The CHALLENGE chugs on!

[Glass Mouse]

Status for the week October 19 - 25! And not a single fail this week - we rock!


Glass Mouse passes with a Genre Unsavvy strip, and two pumpkin carvings.

Lycunadari passes with two city photos and two wardrobe memes.

Allan Dotson passes with a Critters page, a shaggy beast, a robot tank, a futuristic vampire, a candy monster, a Crusher Kid superhero type, and an ogre skeleton.

Cuthalion passes with two tiny landscape paintings, a horse, a mouse, two dolphins, and a bunch of birds.

Artman77 passes with an unemployment strip, a mafia-sanctioned pony murder, a watercolour birb, and four t-shirt designs.

LeSwordfish passes with 1576 words of battle report.

TheWombatOfDoom passes the past four weeks with roughly 350 vacation photos, a tattoo design, and episodes 16 and 17 of Majora’s Mask Point Race.

jseah passes with 9414 words of Hero’s War.

celtois passes with a house, a soldier, three faces, and a Calvin treehouse.

UXLZ will be back on the 10th of November.


Thus, no one FAILS this round!

Glass Mouse, Lycunadari, Allan Dotson, Cuthalion, Artman77, LeSwordfish, TheWombatOfDoom, jseah, and celtois PASS this round!


Current standing:

Spoiler

Show

Glass Mouse
Current run: 261 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

Lycunadari
Current run: 146 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

Allan Dotson
Current run: 60 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

Cuthalion
Current run: 7 weeks
Longest run: 21 weeks
Themes: -

Artman77
Current run: 1 week
Longest run: 13 weeks
Themes: -

LeSwordfish
Current run: 17 weeks
Longest run: 5 weeks
Themes: -

TheWombatOfDoom
Current run: 17 weeks
Longest run: 71 weeks
Themes: -

jseah
Current run: 18 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

celtois
Current run: 7 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

UXLZ
Current run: -
Longest run: 2 weeks
Themes: -

This week's theme (October 26 - November 1) has not been chosen yet, so for once I’m gonna swoop in with Demonic critters.

Next week's theme is chosen by Artman77 - let me know in PM or this thread, and I'll include it in the next status.

Battle scenes seriously eat a ton of words. I wrote the army battle (~3k) in one night...

Holy wow. You’re crazy productive, mister.

Guess who forgot about this until like 9.30pm after he'd turned his computer off? This guy! 541 more words.

Good catch! And great writing on that fight sequence in the end. I love the "close as lovers and clawing like cats" line - wonderfully evocative.

Due to a variety of circumstances my game has been delayed so there are no more session reports :(

Boo! Hope it gets back on track soon.

Art here: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...-Master!/page3

Welcome back proper :)

[jseah]

Holy wow. You’re crazy productive, mister

It's actually pretty normal for me to write most of the chapter in one or two nights. The others are spent on... uh... planning, yes. (read: staring at screen blankly)

In any case, next week is just a cato's notes, so I'll try to do a different story again.

[jseah]

2841 words for Cato's Notes.

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3238329/46/A-Hero-s-War

Now the question is,
1) do I continue Hero's War chapters
2) write a pilot for a new story idea
3) start a programming project? For a game idea

[jseah]

I decided to go with the new story idea.

Villainous MC here we go! Time to conquer the world!
But first, time to clack away on the typewriter...

Fallen Star
1415 words

EDIT:
Chapter 2. 1539 words.

[LeSwordfish]

2118 words of novel! This represents so much useful work I didn't do!

Spoiler

Show

She felt her teeth crunch through muscle and tendons to reach bone, and tasted blood, hot and meaty. Gideon howled, an inarticulate screech of pain and fury, and his spasming hand finally released the weapon. Cora made a grab for it, but as she did another glancing blow struck her head, making it spin, and all she could do was send the pistol sliding away across the polished floor. She released Gideon’s wrist and threw herself after it, but the chair tangled her feet and Gideon grabbed her ankle, bringing her down hard onto the floor. Gideon kicked the chair away and clambered forward onto her back. She felt his knee twisting her spine, his weight forcing her down, his hands gripping the back of her head. One hand was slick with blood.
“You filthy little animal.” Gideon growled. “You stinking demon.” He slammed her head hard against the tiled floor. Sparks exploded in her eyes. “I’m going to murder you, you little wretch.”
He struck her head again, and she blacked out.
When she came to, it seemed only seconds later. Gideon had stood, and was striding over towards the corner in which the gun had fallen. Every inch of her hurt. Blood was in her eyes, and her ears were still ringing from the gunshot. Trying not to make a sound, her arms screaming at her, she lifted herself onto her knees, and then to her feet. Her head was swimming, and she had to place one hand against the wall so as not to fall over.
Gideon turned, and opened his mouth to speak, and Cora jumped out of the window.

