Author: Teel

Now, this isn’t going to stop me from writing this book, because it’s impossible for there to be much more to research at all, but I wanted to stop writing for a moment and mention that I’ve just had to do some research for my newest novel. Which is weird.

Okay, so I invented this city, and I was getting into describing it and I got to a point where my main character asks it’s name. So I tell him the name of this totally invented place, I just made up out of my own imagination, totally fictional and never-conceived of before an hour or two ago. Except some part of me wants to look this city up online, so I do, and would you believe that I’ve just spent ten or twenty minutes researching a new, never-before-imagined city and it’s history online? It wouldn’t have taken as long, but I found I needed to draw a map of the place so I wouldn’t get lost as I wrote my characters around the different parts of the city. All the names of the places were right there, online, for me to find. Information about what the different parts of the city are like and even hints about the sinister underbelly of the city were all there.

Now, I know I’ve been saying for years that “everything is on the internet” and that you just need to know where to look, but this is getting ridiculous. It’s like google is tapping right into my brain and building websites based on what it finds there. I need to fill my head with robot.txt files so it’ll stop that. or do I?

Man. A map. What is this? Tolkein? How complicated does a fictional place have to be that the author of it has to draw himself a map? And the idea of researching something based totally in fantasy, not even connected to the realm of reality. Whose idea was that? I’m going back to writing. I’m at … 31,195 words right now, but I’m about to try to describe what I drew on the map out in agonizing detail. Did I mention that the writing on the map is not in an alphabet you can read? it all looks like some cross between elfin and runic letters. There’s even a compas rose on the map. My world doesn’t have North, South, East, OR West, but there’s a compass rose on my map that makes sense. Gha.

Okay, so as you may or may not be aware, I’ve been having some trouble with the site in the last week or two. I’m getting errors that don’t make any sense and that don’t give enough detail to try to fix them. Since I was only having the trouble when posting to FYTH, I thought I’d try simply replacing all the templates here with the defaults for Moveable Type. It didn’t entirely work out the way I’d hoped.

Still, you’re stuck with this design at least until the end of the month, because I can’t spend any more time fighting with this right now, I need to get my characters out of a bind out out of that book within the next two days.

The really fun part, I think, is that sometimes you’ll come across a page that didn’t get updated to the new design. That’s fun, and there’s not much I can do about it today.

So I just crossed the 25,000 words mark for the first time. Three days left. Oh, and it turns out the article will be in Saturday’s paper. Hey, I didn’t find out until around 5PM today, when I emailed the reporter about why I couldn’t find it in today’s paper. I can write 25,000 words in three days. I just can’t do much else. Except right now my body is calling out for sleep. I’m behind. Starting Saturday was feasible, but I was supposed to be to 31,250 words by now. I’m a little behind.

For those of you keeping track, if I had written at the easy and steady pace of only 1667 words a day, I’d be at 45,000 words today. Ha!

Hey! It’s finally done! You can now order the calendar I created for my 2D Design class. I spent a long time putting little details into every image while constructing an overall theme for the entire piece as well. It can all be yours, prints of 13 (12 months plus the cover image) original works of art by Teel McClanahan III, in handy 2003 calendar format, all for the low, low price of $20!

Order now!

So today in Drawing, Wednesday’s class was moved to December 11th, after the last day of classes. Which means that the only thing standing between me and writing my novel for the rest of the month is a potential meeting with my 2D Design teacher to see the PRISM labs, a couple hours of turkey eating and familial socializing thursday, and sleep.

Sleep. Which is what I am going to go do right now, in the hopes of waking up bright and early and working all day on the novel, now slightly behind schedule. (I got distracted yesterday afternoon when I met a really great guy. It would have been a little more worth it if he weren’t as married as two men can be to someone else, but it was still worth it. I can make it up, I know I can make it up. I have a spreadsheet that recalculates how many words I need to have written by the quarter-hour, floating in the corner of my screen at all times. Of course, when I wake up tomorrow It’ll think I’m pretty far behind until I start typing again and it updates automatically from my Word word count and recalculates the rate I need to be working at to finish in time again and so on and so on and gosh I’m good at putting together spreadsheets when I should be writing novels.

Sleep, now.