Plotting – The Climb #960

Saturday 9th October 2021

One of the things that bothers me about Pokemon Go community day is how much time it wastes. C always asks me to come over, sometimes to help them get ready due to medical issues. If I do, it means I need to be at the support bubble sofa before the 11am start. Usually by 1 or 2pm everyone is bored but by that time the majority of the day is done. It’s not worth me going home as by the time I settle it’ll be time to come back for the evening.

So I get antsy some community days. I feel they are lost hours, and if the pokemon isn’t one I’m particulalry interested in or I’m a bit annoyed with the game then it’s purely FOMO that has me logging on. There’s a lot of Pokemon Go events this month as well as online conferences. It means my weekends are pretty much out for October.

I have things to do, and they’re all those things that I’m likely to put off unless I get in a routine and really push myself. Having huge great weekends in the way is not going to help me. I ask myself why? If things were so improtant couldn’t I miss those events… but it just ends up triggering fomo which breaks my concentration.

I tried to make up for it by bringing some work with me… the sort I could do on an iPad. After yesterday’s success in research, I hoped to repeat it today, but for most of the day I didn’t really feel I’d got anything done. A day wasted.

But in the back of my head, a novel is bubbling. I think time I get it all worked out and outlined then it’s going to be November so I suppose this could be my NaNo Novel this year.

This novel is very much in the ideas phase. I have a concept, a world, the magic system, and that’s about it. I have some rough ideas of characters, but nothing solid (as was proved today).

I do this weird thing (at least I think it’s weird) where if I have a story like that, I’ll throw other ideas at it to see if they stick. Would a zombie invasion work? Or space pirates? If my brain starts sparking as to how the idea could be worked into the book, then it’s sticky. If not, onto the next idea.

And I’ve been doing that a little today. I have an idea that I’ve had in my notes for a while and I could see it working.

At the same time the main character has been through a few iterations. Sometimes as a baseline, I’ll take a character from popular culture as a starting point. It’s Rick Grimes, but he’s older. As I work out their situation and back story I find the original source drops away to leave me with something wholly original. If you know what to look for you can sometimes see the original influence but sometimes, during the planning stages, I’ll flip things on their head so that the end result is something totally different.

And I’ve done that today, while doing nothing. I have a solid base for my main character. I jokingly told myself I’d even use the same name but use a Russian version of it, but that in turn has lead to the idea of the sorts of naming convention my world will have.

What I’m really taking from the source character is their values and how they came up with those values. This works well with the concept of this story, and at the same time, the idea that stuck may work as a catalyst.

It’s still all very rough but it’s starting to have some structure.

That’s pretty good progress for a day where I spent most of it sat on the sofa playing Pokemon Go.