---


The wind tugged Cora off-balance and the cold blast shocked her back a little closer to wakefulness. She turned left and ran forward, her feet thundering on the wooden decking. The corner seemed so far ahead, and Gideon would be rounding the corner with his gun any second. There were narrow stairs down though, and she took them. Now she was on the lower level of the scaffold, without direct line of sight to the window. She leaned into a run towards the corner, and had nearly reached it when Gideon got to the top of the ramp.
Cora felt the scaffolding shift as he crouched, and twisted sideways. The roar of the gunshot was barely audible over the wind, but she felt the bullet pass her, felt it’s breath hot against her shoulder, and saw it punch a hole in the tarpaulin ahead of her. She was off-balance now, but managed to throw herself sideways again as Gideon fired another shot, and then she was at the corner and around it and-
-it was a dead end. Around the corner, the scaffold continued for a bare few meters before coming to a halt, with another tarpaulin snapping in the wind. She nearly ran straight into it, and had to grab the handrail to stop from falling as a wave of despair crested over her. She had been hoping that there would be another way into the building, but here in front of her was a wall.
“I wondered if you’d run into that.” Gideon shouted over the wind. “I’m not sure where you hoped you were going, Ms Al-Asadi.”
Cora turned slowly, trying to see a way out, and then pressed herself against the edge of the building, ready to leap on Gideon as soon as he rounded the corner. When he spoke, his voice was no closer than before.
“I assume you’re planning an ambush, and want to assure you that I shan’t be coming anywhere near that corner. I’ll give you thirty seconds to come out my dear, and take what’s coming with dignity: I can’t waste any more time than that on you.”
Cora paused, her back against the cold steel, and closed her eyes. The wind washed over and around her, and despite the screaming pain of her injuries she forced herself to take two long, deep breaths.
“Twenty seconds!” Gideon called.
Take stock of the situation. What did she have available to her? The gloves were inside, but she was still wearing her harness and rope. Gideon was watching both this level and the above of the scaffold, and was too far away to charge. Could she get back into the building? Not from here.
“Ten seconds, my dear.”
So she did have an option, but she didn’t like it. She reached out to the tarpaulin that blocked the end of the scaffold, and hauled upon it. Her tired arms shrieked in pain, but she did manage to tear several of the connectors, and open a space wide enough to fit through. The wind caught it and flicked it violently at her, but she held it tight and started to squeeze through the gap. It had now fully started to rain, and she had to turn her head sideways to avoid the droplets of water splattering into her eyes.
Now she was on the outside of the scaffold, with nothing between her and the long drop to the city below. Once again she felt her eyes drawn to the void, but this time she forced herself to look away, to stare fixedly upwards for a second until the compulsion passed. She clipped one end of her harness to the scaffolding above her and started to climb - she could get on top and cross over to above Gideon.
“Zero!” Gideon called, and fired the gun. Cora flinched, but the only response was a crunch of shattered metal. Gideon was firing on the scaffolding, perhaps? Why would he do that? He fired again, with another shriek of metal, and then a third time - and this time she saw why, as, with a scream of tortured steel, the whole length of scaffold she was standing on dropped by nearly a meter. She lost her grip, and fell - once again her stomach twisted and her hands flailed wildly, but she was roped on and, with a painful jerk she came to a halt, spinning wildly, at the end of the tether.
He’s trying to take down the whole scaffolding, Cora thought with horror, and this was confirmed as another shot rang out and the tilt of the scaffold above became even more extreme. She gripped the rope with her hands, braced her feet against the wall of the tower to arrest her spin, and began to haul herself upwards.

