*beats head on keyboard*

[agilebrit]

Actually, I'd be beating my Muses...

If I could find them.

The Books Gone Bad story? Yeah, HUGE plot hole. Unless I can turn it around so Gabriel's uncle is a retired high-mucky-muck wizard who's thrown it all over to run a pawn shop, it makes no logical sense that he'd know what the book was and be all "GETITAWAYFROMME!", but the professors at the magic university would just reach out and grab the damn thing going "Ooo."

In fact, logic is failing on so many levels on this story that I'm seriously considering just abandoning it...

The problem is that I don't have anything else to write. *cries*

Comments

[ericjamesstone.livejournal.com]

Of course, without seeing the rest of the story I can't give much advice, but perhaps you could solve one of the problems this way:

I think it's perfectly reasonable for the professors at the magic university to believe that common, uneducated folk might have all sorts of superstitions about this book, but that in the right (highly educated) hands, the book is an artifact of immense historical value.

So it's not that Gabriel's uncle is a retired high-mucky-muck wizard that allows him to identify and be frightened of the book, it's his layman's knowledge as someone who buys and sells a lot of stuff. He's heard rumors, and he wants nothing to do with the book.

I don't know if that works for your story, but it's an explanation I would buy as a reader.

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

*nods* That could work... *steals idea with both hands*

That doesn't solve the larger problem of actually writing the damb thing.

I may just turn the radio off and retire to the other room. I've got 1100 words, I know how it's going to end...it's just a matter of all the stuff in between. I could probably wrap it up in another thousand or so words, in fact. But something's blocking me, and the usual "change of scenery" thing is totally not working.

It doesn't help that I've got way too much to do today. AUGH.

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

At least you've got a plot. Mine...well, okay, it has a plot too, but it's like...stuff happens...and there's backstory I don't know how to convey...and there needs to be a sort of gothic aesthetic to it that I don't know how to convey either, without descending into cheese (although I'd really like to evoke some kind of surreal nightmare feel with the writing style, which is probably Not Happening because my protagonist wants it in irreverent first person, and now I'm worrying about ripping off Sunshine, too)...and I have no idea how it ends. Or anything else, really, because at this point all I have are some scattered notes and some even more scattered ideas in my head. Haven't written a word.

Also? To make sure for once I got it done way ahead of time for once in my life so I could send it in to this contest, I signed up to turn it in for my fiction workshop (one of my ten million classes this semester) on Sept. 11, which is about two weeks earlier than I'd actually like to turn it in. So I have...two weeks to get this story from nothing to something resembling a final draft.

Yay me?

On your story...ericjamesstone's idea sounds workable, especially since then you could prod at liberal scholars who think they know everything. Not, you know, that I'd have a personal reason to be annoyed with such types or anything. But I could see that--either they think that because they're so educated and enlightened, the book poses no danger to them, but Gabriel's uncle has actually been out in the world and knows a thing or two that's more practical, or they've just been in their ivory towers so long that they don't have much of an idea how magic (and evil magic books) can actually work out in the real world.

*shrug*

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

I've found that a deadline concentrates my mind wonderfully, although here lately I've been in such a panic that it's been feeding off itself and now it's like I can't write ANYTHING AT ALL AUGH.

Ah, yes, the empty Word doc, it doth mock us mightily. If it makes you feel any better, I usually start a story with no idea where it's going to wind up; knowing how one is going to end is an anomoly for me, even a thousand words in.