No More Excuses
Update 63 8- 14 August 2022
The title is meant to be a little funny.
I’m writing this late, and it will probably post late, and last week was full of excuses.
Perhaps a better name would be “no more excuses starting now.” I have struggled to balance side work, house work, and deal with my own mental/emotional state with my writing over the last three weeks.
Yesterday, the 14th was the end of my week and it was the memorial service for my brother. It was a day of sadness, but also a celebration of a life. Of a storyteller, gamer, ranter, and lover of everything geek. He was one of the main people I went to, to fill in the gaps in my memories when it came to comics. And to talk characters and writing issues.
He was player in my games and my DM at times, though not for a long time unfortunately as our various groups split into sub-groups and I hadn’t played under him as a DM in many years.
But we did play side by side in two campaigns over the last two years and that was so special to have him back in the saddle again. Even if we did butt heads and sometimes fight for control of the group.
Words Fail me…
Well… not true exactly I could spend the entire blog just telling stories about characters, games, arguments, books… Book. He was also a writer. Working on the script for our family’s faire. I constantly pushed at him to try and get his novels published (there were various reasons he gave why the few things he had done were unworthy.)
But he always had new ideas and notebooks full of characters and places. Like myself, he loved to work on world-building and over the last couple years as I finished my Master’s degree I would share with him the websites, work sheets, textbooks, and other such that I discovered. I shared with him my work shops and had him read chapters of my novel and give me feedback.
Sometimes we would sit together in his room and discuss character arcs, and map out villages/countries, or just talk about old games. But we should have done those more often. I just thought… I thought I had plenty of time.
But we never know our full allotment of time, do we?
Back on Track
I know that the handful of you that come here just want to hear about the novel and what I’m going through creatively.
So, I will get back on track.
Somehow last week, I managed to get in a single writing session. Then I just couldn’t do it. I will get back to three a week starting today, the day this posts on my website, I will spend the rest of the afternoon writing my story and hoping that Anthony is over my shoulder criticizing every single word.
Words
I’ve been mired in chapter 13 since the 4th of August and I’m almost at the point I can call it quits. I added a further 1629 words to the chapter and the novel now sits at 76.660 total worlds.
Many people consider that to be a full-length novel, and yet I’m still in the beginning of the second act. I have over twenty more chapter to go through and really, I’m probably only a third of the way through the book.
Hell, I still have two more characters to introduce to the narrative. And personally, I feel like I’m rushing through some things. Now, I know I’m a bit of an over writer, but still it feels like I move through the scene, I spend a lot of time either having characters argue or I have one character completely in their head with worry, put up a problem, solve the problem, then move on to the next scene.
The Doubt
But sometimes I feel like I move through the scene without enough detail… or too much detail at the beginning and not enough during the action sequence. I don’t know.
The real problem is I have no one reading or commenting and I don’t know how the story lands on anyone other than me. Am I too slow? Am I too fast? Am I mixing up the parts that SHOULD be fast with the ones that should be slow? Did I put down enough descriptor to clearly sketch in the scene?
I don’t know.
I’m still looking for feedback on my Thesis Novel. NO ONE has read the second novel, and now I’m struggling through the third.
I wish I still had the confidence of teenage me who never had a second thought that the story might suck, or be too boring. (Matter of fact, teenage me wrote way to fast and short. The pace was just…this happened, then he did this, dialogue, fight scene, move to here, set piece, action, action, thin description of character, three paragraphs describing a gory moment or a sword, move on, three lines of dialogue in fifty pages, that’s ok, the end.)
While I would love to be so carefree again, I just want to produce something that is actually readable, marketable, saleable… whereas the kid me just wanted to tell a cool story. Maybe that is the trick? Just don’t care if I ever make a living off writing and just make stories for me? But that kind of goes against the degrees, the years of networking and traveling to conventions, meeting other writers, and all the other stuff I’ve been doing (mostly in lieu of writing… sigh) and just feels like I’m wasting my potential, and I’m already upset that my brother’s greatest was hidden.
Gaming, Hobby, Other
I could probably go on and tell some stories here. But I think last week I did a rather long post and now I don’t know what I want to talk about. Do I tell you more stories about my brother’s characters or gaming with him. Do I just report on the stories of this week’s gaming.
Probably the latter. I have one I should do for the dedicated readers.
Curse of Strahd
Last week, I mentioned having a hard time with playing in the Curse of Strahd game. How much the world is just a drag and that might be because of my current mood and how things are going in the world in general. This weekend my character was put through a trial, but it went better than expected.
I had put together some defenses and readied myself for the worse. Some of my planning got thwarted before the trial even began, but I did manage to uphold my characters ideals and make it through the session. Perhaps this character has a little more life still left in him, though I was prepared to pull out my back-up character and swap them out. I have three… almost four weeks to wait before I get back to that character so we’ll see what happens and how my mood shifts as we get into my favorite time of year.
Outro
Anyway, I would and could talk more about streaming games, TTRPGs, and other such but I am writing this the morning of posting and I am literally minutes away from being late. I will end this one short and make up for it on the next.
Be well, let your loved ones know they are loved, and keep on reading and writing.