---


And Cora came swinging down from above, feet-first, and kicked Gideon heavily in the small of his back, sending him flying forward onto the scaffold floor.
She had attached the karabiner from her harness to one of the high bars of the scaffolding, and swung on the harness rope like a jungle vine. She’d needed to eyeball the height of the scaffolding and had looped the rope around her arm so as to get it at the right length, but it had allowed her to put all of her weight into her feet, and send Gideon sprawling. He fell heavily, and Cora jacknifed her legs to arrest her momentum, dropping to the ground. She needed a second to shake the rope off her arm, and in that time Gideon had already flipped over - before she could retreat he was on his feet. This time there was no apology, no charm - he slipped into a fighting stance and came at her like a freight train.
Gideon began with a flurry of low blows that she was forced to dance sideways to avoid, before aiming a vicious kick that would have broken her leg had she not dodged it. The kick had placed him slightly off-balance, and she brought her hand around towards his windpipe - he blocked with his forearm and struck out again - she dropped low, turning the strike into a glance to her shoulder, and let the concussive force roll her back and away from him. He followed instantly - no banter, no talk, but murder in his eyes. She swung her whole weight sideways to avoid another firm punch - and the scaffolding, weakened and creaking, began to collapse. Gideon went backwards and sideways against the tarpaulin wall, and Cora fell on top of him.
For a moment they were close again, face-to-face, until Cora hurled herself away, up the incline of the collapsing scaffold, and through the window into the office. The door wasn’t too far in front of her, and Gideon didn’t have the gun. She put her head down and ran - all she needed was to reach the door, and then -
-the harness pulled tight, and she was thrown clean off her feet. She was still attached to the scaffolding.
Cora landed on her face hard, and felt her head swim with nausea again. If she passed out now, it was over. She rolled over and scrabbled at her harness for the karabiner - it took her a moment for her fumbling hands to remember how to unhook it. It was detached, she tried to rise, and Gideon fell on her like a meteor. His first strike split her forehead open and nearly blinded her with blood - his second hit her in the jaw, and she felt one of her teeth break. The blows kept coming, each one knocking her further and further from coherency, and her desperate attacks back couldn’t get his weight off her, or even make his assault relent.
Desperately, she scrabbled for something to hit back with, a weapon, anything, and her hand met cool metal. Blood was in her eyes and she couldn’t see what it was, but she struck upwards with it once, twice, three times, each one eliciting a grunt of pain from Gideon. The forth strike it stuck, and was torn away from her hands as Gideon reared back. With more space she could see him now: bruised, dishevelled, sporting a gash on his cheek and one eye swollen shut - but his weight was still holding her down. Even if it wasn’t, she wasn’t sure she could have moved. With the quiet detachment of the nearly unconcious, she noted what her makeshift weapon had been - her harness’s karabiner, the rope snaking away, the hook now caught firmly in Gideon’s collar. Another wave of pain washed over her, and she forced herself to stay awake, to stay alive.
“Oh, my dear.” Gideon said. His voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away. He looked around himself, and picked up a length of debris in two hands, like a baseball bat. It would be easily enough, Cora thought, to crush her skull.
“Goodbye, Cora. Nobody can say you didn’t try your best.” Gideon raised the makeshift weapon, and -
-and outside the window the scaffolding collapsed away from the wall completely, with a long screech of tortured metal. Gideon turned slightly to look at it, before turning back to Cora, raising the weapon again -
- and the rope went taut.
One end of it was still clipped to the falling scaffold, and now the other was hooked firmly into Gideon’s collar. Gideon screamed as the tightening rope hauled him backwards, a thin reedy noise that seemed to last forever, even if it only took a few seconds for him to be jerked backwards off Cora, dragged across the office floor, and then out over the edge, through the window, and onto his long long journey to the ground.
A few seconds later there was the thunderous noise of the scaffold hitting the ground and then, it seemed, silence. Even the wind seemed to be holding it’s breath.
Every movement paining her, Cora turned sideways and vomited blood across the office floor. It seemed to take her a long long time to rise, first to her knees and then to her feet, and for her to trudge across to look out of the window. The city was so far below that she could barely even see the debris of the scaffolding as it lay at the bottom of the tower. She took several long deep breaths, and wiped the blood from her eyes. Every inch of her was painful, every movement excruciating, and she felt that maybe she was seconds from collapsing into unconciousness.
She turned away from the window. Behind her, Mathilde was stood in the doorway, her pistol in her hand.

[jseah]

Fallen Star Chapter 3 is 1259 words.

[jseah]

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3238329/47/A-Hero-s-War

Chapter 47. 2582 words.

[celtois]

On mobile so I cannot link things easily. Six more drawings this week

http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/art/Halloween-face-3-569758759?
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/art/Frisbee-569758403
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...rait-569757730
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...blue-569757411
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...ce-2-569756880
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...-guy-569755915

[Cuthalion]

Some bad webcam photos, since no scanner.

