February Update: Backtracking

Well, last month, I stated that for February, maybe I'd edit or maybe I'd write short stories or maybe both. What I didn't consider was the possibility of neither.

And that's what I did.

I'm not sure what happened. I lost my drive to finish the Witch's Daughter story, then nothing else seemed interesting, and then I got Lisa's dev edit. I was supposed to get that the 10th, then the 15th, then the 18th, then the 20th, and then it finally came on the 22nd. So of course, I didn't want to start into anything early in February knowing I'd need a week in the middle to work on someone else's book, and then it came over two weeks later than planned, which took up any other time I would have worked on my stuff.

I don't say that to sound bitter, although in hindsight, I guess I am a bit. Trying to leave time for Lisa's stuff takes away from my own. Which, I'm not doing a whole hell of a lot these days. But still. Knowing there are times I won't have any freetime makes it hard to get excited to start anything.

Anyway. I have her copy edit next month, so I'm not sure how much of my own stuff I'll get to in March, either. But. I hope to maybe at least read Mystwatch 1, so I can get into the Mystwatch mindset and maybe poke at book 2 edits. I have April set aside for Sally Prescott, so I hate to get too into anything and then have to switch gears. Copy edits usually take me 10 days or so. So I'd have two weeks, I guess.

Maybe I should just focus on short stories. I can write one of those in a day, if needed.

Or maybe I should just keep relaxing until April.

I don't know. I really thought I'd finally fallen back into this. I was excited. I had a plan.

And now I'm not excited and I'm behind on my plan. Well, not too far behind. If I don't get short stories written this year, that's fine. Those were just a way to tiptoe back into it. I can still work on some of my goals.

I talked to Aron about reading Mystwatch 3. I told him I'd done significant edits on books 1 and 2, so he'd need to reread those, as well. He wants them in hard copy, though. Which means finding covers that aren't awful at the very least. I've spend a lot of today looking at Selfpubbookcovers.com, but things on there are pretty hit and miss. I may be better off just trying harder on my own. Although I did find two that I kinda really like. If I can find a third that matches, maybe I'll do that. Although $300ish on reader copies for my brother...maybe I should hold off on that. I can work on cool covers in the time it will take me to finish editing. It'd be cool to take pictures around Lawrence and use those. Maybe I can even get people to pose in them for me. Jack could make a convincing Shaidron. Mary would be an awesome Diana. Aron could totally be Makai. Then I'd just have to figure out the silhouettes of the creatures I want to include and fuck around with effects and figure out good title/author text.

Yeah. I wanna do this, now. Heh. Sometimes I explore visual mediums to express my creativity. This could be fun. I'll have to brainstorm some ideas. I'm thinking that iconic Lawrence alleyway, the city scape from the top of the parking garage, and then maybe entryways into cemeteries? Oak Hill for sure. Maybe I could venture onto the Haskell grounds. Or maybe under that bridge on the rail trail. The view from Burcham could be neat.

Anyway. That's probably putting cart before horse. But. It's something I've thought a lot about since he requested real books. Getting proofs through Amazon is easy enough. And if they're just for Mary and Aron, they don't have to be perfectly copy edited and proofread. They just have to be as good as I can make them.

So, yeah. My update this month is I didn't do much of anything. I've done a lot of thinking, as usual. Hopefully March, there will be more doing.

January Update: New year, fresh start, old goals

Well, I left off last post not sure I'd actually do any writing in this New Year. And I didn't, to be honest. Not until the very last week. But. After a six-month hiatus...I am making a small amount of writing progress once again.

I talked about this in my main blog a bit, but it seems like half a year is about as long as I ever go without making at least some minimal writing progress. I can't ever stay away. I often need the long rests, especially when I've been hitting projects hard and pushing myself to reach challenging goals.

Which I feel I did last year. The fact that I wrote over 30k words on one novel over a few months was pretty intense. I always need breaks after that. And after the devastation of realizing how much work MystWatch 2 needs, it was difficult to make real progress on that one.

I did finish a whole SP novella. The end is garbage, but it has an ending. And oftentimes, I get to the end and think it's garbage, then go back and read and realize it's not as bad as all that. This was an important adventure, where the stakes get higher and the consequences bigger. It's where a shift in the series starts to happen. So, yeah. It was a hard one to wrap up. And while I don't love the execution of the last third of the story, I do like what happens, so I'm okay to keep going, at least. And I have a great first line for the last adventure of season 2! I'm excited to work on that this year.

