Today is a blah day...

I totally don't feel like writing. I started yet another outline and got maybe halfway through before someone said something mean to me on the NaNo forums regarding my complete ignorance of computers... I won't deny it, I can hardly make my way through adding a new post, but they were very rude. And besides. Since my proposed computer situation doesn't work I really have nothing for my characters to need to do to keep them in the city... Plus I don't feel like developing Mr. Hibbins's wife, who has apparently decided to make herself important. The point is, I really haven't gotten a single thing done today. I told myself I wasn't allowed to turn on the computer until I had finished my outline and some portion of the first chapter, but it's nearly 1 and I've got to scrap most of what I did on the outline. Whoo.

M.A.G.N.E.T.S. is actually magnetic now.

Whew, this is a long one. Hang with me.

So, remember all that crap I wrote a few days ago?
Forget all of it.
I've got an entirely new system half-worked out. Let's see if I can actually explain it without all of my diagrams...
Imagine the Earth's magnetic field, with the north pole and the south pole and all of that. (You can tell how much research I've done >.<) Now imagine it existing in a human being, with our "north" poles being at the tops of our heads and our "south" poles being at our feet. As far as I understand, humans do have magnetic fields, but not like I'm talking about. We have tiny little fields that are constantly changing, literally with the fluctuations of our synapses. But I'm pretending this is one big field.
Actually, it's extremely small. WAAYYYY too tiny to actually attract anything at all, even the strongest of real magnets. It's so tiny that people have never really discovered its existence, not even the scientists that deal with the most miniscule magnetic systems.
But it's very strongly connected to our body systems, so that if it were to change, we would feel it. Normally that's not a problem because even when we're standing next to huge magnets, nothing really happens.
There's a small group of people who are able to manipulate these fields, though. Thousands of years ago (like, the first few years of homo sapiens) there was a big magnetic flare of some sort (again, I've done next to no research at all...) which corrupted the gene that controls the human body's magnetic field. People with the corrupted gene can manipulate their fields in certain ways, and if they work with it enough, they can even do it to other people's. It's not hard to learn how, but since the fields are so tiny, most people who have the corrupted gene wouldn't even know they had it.
Also, it's hard to pass on. It's recessive... in the extreme. Normally, a person who has one of the corrupted genes and one normal one would be a "carrier" and would be able to produce a child who is "magnetized" (the very creative word I'm using to describe those people who can manipulate the fields >.<) if their partner also had one or two copies of the corrupted gene. But it doesn't work that way. Even if two carriers pass on their corrupted genes, the child wouldn't be magnetized. Even if a carrier and a magnetized person pass on corrupted genes, the child wouldn't be magnetized. The only way to produce a magnetized child is for two magnetized people to pass on corrupted genes. But people with the corrupted genes are... well, not infertile, but less fertile than a normal person. It would take three times as long for two magnetized people to become pregnant than two regular people.
Understandably, magnetized people became very rare. (Not to suggest they actually KNEW they were magnetized--they spread unnoticed through all cultures and races as homo sapiens actually began to develop cultures and races.) In the present day, there are less than a thousand of them, and most of them are concentrated in the US (explain that later.)
However, for the past generation and a half or so, the population has been... not necessarily going up or keeping stable, but not declining so much as it normally would. This is because all magnetized people are being hunted.
Everyone's favorite genocidal maniac is looking for them. Addy (name change impending) is out to get the magnetized people. So most of them are on the run in small groups of two or three, which means that most most of them are now unable to form relationship with normal people, and if they do become part of a couple, their partners are more than likely to be magnetized as well. Boom. More magnet-children.
Most parents do give their babies to the M.A.G.N.E.T.S program (needs a new acronym... I'll do that later) so that they can be hidden from Addy and live a normal, not-on-the-run life. The children end up in one of a couple of schools (all in the US, because that's where the program is based) which will have usually five to ten magnetic students in it. They don't want too big a cluster, so that it will be harder for Addy to discover the schools, but they also want for the kids to have the support of a group of other kids in their same boat.
The whole reason Addy wants to destroy magnetized people is... classified. Actually it's very sketchy; not even the M.A.G.N.E.T.S. people are sure what's wrong with her. Also, forget about her having thousands of people following her. She has maybe twenty-five hired people on her side--mostly just big strong guys who can shoot people. A few detective-type people as well.
So, that's magnetism for you. I've worked out each of my characters' individual abilities, but it's kind of hard to explain them. (This is the part where I need my diagrams. Wish me luck.)
