Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Journal 127 8-22 Sept. 2024

Every post lately, seems to be about set back and all of that. But I refuse to be negative. One step backwards does NOT negate the two steps forward.

This journal will have positive progress notes, a few setbacks, and how I will get past (or in fact am already getting past it right now).

The next section will then be about my new D&D campaigns that are starting soonish. There were some setbacks there as well, but that’s only a slight delay. I have two characters mostly figured out… background and storywise, I have not set pen to paper to mechanically flesh anything yet. This is all concept work right now. I have a third I just started to come up with last night. Perhaps I will muse my way through that down below?

The final section of this journal will cover media consumption. I haven’t done a lot of that. So, I might just talk about some old wrestling stories/criticism. I’m weeks behind in my comic reading, and most of my other reading has been nose deep in the 2024PHB.

Writing.

Progress

I promised to get the “project” started and work on outlining my chapter count, and working on my “cheat sheet.”

No buried lede here, I did all of that.

The first obstacle was trying to remember all the settings and how to get a new project started using Scrivener. The way Scrivener works is through open projects, to clarify… you want to open a file in Word; you would click on word, and then open the document that you want to work on in.

With Scrivener, when you open it, it automatically opens a project (document). It never opens to just a blank page. So, I open Scrivener and it opens the last novel, you go to the file pull down and hit new project. But when I hit new project, the personalized Default Project I spent a LONG time creating was not there.

Panic. Bedlam. Anger.

An hour of freaking out and trying to remember how to set all of my defaults again, and looking for the YouTube videos to teach me how to do it again. Lots of rage… lunch. And then a discovery.

Weirdest thing and I don’t know how I thought to do it. But I opened Scrivener, last novel opened up again. I think because I was angry, I shut down the project but left Scrivener open. The program does not like that. It immediately told me I needed to have a project open, and this time, my default novel layout was available as an option.

I was surprised, but after the hours of frustration and worry, I was not going to ask questions. I created the DUSK file, wrote my title page, my epigram, my dedication, and then worked on the unique layout of this narrative.

Second Set Back

And here is where I started overthinking and finding issues.

First, I realized that of the four book I’ve worked on these last few years, the last one is the only one without an epigram. My thesis novel had an epigram because my professor gave me a great quote that she felt the narrative inspired. The next book, I used a “tongue in cheek” joke, the quote fit the theme of all the storylines.

The last book, I didn’t realize what the central theme was until the end of the book, and then I finally knew what all the pieces added up to. But I just didn’t have a quote to use. Partially because I never remember key quotes from books. I have a lot of friends who play trivia where they try to guess the final line in novels. I can not for the life of me remember a single final line (or opening) for the life. No matter how badass or awesome. They just don’t stay in my head. And I fully understand the need to hook a reader with a killer first line.

Now with this novel, I came across a discussion of a quote…. The actual final line of a novel… a novel I only partially read in high school and never cared for. But the final line is amazing when you think about all the implications. Which is what I want readers to do when they read this book. Think about the meaning of the final line of The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Writing

I didn’t get the novel started, I must say that.

I literally spent days thinking about how I should find an epigram for the last novel. I need a good quote, thought-provoking that thematically deals with community, found family, strength in unity. Something uplifting, but also something that makes you think.

A writing day for me is a session between 2-8 hours, and I try not to do the longer days any more. My back can’t handle sitting in my desk chair for that long. But my newest setback has sort of dealt with that as well. I’ll get back to that.

Here is a quick look of how the last two weeks went.

1 writing day, almost 4 hours, dealing with the scrivener project problem and then getting my title page, and etc. finished.

Cheat Sheet

1 writing day spent updating my “Cheat Sheet.” The cheat sheet is a document that lists all the characters in the novel, some of their basic story, a general timeline of events, and other notes like religion, calendar, made up terms and words. Magic bullshit. Fantasy stuff, random side stories I mention and other such. Every novel I add to it more and more. If I’m honest I have NOT been keeping up with all the details that SHOULD be in it. So, it’s only partially helpful.

But every novel I set it up to go into the Scrivener project. The current cheat sheet is about 44 pages long and 11,000 words of information… and that’s with it missing a bunch of characters and details that it really should have.

Spent another 2 writing days outlining the chapters for the first two sections of the novel. If you look at the picture at the top of the page you’ll see 6 cards on a cork board. The cards with the blue square are sections of the narrative, each of those have a number of chapters beneath them, which could be seen if you lean in close on the image. The book has a short “recap and prologue” section, then the main novel is broken into three parts: The Past, The City, and The Invasion.

I might have to add in a 5^th section that is an Outro/Epilogue?

Final Setback

That took me though most of the first week and then we had the big problem.

Several years ago my desktop crashed and died very hard. Luckily, I had a laptop and I use Onedrive and Dropbox to keep files going. So, when I write things on my desktop, I can go to my laptop and open the same file and keep working.

A friend of mine got my desktop working again, and that helped me get a bunch of files that I had NOT saved to Onedrive. I backed everything up and for the last few years I have kept the desktop limping along. I wrote all of my novels on it since 2018.

Well, its fully dead again. And I was noticing that over the last six months that my onedrive refuses to sync up on my laptop. I have to log into my account and manually load files. Its weird. Thankfully in the last week I managed to get these journals and some of my other word files to work, and even the scrivener project worked for the one day, before my desktop just died.

I’m pretty sure it’s just the graphics card, but really at this point I have kept it barely functioning for the last 4 years. Does it matter?

This Post is Late

These journals usually drop at 10am on a Sunday. But today I confirmed that the desktop was fully dead. So, I’m writing this with a lapdesk, in my bed, on my laptop… which might be how I have to write the whole novel. I mean probably not in bed; I can take the laptop anywhere.

That aside, I’m writing this right now, late, but getting it out.

And I just realized how much I’ve been talking. Ha. Perhaps I should get back to doing these weekly, since I don’t think I have space to talk about three characters for D&D, nor to bitch about wrestling stuff from 2015.

Let’s call it here and I will try to go back to the weekly schedule.

Next week I hope to talk about progress on the first words of the novel… also, I still need a good quote for the Daeria novel. It’s going to bother me.

Next week I’ll also talk about the new characters. Sadly the character I haven’t though of at all is the one I need created by Tuesday as that’s the session Zero for that game. I wanted to talk about my ideas here to get them written out.

Quickly, the first thought that comes to mind. The character needs to be 5^th level, a mercenary, and I’m going into a mega-dungeon to find and remove a relic. OK. Bugbear, fighter, runeknight. That’s idea number one. Pros, never played a runeknight and it hasn’t been ported to the 2024 book, so this is something I can only play in this game that is 2014 material only.

Second idea…. Half-drow, ranger gloomstalker. Invisible killer in the dungeon. Might save that for one of the characters who is higher level. (I mentioned last journal that this game is a Mega-Campaign told over 10 Chapters of short games that leads into the greater final Game).

Anywho… those are the ideas, I have a ton of things to manage and it is getting later so I will stop here and on we go.