Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

The first step in filing off the serial numbers is changing the names.

This can be a trick when the old name has a magnetic attraction.

Today I am discovering it can be a trick even you hate the old, because the old character needs a suitable and fitting name, and the changes from renaming fight against it.

sigh

After a time, the evil necromancers face an invasion by an army. Our hero gets to escape during it.

So there has to be some time -- absolute necessity for plot reasons and to motivate our hero -- and I ponder why the delay. The hero doesn't know at first, but other point of view characters do, and the hero will learn it in time.

( Read more... )

I was ripping off a character, and needed a name for him. For once, the character's original name had no attraction. . . and left a void in its place. I wrestled with a number before one managed to attach itself.

And another character might be confused with some others, so I tried to change her name to -- Stella, and was worried about whether it's too recent. Then I realized it might be confused with yet another character, more easily than the first name with THOSE characters, and so turned it back. In the meanwhile, it turns out it's Renaissance, so a bit late.

The cast of thousands needs a lot of names. And raises much potential for confusion.

The trick about taking an idea and filing off the serial numbers so that no one but you can recognize the origin -- and sometimes not even you -- is that --

( Read more... )

Ripping off a story idea and hitting on an issue. It's a nominally feudal land. (Nominally because it's inconsistent.) And the knight has a castle and an estate, both distinctly grand. It's explicitly mentioned that he got them in the original story, but nothing more. Which is one of the flaws that inspired me to redo the idea.

( Read more... )

Sometimes you rip off an idea from a work.

( Read more... )

Sometimes the thing you want to rip off is an element of the backstory.

( Read more... )

Poking around with an idea. A superhero story with a different metaorigin that the one complete AND the one in process.

It's ripping off an idea from the backstory of one I read. The story was great, but -- I was kinda interested in what happened to a major character whose story the main character had learned. Back stories are generally nicer to file off the serial numbers off. BUT -- it needs to be simplified for structural elegance.

( Read more... )

I get inspiration from another work. Fortunately for me, it's an incidental point, or I took an element from the background and said, hmm, what if the exact opposite were true?

So little that it would be impossible to infer what the original was from my work.

BUT -- when I suffer from writer's block, for some reason, reading the original work, however unrelated, sometimes jogs loose that work.

sigh Sometimes the writing life is odd.