At some point during NaNoWriMo i heard of Tarot for Writers, which uses tarot cards to brainstorm character personalities and plot outlines. I’ve been lusting after it ever since and finally gave in and downloaded the Kindle version last night and have been drawing cards for my novel characters (especially the borderline random and unrealistic minor ones).

It’s far more oriented towards writers who are just starting their novels than those who have already written one and are trying to edit, but it’s still proving useful. At the very least it’s prodding me to be a bit more creative – most other tarot spreads, if they touch on personality or backstory at all, do so in the sense of how it all affects a bigger problem. The Tarot for Writers spreads don’t have the whole ‘real live person with a backstory you can’t change on a whim’ limitation.

It has awesome plot-outlining bits, too. I’m going to go nuts with this next November… i’m already having trouble resisting the urge to play around with the various plot spreads. Maybe by the time i’m done pulling cards to work on a whole small cult worth of character design the novelty will have worn off a bit.

random other stuff

• I somehow suspect i’m going to end up with a copy of Out of the Box & On the Page before i’m done editing. Right now i need more editing advice than idea-generating advice, though.
• The ‘post-literate’ Cat and Girl strip makes me giggle – though i admit to being on the pro-spelling side. And the comments below have devolved into pro- vs anti-spelling debate of most wondrous form, including at least one impromptu mini-poem.

I read my 2007 NaNo again last night. It’s… actually really good (says the person who wrote it and is therefore not biased at all… well, it’s good compared to most of my other hacked-out-in-a-month novels).

It’s still very much a rough draft but i’m happy with it. I can do something with this. I can make it good.

That said, if any alien biologists, cult psychologists, or world-destruction-ologists know anything about two-hearted knife wound victims, otherwise sensible cult members, and slowly but irreversibly making Earth uninhabitable… i think i could use the help.

I’d normally have updated earlier (sticking with #98 on my 101 list, ‘update weekly’), but my internet has been pretty shoddy lately. It works, then it doesn’t, then it does. Still doesn’t properly work, but whatever. I’ll not let that stop me. Though it does mean any update will be random hodgepodge ‘everything i meant to write all week and didn’t’ thrown together instead of anything coherent.

On the novelling front: lots of character-building, lots of world-building, lots of research. My current novel project is going to read like an urban fantasy, even though in my head it’s more of a hard sci-fi novel, so i’m basically creating alternate versions of the whole world and trying to work out plausible reasons for the alternate version to exist. I really hate stories in which there’s no logical explanation for why something happens the way it does – even a technobabble sem-logical explanation, ‘Doctor Who’-style, is better than nothing. Heck, even if the explanation isn’t in the story, if there could plausibly be an explanation, i’m okay. But ‘well, it just magically happens‘ doesn’t go over so well with me. So even though my novel involves alternate realms populated by dragons, and even though i don’t plan on explaining any of the actual science in the story, i’ve been doing a ridiculous amount of research on hyperspace. I think i’ll own every single book ever written by Michio Kaku by the time November is over… Then there’s the research i’m doing on fae and technopagans and coffee and Watergate and Buddhism. It’s a long list.

I’ve also been sort-of using my tarot deck – mostly simple readings for my characters. Someone on the National Novel Writing Month forums mentioned they have a simple four-card layout they use to determine a character’s fears, hopes, loves, and hates, and that plus one extra card used to determine a dominant personality trait has given me many wonderful ideas for my characters. I still have to look up the meanings behind just about every card, and i don’t have any traditional layouts like the Celtic Cross memorised yet, but i’m starting to get a feel for the cards.

Dvorak – i’m kind of hoping to have figured out before NaNoWriMo starts, but i’ve been slowed up a bit by my lack of consistent internet and my ‘hey, i can just use online programs!’ attitude of last week. I do have the home row more or less memorised now; that’s a start.

And as far as replacing my software with open-source stuff, i’ve actually gone backwards a step – i’ve switched, at least temporarily, from Firefox to Opera. Opera’s noticeably faster (important right now, when the next page load could be my last for twenty hours), and for whatever reason Firefox keeps crashing even when the internet’s working. I’ve heard people complaining about the latest version of Firefox but it seemed to be working fairly well for me for a while and only started crashing recently; maybe i’ll just reinstall the whole thing once my connection’s properly functioning again.