There's two categories: People who mess with your mind, and people who mess with your bodies. I'm starting with the mind people.
This would be Abigail, Hugo, and Charlie. They basically disorient your poles--move the poles around in such a way that your balance actually isn't affected, but your brain can't keep up with what's going on.
While your brain is scrambling around to figure out what's going on, Abigail can influence you. All she has to do is say something to a disoriented person, and they will accept whatever she said as fact. At least, it's that simple for something easy. If she wanted to convince someone who didn't know her that her name was Samantha, she could do that easily. She would have to work harder--warp the poles more, or repeat whatever she's saying several times, or even get into an argument with the person--to convince someone she'd known for a long time that her name wasn't Abigail.
Hugo does something similar, except instead of influencing your knowledge, he literally sucks the "concentration" out of your head. He gives you temporary ADD. You would forget what you're doing at that moment, and depending on how strongly he affected you, you might have a hard time concentrating on things for the rest of the day or even longer. It's harder to defend yourself from Hugo. If you're certain enough about something, Abigail won't be able to change your belief; but Hugo can disorient anybody, and there's not much you can do.
The only way I know how to explain their disorientation of people is like this: Imagine a person with a line running straight through their body, starting at their feet and running to the top of their head. This is their magnetic field--obviously it's more circular, not just a line, but I'm using a line right now. When you're disoriented, the line tilts. It doesn't matter what direction; as long as it's not straight up and down, as it would be when you're standing normally, your brain will be massively confused. The farther it tilts, the more disoriented you would be. It doesn't affect physical balance though. There might be feelings of nausea if it's tilted far enough.
Charlie is the other character who gets into your head. Picture the person with the line-field again. Charlie, instead of tilting the field, stretches or compresses it. If the field is longer than you are (stretched), then it will seem as though time is moving way too fast. When the field is compressed, time seems to slow down. It's all perception, but it's strong enough to completely confuse most people. Charlie has been using this ability mildly on himself and the people around him since he was a baby, but it was so weak that no one ever noticed it. When he was enjoying himself, naturally he would want the situation to last longer, so time would seem to move more slowly. The difference would be so minute that no one would notice until after, when they looked at a clock and realized it had only been one hour. But when he starts "training" with this ability, it gets to the point that things would seem to be fast-forwarded or moving in slow motion. It's helpful when they're fighting because the enemies would be overwhelmed by how quickly the battle happened, but he and his friends would feel time so slowly they could react to everything without a problem.
Others affect people only physically.
Xin can move people around by pushing or pulling their fields, as though there was a metal bar through the person's body that he was literally grabbing and dragging.
Maria can cause intense physical pain without actually inflicting injury by twisting the field. (If the line through the person's body was a rope, she would twist it around. Even one rotation is absolutely excruciating; you can imagine how much power this gives her.)
Other characters have the ability to heal or defend.
So, if you were injured, there would be a break in your field. If it were just a cut, the break would be miniscule, but it still exists. If you broke your leg, there might be a large gap in the field. Either way, the field is affected by everything that happens in your body. Lillian can mend these breaks, and as she does, whatever injuries would be healed. Addy's power is to create these breaks. If the break happens before the injury, then the body would simply break down--if you were running, for example, when the break was created, then your ankle might be sprained. If you were just sitting down, your organs would start to dissolve inside your body.
Billie's power is more defensive, but can also be used for healing. He prevents the sort of tilting disorientation that Hugo and Abigail cause. He can also right a field that has been tilted. If Abigail had already influenced someone's belief of something, Billie's righting of the field wouldn't make the person remember what they had thought before, but they would no longer be disoriented.
I believe the only person I haven't covered yet is Hailey. Her power is potentially the most powerful of all of them, but there's a huge weakness.
Hailey can suck away people's magnetism. They would not be able to use their powers as strongly when she's "feeding" from them. It would gradually return to them when she stops, but they would be very vulnerable. The downfall, though, is that when she has sucked magnetism away from other people, she essentially becomes a stronger magnet. She's so much stronger that anyone she hasn't fed from would be able to affect her much more potently. If, for example, she sucked off Abigail's power, Abigail wouldn't be able to do anything to her. But if Maria was there while this was happening, and Hailey didn't do anything to her, Maria would be able to cause Hailey much more pain than she would a normal person, because Hailey's field would be temporarily much stronger.

