One day, I showed up after the meeting was finished (but everyone was still hanging around chatting) and Reigheena was like “so, you want to be writing vp next year?”

I was kind of nervous but really excited that first semester, with lots of ideas to try out. We posted our fliers around all the freshman dorms the first couple days of class (most of the members were graduating and/or moving on), and we got quite a few new members, as well as curious English majors who came for a couple of times before moving on.

Those first days, meetings were two hours long, the submissions were up to 4,500 words, and we did four of them every meeting. We met in the basement of the BYU library, in one of the study rooms, and we crammed between ten and fifteen people down there each meeting. Pretty intense! Two hours was not enough time to comfortably cover everyone’s story, and we always felt rushed. We held meetings every other week (or, more accurately, every 1.5 weeks) on a weird schedule that only I really had figured out.

Well, after that first semester, we made a few changes. Reduced the submissions length to 2,500 words, the number of submissions to 3, and the length of the meetings to one hour instead of two. I think we also started meeting weekly, instead of the weird Tuesday–Saturday–Tuesday schedule. We also got a real room, over in the Talmadge building.

Things have definitely changed. This past year, we didn’t really do much to get new members, but we have started to bring in people from the other sections of Quark. A lot of other old timers have moved on–Drek moved up to Draper, so I doubt we’ll see much of him, and Jakeson and Gamila have been coming less and less as they move on to the next stage of their lives. Still, it’s been fun, holding our weekly writing meetings each Saturday.

While I always tried to encourage everyone to be frank and honest with their criticism, we’ve also done a good job diffusing that tension with humor. Here are some of my favorite quotes from my time as writing vp:

“He has two guns in the office and he wants to give Autumn a talking-too for having a knife in her boots?”
“She’s an intern.”

“Other than that, I thought it was just good ol’ fashioned fantasy violence.”

“I don’t remember anything about your characters right now, but I remember when I was reading your story that they were very distinct and I knew who they were.”

“I’m trying to think of something I can say that doesn’t sound like a critique.”
“Your writing is…legible”

“I have a friend that had a way to hide a knife in her hair.”
“I want a wife like that!”

“Some books don’t have chapters, they have acts.”
“We have a name for those. We call them… ‘plays’.”

“As always, your writing was legible.”
“No, wait, it wasn’t! It was courier!”

“If this was meant as a short story and not the beginning of a novel, “defenestration” will suddenly become a useful word in your vocabulary.”

“Maybe I should write a prologue about a writer who’s writing a prologue and realizes that nobody ever reads them.”

“It doesn’t have to be functional, it can just be like ‘hey, we make gears.'”

“The love in Twilight is all based on scent: he smells nice and she smells delicious.”

“The goatee gives me programming x2.”

“Missions…”
“The first six months…”
“The first two years…”

“I like getting to the exciting event within a page of the story.”
“Frodo, see this ring? Destroy it!”

“I loved how flat your characters were!”
“You’re so good at poor writing!”

“Maybe ‘MacBeth’ could be a title. Like, the leader is known as ‘The Macbeth.'”
“Yeah! And all the lower downs would be ‘the Duncans.'”

“Wait… I did write something good… at the very end!”
“Like, ‘Oh good, it ended!”
“You are putting words into my criticism!”

“Then I thought, what would my characters be like if they were alive? And then I was afraid.”

Ah, the good times. It’s so sad to log onto the Quark forums now and not have moderator privileges, to know that I won’t be sending out those weekly emails, moderating things, doing all that other stuff. It’s the end of an era for me. My duties as writing vp for Quark have been a major part of my college experience here at BYU, and I won’t forget it.

Some thoughts

This is going to be real quick, since it’s 1:30 am and General Conference is tomorrow. The revision is going along really well for Genesis Earth–I am really excited about this project. My only regret is that I don’t have more time to dedicate to it. As it is, I’m probably putting too much time into it already. But it’s worth it–it makes me happy, and I feel I’m telling a story worth hearing.

Yesterday was also the awards banquet for the English department. It was a very positive experience. I saw a few familiar faces–Chris from my English 318 reading group last year, and slipperyjim from Quark.