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2
3
4
5

[Artman77]

Arts; http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...4#post20024344
Comic has multiple panels

Theme: Excuses

[Glass Mouse]

Status for the week October 26 - November 1! Kinda late this week as people kept showing up at my door and distracting me.


Glass Mouse passes with a Genre Unsavvy strip, and 7811 words of NaNoWriMo including a scene of demonic critter-based fortune telling.

Lycunadari passes with a witch drawing, and six pretty autumn photos.

Allan Dotson passes with a Critters page, a Night Goblin, some Martian sketches, a Slytherin witch, a Martian flowerhead, a devolved human, an ox, some battle princesses, and a Martian spaceship.

Cuthalion passes with four water birds, two smaller birds, a cute owl pair… and two links that don’t work?

Artman77 passes with a skeleton comic, a disarmed werewolf, and a skeledrider.

LeSwordfish passes with 2118 words of novel.

TheWombatOfDoom passes with Majora's Mask Point Race episode 18.

jseah passes with 2582 words of Hero’s War, and 4213 words of Fallen Star, and 2841 words for Cato's Notes.

celtois passes with two Halloween portraits, a frisbee catch, a self portrait, a teethy monster, and a squatting guy.

UXLZ will be back on the 10th of November.


Thus, no one FAILS this round!

Glass Mouse, Lycunadari, Allan Dotson, Cuthalion, Artman77, LeSwordfish, TheWombatOfDoom, jseah, and celtois PASS this round!


Current standing:

Spoiler

Show

Glass Mouse
Current run: 262 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: 1 week

Lycunadari
Current run: 147 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

Allan Dotson
Current run: 61 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

Cuthalion
Current run: 8 weeks
Longest run: 21 weeks
Themes: -

Artman77
Current run: 2 weeks
Longest run: 13 weeks
Themes: 1 week

LeSwordfish
Current run: 18 weeks
Longest run: 5 weeks
Themes: -

TheWombatOfDoom
Current run: 18 weeks
Longest run: 71 weeks
Themes: -

jseah
Current run: 19 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: -

celtois
Current run: 8 weeks
Longest run: -
Themes: 1 week

UXLZ
Current run: -
Longest run: 2 weeks
Themes: -

This week's theme (November 2 - 8), chosen by Artman77, is Excuses.

Next week's theme is chosen by LeSwordfish - let me know in PM or this thread, and I'll include it in the next status.

Theme: Excuses

How meta is this supposed to be? Because I can find a ****ton of excuses not to follow the theme


Also, hey, is anyone else doing NaNoWriMo? I signed up this year on a whim (first time I’ve had a chill November and a novel concept both line up), so, uh. Let’s see how this goes.
I'm here, if anyone wanna buddy me!

[jseah]

Unfortunately I can't do nano this year due to having a job. /excuses

Besides I don't write A Hero's War quickly enough.

[Artman77]

Nano: yes. 90% Of my updates will be writing.
Theme: lol, yeah. I wasn't expecting irony as an easy out, but if he shoe fits...

[LeSwordfish]

Alas - I wanted to do NaNo, but I have about six assignments due over the course of this month, and I really shouldn't start a new project.

[Glass Mouse]

Ah, yes, work and projects... The bane of every creative marathon.

Artman77, high five! I'm about to embark on the fourth day's writing which, I'm embarrassed to admit, is the furthest I've ever made it in NaNoWriMo. So it's definitely going well here!

I suppose I should also mention that I'm not gonna draw my comic these weeks, so it's not gonna count for the Challenge. All updates will come from the buffer. Just wanted to clarify that before anyone started wondering.

[Artman77]

WRITING FIVE!! *smack*

And hey, four days is nothing to turn up your nose at, considering you've got 11k words already. Good job!!!

I've got a paltry 4k. Since I'm an uber-creative artist, I don't foresee struggling with the dreaded writer's block problem. My issue is that I'm a visual artist, not a writer, and have trouble thinking linearly. I also have mild ADD that can turn into a case of severe ADD on steroids when it comes to writing, apparently. Imagine taking the first, second, third, eighth, and 29th chapters, putting them in a blender, and pulling them out one sentence at a time. That's what I'm dealing with right now.

Anyhow, I've had this story floating around in my head for the better part of a decade, and I figured it's finally time for me to get it out of my head. Is Witch's Brew a spur of the moment type story, or one you've been thinking about for a while?

