A Tale of Two Computers

Journal 86 13-26 March 2023

I will admit that I toyed with skipping last week. Weighed the Pros and Cons.

But then the decision was taken to me as yet another computer issue reared its head. A slight drop of my charging unit left my laptop without a way to power back up. I was left computerless for the weekend, and we can ignore word counts on this post, I do have a meagre handful, but nothing great.

I believe that fate likes to mess with me… which is probably the reason I made her goddess in my novels and one of my characters is obsessed with trying to appease her at all times.

As soon as the laptop when down my friend who has been trying to resurrect my desktop delivered it back to me and said it will limp along if I treat it right. We swapped broken laptop for semi-broken desktop, and I’m back in business.

That was last weekend, when we didn’t have a blog post, and now this weekend I have my laptop back working as well. So, no excuses not to get some writing done this week.

Word Count

I’m not going to make further excuses. Things just didn’t get done the way they should have. I have a lot of things pulling me in many directions, and focusing on only one thing is my weakness.

That all said, I did knock 2456 total words into chapter 29 and the novel sits just on the cusp of 155k.

Story

I’ve paused the A-story, and the B-story is moving to intersect it.

I debated removing the next chapter and folding it into chapter 29 to make one thick chapter. There is not a lot going on in both of these chapter except for the end and the beginning. Right now, I feel like I’m just filling in some travelogue to pad out the chapter because its 2 separate chapters.

Considering I had to add in extra chapters previously, this could balance it back out by removing one.

Sometimes I get obsessed with the number of chapters. I don’t know why… seriously if weird numbers crop up a bunch, I get superstitious about it. For example, my thesis novel and invasion part one both came in at 42 chapters. And that was without planning. They just both lined up and they both ended within 1000 words of the same total.

Weird.

Two Weeks and Hobby?

Without the computer I spent a lot of time reading, finished a Korean drama, and started thinking about typing up a players guide to Dusk and running my world in games once again.

Dusk is the setting for the next novel and I place I really look forward to writing about. Whenever I feel too lazy to get to the keyboard, but I get mad enough to make myself write, I usually pull out a notebook and start to outline, or work on historical/cultural background, and almost always set in Dusk over anywhere else in the world.

I have been using a picture of the core of the old city of Dusk as my header. So just scroll back up to the top of the page and you’ll see a map covering a 3 x 3 mile square of the city.

Pulled in All Directions

I have a friend who named his office Oscillation Studios… he had it set to write, play drums, and make art. Because as he put it, “I tend to do one for a while before one of the others calls me away.”

I find myself kind of the same. With one or two things always holding my attention while others rise and fall to cut into my time. So, I want to write all the time… but sometimes instead of the novel I work on gaming rules or characters and histories. Or I don’t want to write but I still want to work on the novel so I start to draw extensive maps or sketch monsters.

Then I want to play more games, so I do that all the time, and then when I have a moment to watch a movie I instead watch more actual plays or listen to podcasts instead. Hey I want to build a Lego set… or a model… or paint some minis. But wait, I have some commissions I should paint to make money instead of painting the things I want for myself.

So on and so forth.

Choices

It’s hard.

And now, besides playing in all these games I really want to run games more often. But I already feel like I’m stretched way too thin.

All of this isn’t addressing the main topic of this blog… I got my desktop back… that means I got all my query letters back as well. So, it’s time to shotgun out the last handful of letters… though again, my top three are still listed as closed to queries.

I seriously need a hand with this. I mean I just have less and less options. But I will push on.

Choices. Speaking of which, as I come to the end of this blog, I have three choices before me:

1. Get in a write session and try to finish chap 29
2. Paint some more on the commission.
3. Start a model kit.

I know which I should do… can you guess what I will do?

Thanks for reading this far and I hope you all have a wonderful day. I’ll try to get more talk about process and plotting and other interesting topics down the road.

Just a heads up I might be skipping a number of blogs in April with the holidays and everything.