Traditions (and maybe Procrastination)

Update 46 18-24 April, 2022

I don’t have much to write about today, as a matter of fact I forgot to take my laptop with me this weekend and I’m writing this just this morning. Trying to get it done before my normal 10am posting time. Let’s see how that goes.

Last week was a lazy week dealing with my health, and getting ready to spend the weekend with my friends who celebrate Orthodox Easter.

I forgot to bring my laptop with me and as such no work was done from Friday until this morning. In either case this week was supposed to be the last away from writing anyway (not that I fully stopped outlining or doing other work).

Ready for the Story

I’m ready to get started, though there is still a lot of prep I could do. I have not worked on a single map in the last three weeks, despite the fact that I have mentioned them in every post. I have procrastinating from art a LOT more than from writing.

Unbelievable I know.

My original start date was May 1^st, but I might try to get it going this week.

I don’t know. There is no precise plan this time (and to be honest the previous “plan” was garbage). I prefer to give myself a start and end date and just work in between. The week-by-week planner just doesn’t work for me. It seems so simple when you plan it out from the desk, and then the time actually comes and things happen.

Co-worker goes on vacation, car breaks down, holidays, travel where you forget to pack your laptop (but not all of the accessories, sigh). Planning in a vacuum just doesn’t survive meeting the reality of life.

That Said… I do have a bit of a Plan

I will start the book on May first (or earlier) and I will try to complete it about 4 months. I’m pretty sure “four months” will not happen. Basically, I aim for 100 writing sessions, 3 per week, that should allow me to hit 200k in less than 12 weeks. But you never know. Also, this might be a book that’s less than 200k… the outline seems tighter, it’s 10 chapters shorter than my normal ones (though I already have ideas to expand it).

I have also focused in a smaller cast, not much smaller, but smaller than the previous books. A few of the chapters as they are currently outlined feel a little… redundant….? That might not be the right word. I’m looking at a few of my chapters and thinking that they could be combined. Like both problems could be handled at the same time in the same chapter.

I have a feeling that sections of my book will be re-outlined, and re-jiggered, on the fly. That could be interesting for this blog, but it could also throw my “fake” schedule into chaos.

So Be It…

I already said that schedules are crap at times. Better to just have a loose idea of where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. It’s pretty much the same with my outlines. I write a bunch of plausible events in a linear fashion, but I keep it loose enough to ignore the hell out of it as I go.

I might have already talked about this, but I’ve been writing this blog every week for over three years now and it gets hazy in the memory. In the past I couldn’t go against my outline. I would spend months writing outlines, character sketches, and working out the details of the entire novel. And then when I got started on the novel, I just “Had to follow” my outline. And if I got a new idea while writing I would come to a complete stop while I fought over changing things.

It took me a long time to loosen up on the outlining and allow myself to just do what I felt was right while I write. Now, in counter to how bad the above sounds I will point out that multiple times when I thought I had a better idea on the fly, I had already worked that idea into my outline and just placed the reveal later in the narrative, or in a more subtle way. My “lightning stroke” good ideas were often not as good as the work I did in advance.

In the end I used this struggle between outlining and spontaneity as a further tool to procrastination and ended up not finishing stories, or never going past the outline stage. I spent decades with only outlining and re-outlining books without finishing, or even starting many of them.

I have often joked about “past me” being smarter than “present me” at times.

Toku Talk

Had a bit of a setback with my Toku watch. I belong to a site that hosts the old 80’s era shows and I’ve been slowly working my way chronologically forward. I then encountered a show that wouldn’t play and despite having three different sources of files, none of them would play. That was depressing. Checking through, I found that several other are also dead links and as such I will not be able to complete my watch through of the whole era.

As such, I finished Sun Vulkan and tried to watch Goggle V, I only got episode 4 and 5 to play, the rest are trash. I skipped to Dynaman, but no, its corrupted as well. But Bioman is playing fine and I’m enjoying that right now. I would have finished it this weekend, but once again… no laptop. Sometime this week I will try Changeman, and hope that that is watchable.

I had just started to keep track of details in a notebook. As I mentioned in the last three blogs. It was fun, but with the loss of two chows and looking them up on the wikis and both shows had fantastic first-time elements. Dynaman has the first “Dark Ranger” (basically when one of the villains decides to become an antihero and both helps and hinders the rangers).

Oh well.

On the other hand, with all of the corrupted files, I should be able to get through the decade faster, meaning I can get back to where I left off with the newer episodes sooner.

But anyway, I’ve gone on long enough this week. I promise soon we’ll be back to word counts and story beats and all of the other fun stuff that kept this going over the last year.

Be well, and thank you for reading.