I decided last week to grow a beard. Or rather, I decided not to shave and considered growing a beard. The progressive apathy has lead me to the scruffy growth that I sport today and I don’t know if I like it or not. Sarah likes it now that it’s soft and not scraping her face off when I kiss her, but I can’t get used to seeing it in the mirror. It’s reddish and I feel like my main hair color needs to be different in order to match. I’ve considered highlights or something similar, now that I’m not actively looking for a new job. Maybe I’ll go with a Mohawk.
On a mostly unrelated note, I’ve restarted work on my Faith fiction. I won’t call it a novel yet, though I think I have enough of a plot to cover three or four hundred pages, but it’s rewarding to write. This activity was kick-started by my dissatisfaction with books that I’ve been reading lately. I literally enjoy re-reading the six pages I wrote about Fabricio more than ANY of the last five novels that I’ve read. So I’m approaching the project as an enjoyable hobby rather than ‘work’ and it’s going well so far. I’m getting down the outline, I know how it ends, I know how it starts and I have the general main plotline, but other details are sketchy. I know there’s a woman that comes into Fabricio’s life but I’m not sure if she’s English or Spanish or what. I think she’s a noble from Albion who is taking the reins of business in ‘India’ and gets embroiled in the military coup. I need some more compelling motivations for her, though. Or maybe I don’t… I’m not writing a prize-winner here or my magnum opus, I’m just telling a story and seeing if I can really do it rather than just talking about it.
I have other writing projects. I want to write some pseudo-fiction about outsourcing development work to India, but I realized that I don’t know how to make that interesting reading, unless to a select group of readers like myself. I’ve had delusional visions of it being popular reading in the ‘business’ section of the bookstore, but I need to find the meat of it and I haven’t… I’ve mostly got a string of anecdotes and e-mails. I do have an outline, though.
One thing I learned at seminar is that each chapter should have two or three important things that either happen or are revealed. For instance….
Chapter 1: We meet Fabricio and Adamo. They are attacked in the street.
Chapter 2: Fabricio trades the guns for the cheese. Fabricio is confronted at the docks.
Chapter 3: Lady Farthington is introduced. Lord Farthington is institutionalized.
Etc.
I’m saving the end and the plot turns for myself… I’d like it to hopefully be fresh when y’all read it… if I finish it and if you’re around to read it.
I have questions regarding intellectual property rights of course. If I finish the book, I’d like to get it published. Does Microsoft ‘own’ any of our intellectual property? Does Edgecase exist as a corporate entity? Etc, etc. I wouldn’t have any problem sharing reasonable proceeds from book sales since I’m just writing in a world that we’ve all developed.
For the record, I think the concept of ‘falling from grace’ and atonement in the literary forum is excellent for Faith. I can understand not wanting to bite it off as a game mechanic (I’m talking to you, Rich), but from a storytelling aspect it makes a lot of sense.