Let’s Do This
Update 47 25 April- 1 May, 2022
Well, this will probably be short. Last week I went away for the weekend, so this weekend I need to work. I’m writing this on Sunday, two hours before my Comic Shop opens. I’m standing over the back issues with my laptop on one set of comics and my keyboard on another.
Today, May 1st, would have been the start of my next novel, however I will do it on the 2nd when this blog goes live. Considering I reckon my weeks Monday thru Sunday, that makes a little more sense to me.
Besides, this blog post is about everything that happened during THIS week, from April 25th to now.
Mapping Issues
I love mapping, I really do. The problem is I become obsessed with scale, and figuring out time tables. Hoe far can one walk in a day, what if you use horses. What is the width of your average mountain range? Is this valley too small, too big? Etc.
It becomes a real problem that leads to a lot of procrastination and has me throwing out every map I draw. The it has me surfing the internet looking up the square mileage of ancient cities, the size of rivers and mountains, and all of that.
Sometimes I wish I could just turn off that part of my brain and relax. Keep it loosey goosy and make the maps fit after I get the writing done. In any case I did manage to get a few sketches together for the areas I need and I will always end up doing more work as I get to each chapter anyway. I have a habit of working out all of the details as I go.
Hybrid Writer.
I’ve mentioned it so many times in these posts that I won’t go over detailed here. But I am a hybrid writer, pantsing and plotting in almost equal amounts. I would probably say 70 percent plotting and 30 percent pantsing… but it probably swings differently on each book.
I have been putting a lot less time into plotting on the last two. I mean I am mining old games and stories for a lot of these characters and events. Only the motivations and depths of the characters have changed greatly because its hard to remember a bunch of gaming characters from over 20 years ago and how they truly were played. Versus how I think and act now as a far older writer.
Though funny enough I still wrestle with many of the same issues with my characters. Dealing with family issues, their pasts, and trauma. I guess those things never change. But how we deal with them does.
Second Guessing
I have been worried that I might pushing myself to just keep writing and concentrating on that to the exclusion of other things. Like, for some reason starting this book today or tomorrow is vitally important… yet I haven’t put nearly as much effort into the outline as I should have. Also, I have been ignoring my dead desktop for over 5 months now… meaning I haven’t sent out any query letters since October.
Why do I keep writing if I’m not paying enough attention to the business side of things?
I have writing friends who would have told me to stop writing after the thesis novel and just work on outlines and pitches for the rest of the novels. As they say, “Why are you writing books that someone hasn’t asked/paid for?”
When I first got that advice I thought it was great… but also didn’t know anything about pitching or selling a book that wasn’t even done. I have since that time (more than 15 years ago) met a lot of other writers who said that was the worse thing. Get several books done, always be working… always have irons in the fire.
Well, I seem to be alright with making the irons but I sure don’t seem to put them in the fire. I stopped doing short stories ages ago… so I never have any out in the wild looking for a home. I keep working on the single book series and not working on other things. I keep saying I want to do non-fiction essays and papers but I haven’t worked on them either. I am very singular of purpose. I want to write this series of books ad not much else right now. But I sure am forgetting the business side of things.
Hence why I feel I need an agent… but I seem to not be trying very hard to get one. (Though in my defense I have a list of agents I want to query and every time I check on them their status has been closed to queries for the last three years. So, even if I did have access to my desktop and could get my query letters and packages out of it and onto my laptop… I still couldn’t submit to the people I want to).
I’m getting depressed now. Let’s move off writing for a bit.
Toku Talk
My continuing saga of working through the 80s Sentai…last week I mentioned running through Bioman after having two other shows fail to run. I finished Bioman, which was fairly over the top violent and then started Changeman. Changeman started out brilliant with really gross monsters, slime, and some body horror. Following the violence of Bioman I was really digging these shows. However, Changeman proived to only have 10 episodes available in English so I had to stop and skip ahead again.
Flashman
Flashman, 1986, was pretty good. It had a sad ending and there were a bunch of family issues and such that while they could have been really sad and emotional, I question the memories of kidnapped people that were 1 or 2 years old remembering their parents 20 years later. Also, coming back to their “home” –Japan—and really feeling that it was “home.”
Interesting tidbits this show had a monster that was Doomsday long before DC Comics created him… in that they had a monster that when it died it became stronger and kept coming back. It was also grey and white and covered in spikes.
They also had a character with two swords that clicked together and became a nasty double weapon, which I had seen for the first time in 1997 (1998?) with Darth Maul. So, double weapons existed much earlier. Very cool.
The villains were based off of genetic manipulation and hybrid creatures, so of course the show completely got genetic science wrong a LOT.
Overall, it was fun.
Good News
Well… maybe good news, so far, it’s kind of meh. I managed to find a site that had the two sentai I skipped. Goggle V and Dynaman.
I am most excited for Dynaman as I’ve heard good reviews and it has some notable firsts in it. Including the first Dark Hero. In sentai dark heroes are normally villains who have a change of heart or who are willing to work on ether side to get their own goals. So, in Dnyaman we have the prince who wants to depose his father who sometimes helps out the heroes.
The problem is Goggle V, which I need to watch first to get back to chrono. It starts out promising but funnily very edgelord. The villains are called Deathdark. Their castle is Deathtopia. General Death Grilla. Etc. There are skulls on everything and it could be fun. But the show is very kid centric.
To the point that the support team behind the Sentai are a bunch of 9-year-old computer nerds and gifted kids. And worse the sentai is themed off “rhythmic gymnastics.” Meaning that when they fight, they pull out hula hoops, batons, and even ribbons as weapons and try to make it look anything other than silly. It is going to be a chore to watch.
Worse it has three more episodes than the previous sentai, 52 episodes. And this is before they switched to the 20-minute episodes, so each episode is closer to 30 minutes.
Gaming News
Super excited that Wizards of the Coast announced Spelljammer.
The funny thing is I barely ever played any Spelljammer back in the day. And when we did, we took it far too seriously. Watching the current reflux of videos talking about and the new direction that 5E is taking things, it really looks and feels like it is meant to be a FUN game first.
Their YouTube channel started a campaign, Masters of the Multiverse, I never watch D&D games on YouTube, but I watched this one and I was hooked. I might have to go back and start watching a lot of others.
I’m just really happy and thankful that I’ve had gamer friends for ¾ of my life and that I get to game multiple times a week. I’m also glad for podcasts of games that I can listen to and enjoy other people enjoying games as well. I should focus more of my writing toward gaming things but as mentioned above I tend to get singular of purpose and work on one thing only.
Outro
Well, I made myself sad in the first half and now I’m happy in the latter. And I’ve actually spent longer than an hour on this. The store doesn’t open for another hour, but I need ot clean up and get ready. Hope you all have a wonderful Monday.
