Too Long from the Keys

Update 62 August 1-7, 2022

These last two weeks have been busy as hell, and when they weren’t busy, I was just trying to survive the heat without AC. This week has been crushing me with guilt during the times I was just lying down and trying not to sweat.

I could use this time to write, I’m just lying here watching a video on Flax seed and watching how its grown and prepped and turned into linen. Amazing. While none of that is pertinent to the week’s writing, it does contribute to the overall world building.

Which brings us around to last week, when I asked all of you about calendars and how you handle them in your writing. Do you go the full distance and create a new one? Do you just use our normal one? Or do you avoid dates entirely? Still haven’t heard much back on that, so feel free to comment or what have you.

But let’s get on to this week.

Words

I mentioned in the last two posts that I will be very busy for a while. Side work, memorial service for my brother, and gaming projects have been eating up my time.

Excuses all laid out I did manage to get back to the keys one day during the week. And I’m aiming for two or so this week. The heat is not helping at all. (Also new kitten as well).

I started lucky chapter 13 and knocked out close to 3600 words. The manuscript is now sitting at 75,046 total words. Or about a third of the way done. I still have two more characters to introduce and a lot of ground to cover to get to the final set piece. I also realize that I have a ton of antagonists, but no direct villain in this book.

The overall story has a singular grand architect villain but in this book there are just a number of bad people who are obstacles, but no named foe that stands directly in the path of the group. And I realize that might be a product of limiting my pov to a single character in each chapter and not doing any villain povs.

Driving the Story and Clues

Currently all of my named “badguys” (antagonists have been left behind to do whatever evils they are doing) our heroes (b team) are on the run and looking for someone. They’re trying to thwart the enemies’ goal, but in order to do so they have to ignore what’s happening in their homes.

I hope this works. My dual narrative where characters are both rushing toward something but both the reader and the characters barely know what that is. I have been dropping a lot of clues and hints at things in both stories as is my style. What Team A is talking about or discovering usually has a larger significance to Team B and vice versa. 

This method allows the reader to figure out more things than the characters.

Sometimes I will have Team A talking about something and get a lot of the facts wrong, then we switch camera to Team B and one of them is telling the same thing but telling it correctly.

Film and Books

I keep using film analogies with my stories and the funny thing is I never think of it WHILE I’m writing.

Like here, I’m mentioning the “camera switch” and yet when I’m writing the story I don’t write out the fade in and out from a scene, nor do I direct the “camera.”

As a matter of fact I struggle with the “camera” all the time. The main question is whether or not my “camera” is my POVs eyes, or whether it is over their shoulder. I tend to do the former, and I would rather do the latter. But for some reason I have a struggle with pov.

(Bad) Advice and Over-thinking

I believe it stems for really poor feedback. I wrote a number of shorts back in the day and I had people telling me a short story should only ever have a single pov, so no shifting between characters. Then when I wrote everything from a single pov I had people tell me that I shifted the pov too much at the end of the story.

But I never thought I did. I thought the camera was still with the main character, but it was showing the reader something the character himself didn’t notice. It was a horror twist. The villain was still alive type moment.

In any case, I got all pf this feedback back when I was a relatively young writer and a dozen more like it and LOTS of “Advice.” Which all contributed to making me feel awkward with my own writing and made me second guess everything. Now over a decade later, I’m still questioning how I do pov, am I shifting out of one character to another. Am I doing this wrong, have I done that wrong. Over and over.

Its weird that the teenage me was super confident but had typos, bad spelling, rushed “telling,” edgelord characters, soap-opera drama, and main characters that had to be terminator level badasses… but I never questioned my writing and some of my plotting was pretty decent. I can go back and read what few things survived my many moves and my shattered hard drive, and while I cringe at the spelling the rest is fairly readable.

Its only now after a decade plus of spending time with other writers, earning two degrees, and really settling in and cranking out words that I’ve become this doubting creature that constantly second guesses everything, over thinks every word, and worries all the time.

IDK.

I’m still gonna keep at it.

Hobby, Movies, Etc

I watched Prey, the movie rules. You should watch the hell out of it.

I will also admit that one day when I should have been writing I just sat back in my 90 degree room and watched five movies, while three fans tried to keep me cool. So, I watched a bunch of movies. Mostly late 80s direct to video trash and a few Italian Films I like.

In the world of comics over the last two weeks I took a break from some of the current issues to read older stuff. I started by reading the first 50 issues of Amazing Spider-man and while the early sixties slang gets old fast, the introduction of one great villain after another was a lot of fun to read.

Also, the original personality of Parker was very interesting. Like the way he was bullied in school is always in the new movies, and the reboots, but nothing captures the fact that even PRE-spider bite he has a mouth on him that viciously attacks back.

