philippos42

I'd like to beg for money for me, because I am really really broke, but instead of digging up my paypal button, I am going to boost a request for money from Shinga of Head Trip, who is freaking out.

http://shinga.livejournal.com/1237980.html

Yesterday? I'm not sure.

I tried writing a scene. Got bogged down trying to make the scene before make sense in my head.

"Why I can't write narrative." No, just really haven't worked on it enough. But today a self-critique: Write the scene you mean to write, not a well-analyzed setup for it.

I was thinking about the Jean Grey School, and what characters I would use if writing X-Men. I had this memory of two of the five Stepford Cuckoos losing their powers in M-Day, and thought I remembered a scene where the five are freaking out because two of them lost their psychic link:

"Mother, I can't hear [name] in my head!"

So I had the idea that there were these two other Cuckoos out there without powers, and there were stories to be told. Well, I should look up their powers, right?

OK, the wikis are telling me that they were already down to three by M-Day, and the other two are not de-powered, but dead. Also some really weird stuff in one of the miniseries, I think it was called Phoenix: Warsong. Anyway, it torpedoes my ideas.

This is why I should just make up my own characters.

I like Chicago Fire, but the way they're writing it, they're set up to write out most of the main cast by the end of the season. I mean, not just that anyone could be written off randomly, but it feels like we're watching some of these characters' last year on the job.

I think Casey (whose fiancée has already dropped off the show), the chief, and Otis are mostly in the clear--at the moment. (Though earlier this season Casey kind of attacked a cop, so maybe not.)

Hermann's always looking for a new way to make money and might just quit, Severide is hiding an injury that could cripple him, Dawson is the hothead (OK, so are Casey and Severide, kinda, but she's a hothead on the job), Shay gets sucked into Severide's and Dawson's problems and could lose her job because of them, Mills has a mother who wants him to quit (and fits the doomed nice guy trope), and Mouch...is out of shape. And last week Leon (who seemed pretty solid) did something that he's now really torn up about.

Seriously, if this is a one-season show, they can have all the main characters lose their jobs by May. If it's not, seriously, did they give the whole cast one-year contracts? Everybody's set up to be able go at the end of the year.

At least it's a way to get drama for this season and foreshadow anyone leaving at the end of the season without it feeling random. Oddly, though, the one supporting character that already did have to leave the department did leave after a sudden random accident. And the way Hallie was written out was kind of out of left field too. (Then again, their departures help play off Severide and Dawson, and serve their arcs, so they're not totally left field thematically.)

So I don't know. Maybe this show goes for six years, and Dawson and Severide hold on all that time.

One of the crazy things about Dungeons and Dragons, that prevents it from being more generally adaptable to different settings, is its treatment of theology, and by extension, of religion. (Well, I haven't played D&D in years, and not the current edition, so in modern terms I guess I mean Pathfinder.)

In D&D, there are real, powerful gods, and clerics are connected to them. If you want a cult where the god is (like in real life) sort of unknown, an open question, D&D doesn't represent this well. I think Eberron tried to be more ambiguous, but most of the time, there are gods, they are definite, their existence just is.

So--a culture that venerates gods with no unambiguous reality? Non-standard.
An empire where the god is the dead father of the present empire, like Rome? Nope.
A cleric of a cult that venerates something that isn't really a god (like the Sun, or a dragon) or may not exist at all (like a legendary hero)--not a cleric in game terms.

Nope, D&D has its particular theological rules, and your particular campaign may be even tighter.

It's limiting, and something I ran up against when I started playing it, because divine casters were expected to have an affiliation with and outlook on the supernatural that I did not expect, and not to have views that seemed reasonable to me in fantasy worldbuilding.

Bleh.

Something that came back to mind after a discussion about the cult of Sol Invictus. Not Saturn & Jove, not Sol Invictus, not the divine Caesar, not Jesus Christ, had clerics quite like those in D&D--as far as I know.

Funny way to set up something that spawned so many variants and settings.

Blah.

August 19th, http://philippos42.livejournal.com/225970.html

So, I have this detective fiction concept, and maybe I should try writing stories in it without explaining it, but that would mean actually writing narrative instead pretending I'll write narrative someday, and while that would make more sense, it's never going to happen.

Oh, yeah. Never mind.

I've been ashamed of that post for a while now. I've written embarrassing posts, angry posts, stupid posts, friend-losing posts. This may be the worst post.

I don't remember what the idea was. It's just gone. It's been gone. I could at least make notes of things like this, pitch them so others can flesh them out. Then they would have a chance at life. Instead I just killed that idea and went on with my pathetic self-hating life.

There's something I realized in the last few hours. My whole life, I have been thinking in terms of being creative, of being a writer or some kind of creative artist, an author of a work, not just a technician fleshing out someone else's story. Even if at the time I thought it was about acting or film production or music, it was about making something--my opus.

Oh, sure, I went through long periods of thinking that fiction was not for me, that it was more important to live life than to imagine it. But I was defining that in terms of, "If I'm not a writer." For a long while now, I have been, really, "not a writer." A failed writer trying not to think of myself as a writer.

But where other people might want kids or their own business or a degree, what I have wanted all along was to have a creative legacy. Maybe in film rather than prose, maybe nonfiction instead of fiction, but I wanted a work with my name on it. I want to be known for a work more than I want to do the work.

I know I'm oversimplifying. I did go through my period where I wanted to be a photographer, and another where I wanted to be a statesman. Sometimes I thought I could channel the drive to make into something physical like fruit tree breeding or architecture, that that might be better for my ambition. But really, I'm a frustrated creative person, who comes up with characters and then can't write their stories, or imagines stories in fair detail but somehow balks at writing them down.

I have worried that I wanted to write books because I read books, that I wanted to sing because I listened to music, that I wanted to go into politics because I followed politics, that it was only stupid imitation of things I find interesting with no aptitude to be able to do it.

I think I do have some aptitude as a photographer; why am I not a photographer? (Well, there's a reason for that; that's another story.) I quit photography a long time ago, and I don't really run around thinking I really should try to be Eisenstadt now (though I did for a long time).

But creating characters, that's always been there, or at least it's recurred an awful lot. Whether making up characters for stories, or imagining a person I wanted to make myself into. That's a pretty basic part of me. No use denying it.

And that means I'm not really cut out to make a career of being an editor or a critic of others' work, which were ideas I had at various points.

So here's the thing. I'm not a writer. I may never be. I may never make a living at it. But if I have an idea for a premise, or a pitch, I want to post it so it's out there and it has a chance at life. Maybe it can be fleshed out or even produced as a film instead of yet another treatment of some character we've seen a dozen times before.

I know, I should talk, but I wonder where people from old LJ days went to. Off raising children or something, maybe.

Apparently there's now a book named Blue Fall--not written by our blue, maybe by someone who remembered her name and thought it was cool, probably just a coincidence.