Going thru the Motions

Journal 82 13-19 Feb 2023

Wasn’t much of a week so I don’t have a pithy comment to start on.

My team lost the Superbowl… boo, hiss. Oh well.

There was a phase in my life where I religiously watched football. Too the point where I would sit on my couch reading a book with the NFL channel on. Every day.

But that was almost twenty years ago.

Now I pretty much only watch the Superbowl and the occasional game.

But none of that has anything to do with writing, so here we go.

Words

I’d like to say I finished 2 chapters this week. Only I’m not 100% happy with the way I left off the last chapter. It sort of just peters out.

I think I could tweak it a little, but then I worry that I might just overwork it. Perhaps it’s something I can leave for when I do my first revision pass.

In any case, I’m 25 chapters into the novel (the current outline has the book at about 38 total, but I think I’ll be adding one or two more at the end. I want to throw in a villain pov and introduce the actual enemy of the whole thing).

I hammered out 5652 words over two sessions this week and the novel now sits at 135,555 total words. I’m aiming between 180-200k.

Story

I’ve laid the ground work for the current situation and some of the history for the area where the final act takes place. I’m giving information from two different sources to two different groups of people. So, the reader gets variance in some of the same information, or in some cases they get info from A that helps to understand B, while B gives their own bias on an event happening to A.

And I know that sentence might have been a little hard to parse. Here’s were learning to use infographics would have benefited. (I actually did have one of my college courses introduce me to a dozen websites that do all sorts of things, but one of them was making infographics. But alas, I was more interested in just writing stories).

Speaking of stories, I keep coming up with novellas and shorts that I would like to write while working on the novel. It’s so funny, because I went months/years without writing and found it hard to get ideas. But when you write all the time you suddenly have more and more ideas. At least I do.

Any one else have this issue?

I know I have a bunch of friends who say they always have a ton of ideas. But they also tend to write more regularly than me. So, is it that active writers have more ideas? Am I correct?

I know that back when I used to run DnD all the time I also was more creative and had more ideas all the time. I should probably gauge how that tracks with more reading as well. I haven’t sat down and read a novel in over a year. Seriously. It’s mostly just comics, and I watch a lot of foreign TV, so subtitles. The stacks of novels in my room stare at me accusingly all the time.

I’m mad at myself for the lack of reading by the way. I’ve always believed that a writer needs to read just as much as they write. I was even that guy who very heavily judged other writers who said they never read… or don’t have time to read.

I will start a novel today. As soon as I’m done with this blog, I’m going to dig through the stack of books I have and pick one and start reading. (I also have a non-fiction book that I started but didn’t finish, so maybe I’ll go back to that and get it done).

Hobbies

Well, this was a shitty week for hobby. My Tuesday game barely got any time in as Roll20 kept crashing or dropping players and then the DM had his computer crash all the way. That last crash was his fault but Roll20 didn’t help.

My Thursday game didn’t happen as the DM had to take a trip to Florida. But the rest of us got together and played Cards against Humanity and other games.

Saturday was the first full night of gaming in over a week, and it went well. That game is based on exploring fantasy versions of real world ancient cultures. We’re in the 3^rd part of the game where we’re exploring ancient Babylon (the empire right now not the city-state, though we are on course to arrive there sooner or later).

We’re currently in the city of Mari (Mari-tell), and in this fantasy the current city is built over a collapsed undercity that was destroyed a thousand years earlier. As we are “British” explorers/Oxford Professors we were hired by locals as experts and bodyguards.

The DM is using a real map of Mari from an expedition, it’s pretty cool.

Next week we go back to the rotating games on Saturdays. Two weeks of Babylon, two weeks of space scoundrels trying to smuggle goods. I’m super excited for the first game of the smugglers game. We decided we all wanted a light hearted very UNSERIOUS game.

I’m looking forward to playing my 8 Wisdom, spoiled brat, smuggler/ sorcerer.

Expect to hear all about the first game next blog.

Outro

I can’t think of anything else to talk about. I was going to talk about how the sequel to Sorority Babes at the Slime Bowl-a-rama is pretty poorly written. But it’s a stupid movie and it’s not meant to be high art. Though there is something to say for taking your damn time with a movie and building up characters. The movie is only an hour long and it’s so fast to each point that it just all feels “fake.” Very unbelievable.

But anyway, I’ve said too much. I still had fun watching it.

I know that these posts barely touch on writing sometimes and are more like a weekly journal of events. I’ll work on more criticism, reviews, and story/writing mechanics talks as the year goes on. Sometimes it’s hard to do a weekly blog and not just talk about normal things.

Also, I will tell you what book I picked and started to read. I use this blog to hold myself accountable for a weekly word count. I will also use to make me read more.

Thanks for staying on this long.