Alas! Something Wicked This Way Comes.

It felt like millennia. My consciousness dreamed of stars. Backup systems hummed, until a word flared engines to life.

***

Dear Diary: I’m about 500 light-years away from what’s left of Earth. Dammit. All I wanted was some crab rangoon!

***

“Miss? You have all-natural hair products? My hair’s kinda …” She slid off her cap, revealing coiling locks.

***

[Recent Microfiction]

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“It’s coming. Brace yourselves!”

“What’s happening, ma’am?”

While doodling around on the Internet in the midst of a study break, I stumbled upon a word. A word that drained the blood from my cheeks. Turned my lungs to lead.

A whisper in the dark.

“N-Na-NaNoWriMo …”

[Cue Otherworldly Scream. Moon eclipses Sun.]

Something wicked this way comes, y’all.

Just kidding! (I did panic, though.)

I’m Oh-Em-Gee-ing. What am I going to do? I skipped out on NaNo ’09 and ’10 due to tons of schoolwork, but I don’t have an excuse this time around–my schedule is much lighter. It’s not about the time, though. It’s about the piece. And I WANT to do NaNo this time around.

What am I going to write? I don’t want to use Sentinel of Mirrors for NaNo–she’s too sensitive for rough, cut-throat writing. No, no, no. SoM requires delicate handling. I do have another novel idea in mind, though, from my first (and failed) NaNo attempt (NaNo ’08), renamed Chaos Standard. This is not as adequately prepared as SoM, but I’m so much more at creative ease using this piece. (I actually started writing this piece in 2007–got 40 pages into it. It was cliche-ridden, so I set it aside for a rainy-day complete rewrite. Been remolding and tweaking the plot.)

I’m going to spend a month fixing parts and oiling gears for the November War: plotting, outlining, and hard-core musing. I tried “winging-it” last time …

***

Um, so are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Are you a NaNo veteran (successful or failed) or new to the game? Want to share how you prepped (or planning to prep)? What methods did you use to make it through last time around?

Overmusing on Twitter: Seasons in Westeros & Kepler’s Three Laws

I danced in the city’s neon lights, forever too soon. The man in black caught my eye. He tapped his watch and smirked.

*
She slid her resignation under the Dr.’s door and half-dragged R12U-8 from the lab to her SUV. The man did not stir.

*

The sky was unusually bright–a stark white. That could only mean one thing: the Alliance had arrived. Time to split.

***

[Recent microfic]

Shoutout to Elisa Michelle! This fellow writer decided to join in on the #microfic challenge. Yeah-yuh! *confetti and fireworks* Recent shorts are posted on her fiction blog, ElisaMichelleStories, and she posts updates on Tastes Like Spaghetti, her Tumblr account. Go check them out!

**

*

By the way–Happy Autumnal Equinox for you Northern Hemis and a Great Vernal Equinox for you Southern Hemis! (Someone’s having fun in Stellar Astronomy class. ;))

200+ tweets in so far on my new Twitter account, rowannhai. It’s been an interesting endeavor so far, but I really hope I’m not spamming followers with my thoughts … Let’s say that for a few minutes a day, I may go into a musing-lapse. Like today.

Post-Spoiler: I completely forgot that summers and winters on Westeros vary in length (so no, summers are not “shorter” than winters), but I’ll just clarify what I had thought (since I only had 140 characters for each post to explain):

[Read from bottom to top]

(Read from bottom to top)

Johannes Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion, if you’d like to know more.

In the world of A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, summers and winters can last for years at a time. Why is that?

I jumped ahead and assumed that Westeros is on a planet (it has day and night) and it is part of a solar system like our own so that Kep’s Laws could apply (as far as we know, Kep’s may only apply to our system and no other).

Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion States that p^2 = a^3.  In simpler terms, that means that the longer the orbital period (time it takes for a planet to orbit its sun-star, the longer its distance from its sun-star. For example, Jupiter’s distance from the sun is greater than Earth’s distance, which means that it has a longer orbital period than Earth’s orbital period of one year (this law seems sorta obvious to us, today).

Seasons are caused by the planet’s tilt (such as Earth’s 23.5 degree tilt). As the tilted planet orbits its sun-star its hemispheres receive least/most amounts of sunlight, like below:

Courtesy of HowStuffWorks.Com

But alas. One thing I absolutely forgot to put into account–which shatters my ideas, anyway–is that the length of summers and winters vary in Westeros. Sorta hit me when I took a break from this post and returned. Argh. For the length of seasons to abnormally change, I guess the orbit would have to be unstable … I dunno!

Perhaps it’s fantasy, hahaha! Le gasp, Batman!

I’m only a newbie to Astronomy. *shrug* Yeah, yeah, everybody’s splurging out on A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) these days, but I was tempted to add some thoughts as to why summer and winter are so friggin’ long in Westeros. How do they measure time outside of days, anyway, if winters and summers vary? I believe that I read that age is measured in winters (or summers?), if I remember correctly …

Ok, ok, it’s fantasy. But sometimes I want to wrap my head around things, you know? I guess all this astronomical analysis puts things into perspective as I work on my WIPs. Verdigar of SoM has a few “scientific” things to iron out.

Microfic: Bite-Sized Stories with No Calories

Around 1 am, my great-great grandpa showed up on my doorstep, wielding an automatic crossbow and a grimace.

I want a normal life.

*

“I was human, once.”

“Well, then, what are you now?”

“Invincible.”

*

“Spell ‘anomaly’.”

“Anomaly. M-a-d-e-l-e-i-n-e. Anomaly.”

***

For the past three days, I’ve posted these lines on Twitter under #amwriting #microfic, partially inspired by a post on Wired (do check it out–famous authors’ six-word stories! So many good ones … ) and previous experiences with micro-fiction. I would’ve posted with the hashtag #sixwords, but alas, my word-counts were out of control. I wanted the flexibility!

I wanted a cool way to get quick literary exercise while waiting for class to start, taking a quick break from studying, waiting for the academic adviser, etc. Twitter’s 140-character limit was a nice challenge to undertake, too.

Perhaps this will be a daily thing. I may post each week’s progress on this blog on Mondays.

(The last two lines remind me of dialogue snippets from movie trailers, teehee!)

Back to Basics

It is 5 am. I’m writing this on my phone under the sheets. In the dark. In a building of probably 1000+ students lulled to sleep by the Sandman.

A lot has been on my mind as of late. (Let me keep this short so he doesn’t sneak up behind me and knock me out, haha.)

I’ve been writing for about … let’s see … subtract 9 … eleven years. In actuality, I’ve learned a bulk about the craft and fantasy genre in the last three years. It’s been an uphill adventure. Sort of like a hike. Tour, perhaps.

I’m at the end of this joyride now. I think I’ve been here for quite some time and I didn’t realize it. Maybe I did, but ignored the tingle in my stomach.

The tingle is now a snake. It’s time.

I think I need to go back. Way back. Meet myself again. Or discover her. Or save her from the woods. Who knows? I need to reassess and weed out some pipe dreams–or give them potting soil.

I think I’ve become a bit too comfortable at times with the structure of my work, spending more time with my good fellows Story, Plot, Concepts, and my handsome lover, Worldbuilding. But there’s so much more in the grammatical and structural realms I need to grasp. Just a lot of ignorance hiding under the bed. The night terror of a Good-Concept-but-Bad-Writing creeps up on me in the shower, in class, and in bed.

Can’t laugh in the face of a sphinx if you don’t know the riddle.

I know, I know. Obvious post is obvious. But it’s good to pry some things off your chest. You know?

My apologies if this is an unintelligible ramble. It’s almost 6 am now. K, he’s here. Going to–