There are scenes where the things he says to Flash Thompson are sometimes more vicious and crueler than what Flash said to start off the argument. There are a couple issues that if you started there as your first, then Parker would seem the bully.

Comics Rant Incoming

The first 4 years of the comics also reinforce my hatred for the Aunt May character, and the bullshit of their living situation. Stan Lee liked to invent drama that shouldn’t exist, ignoring the problems of Aunt May, there is a moment where Parker gets in a lot of money and he pays off the rent for a full year to give them breathing room. Now, we’ll ignore them paying rent on a house that May and Ben have lived in for decades. It should be mortgage or something, and I will only accept that she remortgaged the house because…?

I don’t really know.

Ben had a good enough job that he paid for everything, and then he died. I would like to think he had a full pension as this was the 60s and he had enough money to pay for this massive house in a nice suburb of NYC. So, his funeral should have been paid for and then there should have been savings AND a pension that would have gone to May? But apparently his dying just removed ANY future income entirely and they only have his savings and some meager funds coming to Aunt May.

It’s a joke (at least in the 60s, now it’s much more believable).

But the real problem goes back to the “paid for a year.” Now we all know that comics don’t move through time properly, so an issue that comes out six months later is not six months later in the comic. But there is an issue six months later that is probably only a month later in real time as the original comics do have Peter getting ready to graduate and the timeline is progressing, but slowly. So, six issues later he’s complaining about how they won’t make the rent this month because he can’t take pictures as spider-man. What? That rent is paid in full for a year? What? Sigh.

Rant Over, really good comic story

On the flip side I read the original Frank Miller run on Daredevil and that was a joy to read. The stories just flowed. Like I’d start reading and the next thing I knew it was twenty issues later and I was halfway into the next trade.

Bullseye was an unhinged monster and Kingpin was redefined as we know him today. If you don’t know, Kingpin started as a Spider-man villain who just gathered the mobs together but kept failing to kill spider-man and made a bunch of foolish mistakes. Eventually he got married and retired from crime.

But in Daredevil he gets brought back to New York and he ruthlessly retakes the top of the criminal empire. He uses Daredevil to take out his enemies and manipulates things. It is a thing of beauty and I don’t say that because it is pretty much the way I tend to play a lot of my D&D characters. Making my enemies kill each other.

TTRPGs

Speaking of gaming. Got in both games again this week and both took interesting turns. The curse of Strahd game is interesting but I’m starting to feel like its just not for me. I’ve never had a good time with modules but I feel like I’m missing out when all these people talk about their times in modules.

Whether its DnD or the more Iconic Call of Cthulhu modules (actually a LOT more in CoC) there are all these groups that get together and talk about their experiences and I always felt I was missing out. That said, the nature of current version of Curse of Strahd is just… not working for me.

The problem is I love my character, but he should be in a different game. If you take things really slow and just try to live in the villages and do a day-by-day “meeting your neighbors” and make it a sim life game, it could be quite enjoyable. But anytime you attempt a task it is always met with a harsh rebuke. I think the relentless everything sucks, there are few “good” people, and every act of good and decency you preform is penalized.

The handful of decent townsfolk suffering under the tyrants give you reason to fight… but even many of those people would just turn away if you were in need. It’s quite crushing. I have an idea for how I will handle the next game, and if things go poorly, I will swap to my back-up character. I think a lot of the issues is just the character himself, though personally the module gets old quick.

Non-Ravenloft D&D

My other game continues to be amazing, since it just started, we’re all still feeling out our characters and we had a largely RP session that might have introduced a bunch of future conflicts. We’ll see how that goes, we might be getting another old player back into the fold and we’re a few weeks away from possibly gaining new players as well. If this keeps up it will become a huge game like the ones of old.

The funny thing is I LOVE horror, and I love all of Ravenloft… but playing in it has not been as fun as I would like. And I think its just a change in attitude. For example, in the way back past I didn’t think Spelljammer was all that cool. We always ran it super serious and it was ok.

BUT… all the current hype for it and seeing all the D&D people online talk up the silly aspect is what I’m feeling. Just having FUN. That’s probably where I went wrong, I created a FUN character for Ravenloft (he’s a shovel wielding gravedigger) but then also made him heroic and serious (Paladin, Oath of Vengeance Undead Slayer).

I really think I might have to come out of retirement and start running DnD again, but the problem is cutting into my writing time. The solution to that is to run games in this world and either run events in the next novels, so that I get material, or run past events so I can reference them and flesh out the world. I might have more fun running games instead of playing in them. (well, let’s not go crazy, I will always need a game to play in).

Outro

I have more I could say but this one is being written the Morning Of… so I’m already late with the post. Might happen again next week as well, we’ll see what happens. Thank you for reading… any thoughts or comments? Want to talk world building? Leave a comment and we’ll chat. Be well.