[Glass Mouse]

WRITING FIVE!! *smack*

And hey, four days is nothing to turn up your nose at, considering you've got 11k words already. Good job!!!

I've got a paltry 4k. Since I'm an uber-creative artist, I don't foresee struggling with the dreaded writer's block problem. My issue is that I'm a visual artist, not a writer, and have trouble thinking linearly. I also have mild ADD that can turn into a case of severe ADD on steroids when it comes to writing, apparently. Imagine taking the first, second, third, eighth, and 29th chapters, putting them in a blender, and pulling them out one sentence at a time. That's what I'm dealing with right now.

Anyhow, I've had this story floating around in my head for the better part of a decade, and I figured it's finally time for me to get it out of my head. Is Witch's Brew a spur of the moment type story, or one you've been thinking about for a while?

That sounds like a very interesting dadaist project I hope the pieces fall into the right places soon enough. I love the almost fairytale feel of the Knights of the Air blurb. Do you have all the smaller stories planned out already?

I cheated a little with my own story. I had a very messy 5k words written for Witch Brew already (I spent the first day heavily editing those), so it's not a purely-new project, but it's also not a very well-planned one. I tend to write very exploratively. But I figure even with that head start, 50k is gonna be a huge success for me if I manage. Either way, I'm already vastly enjoying writing every day. It's an entirely different experience from writing in bits and pieces, and I'd forgotten how great it feels. This might not actually be that hard.

[Artman77]

Some of them, vaguely. On the agenda we have the introduction of the alien cast and crew, clues about his grandfather's past, (now dead, once claimed to be abducted by aliens and got thrown in the Looney bin) a dogfight with space pirates, almost getting stranded on an alien planet, a shootout with the main group of bad guys, and assisting a planetary rebellion against 'the man' where the bad guys make a second appearance... I wholly expect this text to be a giant mess by the time I'm done.

I'm also a fairly explorative writer, (--what Nano calls Pansters?) often letting my characters develop organically. I'm finding it to be slightly counterproductive though, when considering the massive amount of editing that will result from this approach. As an avid movie goer and critic, plot holes are a major pet peeve, and I would like to keep these things out of my book as much as possible, whimsical/fairytale though it may be...

I was going to cry "CHEATER!" but I can't really, cuz I tried to do the exact same thing. 50k is a lot of words any way you slice it. (unfortunately I'm better at procrastination than at proactivity, so my cheating attempts failed by themselves.) Also, it made coming up with a theme for this week really easy.

[jseah]

I'm in the planner category. A Hero's War and the new Fallen Star are about as unplanned as I get and I have rough ideas for each arc as well as a general idea for how the story starts and ends.

Twin Faces of the Sky (my last Nano) was planned scene by scene. I still have the pages of notes around in my A4 writing notebook.

[LeSwordfish]

I was always halfway- I tend to make a plan for the whole thing, but that plan tends to include a lot of phrases like "and then they fight and win." I always planned characters and character beats more closely though.

[Glass Mouse]

Haha, regarding cheating, it was really a case of the stars aligning just so. I agreed to submit chapter two of that particular story to my writer's group, realized NaNoWriMo was starting, and went "what the heck". I think the last time I touched that story was 1½ months ago. So, yeah. Planning. I don't do it.

Interesting stuff about the difference in planning levels. My "plan" for Witch Brew consists of story beats that look pretty much like LeSwordfish's. Some of the currently planned beats (until this moment only existing in my mind):

• "they have to talk about X and Y and Z at some points when the plot needs breathers"
• "that one character shows up and forces backstory to come out (note to self: flesh out backstory)"
• "now everything goes wrong and they probably have to flee if I don't figure out something cooler, maybe involving that other character"
• "now X happens, and they react in these ways I've planned out in intrinsic detail"
• "maybe DEMONS!"
• "could a trial scene be fun, maybe, hmmm"
• "weird cosmic metaphysical magic stuff possibly because who am I kidding I am never NOT gonna go there"

I'm not always sure about the order. I rarely know how it will end. Knowing too much feels less like storytelling and more like putting pieces down in a boardgame. At least for the first third of the story. After that point, I start to realize what this story and these characters allow for, and I start being able to see a clearer path. The ending always surprises me. But I usually have a few options in mind around halfway through and onwards.