The main address and proceedings in general were very interesting. There was a lot of talk about the value of literature, its importance in our society, but more than that, the importance to write good literature. By that, I don’t mean the kind of stuff that has the stamp of approval of some elite clique of stuck up literary types somewhere–by that, I mean literature that has purpose and meaning, that shows us something worth living for, not merely pointing out the absurdities of our modern world. There are plenty of absurdities and paradoxes and stupid little meaningless things, but where does it really get us to be pointing those out all the time?

I came away from the conference with something really valuable: a heightened awareness of all the things that made me want to write Bringing Estella Home, the novel I’ve been working on this semester.

Bringing Estella Home is very tragic, a little dystopian, and has a lot of unrealized hopes–a lot of shattered lives. It’s essentially a tragedy, and I’ve found that I don’t particularly enjoy writing tragedies. When you’ve worked on one for a few months, it tends to grate on you–all of these suffering characters, and you with the knowledge that it’s only going to get worse. Not very feel-good.

But that’s not the thing that made me want to write this book. There were two things that I wanted to get across, two major ideas: sacrifice and loyalty. If that makes any sense. I guess it won’t, unless you read the finished book, but I wanted to show how people struggling to do the right thing in a world turned upside down could find meaning and depth in their suffering, in their trials. Suffering comes and goes, but it shapes you in ways that last forever, and I wanted to show good people becoming better through their suffering. I guess that’s the best way to put it.

I think I’d lost sight of that recently. This novel needs a lot of major changes to it, especially in the middle section, which I was just wrapping up when I put it on hold. But with a clearer idea of the overarching goal of the story–what deeper meaningfulness I’m trying to get across–I think I’ll be able to pick it up again and give it a strong finish. That’s good.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write another tragedy again. This one has been quite a ride. However, I shouldn’t just throw it out and run away from it–I really need to listen to this story and tell it like it needs to be told. I guess that’s the ultimate motivation, or should be. I don’t just sit down and write because it’s what I do, I do it because it is something meaningful, something that can help others see the world in a new, better way, and obtain those truths that will really bless their lives.

…and they all lived evily ever after.

Today we had a quark writing group party, and it was lots of fun! We all went up to drek‘s new house, up in Draper, and read some of our really old, really bad first attempts at writing stories. Good times!

Drek, Nick, lexish, slipperyjim, jakeson, gamila, aneeka, and one of my friends from the FLSR writing group all came up. Jakeson and his crew got lost on the way, but we had a good time hanging out, chatting, eating the pita bread and hummous that I’d cooked (I figured everyone else would bring sugar-heavy treats, so I cooked something a little more on the healthy side–still delicious, as evidenced by how much everyone ate!), and talking about how we’d gotten started writing.

I think a lot of us had similar stories–while we all wrote for different reasons, we all tried to do something big in high school, something that marked a turning point of some sort. The other common thread that ran through our stories was…how laughably bad they were! There were gradations, of course (Nick’s story that started with the word “Gandalf” and only got worse was pretty ridiculously crazy), but all of our stuff was pretty bad.

It can be both fun and painful to look back on past stuff, especially the stuff you wrote back in high school. It’s like, all the painful awkwardness of high school is not limited to your social life, it seeps into your writing as well, especially if that’s when you first try out your hand at the craft. So many cliches, so much bad grammar, so many viewpoint errors and info dumps…ARGH!!!

Of course, that is precisely what made it so entertaining. The awkward, emo, immature teenage grasp of the universe, combined with dozens of stale cliches and atrocious grammar–brilliant! I’m glad we were all at a point where we could look back on this stuff and laugh. It can do you good to air out your closet and let go of some of the old stuff you are sure would destroy you if you ever let it saw the light of day.

My first writing attempt was a novel that has since been entirely lost. I printed up a hard copy, once a long time ago, but I’ve lost that one and really have no desire to try and dreg it up. Of course, all the digital copies haven’t survived. My second novel attempt, however, I have in both digital and hard copy. That’s the one that I dipped back into for this writing party.

I actually sent out a copy of this to my aunt in Washington DC, who is/was an editor for a magazine. She read about the first twenty or thirty pages and sent me this letter, which I will use to finish off this post. The only places I’ve used ellipses are when my aunt described problems specific to certain passages and quoted them.

October 14, 1999

Dear onelowerlight [name, obviously, has been changed 😛 ]

The manuscript your mom sent home with Evan has proven to be an interesting read in many ways. It is wonderful to see people take an interest in writing. This pastime has given me many hours of satisfaction. I find that the joy is in the journey and that the process is as important to me as the finished job. However, it is always satisfying to have a finished product that I feel good about.