Yeah. This year. I sat down at the beginning of January and made something of a plan for this year on my project timeline spreadsheet. As mentioned in my last post, it is mostly just finishing things I didn't finish last year. So finish writing Chain Letter Choice, finish editing MystWatch 2, write an outline for the next novel or two I want to write, and write 1-2 SP novellas. When I sat down to figure out the timeline for that, I got a bit overwhelmed. How does one finish a novel and edit a novel when one hasn't written or edited for half a year?

Well, one starts smaller.

I thought about starting with SP, but I didn't really have the energy for Sally's chaotic good energy. So. I am starting even smaller than that.

Short stories.

I haven't written a short story in awhile. I started a couple last year but never finished them. So, this year, these first two months, I am going to write short stories. I have three or four I want to play around with. The first is the next installment of Witch's Daughter. I'm almost finished. I have written up to the climax scene, then written notes for that, then started writing the resolution. I may not finish it by the end of the month, but I hope to. I should wrap up the month of January with around 5k words. Which is not the 8k words that will get me where I'd like to be by the end of this year. But. It's more words than I've written in the previous six months combined. So I'm counting it as a win.

Next month, I will probably try to write another short story. I have the knights unemployment office one that I really want to write, one about witches I started to write for Althea, one about little kids and a dragon that I'd like to finish for Althea (once I find an ending for it), and then, of course, the Makai short I've been toying with for awhile.

Now, I did put an editing month in for February between short story writing. We'll see how that turns out. Maybe I'll edit next month, maybe I'll write short stories, or maybe both. But yeah. Between now and the end of March, I'd like to finish at least a couple more short stories and start again on the Mystwatch 2 edit.

April is Camp NaNo, so I'll switch to Sally, then. She'll take a bulk of the following few months. She usually takes two months to write a complete adventure, and I'm hoping to write that consecutively this year like I did last year, because that worked pretty well. Once I finish month two of SP, I'll take a break month, where I'll try to outline my next novel. Then for the second round of Camp NaNo, I'll work on fixing and finishing SP 3.1, which I started writing ages ago. It needs massive edits to be able to fit the ending I want on it. So we'll see how that goes.

That puts me way beyond the first half of the year. If all that goes well, August will be more editing, September will be outlining another novel (probably the first Shane spinoff, because I've been thinking about him a lot, and I'll be working on Mystwatch edits in August), then October and November, I will dedicate to wrapping up Chain Letter Choice. I think it needs about 30k more words at this point. Ugh. So much longer than I ever meant for it to be (but I always write long, so that's no surprise). If I do a half-NaNo in November, I only need to do maybe 5k-10k in October.

Then, of course, December is a break. Or maybe one last short story. If I can finish three short stories this year, I will be tickled beyond belief.

And if I can finish all these other projects, as well, I will also be tickled. Maybe even to death. To finish CLC and season 2 of SP, finally edit Mystwatch 2 and get SP 3.1 in line with the rest of the series after starting it back before season 1 was even finished...that will feel so fucking amazing. I don't even care if I don't get any new novels outlined. Although I think it'd be nice to go into 2024 with at least a couple of novels ready to start into. Brand new stories.

Mystwatch 3 I think I had planned to poke at as far as editing this year, but we'll see. I may not have it in me. I may turn it over to my brother and sister for feedback. Since they devoured my other two books. Well, three, because both read Druid Wars, as well.

Anyway. As always, I've gotten way ahead of myself. I've written 4.5k words this year so far. Asking myself to write 70k more and edit a very broken novel seems like a lot.

But I've got 11 more months to face that.

So, yeah. My main goal this year is to finish old goals. So next year can be whatever I want it to be.

December Update: A Long Rest

So, my unintentional break ended up being more of an extended rest. The last few months have been difficult as far as my creativity goes. I've wanted to want to write, but in all honesty...it's been a relief not to. I go through this phase every now and then, where it's nice to pretend this isn't something I have to do.

