Sweeping Changes (maybe, I guess…)

Journal 97 17-30 July 2023

I think I’m reaching a point of critical mass… a break thru in the ennui and a finer balance between “not giving a damn” and maybe, just maybe caring about myself again.

Maybe not the best way to start this journal, but I assure you that it goes good from here forward. These last two weeks saw a lot of changes, or at the very least the beginning of changes. Bi-annual doctor’s visits both landed a week apart. Between the two of them I got a few good and bad calls… the usual bad, too much weight, not enough activity, etc.

I think I found something inside that finally said “enough.” Back in PT for the lower back issues, cutting my sweets intake further, and I’m starting yoga for every day strength and balance. I’m hoping that this will kick off further exercise and get me back to who I used to be.

I mean as close as I can at my age.

To round this even further, I have also started to write again! Not just notes and character ideas, but two new chapters in the manuscript.

Words

It was a rocky start. I sat down and just started hammering away at the keys with almost no planning. And I immediately got into trouble. I realized that months ago I had made minor changes that ruined the outline for the next few chapters.

I might end up cutting whole chapters or dumping and re-outlining the end of the novel. IN any case, I sat down and hammered out chapter 30. I felt like I was back at it and then I started chapter 31 and realized that I should have gone back and reread the previous chapters. I mean, I wrote them back in MARCH!

Ended up deleting over 800 words of chapter 31—that was actually stupid as there were whole sentences I could have used in the rewrite. Sigh.

Long story short—too late!—My numbers are OK but not great due to the revisions and deletions I had to make.

But here we go, the first word count in four months.

I only wrote in three sessions over the two-week course, but I managed 5,582 new words and a new total manuscript of 160,316 words.

I’m iffy on how I will continue since I dropped some set up for how the original outline went. But I’ve always replanned on the fly.

Storyline

I have the A and B story finally meeting. It went about 60% according to plan, but the other 40 was improv and it’s already rippling into the next chapters.

I have one set of villains being dealt with in a large fight scene and I have the true villains descending on the fight at the same time. The A-Group is split in two, so I will have them join B=Group and run to meet up with the others. At that point the story will be a little unwieldy with so many characters on the scene. But that’s what I did to myself.

I might have to take some time today and just do a new outline.

In any case, the end is closer and closer and these chapters should prove to be fast. I don’t know what it is about me but when I get to the end it seems to rush forward at a million miles and hour. Maybe its my excitement, or maybe it’s the fact that I seem to end every novel with massive fights or lots of action.

Moving on…

I’m still going to work on the gaming/world notes. I mean they will be used in the next novel. And those back problems I mentioned in my intro are causing me to only be able to sit at the keyboard for a few hours at a time.

Between the yoga, PT, and other issues I might see my time at the keys diminished. But I will find ways to keep writing as I have always done. At least my notes and outlining process is still pen to paper, and that I can do anywhere, at any time.

I’m still working on gaming projects even though I don’t have a suitable outlet for them. Like I want to run D&D but I want to do it in person, and I don’t want to run it once a month but at twice a month.

It’s hard, made harder because I want to do it in person, and I don’t have the prefect group for it yet because scheduling and such. In an ideal world I would take over working every Sunday at work and try to put together a group to play there.

The space is limited but it could work out pretty well. Course the boss might be against a weekly game in the shop every Sunday… it’s all dreaming and planning anyway.

Other Media

I’ve fallen behind in my comic reading, and not because I’m not reading as much but just because so much is coming out right now and I only read a handful of books a week.

As to TV and Movies… I’ve been back on a major K-Drama kick and watched… 8? I believe 8 different shows this month. I did catch the release of the new Shin Kamen Rider. The effects were nice and I liked the costuming, but I don’t know that I loved the changes to the characters and the simplified version of the story.

I guess if you condense a 96 episode series into a barely over 2 hour movie you got to just get the basics. I don’t know how I feel about the modernization of Shocker, but it makes sense.

Saying a bunch of rogue AI’s have decided to slaughter a bunch of humanity in order to learn about it and make the world “happier” is interesting, but cliché by now…and the original ex-nazis in hiding becoming a global corporation is just dated in the extreme. But with rampant fascism rising all around the world right now… having some ex-nazi bad guys really resonates.

K-Drama Mini-Rant

I think it was last journal or the one before where I brought up ranting about certain things… I had a list but I managed to not rant and rave. And to be honest most of them are just silly.

But I did promise I would talk about them. So, let’s talk about just one of the items on the list.

Cellphones. Korea is the home of Samsung, my favorite cell phones. I only use them.

But in there shows they constantly have them do things that cellphones can’t do. And before you say something… I don’t mean like weird sci-fi things like Unlock my Boss (a show about a CEO who is murdered and he puts his soul into a cellphone and one of his employees has to solve the murder while talking to him thru the phone).

I mean mundane things. Like the sheer number of times people will call someone, who of course NEVER answers the bloody phone, and then later on will say something to the effect of, “you never called me or talked to me!”

Hey, your call log says I called you five times. Nope. I mean as soon as you turn your phone on there is an icon that says missed calls right at the top. Nope. Not in a K-drama. That missed call was just missed forever.

This can be so infuriating. I mean I understand the drama but you’re inventing a situation that shouldn’t (and couldn’t happen). Hell, I watched one drama where the person deleted the text on THEIR OWN phone, and it somehow deleted the message on the OTHER PERSONS phone.

I mean maybe that’s a new feature, but I have a 2022 phone and it can’t do that… so… no?

You are the land of great cellphones Korea, stop it.

Yeah I know that’s a stupid thing to get worked up about, but it was one of those things that bothered me on not just 1, or 2, but like 10 shows I’ve watched over the last year.

Outro

There you go.

I’m writing the novel again. I have PT for the lower back, Yoga for the overall exercise, a ton of doctor’s appointments, and I’m trying to make a turn in my life. Let’s see how the next six months go? I’m going to put up word counts, PT and Yoga Progress, maybe even some other positive changes.

I used this journal to keep me accountable for my word count… I slipped hard, not I’ll use it to keep me accountable for other things as well.

Thanks for reading this far, have a great day and see you next time.