To Valhalla

Writing Journal 53 6-12 June 2022

I was going to skip this week. I probably really should skip this week.

In my last post, I was talking about characters, but more specifically, I was talking about my brother, and him being in the hospital. I processed my feelings by talking about writing and character, and I’m doing that again.

My brother has passed over the rainbow bridge and awaits me in Valhalla.

And yeah, I’m not a bloody Viking, but the sentiment very much fits my brother and our lives.

Last Week

I felt really bad that I couldn’t remember the name of one of the greatest characters my brother ever played. His blind druid, but in talking about it with other friends one of them remembered the name, and more details. Iosef.

We’re still in the process of cleaning out his room and I found the actual character sheet and some of the notes he took as the character. I treasure this sheet and the notes, and promise that Iosef Grigori van Richten will appear in one of my novels. Though probably with only the first two names, I don’t want WotC coming after me for the last name.

I thought the character was an Aasimar (a celestially infused humanoid) but he was a full half celestial. Pretty much an angel in a mortal body. The character was way more powerful than I remembered. He had regeneration, and the acid resistance was 10 not 5. Take the link above, to go back and read the story, believe me it is well worth your time.

I thought the character was just a druid, but he did take sorcerer levels and was aiming to be a full dual caster. His feats were pretty amazing (this was a third edition character) and I forgot how badass animal companions and familiars could be in the old edition. Then again everything is over powered in the previous editions.

Trying to Move on…

I am the type of person who throws himself into work or projects to keep my mind off of things. It hasn’t been working well this week. I got one write session in and it went rather well, but then I had to stop and I just couldn’t get back to it.

I believe I can be forgiven for not being able to muster the energy this week.

But, since I made this blog, I will adhere to the spirit of the process. I sat down and wrote a single day this week. I managed a further 2467 words on chapter seven and pushed the manuscript up to 34k.

I’m debating cutting chapter seven into two and adding a new chapter to the outline. I just have so much going on and I think I should slow it down a little and take my time. Or I could just do a very long chapter.

Writing Questions

So, here is a good question. Do you plan out the length of your chapters?

I know people who are much more in-depth plotters than me (I’m a hybrid writer, in case this is your first post I talk about this A LOT). And in their outlines, they have the chapters planned out in sequence and with a general page or word count.

I personally seem to aim for chapters that are about 5k long. But I have written chapters over 20k in the past. Hell, I once wrote a chase scene and final fight that was almost 11k. That is a very long action sequence.

I always thought it was interesting to find people who plot out their book and then say, this plot will be exactly 90k words. And I’m over here going I aim for a goal and usually shot over it. How the heck do you know you’re going to hit an exact number. I finally realized they were aiming for a set number of words per chapter and that’s what I started to do. I average 5k a chapter, times 40+ chapters… 200k novel, yada.

I’m just wondering how other people do it.

Plans for this week…

The last two weeks have been up and down, I don’t expect to make many words this week either. I have side projects that need work and I’m still trying to get the house in order.  Next blog might be another one just about characters and gaming.

Gaming has been the one thing that helps me through these times. I’m hoping I can find more old character sheets and notes while cleaning. IN any case, this post is already late as I’m writing it this morning directly, whereas I normally write these in advance and set them to auto load.

Sorry that I just don’t have much to say today, next week I will try to be back to a semblance of normal.