So, wow. If you stuck with me through all of that, thank you. And congratulations. I think typing it all out has helped me understand it better, so if you didn't, oh well. Also. I was much too lazy to go back and reread this so it's probably quite incomprehensible in places xD.

M.A.G.N.E.T.S.

Because I'm much too lazy to actually do some real writing, I've decided to put out what I know about this book so that when I randomly start ranting about it on some other post... there's a chance of keeping up.
M.A.G.N.E.T.S. is a working title for the first book in the series. It stands for Magically Advanced Group Network for Educating Talented Students, which is the semi-humorous name for... a magically advanced group network for, you get the idea. It's a group of what I call 'specialized' people who go into certain schools as teachers to train and protect specialized children who otherwise would have no idea what to do with their gifts.
Being 'specialized' means you have some sort of relationship with, well, anything, really. One of my characters has the ability to control how time is perceived by the people around him. Another can talk to lizards. Yet another can influence peoples' brain waves by talking, and another can control the way certain types of grain grow to produce better types of bread. It could be anything. It's strictly genetic, getting a specialization, and you have to have two specialized parents to create a specialized child. Specialized adults get together more often than you would think (there's only about a thousand of them worldwide, most of them concentrated in the US, since that's where I'm writing about) because they're often traveling together to avoid the antagonist, who I will get to later. Anyway, when a child is born to two specialized parents, he or she is usually taken from his or her parents and put into an adoptive home so that the M.A.G.N.E.T.S. can hide the child's identity from the antagonist for as long as possible. The adoptive parents are unaware of their child's specialization.
In my story, I'm focusing on eight specialized students and their M.A.G.N.E.T.S. teacher. They are as follows:
Abigail, the one who can influence people by talking.
Charlie, who can control perception of time.
Hugo, who can confuse people by literally sucking the concentration out of their brains.
Lillian, who can do just about anything with certain types of grain.
Maria, who is very closely connected with trees and can make anything out of wood.
Xin (temporary name), who can control anything adhesive.
Hailey, whose specialization I'm unsure about. Either she'll have special singing powers (like a Siren) or she will be influential in a way more similar to Abigail's.
And Billie, who can talk to lizards.
Their teacher's name is Mr. Hibbins and he can control the way rooms and buildings appear to people. (Example: he 'creates' a huge room out of a closet by making it appear large to the people inside it.)
All eight of them were adopted and are unaware of that, except for Billie. Billie's parents (his mother, mostly) wanted to keep him, so he lived with them until he was six. When he was six, they were murdered by the antagonist, and he was adopted by Hugo's parents.
I guess I should say something about the antagonist now. Her name is Addison, more often called Addy, and she can talk to and control snakes, and also is 'venomous'. She doesn't have to bite you, she can just scratch you with her nails. It's  not as strong as snake venom and pretty much just causes irritation unless she gets you really badly. She has a plan to destroy all specialized people in the world.
Obviously this seems kind of redundant, since she herself is specialized, but she's managed to brainwash thousands of people into following her cause and apparently plans to commit suicide once she's certain the last specialized person is dead. (This is a lie; she just wants to get all of the specialized people out of the way and then pretty much the world. It's more complicated than that but since I won't be getting that deep into her motives for several more books it's all that needs to be known now.)
Since she has several thousand people on her side, it's pretty hard to hide from her, but the M.A.G.N.E.T.S. people are good at it. They make sure all of the specialized children are adopted into families from the same area so that they will all go to the same school and can be looked after by whatever specialized person has been put in that area. (This is how eight specialized students came to be in Mr. Hibbins's seventh period class when there are only maybe two hundred specialized children in the entire country.)
The basic plot idea is that the eight students are in a class together, and they're trained to use their specializations to their advantage, and they become really good friends. They learn the basics of Addy's whole plot as well, enough that they know she's dangerous. I know how I want it to end but the middle is just a big grey area right now. I'm getting there.
Certainly I'm forgetting something, but I want to do some actual writing before I go to bed. So, bye.

...A blog?

So, I've never done a blog before. Excellent way to start mine, right? >.<
Well, so far, all of my writing woes have been shoved onto one of my characters, who does not deserve to have my hardships on top of everything else I put him through. Instead, I'm going to post here whenever I can so I can stop outlining in second person...
Perhaps later tonight I will actually write something about this supposed novel. As it is, I'm too lazy right now.