NaNoWriMO 2016

Smellincoffee

Trekkie At Large
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It's two weeks away! Who's excited about, who's participating, whatcha writing?

I just returned from a week spent in New Mexico -- my first time outside the South -- so I'll be using its landscape as my inspiration, perhaps a story involving secret science installations, ghost towns, and hippie communes.
 
I was looking forward to this thread being made.

I'm participating this year, as I did last year, but this try should hopefully be more successful. My attempt last year was a novel adaptation for a roleplaying forum I was responsible for that shut down midway through NaNo, so I never completed it. This time, I'll be trying to write a fanfic (my first ever) in the Star Wars universe. It will be based on the crew of the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels at the time of where season 3 starts, so it'll be an Alternate Universe story instead of filling in any blanks in the plot. It's called The Scourge of Dagobah. :)

Just like the year before, anyone is welcome to buddy me on the NaNo website: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/synsensa
 
I was looking forward to this thread being made.

I'm participating this year, as I did last year, but this try should hopefully be more successful. My attempt last year was a novel adaptation for a roleplaying forum I was responsible for that shut down midway through NaNo, so I never completed it. This time, I'll be trying to write a fanfic (my first ever) in the Star Wars universe. It will be based on the crew of the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels at the time of where season 3 starts, so it'll be an Alternate Universe story instead of filling in any blanks in the plot. It's called The Scourge of Dagobah. :)

Just like the year before, anyone is welcome to buddy me on the NaNo website: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/synsensa

Cool! I've thought about doing that, improbably using the game ST Away Team as my base. It doesn't get a lot of love (Star Trek meets Commandos, basically), but it provides a lot of different characters. Not its fault the story and some of the later levels sucked.
 
Well, looks like someone beat me to the OP.

I'm going to try to pull off a hat trick this year. I won both the April and July events, and since my best word count for the November event was a bit over 22,000, it's going to be a real challenge.

I've been working on adapting various Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to prose form. There's not a lot of FF fanfic around, so I decided to do it myself. I've only had some of these ideas kicking around for 30 years or so, so it's time to do something with them.
 
Cool! I've thought about doing that, improbably using the game ST Away Team as my base. It doesn't get a lot of love (Star Trek meets Commandos, basically), but it provides a lot of different characters. Not its fault the story and some of the later levels sucked.

At first, I was very confused and wondered how there could be a Star Wars game I didn't hear about. Then I realized you meant Star Trek. I remember that game! I did not play it very much but I did enjoy the aesthetic. That said, I'm not a big fan of isometric games typically. Do you have any experience with fanfic writing? I'm admittedly not very confident in my skills in emulating a preexisting personality.
 
At first, I was very confused and wondered how there could be a Star Wars game I didn't hear about. Then I realized you meant Star Trek. I remember that game! I did not play it very much but I did enjoy the aesthetic. That said, I'm not a big fan of isometric games typically. Do you have any experience with fanfic writing? I'm admittedly not very confident in my skills in emulating a preexisting personality.
The trick to good fanfic is to be as true as possible to the source material, while bringing something original to it.

This can be quite challenging at times, particularly if you're trying a crossover. One of my projects is a crossover between Sliders and The Handmaid's Tale. Trying to get the speech patterns of the Sliders characters and Margaret Atwood's characters accurate - in the same conversation - is one of the most challenging things I've ever tried, because they're so different.

If you're trying to write dialogue for a character (assuming it's a TV/movie character), one suggestion I read a long time ago is to watch it with your eyes closed. Just listen to how the characters speak. Do they have an accent? Do they use standard, grammatical English, or do they use slang? Do they drop their "g"s? Do they use profanity? Do they have unusual speech patterns? You can pick up on these things better if you're not distracted by what's going on visually.
 
Another NaNo, another failure for me, I dont need November to pass by to know. :p

This time I dont even know what to write...
 
At first, I was very confused and wondered how there could be a Star Wars game I didn't hear about. Then I realized you meant Star Trek. I remember that game! I did not play it very much but I did enjoy the aesthetic. That said, I'm not a big fan of isometric games typically. Do you have any experience with fanfic writing? I'm admittedly not very confident in my skills in emulating a preexisting personality.