And yes, it creates an ungodly amount of editing.

jseah in particular, now I'm getting curious about what your thorough drafts look like. Would you mind sharing a few of those note pages? Or just saying a bit more about what planning looks like to you?


and no I'm not using this to procrastinate, shush, how dare you, I'd never

[LeSwordfish]

I've dug up the plot outline for my own novel, out of idle curiosity more than anything else:

• First heist- Randall's party. Sho is assassin, Adam is invited, Jessie accompanies to pick locks. Cora climbs up outside to hand gun in. Jessie picks lock, and Sho gets in, but her and Adam are interrupted. Cora passes Sho gun, he shoots Randall.
• Second heist- Lucy's house. Lucy has sealed herself in bedroom and covered property with network of webcams. Adam shuts down some webcams, Jessie disguises herself as Adam and acts as distraction while Adam enters through back window with Sho and Cora's help.
• Contacted by Kessler, contracted to steal emerald.
• Prepare for big heist.
• Sho contacted by gideon, told to drop it. Cora/ Adam suspicious of that.
• Cora has her first date with Lucy
• Big heist, steal emerald successfully.
• Go to drop it to Kessler, Jessie and Sho arrested. Gideon breaks them out, offers to split money.
• Adam identifies Kessler as being all fishy and stealing the emerald for insurance.
• Plan last massive heist on Kessler's house. Jessie is suspicious of Cora's girlfriend, gets Mathilde to help her spy on them. They rescue Cora and Sho from the rival team.
• Mid-heist discover that Gideon called the police on them.
• Jessie double-crosses Gideon and Mathilde and escapes with money, emerald and wins
• Epilogue, they win the game and get the money.

For what I say about having character beats planned in advance, actually they seem to be what's changed most - i shan't bore you with the details, but several of the X does Y above have changed to some other X.

[jseah]

They're not drafts, it's literally a list of scenes with a small amount of description each, plus a whole ton of arrows linking concepts together. All handwritten of course, and in personal code (read: bad handwriting).

I'll scan a few today and see if I can't upload by tonight.

A draft is what I would call the nano novel that popped out from those outlines.

[Artman77]

Such a writing noob. I type soooo slow, and I had to look up "beats" as it pertains to writing, loll. I'm learning tho, so that's cool.

[jseah]

Some photos of my notes on Twin Faces of the Sky Rewrite 1 (the Nano version, I've done a bit more on Rewrite 2):
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/aoyt0wb1o...sXteEoDea?dl=0

It doesn't include notes on the various Lands and the notes on arc 5 but that's just more of the same. I think a page or two might be missing somewhere, Twin Faces notes are interleaved with those from other stories too.

[jseah]

Chapter 48. 4949 words.

https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3238329/48/A-Hero-s-War

[Glass Mouse]

I feel so unstructured right now, haha. Obviously jseah takes the planning cake, but it's cool to see the level of decisions going into the process for both of you. But I'm glad I'm not the only one whose characters consistently go "nah, I'm not gonna do that" once the plot point rolls around.

[LeSwordfish]

I've never entirely seen the "characters refusing to do the writers bidding" thing - I do tend to nail down character interactions and actions only after i've written them long enough to get the feel for them though, which I suspect is the same sort of thing from a different perspective.

Anyway! Here is this week's writing, once again done on a long bus journey. Maybe one of these days i'll do some writing when i have the option to do anything else? Who knows! Six pages of script (interestingly suggesting that were I to try and do NaNoWriMo as a scriptwriting thing at one page per day as i've seen suggested, i'd be only a little behind.)

[Lissou]

That totally happens to me. The "worst" example is this one time I had an idea, plotted a whole story around it, and by the time I was writing it, it became obvious that the basic idea was not going to happen, so it didn't. Without that idea I wouldn't even have written any of that story at all, but it wasn't part of the end product. Kind of weird to think about.

In a similar vein, I went to a convention last month, and in one of the panels, a panelist explained he once created a character for the sole purpose of killing him (he needed a significant death as a plot point), developed the whole character with that goal in mind, even wrote everything up to and including the death scene... and then changed his mind and the character became a second main character instead, and was very influential in the sequels, and a reader's favourite.

So yeah, I guess it's pretty common. With me, most of the time what happens is that some characters I thought would end up together decide they don't actually care for one another, at least not in that way.

[celtois]

And I managed to get this week's sketches done and uploaded just in the time!

I draw a 3 panel comic this week, but panel 3 was so easy to draw it really shouldn't count.
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...wall-571163412
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...Face-571163575
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...-guy-571163689
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...-dog-571163956
http://dizzyartist.deviantart.com/ar...itar-571164120