20 Days Into September...

I think we have a Writer's Night tomorrow.  I know that Rainfurrest is next week.  I haven't completed a story since the 2nd of the month.

It's not that I've been doing nothing, I just haven't been doing a lot.  I've started or worked on several different projects without finishing them.  To begin with, I want to work up detailed information on the more prominent characters in my stories to try and nail down their personalities and voices better.  I've been rewatching Venture Brothers, and watching some Shezow, and it really strikes me that a great many of my characters do not have distinguishable voices or interesting personalities... or the sort of quirks and background details that help make them three dimensional.  It's hard to work that kind of detail into the short stories that I write, but it's even harder if I don't know any of these details in the first place.

One of the big benefits of working with the Tai-Pan Project is the process we went through when developing our characters, which gave us very solid ideas about what each character was like and what was in their background.  So I set out to do something similar for my Anarchy Universe... and then kind of failed to continue with it.  But it's still one of my projects that I intend to work on.

A second project was to develop some new and better villains.  Honestly, many famous superheroes are defined by the villains they face as much as by themselves.  What would Batman be without the Joker, Scarface, etc.?  But with Grandpa Anarchy, most of my villains have been created by accident -- whatever I needed for the story.  Some have developed as I went along, but nearly all of them are street fighters or mad scientist types... I have very few villains who are super-powered or who are something other than strictly human.  So I set out to create a bunch of new villains with more dynamic powers, and this project was a little more successful.  My favorites are Douglass Fear, Brain Bomb, Aquakinetic, Radiation Charlie, Death Medal, and the No More Heroes villain group.  I also borrowed a few of my old City of Heroes characters...  Pharaoh O'Malley, Monkey's Uncle, The Quantum Butterfly, Mia Nevermore, Machine Spirit, Huntress Midnight (renamed Twilight Huntress).

But simply having the villains does me no good if I can't come up with stories to put them in, so I started a few more story files.  Bark Is Worse for a story involving Douglas Fear, Bombs Away for a Brain Bomb story; A River In Egypt for a Twilight Huntress story.

Of course, I haven't worked on these stories.  Instead I've worked a bit on Unpossible (the last letter of my "every letter of the alphabet" stories) and I've worked quite a bit on Miles To Go Before I Sleep.  I've actually transformed this into a trilogy similar to my earlier Amethyst Road trilogy, of which this is a sequel.  I've titled the first Return to Amethyst 1:  Miles to Go Before I Sleep, and the second Return to Amethyst 2:  China Town.  I didn't have a title for the third one so right now it's called Return to Amethyst 3:  Title Goes Here.  Which could be its actual title when I'm done, who knows?

I've written quite a bit on the first story but it's kind of meandering.  I need to go back and figure out how to focus the story more, how to give it a central driving force, how to find the plot that drives the story forward and tells me what parts are needed for the story and which parts aren't.  I mean, I've got a quest going on, but that by itself doesn't seem to be driving the early part of the story.

Anyway... that's what I've accomplished in 20 days.  Not really a whole lot.