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I've been considering hosting a playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas on this journal, in the style of the Let's Play Archive (basically a bunch of screenshots with commentary). Not sure why, though—I already have enough on my plate writing-wise at the moment, since I restarted my book this month after my failure in November. And it's not like anyone would read it, unless I linked it on Discord, and even then, I doubt anyone would be interested.
(I had the idea of making the Courier a Pony Express rider on a mission to fix the space-time continuum, since the game contains so many references to historical figures and events. It's a silly idea, since time travel does not exist in the Fallout universe, but I can see myself having fun with it.)
I wouldn't say the book is going well, since it's as incoherent as ever thus far, but it's certainly going. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to happen in the middle and at the end; I just need to make it through the beginning. :P I'm not worried about it, though. I'm saving my worrying for the second draft.
I don't know how the pulp-fiction writers of old did it. Sure, they wrote for a living, but how they managed to write thousands of words per day that were good, or at least didn't need extensive revising, is beyond me. 625 words are as many as I can comfortably write in a day, and most of them are bad.
(I had the idea of making the Courier a Pony Express rider on a mission to fix the space-time continuum, since the game contains so many references to historical figures and events. It's a silly idea, since time travel does not exist in the Fallout universe, but I can see myself having fun with it.)
I wouldn't say the book is going well, since it's as incoherent as ever thus far, but it's certainly going. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to happen in the middle and at the end; I just need to make it through the beginning. :P I'm not worried about it, though. I'm saving my worrying for the second draft.
I don't know how the pulp-fiction writers of old did it. Sure, they wrote for a living, but how they managed to write thousands of words per day that were good, or at least didn't need extensive revising, is beyond me. 625 words are as many as I can comfortably write in a day, and most of them are bad.
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But it would be a major commitment, and I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Especially if you are actually getting somewhere with the book in the absence of rival writing.
Knowing where you are heading is definitely a good thing when it comes to plot progress (as opposed to 'great idea for start!')
It's possible that one of the things you may discover with a second draft is that 'the middle' is where the story actually needs to begin; agents traditionally end up telling first-time authors that they ought to cut the first couple of chapters before trying to market a book.
Writing thousands of words on demand is a specific and allegedly trainable skillset, like improvisational comedy; a journalist, for example, would be given a subject about which he might know little or nothing and told to come back with an article to fit a specific hole in the page layout. My mother (not a professional) could write a 500-word column by hand and without any word count, almost to the exact line.
So far as pulp fiction goes, I suspect there's a certain overlap with the bards of pre-literate society, who had a repertoire of familar topics and formulae that could be put together on the fly to produce an epic on the King's latest victory, or the vengeance and metamorphosis of yet another unlucky divine love-object. Back when I was contributing to what would eventually become Treasures of the Indies, I was sitting down and writing a thousand words or so in a single session (and then frantically trying to get computer access to type them up and dial them in), basically using random tropes from every pirate film/novel I'd ever consumed -- it's weird to remember now, but I know I did it. And kept it up over a long period, as well.
Looking back at http://ivory.ueuo.com/Tower/Fiction/Pirates/Mad.html I can see exactly where my own contributions begin and end, and they're massive great chunks at a time, with barely a day or two between them. I suppose it's the sort of thing that goes on in role-play forums nowadays (or on Tumblr?), but the fact that we basically didn't have any plot at all helped more than hindered; you could just throw in anything as it occurred to you for dramatic effect. I strongly suspect that's more or less the principle on which pulp-fiction serials operated.
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But it would be a major commitment, and I'm not at all sure that's a good idea. Especially if you are actually getting somewhere with the book in the absence of rival writing.
It's definitely not a good idea, which is why I'm not doing it, at least not this month.
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