What it looks like you have is a wonderful outline for a novel. Your language is colorful and descriptive. The battle scene held my interest and made me want to know what was going to happen next. My intent was to read the manuscript from beginning to end purely for the joy of reading it. The urge to edit, an urge that often gets in my way as I write a first draft, got in my way as I read. Hence I was not able to follow through. I have written on some of the pages. What follows are a few other observations.

A really good writer named John Gardner said that a piece of fiction opens up a dream to the reader. Anything that causes the reader to become aware of the author or that jolts him out of the fictive dream does not belong. It is always helpful to let a manuscript cool for several days and then begin to read it. This will help you be more objective. Sometimes the things that seem marvelous turn out to be less enchanting than one thought during the rapture of creation.

Titles are difficult. Would anyone have read Catch 22 by another name? Some people don’t think so. It has been postulated that the reason the story about The Man Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain didn’t do better as a movie–and presumable a book–was because of the length of the title. For many authors the title is the last thing to be written.

Your first two or three pages contain a good deal of “throat clearing.” An opening needs to grab the reader so he will continue. There needs to be a problem, action and change. It should be action that is vital to the story. Someone is going on a trip. Someone is going into battle. someone is getting married. Someone is being born. Unless you want to write erotic literature it would be better not to start with conception. Work the background in later. In The Gospel of John the first few verses talk about the Word. Immediately the Word is identified with the Son of God and the story of his baptism. The problem of establishing himself as a teacher is presented. In episode IV of Star Wars the force is not explained to us at the beginning, rather we see what it can do. It isn’t until Solo talks about fools who believe in an ancient religion that we begin to have some idea th at the force is more than magic. The characters give all this information to us.

Point of view is the perspective that the story is told from. T he most difficult and therefore least used these days is the omniscient narrator. A good rule of thumb is to see the story through the eyes of the person with the problem. Many authors write in first person. One can also use second or third person. Third person is similar to first person except the pronoun I isn’t used as much. (Actually it is more complicated than that, but that will suffice for now.) Sometimes a narrator who doesn’t see into anyone’s mind tells a story. Most fiction that looks like omniscient narrator is actually being told from the point of view of one of the characters. The narrator can then see into the mind of one person and all the other action is viewed through his eyes. Sometimes a novel will contain oone person’s point of view in one chapter and that of another character in another. This seems to work. It is confusing when shifts occur without warning.

Psychic distance has to do with how close you want your reader to be to the story. Stephen King wants to inspire terror. He gets his readers as close as he can. You hear breathing, feel sweat, hearts race. Jane Austin keeps her readers at a great distance. You see the lights, you hear the conversation, it is all very proper–no sweat, no breathing, no racing hearts. Just as with the point of view, the important thing is that the narrative remains consistent. It must not switch in the middle of a sentence, paragraph, or chapter.

Write in active voice as much as possible. Your English teacher will tell you all about this. Be aware that verbs ending in “ing” do not help your story. (Running up the hill after Jill and tripping over a rock Jack stumbled.) This slows the action of the story down but when used sparingly can add emphasis. The following construction works better (Jack ran up the hill after Jill. He tripped over a rock and stumbled. “D___!” he grumbled. Jill took water from her bucket and soap from her pocket and washed his mouth out.)…

…You have many long sentences. Your writing will be tighter and stronger with shorter sentences and fewer prepositional phrases…

…There are lots of ways to deal with dialogue. You can put the dialogue first and description second…you can put the dialogue at the end…you can break it up the way you have in your manuscript or you can put description on either sie of it…Like every other element of your story, you don’t want it to call attention to itself.

I believe you changed fonts to show a change in viewpoint or in who is speaking. For me this is very distracting. There are other good ways that work. Also it is easier for me to read when it is double-spaced.

Two books that I have found most helpful are John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. It is out in paperback. John Gardner also wrote a wonderful fantasy called Grendal. It is not very long. It is told from the point of view of the monster. The other book is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

Thank you for sharing your manuscript with me. It takes great courage to share one’s work. I admire you for starting out early. Remember free advice is worth what you pay for and don’t let anybody discourage you. You learn to write by writinig. You have a good start.

