Fuck You, I'm a Robot

Vampire game is going interestingly. Spent half of it running around trying to get involved in plots--there are some interesting plots going on, like the possibility of a Mekhet clan-o-cide because they're suspected of being plague carriers, the the gargoyles that are attacking the city, the Inverted vampire that people were interrogating all night...and every time, my character is brushed aside. "You're not involved in this! You don't have enough powers to help!"
Finally got to talk to a Victorian scientist lady who wants me to help her with a project involving leylines and labyrinths. The girl playing her also turns out to be a theater major who helped me come up with some background for my character. Rob also lent me his Ordo Dracul covenant book, which is actually quite fascinating--the Ordo Dracul are the closest thing to actual mages that vampires have, full of ideas on how to transcend their vampiric curse and come out the other side with their souls intact.

Made some notes for a time-travel RPG based on the White Wolf system, while I was waiting for things to happen. You've got two possible groups to belong to, your temporal system group and your philosophy group. Your temporal system is how time works for you, whether it's an open linear system where paradoxes can be created (like in BttF), whether it consists of parallel universes than you can skip in and out of, or whether it's a recursive loop where whatever you change has already happened in your original universe. Your philosophy is how you handle time travel. You've got the Temporal Patrol, who go around trying to make sure that everything stays how it is; you've got the academians, who are mainly concerned with going back and watching history unfold (and sometimes change it accidentally in the process); you've got the Green Futurists, who are committed to creating a better world of today by changing the past; you've got the Time Spinners, who believe in alternate methods of time travel (like drugs or magic); you've got time travelers who just travel for fun; and you've got a very weird group whose aim is to erase their own existences so that they can achieve nirvana. I don't really know where I'm going with this whole thing, and I know it'd be hellishly complicated to actually play and keep track of all the timelines, but it's fun to play around with.

Oh! Novel! I've given up actually producing word count for the night (will try tomorrow night, after FC). I'm tired from six hours of pretending to be a vampire. Tonight is a night to read other people's novels--oddzade and diraskyria and lemmealone and drworm and starlasoma are all doing it, and these people are writers who deserve serious attention.
Now that I've established Douglas's and Prof. White's symbolism, I'm worried about their characterization...the problem with making characters into archetypes is that they stop being characters. I don't want to have them spout cultural ideology off every time they open their mouths, which has been a problem in the past with me when I have characters that are supposed to represent certain viewpoints. Nor do I want to have them repeat the same arguments over and over. This is the problem with original characters, making sure that you know how they behave...you don't have this problem in fanfiction, for the most part. You know how Marty or Herbert or Silent Bob is going to react to certain stimuli, and even if you don't, your inability to convincingly portray them doesn't destroy their original character. If Douglas's actions are inconsistent for no good reason, he doesn't really have a character, he's just a plastic doll for me to push around. And I don't want to push him around, he's been pushed around enough already.
Yeah, this is a little bit of culture shock for me. I've been writing fanfic for so long that I've forgotten what to do with characters that actually depend on me for their personalities. Well...kind of. Douglas is part George, after all...just call it a transition period. Doing the established-character/original-character balancing act is proving to be more difficult than I thought.
Plus, the next scene takes place at school and is supposed to have Spiff torturing Douglas, and I don't really relish the thought of writing that part. It makes me a little sick thinking about it...and then there's the question of Spiff and how to portray him differently from Biff. Big dumb brute? Fledgling sociopath? How am I going to take his True Nature into account? Decisions, decisions...this is why I'm going to wait until after FC, they always give me good ideas.

Tonight's schedule: Write bit introducing Douglas. Question is where I want to go with this: Do I show a snippet of his normal day with the bully torture and lack of girl and general alienation in order to cement character, or do I skip straight to the finding-the-alien part and trust that either A) the reader will already know that Douglas is George and therefore a pathetic geek, or B) it'll come through anyway? (Also I need to figure out what his last name is.) Do I dare shove in introspection? Should I quote Bradbury? Where the hell is my copy of "The Martian Chronicles" anyway? Shit, I left it at home.

Anyway, I'll be in the computer lab typing away all night, chain-smoking and wearing a fedora as usual. Actually, I'll be chewing eyeball gum and drinking this nasty energy-drink pop that I bought a bottle of by accident today. (I thought I pressed the button for Cherry Coke, but nooo...) But I will be wearing the hat. The hat is important.

ghostgecko rocks my socks. Because, drawing. And now I really really have to get to work.

By the way? Feel free to comment on the chapters. Tell me what you like and what you didn't like. A lot of this is just off-the-cuff, and I want to know what I'm doing right, if anything, so that I can do more of it.

Also requesting recommendations for songs about aliens that I can download and listen to once my laptop gets back. I need music to listen to over and over to write to, otherwise I get too bored with silence.

Right. Love you all.