Not in the least, but in my case prebuilt characters wouldn't be a major issue. I'd be borrowing the Trek universe, not Kirk or Picard, and the Away Team characters were rough outlines: just an avatar and a little mini-bio. Their spoken lines didn't reveal too much about them.

Another NaNo, another failure for me, I dont need November to pass by to know. :p

This time I dont even know what to write...

This is my problem every year -- I never have a plot. My first year writing was just lots of dialogue and bike camping. Year before last a plot did develop, but last year I made it two days before I decided I really had no interest in my idea.
 
Probably I will make a post-apoc Climate Change story.
 
The trick to good fanfic is to be as true as possible to the source material, while bringing something original to it.

This can be quite challenging at times, particularly if you're trying a crossover. One of my projects is a crossover between Sliders and The Handmaid's Tale. Trying to get the speech patterns of the Sliders characters and Margaret Atwood's characters accurate - in the same conversation - is one of the most challenging things I've ever tried, because they're so different.

If you're trying to write dialogue for a character (assuming it's a TV/movie character), one suggestion I read a long time ago is to watch it with your eyes closed. Just listen to how the characters speak. Do they have an accent? Do they use standard, grammatical English, or do they use slang? Do they drop their "g"s? Do they use profanity? Do they have unusual speech patterns? You can pick up on these things better if you're not distracted by what's going on visually.

It's a whole bunch of TV characters. Canonically, I need to accurately represent at least 8 separate characters before getting into original content. I'm not attempting a crossover so I've got that going for me.

My biggest issue in my writing is that I always feel as though my characters are identical in tone and personality. Nuance in interaction is a silent thing that happens and isn't overtly obvious to me, be it in real life or in writing. It often results in me not knowing if I've given each character a unique voice. Since Star Wars Rebels is a Disney show and follows the same pacing as The Clone Wars, none of the characters have particularly groundbreaking quirks in how they act so that adds some difficulty to it. They don't have unique attributes to their speech, barring a couple mannerisms that I do have down pat (Zeb saying "karabast" and Hera occasionally reverting to her native twi'lek accent).

I guess I am just being a worry-wart about it. I've never written a pre-established character or within a pre-established universe. I have always considered it to be beyond me, or at the very least unsure of how to approach it. I'm walking into this blind.

Probably I will make a post-apoc Climate Change story.

That's a good place to start. :) What's the plot you have in mind? Need any help?
 
It's a whole bunch of TV characters. Canonically, I need to accurately represent at least 8 separate characters before getting into original content. I'm not attempting a crossover so I've got that going for me.
Yeah, I don't recommend a crossover as your first fanfic attempt. It's hard enough to pin down one set of characters. But keep practicing, and have someone beta read it - preferably someone who is very familiar with the source material and who isn't afraid to tell you where you don't have it quite right.

One thing to avoid is the use of modern, RL slang and other words and phrases that are anachronistic or inappropriate to the source material. I recently read a Bonanza story in which the author had one of the Cartwrights mention that someone was upset and "needed to vent." That's a modern slang phrase and completely inappropriate to the 1850s/60s and that set of characters.

I like working with the Sliders (original foursome; can't stand the show after John Rhys-Davies quit) because almost anything goes. Another crossover story is Sliders/Xena: Warrior Princess. The way I made that work is using the idea that in this alternate Earth, Alexander the Great didn't die young - he actually made it all the way across Asia and into North America. That's how the Sliders were able to slide into an alternate California and promptly be confronted by Greek temples everywhere. As for Xena et. al turning up in the 20th century, that show was all over the map as far as time went. Why not an alternate 20th century? :mischief:

My biggest issue in my writing is that I always feel as though my characters are identical in tone and personality. Nuance in interaction is a silent thing that happens and isn't overtly obvious to me, be it in real life or in writing. It often results in me not knowing if I've given each character a unique voice. Since Star Wars Rebels is a Disney show and follows the same pacing as The Clone Wars, none of the characters have particularly groundbreaking quirks in how they act so that adds some difficulty to it. They don't have unique attributes to their speech, barring a couple mannerisms that I do have down pat (Zeb saying "karabast" and Hera occasionally reverting to her native twi'lek accent).
Unfortunately, I can't help with this. I never managed to stay awake for any of the prequel movies, and haven't seen any of the spinoffs. When it comes to Star Wars, I'm a purist in the sense of only the original trilogy (before Lucas decided to "improve" it) counts - as it was shown in the theatre. Well, that and I enjoy a few of the novels.