Your’s truly,

Aunt Yvonne

Productivity breakdown

I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing I accomplished in the past few semesters. In some ways, I worry that I’ve become a lot more disorganized and a lot less productive than I was a year ago.

Back in winter ’08, I took a couple of really difficult classes, got up early each morning to work in the BYU Bookstore stockroom, wrote a handful of very difficult research papers…and still managed to write about 120,000 words. Oh, and I wrote on this blog almost daily. I finished my first novel, started my second, read a dozen other novels, wrote reviews of them all…
I accomplished quite a lot.

In fall ’08, however, my workload was much lighter, my classes were ridiculously easy, I didn’t have to get up early to work…and yet I only wrote about 70,000 words, didn’t hardly write for this blog, only read a couple of books, etc etc. Much less productive.

Though, I guess you could say that I made up in other areas. I started working for the FHSS Writing Lab, and that took a lot of my time and mental energy. Also, I think the quality of my writing improved quite a bit, and I experimented a lot with things that I hadn’t tried previously. Right now, I feel that Genesis Earth, my second novel, is a much better work than The Phoenix of Nova Terra.

So maybe all of this “oh my goodness where did my productivity go” is just me worrying for no reason. It’s hard not to worry about it, though.

I know for certain that I could be much more productive with my time. I come home tired, with less than an hour before dinner, and I usually squander the time on the internet or with video game emulators. I tend to put off homework, and only do the stuff that will get me in trouble if I don’t do it (though some would say that that’s a life skill…hmmm…). On any given day, the last two hours before I go to bed is filled purely with time wasting activity. I could use an extra two hours of sleep…

Meh. I guess it’s always a struggle. A year from now, I’ll probably be saying “I can’t believe how productive I was back in winter ’09!” That, and “holy cow, what am I going to do after I graduate??”

Happy New Year!

There must be a law that states that the climax of your story takes three times as long to write as you thought it would take. Back on Monday, I finished the previous chapter and thought I could bang out the major climax of the story in a day. Look how time has flown since then–and I’ve been writing regularly.

As far as resolutions, well, I’ve got a few. As far as my writing is concerned, I’d like to consistently hit at least 500 words a day (probably more like 1,000), so I can get some solid momentum going. I’d also like to start reading again. I plan on reading 3 novels a month and reviewing them here on this blog.

I’ve also noticed that I don’t blog much here anymore, except to whine and moan about my frustrations and other stuff. That must get really tedious and boring to read after a while, so I’m going to try to blog like I did last year, where I would finish writing around 1 or 2 in the morning and then hastily throw a cheerful blog post together about whatever was on my mind. Those posts are a lot of fun to look back on, and were probably a lot more entertaining to read.

As far as my goal to finish this novel, Genesis Earth, by January 5th? Well, I’m cutting it close, no doubt about it. But I still think I can do it. I’ve been thinking about the storyline in my spare time, and I’m starting to get enthusiastic about it. I know how I want it to end, and I know how to get there. The only trouble, really, is slogging it through.

Every time I sit down to slog it out, it seems to get longer and longer and longer…but I will do it! If I don’t finish it by January 5th, I will at least finish it before the first week of school is over. The main idea is that I don’t want to split my time between finishing the rough draft of this novel and rewriting Phoenix. I found out this September that that doesn’t work (especially after I revised what I’d written–I kept mixing up the main characters’ names for both the stories! This led to some entertaining comments and discussions in the Quark writing group; “What’s Ian doing in this story? I didn’t know he lived in the desert and drove nuclear powered dune buggies!”).

Anyways, I’d better get to bed. I’ve got lots of things I could write about, but that’ll have to wait for another post-midnight rant another time.Happy New Year! May 2009 be filled with at least as much awesomeness as 2008 and a whole lot more fun and success!

Halloween and Nanowrimo kickoff

So, if you checked my blog earlier today, you may have noticed the, um, lack of progress as noted by the speedometers. Well, all I can say is that yesterday was kind of a special case, it being a holiday and all.

However, it was an awesome Halloween! I went to work at 10:30 am and started noticing people in costumes, which made me think “hey, today is Halloween…I should get a costume!” (I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been doing things more and more at the last minute, and I don’t know what’s more unnverving: the fact that I’m doing it more often, or the fact that I’m becoming so good at getting away with it).

