~Writing again?

For a while now I have not done much at all. My activities for the past month or more have been looking for work and trying to get on top of that, making a manageable task of it, and playing World of Warcraft in a stress-relieving, hiding-from-the-world sort of way. Which is not always successful, as the game itself is often fairly stressful and upsetting for me. But! I do seem to have gotten on the better end of these things, so that I can turn attention to what I had wanted to do with February and March (and January and...), getting some work done with personal projects. The big one at the moment is editing the work I finished writing in November 2008. I'm not quite sure what to call that, structurally. In content it is somewhat a parody and condensed version of the standard epic fantasy. In form at the moment it is either a short novel with three parts or a trilogy consisting of two novelettes and a novella. I suppose that does not much matter. Originally I had hoped to be done with editing this by the end of March. As it is now late March and I am only just beginning that seems impossible, and really since I have never edited and revised a finished work of mine before (not having many of those), at least none of much length, I really do not know how long it will take. The approach I am taking is to first reread and reacquaint myself with the story, not fixing anything more extensive than spelling errors and missed words but taking note of anything that will need repair or re-examination later. Once I start the work itself first priority is to make sure it functions as a story, without those pesky holes or broken bits. After that is taken care of, then I can worry about making the words pretty and flow nicely. After that I suppose I leave it another couple of months before checking it over again and seeing if I can find some people to proof it for me. As of reading through part 1, not many problems showing so far. Mystos refers to himself as a wizard, so need to check if later he insists on sorcerer and if so change that from wizard to sorcerer. Need to sort out Kal-Kal's movements and the identity of the rider ahead of them. Problems less easy to specify include probably reducing the jokes relating to alcohol and alcoholism (on the basis of Not Actually Funny and Maybe Hurtful), significantly adjust the opening section for similar reasons, and maybe make Arryn a bit less bitter and angry. Maybe not, but making his responses proportionate is under consideration. There is of course no warrant the finished product will be any good, but I wrote this thing, and I am going to fix it up until it is the best version of itself I can manage, and then I will finally be done with it. In other areas, well, not much to report. Been considering casting details for what I refer to internally as the 'Jedi Detective' and 'Star Trek: Diplomacy', as well as a couple of other fannish projects... I am inclined to be a bit quieter about collaborative projects unless I know the people I am collaborating with are okay with my talking about our work in progress in somewhat public ways. In settings where there are humans and a number non-human species who count as people, I try not to have humans dominate by default. Ami has pointed out this can lead to problems with fictitious alien diversity obscuring and crowded out human racial diversity - is it really any better if your main cast is one white guy and three other white guys in masks and makeup? So that's something else to consider and balance. I still for the Diplomacy series want to give more presence to Federation member species who are often overlooked in the shows, at the moment leaning to having an Andorian captain and human 1st officer, with a mix of human and alien crew in key positions, weighted further from human than found in the television series' but probably not as far as I might have gone. The crew concepts I think were previously more developed, but faded from being left fallow. Writing them out like this might help retention. As for the Jedi Detective stories, had been wondering if our lead might be of some alien species with a Corellian padawan. Now thinking to have our lead as a Corellian Jedi Knight and clueless about who the other characters might be, except sometimes I wonder about having them accompanied by a droid also. Still in very early stages of character development, wondering if trying to write out a story might help things along. I think that's all for now, and out.