Same Old and Again, Again.

Writer’s Journal 7 25-July-2021

Once again back at it.

I feel like I’m repeating myself a lot, but the weeks do tend to bleed together and have the same format to them.

I did a small amount of writing. While I feel great when I hit my little goals, I’m starting to feel like I’m not being ambitious enough. Then again, the last two years have had me admitting that I am always over planning, setting deadlines and goals that are unreachable, and I used to be very hard on myself.

I have worked very hard to give myself attainable goals, and to forgive myself for perceived failures. It is very hard to just stay happy with making my goals when my mind then berates me to hit higher goals. Oh, I make 6000 words a week easily… then maybe it should be 10,000 words. Oh, I write on my days off, I should write every day, every morning.

I was happy to make my 6k a week, but then I think if I was writing 10k a week I would finish the novel that much faster. It is a constant struggle.

Word Count

But hey, you’re not here to listen to me whine about my brain sabotaging my body.

Last week was ok, I only wrote 2 days, as I spent Thursday traveling to the studio to record my podcast in person. More on that in a bit.

I cranked out 8052 words last week, and as I type that, I feel like I should be writing even more. I just stopped working on the manuscript to write this blog post. And I’m going to keep berating myself. Sorry.

But hey, that’s 2000 words over goal. Bringing the novel to 47,584 words. I am about a quarter of the way through the book, I think. I haven’t outlined the last half yet. I merely have a basic guideline.

Part of me is loving the crazy multiple povs/storylines all coming together of this and the previous novel. But part of me is also thinking that at some point I should write a book with a very limited pov. Maybe just a handful of characters going through a smaller plot. It might be nice to work on something a little simpler. But my mind doesn’t think like that anymore.

I always want to know what is happening elsewhere at the same time, and how these characters and events are linked across different parts of the world.

What’s Happening in the Book

I had an interesting occurrence happen. Normally I write the book in linear fashion. I write each chapter, one after the other, even though each chapter is a different pov and a shift to a different storyline. But when I finished my chapter 10 I had to make changes on the fly. The chapter was originally outlined to hit three different scenes and elements. But the third scene was going to be a massive fight and by the time I arrived to that scene I was already well over 4000 words in the chapter.

So, I changed my mind and took some advice from Benjamin Percy (I recently got to sit in on a class he ran. It was on comic book scripting and plotting, but it still worked for novels as well.) I decided to end the chapter just as the fight was about to start, thus giving a “page turn”—cliffhanger.

Now normally, I would have moved on to write chapter 11, which was a post-fight chapter for a different POV. Instead, I immediately jumped to chapter 13 and picked up with the fight scene from a different pov. It was great. The new chapter 13 was far better for being half fight scene and then post fight exposition and dialogue.

I then went back and started working on that chapter 11.

The Podcast

So, last week episode 5 went live, wherein we interview one of our friends. It was a good time and has a couple laughs within. I hope some of you are giving it a listen. We’re back on track with our recording scheduling and for the first time I went into the studio and recorded live. That was a lot of fun and I keep striving to get my audio quality better.

Episode 5 saw the introduction of separate audio for my tracks. Meaning it was already an improvement. The next couple of episodes should be pretty good. We have decided to shuffle a few of the episodes around, and I just want to say that the episode I’m looking forward to the most is episode 10. We’re halfway there. You will all want to listen it. We try our hands at a little bit of voice acting.

Next Week

I want to push on with 6-10k words next week. I also need to start sending the next batch of query letters, but the problems with that are with the agents themselves.

So many of the agents on my list are still closed for submission. Making it very difficult to actually send letters. I will push on.

A bunch of the games are on hold for next week. So, I’m still waiting on starting my Character Journals series on here.

Also, next Sunday, I will be out of town, I normally write these posts on Sunday and schedule them to go live on Monday mornings. There is a possibility that the post will be late next week. Probably not. But I thought I should make a comment here just in case.

Outro

I have not painted or worked on games in a while so no new news there.

Just trying to feel like I’m accomplishing things and moving forward and hoping that my honesty helps others. Keep writing and feel free to tell me about what you’re working on or what is going on in your lives. I love to talk, so please say something.

Be well and thank you for reading.