Wanderers

I said possibly I'd come back following a name change- this name change has now been scheduled and I have gotten my life mostly back in order, and since exams are finished for now...

First things I will post are those pieces owed from ages back. Then I will update people on currently ongoing projects as well as future projects planned.

Stay tuned! Or don't, really. At this stage I wouldn't mind if you didn't.

Right, name change coming soon.

Also, I finish up in Horsham in a week. It'll be neuro after that but on the flip side I have better access to stuff so I can do things (nice and vague).

For a moment I panicked when I checked out the journal and hadn't logged in and there were advertisements and I was like OMG WHAT NO WAI but phew, so long as I don't have to look at them while working on the journal, I don't care!

What else...all projects are getting set up. I'm really gonna do this. Not so sure about bloody NaNo though. That may end up being a total bust this year. Yeah.

Today I played a proper game of soccer for the first time in six years. As a goalie. And I accidentally sent somebody to hospital with a bout of temporary short-term amnesia and concussion- yeah, it was a pretty big collision. I feel a bit bad about that but fortunately he seems to have recovered.

So with that said, I'll go back to study. *limps away*

Okay, I'm slowly coming back to the idea of becoming more active again on this journal. There are a number of things I need to do first.

1. Finish my clinical rotation in the middle of woop-woop.
   
   
2. Change the name of this journal. It will no longer be solely about Anthropometry but about all the projects I'm working on: Anthropometry, Pandora and Strugglers currently, plus a few other side things.
   
   
3. The journal will remain fairly impersonal though.

Things I am doing now:

1. A few pieces I'm owing some people including my sister and meerclar_heidi. And Tam. Yes, I haven't forgotten you :P
   
   
2. Sorting out stylistic details so I can start Strugglers as either a webcomic or graphic novel. I have already written a fair bit of the script and the story is falling into place. At this rate it will be a coupla thousand pages which would keep me busy for many years, haha.
   
   
3. Rethinking the backstory to Anthropometry. I *accidentally* signed up for NaNo '08, despite the fact I have my neuro rotation and exams immediately following. Before then I need to briefly sort out chapter 4 and get some notes jotted down and away I go again!
   
   
4. Getting used to the tablet. I finally managed to get my pen settings right, now I'm just waiting on a new laptop, get the software sorted out and hopefully that will take off too!

That's it for the art stuff. I'll also be posting other things eventually. But don't expect any further activity on this page before mid-October.

1. Week 5 of hospital placement. I go to Horsham in a fortnight. Very busy.
   
   
2. I've decided to take breakdance casually and taekwondo seriously. The good part is that you only need a yellow belt to compete in taekwondo and once I learnt that the movements in Rhee and WTF are almost identical save for certain stance transitions, I wasn't particularly interested in learning the forms. I'll just learn the first one and I'm good to start sparring training.
   
   However breakdance isn't completely out of the picture. I can windmill now.
   
   
3. I'm also doing other projects. In particular, one with the working title Pandora. Maybe I might explain it somewhere.
   
   
4. I got a Wacom Intuos3. I'm still getting used to it, though.
   
   

Now I think I owed some people some drawings, didn't I? Unless they don't read this journal...

Since I'm now what the senior staff at the hospital like to call a trainee doctor (i.e. not an M.D. but getting into the practices expected of one), I'm not going to have much time to write things. Therefore if you read long enough, you will come to see "progress report" used as a euphemism for "no, I haven't done anything since the last update".

Currently I'm working on preliminary animations for another large project as well, so my creative pursuits are definitely divided. As far as Anthropometry goes, I'm still (as I was after November last year) rewriting that much vaunted Chapter 4. For some months I found myself significantly stuck because I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, but having drawn a geographical map of the area, I've got a clearer idea and will finish it hopefully within the next week.

Then, following some posting of some discussion pieces, I will resume posting with Chapter 2 etc.

Also on the to do list: Get some suitable avatars...

dongstyle_ltd is no longer active (technically) due to increased workload (and life).

Posted in its entirety

PRELIMINARY NOTES:

Word count- 2451 words (the footnote is relatively tiny.)
Synopsis- The protagonist is introduced, and subsequently shanghaied.
Comments-

I've made this chapter public because I decided it would be nice to post a sample for everybody to access. I won't do this for most or even any of the other chapters, though, just to make things easier on myself.

This is chapter 1 because technically it's the first chapter set in the world of the protagonist's consciousness. This is important because the narrative voice, even being in third person, is not omniscient. It only serves to convey perspectives, perceptions and states that the conciousness is aware of. As such, the experience should remain immersive- things are shown but not told, or told but not explained. At the same time, I have to relate the connection that this consciousness holds to the reality it processes, so it's hardly like a post-modern stream-of-consciousness narrative.

The other thing to note is that the plot is hardly original once all the clothing has been removed. I don't consider the plot structure to be a main driving force of the book so much as the themes, the questions that manifest itself through the characters. I mean, seriously. Protagonist gets shanghaied. Cliché much?

( Homecoming )

Obviously feel free to link back to this page but don't redistribute blah blah...just had to throw that one out there for the record. Before I post Chapter 2, I will start posting other materials, including character sheets and whatnot.

That's right, in just a moment the first two chapters of the first draft of Anthropometry will be posted to the readers' filter. Don't miss out!

I'll format the posts as follows:

CHAPTER No.- TITLE OF CHAPTER

(part no. if the chapter has been split into multiple posts)

PRELIMINARY NOTES:

blah blah blah. Don't read this if you want an 'unadultered' reading experience as I'll be explaining what I was thinking while I wrote this chapter, and how I might change it. Meaning do read this if you're interested in giving feedback on how to rewrite.

