Slowly Back on Schedule
Journal 54 13-19 June 2022
I’m still not back in the chair as much as I would like. But things are moving forward again in both my life and with the book. I suspect that there will be a few more interruptions over the next few weeks, but I will always make time for these posts.
This one is going out last minute as I spent my entire Sunday crawling through a portion of my brother’s comic collection.
So Many Books
He had a wide range of tastes, but there are about 50 titles that he seems to have never missed getting from the mid 90’s all the way through to just a handful of years ago. I don’t think there is a Star Wars comic from Dark Horse that he ever missed. I’m almost at 300 of them.
I’m trying to focus and sort through everything. He has a bunch of boxes that are already sorted, but sometime back in the early 2000s he stopped doing that and just placed each week’s comics into a box and kept going forward. So, as you dig through a box you get a time line of everything that came out on a week-by-week basis.
The biggest problem is being a collector myself and trying not to transfer things to my own collection. The other problem is having a bad back and after moving through about 1/3 of the collection and moving boxes from one side of the room to the other. I’m completely shot. I’m going to have to manage this whole thing in smaller steps.
You’re Here for the Writing
Well, I managed a session in between everything else.
In the last few posts, I talked about how I was thinking of changing up the outline and adding in an extra chapter. I also asked you all about how you did your own chapter layouts. Do you have limits? Do you aim for a word goal on each chapter? Etc.
For myself I tend to write chapters in the 5-7k range, though I have gone beyond this for some reason I feel like having a single chapter at over 10k and the rest all around 5k make the larger chapter FEEL unwieldly, or worse, boring. I don’t know if that is true, or just some weird bias I recently discovered in myself. But it does feel weird.
I mean, I also feel that a chapter that is really short is also a problem… but I know for a fact that short chapters make the pace of the book speed up, so they shouldn’t be a problem. Yet, when I’m writing if I’m very brief and move on in under 2k I ask myself if I even needed that chapter. It makes me pause and consider if I’m padding.
The current thing that’s really messing with me is for some reason I don’t want to time skip. I’ve become so obsessed with making sure that the timing of things lines up that I keep going minute by minute with my story and characters. I’m spending too much time in the minutia of each day and not just skipping to the salient parts of the story.
The Words
I didn’t get a hell of a lot of time in the chair this week, but I did finish chapter 7 and start the new chapter 8, hammering out 4405 words and bringing the manuscript to 38522.
I’m still second guessing everything, but I’ve yet to meet a writer who doesn’t second guess during the rough draft.
Right now, I’m second guessing my POVs, I switched povs for the chapter change and now I have to have a character give a report of what they saw, instead of just showing it. But I showed a bunch of it in the previous chapter. In either case, a large portion of the chapter is devoted to three characters talking about how they are interpreting scenes. Some of the scenes I have already shown to the reader, two of them I will have not. I don’t know if its clumsy or inspired. I mean I can twist the interpretation to make the reader second guess their own reading of those prior scenes. Or I could mess it up and over explain the scenes. And then it feels like I’m spoon feeding the readers my explanations and thoughts.
My goal is to get across some truths mixed in with the character’s bias, not my own. I also like to allow characters to “guess” the truth but also then make wrong assumptions and work on both of them at the same time. So, I’m always dropping real hints but then muddying them up with a bunch of bullshit.
Where we’re at
My characters have sat down and met the enemy, sort of. They’re at a table with the invaders and gaining their measure. The rest of chapter eight needs to cover three days with spying, overhearing things, and figuring out that these are not peaceful talks, no matter how pleasant they might appear.
This is the turning point that gets these characters on a headlong rush toward the climax of the book.
TV and Hobby
I didn’t get much done with this either. I have been working on D&D stuff, mostly just getting my novel’s world updated to 5e. It’s been a long time since I tried actually place my novels into “rules.” I mean I very much write magic differently than how it works mechanically in the game. Though I do use spells and effects from D&D and try to see if people will guess what is going on.
I find it amusing that my characters in the novels are capable of far more magical effects and spells, but they use these powers far less than the average D&D player does at the table.
As to TV, I recently watched The Offer on Paramount+ and it is excellent. It is all about the making of the Godfather and the cast is amazing. Highly recommend the watch.
I am also continuing my run through Critical Role and Black Dice Society, but have also added the Glass Cannon Channel’s Masks of Nyarlathotep and DnD Beyond’s Beyond Heroes to my viewing lists. It is a LOT of gaming to get through and I’m struggling to give my attention to all to all of them. (I will admit I listen to a lot of Vox Machina while writing or doing other things, only really paying attention to the more interesting bits).
I am sad though, as my brother was a diehard Critter and I was watching the episodes and then talking to him about them. So, now I have to bother other friends, and many of them don’t like Streamed RPGs. It’s been tough finding the right person to text with my “OMG I just got to this moment in the story.”
Anyway, this is late to post so I’ll call it here. Thanks again for reading, I know this is just become a ramble, but it serves its purpose.
