New Title, Same Blog

Writer’s Journal #1

Last week we reached the Update 52 in my Thesis Diary. The whole list can be found starting here. (Looking back, I think I might have miscounted posts as the very first post was June 22).

This series started as a way to keep accountable for my goals for my thesis classes in my Master’s program. I wanted to make sure I made my deadline to finish my rough draft of my novel. And then I wanted to talk about revision and work shopping.

The whole point was to push myself, but at the same time I realized that the transparency might be helpful to other writers. I’m was writing while going to school and working, I was/am suffering imposter syndrome. I keep pushing things off and missing deadlines and dates. I have moments where I’m lazy and moments where I’m working every day.

In short, it’s all a struggle and I hope that my struggle has inspired, or at the least, made someone feel better about their own struggle.

New Name, Same Goals…

Let’s talk goals.

I’m changing the name because one, I’m no longer in school. Two, we’ve moved on to the novel after my thesis. It just seemed silly to keep calling this my thesis diary, when really it is just my struggle with writing.

These posts will talk about the process, will put up my word goals and actual numbers every week. I’m still going to talk about revision and replotting everything… and struggling to cut out the stupid stuff that I keep in the novel because…. Reasons?

We’re still going to talk about Queries and trying to find an agent. Update on that… I have three query letters out in the wild right now. And 21 more to send out. Of the three currently active one has already been rejected, but the other two are live.

Back on Track

So, the last few weeks have seen me slow down in my word count and production.

I jumped the gun with starting this novel. I usually spend a lot of time working on background and characters, and writing side stories and starting and restarting a book. But because of this blog and because I gave myself deadlines for a bunch of things, I wanted to do by the time I graduated college, I jumped the gun and started this novel a little early.

I’m workshopping chapters every week and second guessing myself every week. I have been resisting the urge to go back and rewrite everything. I’m really trying to get the entire rough draft written first. But I think I might fail.

I started writing a glossary and character guide to the entire series to keep track of things, but it has grown into an entire project on its own. Have to scrap and rewrite the entire prologue. And I need to rewrite the relationship dynamics between two of the main characters… I have whole chapters I feel I could drop out of the narrative. I’ve been thinking I could eliminate some POVs and make the book a little easier to follow.

Etc. Etc.

Word Count

Besides all the crying in the above paragraphs, I managed to get a decent word count out of the week. That chapter eight might be cut out and deleted aside, I managed 4321 words over chapter 8 and 9, bringing the novel to 29,733 words.

Of course, a ton of that will be trimmed.

Here’s an aside, though I doubt any of you will comment, my thesis novel was a prequel to this book. The events in that book have started the events that are running through this book and several of the characters from the previous book are in this book.

Because of this scenario, I ran through introducing all f the characters walking out of the previous novel into this one (Literally walking out of a desert and back to the coast to take ship back to where the new book is taking place). Because I wanted a reader to be able to pick up this book without having read the Ashlands, I had to re-intro over a dozen characters. In only a matter of pages, and also establish many of the events that took place in that book. I did this over two chapters to break it up and keep it from being a large info dump.

The question now is: One, Do I really need to cover all of those details of the previous novel? And, shouldn’t I just condense all of that down to as short a passage as possible? I’m already leaning toward yes on the second.

I really want to scrap a lot of my novel and restart.

Revision is going to be crazy on this one.

What else is going on

Besides writing the novel I have my day job. I also have a podcast that I’ve been working on for the last 2 months. I’m currently writing up a script to tell a story in-character as one of my old D&D characters. That should be very interesting. As I am not a voice actor… or actor in any real way. As much as I have assumed characters in games for three decades, my comfort level in doing so is with my close friends that I play with every week.

This could be pretty cool, and I’m hoping that the Podcast goes live this week. Of course, I will have links and articles all over this space as soon as it happens.

Reading Again

During my four years in college, I found it near impossible to read for pleasure. I always felt guilty and would pull out a school book and start reading that instead. Now that I’m out of class I’ve started doubling up on my reading.

Mostly with comics, but that’s the thing when you ruin a comic shop you kind of want to read comics. I’ve been working my way though old books, reading the original 70s Ghost Rider material and the 60’s Dr. Strange. It’s been fun, but I really want to get to the 80’s and 90’s and my childhood issues of the characters.

I also recently got drawn back into anime. (Quick aside, I used to love anime but started to grow tired with a lot of the same tropes and many series get bloated and annoying with later seasons. The last show I watched was Bleach which I loved for the first three seasons, but then it started to get meh. And a lot of my friends kept trying to tell me to skip whole seasons and only cherry pick the stories).

So, last week I watched My Hero Academia and I have to say I really like it so far. I’m two seasons in… and while I hate a bunch of the villains… Stain is super edgelord, emo and I just laugh at him… Shikagari was just weird, but he’s starting to grow on me a little. For the most part I find the show to be a lot of fun. I might try more modern anime.

Anyway, it is great to “talk” with all of you. I have to get back to writing.