Sometimes it helps to study the body language. One of my favorite TV series is The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. The lead actors on that show were amazingly good at conveying very subtle emotions and messages with facial expressions or a slight bit of body language. This is a show for which I started writing fanfic by about the third episode (most of what I wrote was rendered obsolete by later episodes' canon details, so I consider it AU), and some of the stories and poems were inspired by no more than a line of dialogue and a raise of the eyebrows. It made me wonder what the story was behind these actions and reactions, so I decided to write it.

As you write, try to imagine the story unfolding on a screen or stage. If it feels right, you're very likely on the right track. I've read some Bonanza fanfics that could have been real episodes. The characterization is perfect - the dramatic moments, the humorous moments, the character interactions, and the plot is something that could have been made in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

I guess I am just being a worry-wart about it. I've never written a pre-established character or within a pre-established universe. I have always considered it to be beyond me, or at the very least unsure of how to approach it. I'm walking into this blind.
The first rule: Have fun. Fanfic is your take on the characters and what situations you put them in. Since it can't be professionally published, you don't need to worry about pro reviews or whether it will sell.

The second rule: Pretty much everyone will write at least one fanfic that is absolutely awful, horrible garbage. My first Star Trek fanfic was like that, and taught me that writing romance/drama is not my strong suit. That story was so awful, that I don't even care that there was only ever one copy in existence, written in longhand on looseleaf, and it was given to a high school friend as a birthday present. For some weird reason she kept it carefully preserved in a binder - but I sincerely hope that at some point in the intervening 37 years it's been lost beyond retrieval. Damn, that's an embarrassing mess to have my name on.

I have actually found that most of my attempts to write serious material tend to take a turn to the satirical. A friend and I wrote several chapters of a Star Trek: The Next Generation soap opera parody, in which all kinds of bizarre things happened. That was rather fun to do, and I've been thinking about revising and adding to it.

But my two Camp NaNoWriMo efforts earlier this year were decent starts on fanfic based on F.M. Busby's Hulzein Saga series. It's part dystopian, part space opera, and the intention is to fill in the blanks in the characters' lives. Busby glossed over so much in his books, and one of the omissions had me wondering: One of the main characters fathered a son decades (objective time) before he and his wife had a daughter... and a couple of pages after learning of this, the kid was never mentioned again. So it occurred to me that at some point it was possible they would meet - and since Busby used STL for his spaceships in most of the novels, it's possible that this character and his son could meet and discover that biologically, they're the same age.

A little bit of stream of consciousness writing (good for getting ideas down and maybe jotting down a few lines of dialogue here and there), the basic story started to take shape. I mentioned earlier about doing a novelization of a gamebook; I might change my mind on that and continue with the Hulzein series fanfic. There are many stories left to tell in this, and since the author died some years back, nothing I write can be contradicted (thank goodness, because Busby contradicted himself in some really maddening ways).
 
That's a good place to start. :) What's the plot you have in mind? Need any help?
Either a migrant's tale, a community's struggle for survival, or both.
 
Probably I will make a post-apoc Climate Change story.

The second year I 'won',, my setting was a post peak-oil city state. It was rather silly: imagine something between a faux-medieval fantasy and a western. Fun, though. Going to feature lots of flooded coastal cities and famine?
 
Well I thought it would be focused on a conflict between the great migrating masses and formerly isolated rural communities which survived and now too many are eager to call home. Basically a zombie movie without zombies or scares, just desperation and the ultimate struggle for survival on both sides.
 