While chatting with my coworkers in the FHSS writing lab, I decided to dress up as a writer. After all, the costume shouldn’t be too hard–I am one, after all, right? Well, it proved to be a lot easier than I’d thought! Turtleneck sweater, Birkenstocks with socks, a copy of Strunk & White in my pocket–all I really needed was a gray sports coat and a European cap, both of which I got at DI (one I bought, the other I borrowed from a friend I happened to run into at the store).

Properly attired, I was ready to attend the Quark Halloween party!

It was lots of fun! There were LOTS of costumes this year, nearly twice as many as last year. Most of the people were some obscure Anime character that I didn’t know about…I’m a nerd, but pretty ignorant when it comes to anime and manga). I did recognize quite a few of them, though!

A bunch of the guys from the Super Smash Bros tournament dressed up as their favorite characters. There were three Links, a Princess Peach, a Pikachu, Nes, and a bunch of other characters that I didn’t recognize. I thought it was really funny how Lunesar (on the right) and his wife dressed up as their favorite characters. It’s especially ironic because that’s how they met each other–through the Smash Bros tournament. Hoorah for Geekdom–it’s what brings us together!

I really liked Miriel and her husband’s costumes–Star Wars! Miriel is on the staff of The Leading Edge and helps us with back issues to give out as prizes for the writing contests. I really liked her hair in this picture! She gave me a huge box full of back issues of the magazine at the party, which was really nice–we’d been running short. With the new box of contest prizes, though, we’re ready to have lots more contests in the months to come!

For the Halloween short story contest, we did something new and experimental: we had a live reading during the actual party. I was a little bit worried at first, but it worked out really well, I think. We had the third, second, and first place stories read out loud by their authors. It wasn’t as visually exciting as watching anime explosions and giant mecha fighting each other, but it was still a treat to hear the stories read out loud, especially the first place winner, The Beauty of Decay. We actually had a big prize to give out (a $20 gift certificat to the BYU Bookstore), so it was lots of fun!

Aneeka, who won 2nd place, wasn’t there to read hers (since she’s in Germany, and, um, graduated), so we had Gamila, one of the old timers, read it for her. I briefly told the audience how Aneeka started the writing group, back in the day, and how she was the one who got Jakeson and Gamila to start dating (they’re married now–both were there at the party). It’s always fun to pleasantly embarass your friends.

So yeah, this writing contest thing is definitely something we should keep on doing! I just need to convince the rest of the officers to set aside more money for contest prizes. Everyone who participated got a copy of The Leading Edge, which was motivational I think. Besides that, the voting was fun as well. We need more contests–and not just contests, but readings as well!

So that was the Halloween party. It was basically one of the awesomest Quark socials of the year. I love this club!

Today, instead of having a writing meeting where we critique each others’ stories, we had a writing party in room 135 of the TMCB instead. I think it went really well! We started out with lots of food, chatting, and distracting conversations, but for about an hour-long stretch, there was nothing but writing. It was pretty cool. Then, towards the end, I started getting distracted with showing people photos from my photoblog via the overhead projector, but all in all I think it went well.

Today is (was?) November 1st, the first day of nanowrimo! Sadly, I’m not doing nanowrimo this year–at least, not strictly speaking. The rules of nanowrimo state that you have to start on November 1st with a wordcount of 0 and end with a wordcount of 50k. Unfortunately, if I were to freeze all my current projects and focus on something totally new, I’d lose so much time and momentum with the other projects that I doubt I’d meet my goal to have three manuscripts ready for World Fantasy 2009.

Still, nanowrimo is pretty cool, and it’s a good way to connect with the wider writing community, so I’ve decided that even if I’m not strictly going to do nanowrimo this year, I’m at least going to do something in keeping with the spirit of it. My goal is to get 50k into my current project, Hero in Exile, so that I’ll have a wordcount of 64,500 by December 1st. It’s going to require more than 1,500 words a day, but I think I can handle it.

At the writing party, I got about 700 words in, and when I transcribed it from my notebook to the word document, I got in about another 300. Right now, I’m finished with all the buildup, and now I’m poised to go for the jugular: the next scene is going to involve some fighting, explosions, death, and heroics. I’m excited!

I’ve also got to prepare a Sunday School lesson tomorrow morning, so even though we get to set our clocks back tonight, I think I’d better get to bed now. So far, the first half of this weekend has been awesome–and since I don’t have to do any homework on Sunday, I think that the second half has the potential to be just as good!