An Odyssey of Dreams

What the title says. I've been buried under a pile of grad-school-y stuff. It's been an amazingly positive experience thus far, but certainly an exhausting one. Voluntarily I've been putting in hours that have had people in the lab I'm rotating telling me that I'm working too hard and I really shouldn't stress so much. The funny thing is that I'm not stressed at all on this score - it's the most biologically-related fun I've had since I left undergrad. Absolutely wonderful!

So wonderful, in fact, that it's been stimulating my writing. Out of the blue I started rewriting one of the most troublesome parts of Glamour - the prologue - and just today came up with a really nifty idea for short stories. ( Cut to spare those who aren't interested. And also, rambly. )

In other news, I'm enjoying the latest season of Stargate: Atlantis like little else. Character moments! And backstory! And group bonding! Yay! Though I haven't seen last weeks', and won't see this weeks' for a bit. SG-1 is looking good too, though I'm sad about the cancellation.

I'm feeling less-than-thrilled over the upcoming VM and BSG premieres, though. Both shows have kind of left me underwhelmed in the aftermath of their second seasons, and the only way I was able to enjoy the Veronica Mars finale was by tossing the plot out the window and forgetting anything that even stank of continuity and cohesion. Though to be fair, I wasn't thrilled with the the first season's finale, either. Battlestar Galactica sort of went downhill for me after the Pegasus episodes, and for pretty much the same reasons. I'm not at all impressed with the commercials SciFi's been running, either.

My semagic informs me that today is matociquala's birthday. Happy Birthday Bear!

Today is also the start of Rosh Hashannah, so if you thought that I'd be on more now that I've appeared briefly, you were most likely mistaken. Nevertheless, Shannah Tovah to all that celebrate, and may you be inscribed in the Book of Life!

Okay, I've been writing most of my life. "First-time" here is used to denote first original novel.

When I was writing what became the first draft of Glamour I sneered at world-building and went about it in a most haphazard fashion. "It's urban fantasy," I said, "I won't even see Faerie until the next one, anyway. I'll worry about it then."

Well, now I worry about it. I worry as to why an Unseelie knight in the year 2005 wouldn't carry a gun. (Answer: he would. The other one actually works so well with a sword it'd kill his technique.) After all, my fae thrive on human creativity and there is a great deal of human ingenuity involved in making killing things. Honorable challege, though, is still usually done with a pistol or sword rather than a semi-automatic. :)

I find my world-building doesn't center too much on the world itself. Whether it's Boston or Faerie, the world is there. I'll paint that picture readily enough. What I wind up focusing on is the society, it's politics, the tools (whether magic or weaponry) and how they work, and what roles the characters would play in that society. I'm focusing on the meanings of porphyry, royal blue, and grey and what they mean to my characters. What sorts of familiars the characters have or are allowed to have and precisely how many is what I began thinking about today, and as a result I came up with something regarding those things that will bridge the plot of Nightfall. Hell, I can now - thanks to that revelation - say that it has a plot instead of bearing a large similarity to "Bill & Ted's Excellent Faerie Adventure," which was largely its state since any inception worth noting.

I worry that my heroine's luscious locks of hair will seriously impact her ability to kill people effectively. ( Discussion of why that is. )

I'm really giving it a lot of thought, now. And it, in turn, is affecting how I see the characters. Which is good, I think. And I think this is the proper time to look at the world, too. Because if I'd given it this much regard earlier, I'd have been distracted and never written the bloody thing. Of course, now that I have to rewrite it to make it consistent and palatable for the next two, I really wish I'd done it already.

I feel a bit like a child whinging at her parents from the backseat. "Are we there yet?"