Good Times and Sun-Burn
Update 8 25-31 July 2021
Well, this hasn’t happened in a long time, but I’m actually writing this the morning of. That’s right, if this didn’t go live at 10am that is because I took too long to finish it and get it posted.
Sorry, but I did warn you about this last week.
This has been a pretty good week overall. Writing, Podcast, partial weekend away, and fun. There hasn’t been a lot of fun over the last year and a half… I’ve managed a few moments of joy, but for the most part I stay home, or at work.
This was a good weekend. Except for the…
SUNBURN
I spent Sunday walking around a huge flea market, call the White Elephant. It was great, but it was also a lot of walking and a lot of sun. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Usually Saturday night is a D&D game night where I play with my oldest and dearest friends… we’ve been friends so long that I’m considered family and the third brother, and the other player is one of my two best friends from High School. So yeah, it’s a good group.
Well, my best friend took his girlfriend—fiancé—away for the weekend for her birthday. So, I planned to go see my other two friend in person (we play online since covid hit last year). It was going to be a night of bullshitting and probably watching bad movies.
But their house got struck by lightning at the beginning of the week, blowing up part of the chimney and also frying the router, computer and TV that were plugged in along the wall next to the fireplace. And they were delayed in replacing the TV.
Crazy I know.
We ended up playing a pickup game of Call of Cthulhu. Since I’ve wanted to run the 7th edition rules for a year now, and ever wrote essays about it here. As much as I had planned and thought through a story, I was not quite ready to run. Nor did I have everything with me. But I did have my rules books and my notebooks. So, we just winged it.
Call of Cthulhu 7e
It was awesome.
I had the basic story, and if you follow the link above, I planned everything with three main options. And one of those options was always: “The Character’s ignore the story and run off on their own.”
But I was pleasantly surprised when one player immediately picked up the main thread of story and ran with it, and the other player started to unravel and piece together the clues while the first player kept the game on track.
They went from my planned first scene right to the second and found clues rapidly. It was lovely. I wanted to foreshadow that they were being watched by people, and both characters immediately jumped into an action sequence which forced me to pull out and use the most esoteric (but also most interesting) Chase Rules.
They ran down one of my villains and took him prisoner, and I had to go full improv mode from there forward. It was fantastic.
Back on Topic…
But you’re not here to listen to me gush about a game. This is supposed to be a writing journal. So let’s turn back to writing.
Staying with the game for a minute. The way I wrote my story was too hard to follow for the game. Not the story itself, but the actual layout of the pages. For example, I have the layout of the first scene, then the background of the characters, then the ways I can see the scene going (Rule of 3) and then a list of clues and where they lead. But then I go into background of the npcs, what happened before the players got involved.
Pages later we get a layout of scene two.
The problem is there is a lot of information to wade through and a lot of back and forth in the book. What I should have done is put all the scenes and the running order in one book, and all the background, npcs, and details in a second books and just indexed it.
As to my novel, we are well past the quarter mark. I just went through two massive action sequences and introed a villain chapter that was really fun to write.
This week I finished chap 11 and 12, gaining a further 7698 words in the novel, bringing us to a grand total of 55282. I still feel like I should be writing more often, but the book is progressing and that is what matters.
The Story…
Chap 11 saw our new heroes try to collect money from the thieves’ guild, only to discover that their contract was nulled and that the guild want to collect something else they found. Negotiations went south and our heroes ended up fleeing through tunnels under the city, before they tried to cross a bridge and got cut off. The bridge collapsed and dropped them into the sewers.
Their next chapter is titled “Crawling through a Mile of S#!t” and if you look at the cover photo you will find that name up there.
Chapter 12 reveals the scope of the invasion that the whole series is named after and also introduces more about the… powers behind the invasion. The next section of the book should start to move rapidly as my characters are all heading toward the same destination.
Podcast
So, we’ve started to discuss a season break down. Most of the time we kind of wing it with only a couple days of planning before we record. We’re trying to be more professional. Also, we recorded a bunch of episodes in advance but we might slow down to a bi-weekly release. We wanted to get the first few out there fast to whet appetites.
Either way, we have a bunch of good things in the works.
This week’s writing
So, I might not get a lot done this week. Not that I like to make excuses at the beginning of the week. The problem is I have an eye exam and recording session this Thursday so that will slow me down, and I’m spending the bulk of my writing time this morning writing this post… so yeah. I don’t think I will get a lot done this week.
Also, I bought about 50 Ghost Rider issues at the flea market and will be reading a LOT of comics this week. (That is partially a joke, I did buy the comics, but I would never sack my write time for more reading time, I already devote time to reading every day).
Outro
I’m at 1200 words already… I still need to finish more query letters and I’m still waiting for a bunch of my agents to open to queries. It sucks and is pretty disheartening. But I’ll keep writing. Thank you for reading.