Although more than that, I just haven't wanted to write. None of my stories felt interesting. I hated all of my characters. The physical act of writing sounded absolutely wretched. I couldn't even bring myself to read anything I'd written before. That's sometimes how I entice myself back to writing after a long break. Go back and read stuff I've written. It reminds me that I am a good writer and I do enjoy it. That I have lots of ideas and I do love my characters and worlds.

Finally, earlier this month, I was able to do that. I read some stuff I'd written and smiled. I am interested in my characters and my worlds again. But I'm still not ready to actually write, yet. I think I'm getting closer, but I'm still just worn so thin as far as writing inspiration. It won't take much to fray and give out, again.

So, I've decided to take the rest of this month to continue my long rest, as it were. No pressure. I've been doing some crafting and water color to meet my artistic needs, and that seems like enough, for now. I've also been reading a bunch. And even talking to my friends about writing, a bit.

The long and short of it is, even though I'm not writing now, I'm open to writing again sometime. I do hope it's sooner rather than later, but I can wait. I still have stories to tell. Books to finish. Ideas to play around with. Edits to make. To what end, I'm still not sure. Lisa seems convinced that I will publish, eventually. I'm not sure if I will or not. I'm not even sure I'm writing for anyone other than myself, at this point. Which is part of why it's hard to get motivated. And if I do the whole "maybe I will publish for just my small group of friends and family" to get motivated, it doesn't take long for that to blow up into "but maybe I will go ahead and publish on this publishing schedule and make all this money and write all these things."

It's such a delicate line to walk. And I fall off, a lot. Which is why I keep ending up here, after what looked like it was going to be such a productive year of getting things done, and instead, I stagnate halfway through.

Still, it's important to look back at what I have accomplished.

• I wrote 32k on Chain Letter Choice this year. That should have wrapped it up. It didn't. But I'm getting so much closer to the end, now.
• I spent a month on Mystwatch book 2, editing and making a plan for future edits. That included writing and scrapping a whole chapter.
• I finished SP 2.4, writing 20k words on it.
• I also edited three books for Lisa and a novella for Rachel.
• I brainstormed a lot of ideas and wrote some fanfic notes. Even started a couple of short stories.

So, despite not reaching all of my goals, I made really good progress. I don't want to lose sight of that.

My goal for next year is to check in with my writing each month and see how I feel. If I feel like writing, I will poke at projects. 

Projects with priority are

• Finish CLC
• Write a SP adventure
• Work on Mystwatch 2 edit
• Outline my next book (whether it's Druid Wars 2 or the first Shane novella or something else entirely new).

Mostly, finish up the things I didn't get to this year. Bonus things would be to finish two SP adventures instead of just one, actually finish the Mystwatch 2 edit, and actually start on my next book. But I'm going to aim small in hopes that I come out ahead, rather than aiming high and falling short, yet again.

I think I might take NaNo off my list of goals entirely. I love the idea of writing with abandon for a whole month to end up with 50k of a novel, but in reality, I'd rather go into it with a solid outline and take two or three months to write a solid 50k, not a rambling 50k. I do miss the idea of an exploration draft. But I just don't think I'm that kind of writer anymore. I can't go into something without a plan. Not the things I want to write, whether those are sequels or second-world fantasy stories. I think that, even though it's not done, I've shown with CLC that I can write off a detailed outline. And that I can spend two solid months writing the same book. I could probably do three, if I needed to, and that should be enough, if I'm fully immersed in a project, to write 45-60k.

Ugh. Why am I so slow?

Ugh. Why does it matter? This race is only with myself, and it's not even a race. It's...I don't know. I guess that's the problem. The goals keep changing, and what writing means to me keeps changing.

At any rate. I have lots of reflecting to do the next year. To answer those questions. To see if I can figure out what this is and when I need it and when I'm pushing too far or too hard. So. This blog isn't done. I still have lots of contemplation about writing to do and process. But this is my end-of-year post. This is it for this year.

I'll check back at the end of January to update on how things are going. Maybe they will be the same. Maybe January will be more thinking and flirting with writing and resting and crafting and painting.

But maybe, just maybe, I'll throw some words at a blank page or wrangle some existing ones that are mine and not someone else's.

We'll see.

Until then, farewell, 2022. Thank you for a year with more productivity than I probably deserved. And welcome 2023. May you be filled with creativity and joy.