Category Archives: Writing
Chronicles of a NaNoRebel: Distraction and the Dulls
First things first! It is Week 4! That means there’s a new ML update!
Note: You will notice a lack of pictures. Pictures take time. And in November, time is at a premium, so I am forgoing the hunt of amusing pictures to distract the ADD brains of the 21st century. Apologies.
Unlike Val, I am further than 500 words, but alas, I am still woefully behind at 31,000 (I should be at 36,000).
There are a couple of reasons for this. First is that I have these things called friends. Friends who I like and who like me and who lament when I go MIA which for the past year or so has been…always. Read the rest of this entry
Watch “ML Updates: Just Keep Writing!” on YouTube
In lieu of Dining and Dating Errol and I have been making fake ML Updates from Rick and Val, two characters in the NaNoMusical to celebrate NaNowrimo. Here is the latest one! I am feeling like Val is appearing right now.
Chronicles of a NaNo Rebel: Everything sucks.
It is the midst of week two for NaNoWriMo. Tomorrow marks the halfway point. I’m slightly behind but not terribly so. I have 22,000 words. That’s nothing to complain about. Sure, it’s a hodgepodge of blogs, articles, scripts and novel-style storylines, but they’re my 22,000 words and I should be proud of it.
Chronicles of a NaNo Rebel
This year was supposed to be the year I fully got back into NaNoWriMo again. But then, as I wrote earlier, I got the oppurtunity to write a video game. Not just any video game either: it’s a time travel video game. This sort of project requires the time and effort that doesn’t allow for a novel to be written on the side. At least…so long as I have a full time job.
And yes, I do get really cranky when people take my stapler…seriously…
But, all was not apparently lost. I was told that I could still participate in NaNo, counting my script and video game planning towards my word count. However since it’s not an official, coherent novel I no longer can be considered an official NaNoWriMo participant. No, I have become what is known as…a NaNoRebel. Read the rest of this entry
Validation
As I’ve said before, I’m an actor. I was trained as an actor, I still perform as an actor and more importantly, I think like an actor. This can be beneficial in many ways. It makes me more sensitive to people’s emotional states for one.
Like…crazy?
But as with any career, there are downsides to being an actor as well, downsides that manifest themselves as bad habits that you might not even be aware.
Let’s talk about validation. Read the rest of this entry
Panic
Everybody has their own unique creative process. Mine is to panic.
Again, thankyou appropriate picture.
This probably comes as a surprise to no one. After all, I am not known as a particularly calm person when it comes to my creative endeavors. Read the rest of this entry
Disobedience
I’ve been working on a webseries with Errol over the last few months. Actually, it was the entire reason I started up this blog. I wanted a space to talk about my writing process and maybe the occasional post about amusing things.
I may have gotten a wee bit distracted.
by…other posts….
Photoshop
I am not an artist. It’s not that I don’t like drawing. I love it in fact. But I am not an artist. And I am certainly not good. I know nothing of stippling, or shading, or gradients. I don’t know about perspective. I watch people making doodles in their notebook like one would watch a wizard perform a spell to conjure up a dragon. It’s simply alien and impossible to me.
Okay, I DID take drawing classes as a kid, and in fact was considered “good” in many ways. But I gave that up for the various reasons that kids give things up…okay, a boy in my class saw a picture in the newspaper of me drawing and said I looked like a butt. To me that seemed to translate as “you’re a bad artist”. But that’s besides the fact!
I forget what he looks like, but I imagine it’s something like this…
Filk Ontario
This past weekend, I attended Filk Ontario (or FKO in its shortened form) for the first time. For those of you who don’t know, Filk is a vast network of geeky musicians who get together to sing old and new songs about sci-fi and fantasy, most of them falling under the folk music genre. In terms of legacy, it’s been around as long as any sort of geek culture has existed. FKO is the annual Filk gathering in Ontario and Errol convinced me to go with him and Debs after I’d attended a couple of Filk events.
FKO was definitely a different sort of convention experience for me. Strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long blog post. There’s a lot to unpack about FKO…
This is Urban Tapestry…they are awesome.
Opinions
A bit more of a boring blog post, but hey, it can’t all be fun and games and we’re in the midst of Camp NaNoWriMo so it’s a good time to have a post about writing! No pictures in this one, sorry. There’s just no time! But if you find it boring, watch this video about being bored. And then buy the book. It is awesome and hilarious:
I’m Bored Music Video (inspired by the new picture book from Simon & Schuster BFYR) from debsanderrol on Vimeo.
I’m writing a new webseries now. This one is a bit different than NaNoMusical. For one, it’s a lot smaller in scale: no musical numbers, two actors, and one location. This makes for easier scheduling and filming. For another, there’s no definite deadline (ie, 3 freaking months). This has given us the chance to play around with the script a bit more before we finally get filming it. Read the rest of this entry
Thoughts from the Test Chamber 