---

BODY TEXT (the rest is under a cut)

---

FOOTNOTES

And that should be about it. Away we go!

I was going to slap this on the tail-end of the previous post but thought it would do better as separate.

The page background that I've *just* uploaded (on the left) provides a good summary on the thematic foci of the novel, provided you're familiar with the references and enjoy reading into things way more than is healthy :P In case you haven't guessed already, the crude sketch of the anthro falcon is Orlestat, and he appears to be standing in the midst of a tongue-in-cheek allusion to Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man- a sketch outlining the Vitruvian principles in the human. I never found out what any da Vinci's reverse-mirror script that liberally crossed his sketches actually said, so I wrote my own little blurb- this image is cropped for styling purposes so I'll write it in full:

...this work has secured a landmark breakthrough despite the well documented fact that the practice of anthropometry has endured a history of controversy- with the ruling in SD 0131.286 that anthromorphs[sic] are to be included in the Sentient Registry. Be that as it may, the thrust of this article strives chiefly towards unlocking the mysteries of this creature, purportedly neither man nor beast.

Great, only now do I realise I screwed up: I don't like using "anthromorph" so much as "anthropomorph". Anyway, the text continues below:

FIGURE 1: PRINCIPLES OF AVIAN ANTHROPOMORPHISM

It is apparent that we encounter a significant physiological conflict in the configuration of bodily systems which must be rectified. The major parts of concern are as follows: 1) Positioning of the shoulder girdle. In a strict avian, the glenohumeral joint is angled such that range-of-motion allows for the flexion of the limb to the dorsal aspect. In an anthropomorphic being the limb is relatively restricted in this range, which has ramifications for posture and function...

Great, now is not a good time to realise I wanted to say "reconciled", not "rectified". And I wrote that text with the mouse, too. Oh well, it's kinda pretty.

A reasonable question to ask, provided you're actually interested in the literary pursuits of your friends, is to ask them what they're writing about. Hence I've had to field the question "what's your novel about?" dozens of times.

As far as Anthropometry is concerned, I would be happy to answer if only I knew how to! There are a number of issues regarding the actual description of the work which I'll cover in my musings here, but first I'm going to *try* to give you a general idea by summarising the various aspects.

( SPOILERS ABOUND: If you're interested in forming your own opinion by reading the manuscript, don't read this )

In real life, I am loath to answer questions of "what is your story about" without at least outlining all of the above, so my best hope is to draw the hapless fool who asked into a protracted conversation and hope that they are as curious about life as I am. Failing this, I really need to find a quick-release failsafe, so that I may blow a cloud of ink and escape the clutches of being the source of dull conversation. Right now, it's directing attention to the scale of the work via the wordcount, because I usually elicit a "wow!" from that.

I am not proud!

Hello!

As stated in the userinfo, this journal is an archive of material relating to a personal literary project I've been undertaking since the middle of 2007. Seeing as this is the first post, I'll devote it to narrating the events that led to this point:

In February of 2006, I randomly cooked up a character, and even more randomly assigned him the name "Orlestat". I gave him characteristics and a personality, but without a world to live in, he was a husk inhabiting some musty shelf of my imagination.

Early last year, my partner, strawcat drew my attention to a new text-based roleplay project being run by some mutual friends (notably pouncehyena). Admittedly my interest in roleplay in general is fairly incidental to other creative pursuits but I decided to sign up because it was a social thing and I'm usually up for a good time. Unfortunately people had things happen in their lives and as far as I can tell the roleplay never took off.

In the months that things were brewing however, I'd brought Orlestat on board and was toying with various backstories and other characters with my partner. We were experimenting with the effects of collaborative effort on the freeform experience and exploring the limitations of complex backstories- in fact we'd done this with a previous world set up by the same people a year before that!

By June 2007, the difficulties in our approach were obvious, and it was also apparent that the roleplay wasn't going to happen in the near future. My partner had been trying to develop another character and we sketched out a hasty interaction between his and mine. I thought that it might be nice to rewrite it as a narrative as I quite like writing prose. Then it occured to me that I should 'flesh it out a bit.'

This 'fleshing out' quickly turned into "maybe I should write a novella" into "maybe I should write a novel" into something more like "I'm writing a freakin' epic". Over the past few years I've tried to develop my other literary projects and get the real content on the road in whatever format but this had been proving difficult as I was more fond of drawing plans than jumping in. This time round, I was swimming before I even realised I'd jumped in, which is just fine by me.

Two months passed and I racked up several thousand words, passing individual chapters to close friends and asking for feedback. After a while it occured to me that what I was writing might just be a little more interesting to people other than myself than I originally envisaged. Then I heard that NaNoWriMo was coming to town, and, realising that this was my single best chance in a long time to give it a burl free from the relative pressure of exams, I broke the official NaNo rules and completed the challenge having already written about 30k words in the work (bringing the total wordcount to around 80k, just in case you thought I cheated :P).

Immediately after the conclusion of NaNoWriMo 2007, I asked whether anybody would be interested in actually reading what I had and what I presumably would write in the future. Seeing as I got more than zero responses in the affirmative, and I had this journal on standby from a long-ago era, here it is!

So yeah. In the coming posts I'll provide some more background information as well as starting to post the drafts of the novel itself. Later I'll also be posting questions and thoughts about various aspects of the writing process and related thoughts and...oh, well I guess you'll see.

That's all for this post!