The second year I 'won',, my setting was a post peak-oil city state. It was rather silly: imagine something between a faux-medieval fantasy and a western. Fun, though. Going to feature lots of flooded coastal cities and famine?
Bonanza meets Camelot? :p Or closer to Firefly meets those Stirling post-apocalypse novels where a medieval re-creation group turned out to be the ones who survived the best and established a new medieval kind of society in the US?
 
The second year I 'won',, my setting was a post peak-oil city state. It was rather silly: imagine something between a faux-medieval fantasy and a western. Fun, though. Going to feature lots of flooded coastal cities and famine?

I tried to do something like that last year. A setting far into the future where all the resources on Earth had ran out and society had reverted to a more medieval state. I also had mankind disappear from the Earth for a reason that I wanted to reveal in the plot, except I never managed to get that far. What I had written for that went in a direction that now I thought about restarting that story.
 
Bonanza meets Camelot? :p Or closer to Firefly meets those Stirling post-apocalypse novels where a medieval re-creation group turned out to be the ones who survived the best and established a new medieval kind of society in the US?

Probably closer to Bonanza and Camelot. Essentially, the city-state nearly collapses into civil war when a personal grudge between the acting mayor and the high sheriff, both very willful men from powerful clans, provokes a constitutional crisis. The acting mayor was formerly the commander of the army, and the sheriff has a militia of followers in addition to his posse of conspirators. One of my main characters, a young man who was just a clerk to the mayor, frantically tries to keep the peace, and when that fails he becomes the de facto leader of the few people in town who don't support either of the bloody factions. One of the longer chapters involved a city-wide fire, inspired by my previous reading of the San Francisco and Chicago fires. The fighting was all done with medieval weapons, even though the town itself always had a 18th century look in my imagination.

I tried to do something like that last year. A setting far into the future where all the resources on Earth had ran out and society had reverted to a more medieval state. I also had mankind disappear from the Earth for a reason that I wanted to reveal in the plot, except I never managed to get that far. What I had written for that went in a direction that now I thought about restarting that story.

Seems hard to write further with everyone gone!
 
Probably closer to Bonanza and Camelot. Essentially, the city-state nearly collapses into civil war when a personal grudge between the acting mayor and the high sheriff, both very willful men from powerful clans, provokes a constitutional crisis. The acting mayor was formerly the commander of the army, and the sheriff has a militia of followers in addition to his posse of conspirators. One of my main characters, a young man who was just a clerk to the mayor, frantically tries to keep the peace, and when that fails he becomes the de facto leader of the few people in town who don't support either of the bloody factions. One of the longer chapters involved a city-wide fire, inspired by my previous reading of the San Francisco and Chicago fires. The fighting was all done with medieval weapons, even though the town itself always had a 18th century look in my imagination.
Y'know, that actually sounds closer to Bonanza/Robin Hood/Robin of Sherwood.

Did you know that there's a Bonanza episode in which Adam Cartwright meets a crazy old man who rides around the countryside dressed in a suit of armor and carrying a lance? He ended up causing a lot of mayhem with a gang of outlaws that tried to rob the stage, and the local sheriff wouldn't believe Adam when he told them that it wasn't he who caused such a mess, but really the old man wearing armor. I saw it on YouTube; I think it's a Season 6 episode.
 
Y'know, that actually sounds closer to Bonanza/Robin Hood/Robin of Sherwood.

Did you know that there's a Bonanza episode in which Adam Cartwright meets a crazy old man who rides around the countryside dressed in a suit of armor and carrying a lance? He ended up causing a lot of mayhem with a gang of outlaws that tried to rob the stage, and the local sheriff wouldn't believe Adam when he told them that it wasn't he who caused such a mess, but really the old man wearing armor. I saw it on YouTube; I think it's a Season 6 episode.

I didn't! Granted, I haven't seen many episode of that..the only one I can remember is one in which a bar has a trapdoor that some of the guys were stuck in. The only time I've seen it was in a hospital many years ago...the same trip that introduced me to Star Trek!

I was trying a kind of Planet of the Apes style setting.

I was going to ask if there was another kind of society if you were dispatching the humans, but didn't even consider that angle!
 
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