monday, july 2, 2001
writing headaches

some days i really wonder what the heck i was thinking when i did that when that can be anything previously done that no longer makes any sense to me. obviously this has to do with my writing (or the title wouldn't make sense), but it also has to do with world building. world building isn't easy. in fact, it is very hard. i am a writer (ok, so that may be in question, but allow me my delusions), an english major, web design hobbyist, mother and wife. i am not a cartographer or a historian. but to build my own unique world i have to be both. i am geographically illiterate and yet, without a map in front of me, i managed to incorporate the u.s. and southern america in my original maps of alden (my gaming world). rebuilding that was a pain in the butt. then i went and took all the names of continents and countries and threw them into google search. i ended up having to rename a number of them as i didn't want to risk saying anything obscene in russian, german, japanese, spanish or swedish. the only language i have had any real contact with is spanish, and that i have forgotten ten times more than i remember. but the map has been redone.

so now i am on timelines. i had made a unique, if somewhat complicated, system of time for alden. now that i need to revamp the timelines i am finding it impossible to keep the math straight. so, finally i am doing what my players wanted me to do all along and removing the excess math. straight forward years. no more cycles. this removes some of the uniqueness and makes the math 100 times easier, even if i hate doing it. the timelines will now be more straight forward (players, don't cheer too loudly now) and easy to understand.

why did this all come up? because i need to outline, at least vaguely, the keepers and thalionrhoe novels and to do that i had to finish the timeline revamp. in doing so, the insanity of the past came back to haunt me.

of course, then comes the issue of actually writing. i have realized today what it is that makes my writing unpublishable to me: lack of emotion. when i read on of my authors, i feel as well as see. i feel tension when there is suspense, i cry when there's tragedy, and so on. my writing is dry and evokes nothing in me. now i realize this is me reading my writing with my hypercritical eye, but i should feel something...shouldn't i? but nope, it is dry unemotional. it evokes nothing but critical feelings in me. i have never had a reader even tell me they laughed or cried or were tense with one of my books (at the appropriate moment even..).

why do i always pick the harder things in life to aim for?