Darts and Discord

Hmhmhm... What to blog about? I definitely can't blog about writing, because absolutely none of that has been done lately. How about I ramble for a bit about what I've been up to? I hear no objections from the audience, so here we go.

I finally got around to unpacking all the gear I brought home from university. It was a lot of gear. My room is a big room, but when it's all piled on the floor, you feel like you need gymnastics training to dance and step around it all. So that took a whole afternoon. I cleaned as I put things away. I'm not sure the underside of my bed has been so clean since the floor was put down for the first time. I was so very, very tired after all that rigmarole. I swear that they should market cleaning as a workout.

Today I had to make my own fun in and around all of the packing for tomorrow's fishing trip. We won't be doing much fishing though, it's more of a snorkel and a picnic. While Mum and Dad weren't looking, I whipped up a bunch of targets in photoshop for my Nerf gun. The artist inside me was appalled at the plainness of these targets in the beginning, so they ended up looking totally awesome. I printed them, cut them out and and laminated them, then stuck them on my cupboard door and have been practicing with my Nerf Maverick. I'm actually not a bad shot with said gun, although it is an air-compressed, foam dart gun, which makes it difficult to get a lot of accuracy. In contrast, I am very, very bad at first person shooter games.

Now, although I haven't been doing a lot of actual writing, ideas for Soulless have still been ticking over in theirthe back of my head. The more I think about and write about these characters, the more I find out about them. Evie, for instance, has become this very beautiful and kind, but very stubborn girl. She refuses to let Rook tell her what to do, and even when she does, she's very cold about it. Rook seems to be a simple man on the outside, well, apart from the whole being a Soul-Wraith thing, but really there is a lot more too him. I have recently been concocting a delicious little back story for him which will help explain why he does what he does.

I have been made aware that conflict is a major part of good stories. I have always had some conflicts planned, but they're pretty much all external forces upon the characters. I need to think more about their internal conflicts, and their grievances with one and other. When characters are rosy and pleasant with each other all the time, a story can get really boring, really fast. Vivid memories come to me of reading about Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter bickering, and then Ron and Harry having fallings out. Discord can really drive a story forwards and also reveal facets of characters not often seen.

So, what kinds of discord have you subjected characters to in the past? Do you cackle gleefully as I do when I prepare all sorts of weird, wonderful and downright nasty surprises for them? Or for those who don't write, do you enjoy reading about a character's struggles with conflict and conundrums and their growth as a person/animal/omnipresent, inter-stellar, flying-spaghetti-monster? Do you have any favourite such characters?

Eating: Delicious cheesecake and a chocolate chip muffin.

Wearing: Yellow shorts and high school senior shirt.

Listening to: Naught.

Feeling: Insipid.