Failure to Launch
Update 8-14 March 2021
So, I’ll cut through the bull and make no excuses, I have “failure to launch.” I failed to make my goals at all. I could talk about bad back, lots of school work/reading, and my mom’s birthday… but none of that really forgives the fact that I accomplished NO writing this week.
There was no revision of the novel, there was no work on the outline of the next novel, I didn’t even work on the Call of Cthulhu game. Nothing.
What I did do was school work and painting. Lots of painting.
But I enjoyed the painting, so, there is that.
But still… failure to launch.
School Demands:
Being back to two classes, both of which have a lot of reading and work to accomplish has eaten into my time considerably. These are the last two classes to finish my Master’s and I will admit that spending the last 3 terms in my thesis classes spoiled me. Three terms covered 33 weeks of time were I mostly just had to write my novel. There was no reading, no discussion posts, no essays. Just a handful of journals and having to get my word count in.
That is not the case with these last two classes. I have to work toward a final, I have discussions in each week, replies to discussions, and LOTS of reading.
I hate giving you all an update that really doesn’t contain much update, thought thinking about it… having a paragraph or two that discusses how many chapters I revised and how many words I cut out of the novel also isn’t that exciting.
Branding, Content, and Future Ideas
One of my classes has me thinking about branding and my content on this site. I truly believe that this Thesis Diary is important. But do admit that it isn’t always thrilling on a weekly basis. There will be interesting posts, but there will also be many just plan boring posts. When I send out my first set of queries that will be amazing, but then we sit and wait for weeks to hear back, or hear nothing at all and then in six weeks I send out the next batch.
The answer for that is that I KNOW I need other content on this site to let you fine readers enjoy. Maybe something that represents more than just my thoughts on “literary citizenship.”
Just to clarify, I personally believe that my Thesis Diary series is one of the cornerstones of my literary citizenship. I am giving you a personal look behind the screen, into what I’m going through and how I navigate the business. It is fairly open and candid and pretty raw.
While that is all good, this site is also supposed to be about my writing, my thoughts on writing, and even advice on writing. And I have not delivered much on those three things in the last 5 months as I’ve devoted all my time to finishing the novel, classes, etc.
New Posts:
This week I start a monthly game of Curse of Strahd. CoS is a classic module, revamped for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, and takes players into Ravenloft. If you don’t want to follow the link, Ravenloft is the gothic horror setting for D&D. In my long history with gaming, I have only played in Ravenloft 3 times, and I have never run through ANY of the versions of this module.
The game is once a month, and I will be putting together an in-character journal for my character. I haven’t worked out all of the details for the formatting. But I figured by putting it in a journal with some excerpts from other sources it would read kind of like Stoker’s Dracula. In an epistolary format.
Besides the monthly journal post, I was also thinking I might post some of the outlining and idea process for the Call of Cthulhu Campaign idea I have. There is a lot of intricacy in setting open and open world/ sandbox investigative game. It is much different than running D&D. And since I might never run this game, sharing the ideas with you at least makes me feel like I didn’t waste a lot of time working on it.
Bringing back some Horror.
I’m a fantasy writer, but I’m a horror hound at heart. I love horror books, movies, and makeup/effects. Jason Voorhees is tattooed to my arm and I’ve met four of the actors who’ve played the character.
That’s a pretty old picture, I’m fatter and older now.
All of my fantasy, all of my writing period, contains horror of some sort. Whether it’s dark imagery, or just a few jump scares. I love to add in the tension, or to make a player in my games groan that I’m a “sick bastard.” I also love monsters. From the human-monster serial killers to the monstrous undead, or werewolves, or giant humanoid insects that eat people.
Monsters, darkness, psychology, and misfit/ anti-heroes are my bread and butter. My mainstays of storytelling. I will try and make an effort to bring in more story into these posts. Whether it is including snippets of stories in my Thesis Diary Posts, or the addition of the two extra posts a month. I’ve been letting you get to know me “behind the screen,” but perhaps it is time to show you more of what is playing on that screen?
Next Week:
I still need to edit the opening chapters of the novel… and by edit I main revise to make them… smoother. It’s not “better.” The writing is already good, the problem is the prologue and first 6 chapters were written years ago during my undergrad, the rest of my novel was written in my master’s courses. So, the writing is different. I need to get the old chapters up to the same tonal quality of the later work.
Later this week I will post the background and character story for my character for the CoS game. The first journal will then go live probably week one April.
Next week, or the week after I will do a post about Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and the Pulp rules. And the main idea I had for a campaign. (I will not go too deep into the campaign details, just in case I do get to run it, as some of my players DO read this site). The CoC stuff will be a lot of behind the screen stuff, and HOW I go about writing it. It’s pretty interesting as I need to have timelines, scores of characters to interact with, and hooks to multiple directions. Plus, you need to have as many answers as possible to questions that could come out of nowhere.
This probably isn’t making much sense, but it will all become clear when I get the post up.
Until next week and next post.
