My Patreon is Now Fully Live!

Following about a week of work on my Patreon and its accompanying Discord server, everything is finalized and live! Hit the Patreon button in the sidebar to check it out. If you'd like, sign up for one of my tiers too!

After I did the original setup of my Patreon, I came up with more ideas for rewards. Since I wanted to expand the tiers and the numbers of rewards they offered, this was good. As much as I wanted Patrons when I first set things up, I'm glad I didn't have any. Right now, as things are, I see the Patreon page as its final version. If I change anything besides posts, it'll most likely be the Goals bar. However, I'm not really planning on changing anything, so there's that. I really don't want to.

The Discord server that goes with my Patreon page is called AEP's Hall of Patronage. Right now, it has a few honorary members, simply because they've all supported me in various ways for years prior to me setting up this Patreon stuff. I have two moderators, which eases my mind, especially since Jam—thanks for agreeing to be a mod!—is usually signed into Discord whenever they're online. My wife Tess is also a mod, but she's not always on, so I need to discuss that with her, though I won't force her to be constantly on Discord if she doesn't want to be; I mainly enlisted her aid in verifying and setting up things for the Discord.

Now for a little trivia: My favorite tier title is the fourth one, though the second one is a close second. #4 always brings a bit of a smile to my face though. Go check and see what they are! 

Changes are Afoot

Well, though I'm not actively writing on Discordant Harmonies 1, I'm still making progress on its background. Due to some worldbuilding I've developed over the past week or so, I've changed Chraest's name to Aelyshthar, finally given the star system it's a part of and the indigenous race names, and conlanged just enough to make what I have of things linguistically logical. 

This meant I had to create a new alphabet, which you can access by joining at the "Boy My Feet Are Really Worn Off!" level of my Patreon; the link is in the sidebar. I'll be posting something a bit more substantial for the "Why Don't Airplanes Wear Capes Too?" level and above later on, hopefully this morning after finishing this post—if I can just remember what the heck I meant to post in the first place. (And I've been so excited about posting my first higher-level Patreon post, too!) 

In addition to these changes, I've started preparing articles for posting to an interactive wiki-type web app called Archivos. At this time, I've got two articles written and am doing research on volcanoes to bring a little more realism to the worldbuilding of the planet. My friend J.A. Marlow is helping with what knowledge she possesses and suggestions for interesting and informative documentaries for me to watch, and I plan on researching more and looking up some books about it—ebooks from the library if I can find them. I'll be adding this information to a more mundane wiki as well, but the user interface is a bit more difficult to figure out and I don't want to start setting that up until I've got a number of good articles written. Neither of these will be accessible until after the launch of at least book one of my DH series. 

Oddly, I'm really enjoying this hiatus away from my story. Yes, I want to get back to it, but it's not tearing me apart this time around. I'm not sure how well I'll keep up with this blog, my Patreon, Twitter, and my articles for the wikis when I'm interested in my story again, but I'm determined to do better about it this time. And no qualifiers like "We'll see how that goes." I'm going to keep up with things this time. 

Patreon!

So, after years of considering getting a Patreon account, I've done so. My page is up, and I've got one Patrons-only post so far. 

I've been kind of looking forward to this step in my writing career. Years ago, I knew I wanted a Patreon account, and I've held off 'cause I haven't felt ready for it on a mental/emotional level. This is a lot of responsibility for me to take up. But here it is—just scroll down a bit to find the link in the sidebar. 

How Depression Affects My Writing

I mentioned in a previous post that I'm dealing with a depressive phase of my bipolar disorder. This affects my writing to some extent. Even with these posts and recreating this Blogger account, I'm having to fight through feelings that my writing isn't any good and that the blog is pointless. This is even more pronounced with my fiction writing. I haven't touched DH01 in days, and in fact, I haven't touched it since the 7th of this month.

Depression doesn't so much block me as make it harder to connect to the ideas I have for my writing. This is true whether I'm pantsing the WIP or have an outline for it. It's frustrating to be able to see the ideas, but have an inability to "grasp" them well enough to write them out. Back in the past when I got like this, I'd try to force the words out, following advice that it's best to write every day regardless of mood, and that didn't end well for me. Sure, the words were as good as they would have been if my mood wasn't down, but I hated what I wrote and ended up abandoning the project for a few months. Not days or weeks. Months. So now I don't try to force the words out when I'm depressed. I go with the flow instead. 

At the same time, I also have a very poor opinion of my writing. I know I write well, and that I can create engaging characters and entertaining stories. Consciously. Logically. But the depression tells me all my writing, especially the fiction, is crap. This is part of the reason why I don't touch projects I force depression-phase words onto after forcing those words. 

If I'm lucky, I can look at my stuff to edit it. This time, I'm not lucky. I've been using this down period where I'm not writing to get to know ProWritingAid software again, using their web editor one paragraph at a time. It has few complaints for the most part; I've spent long enough writing to eradicate most of the issues it highlights. The "Repeats" checker section, though, always "confirms" the depression's opinion of my writing, so I don't end up doing any editing. I'm trying to figure out how to get ProWritingAid to work best for me, and this is not helping. At this point, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. 

The worst thing about pronounced depressions like this is that I don't know how long I'll be in it. It makes me not care about my writing, and if I had a deadline, that would only exacerbate the disinterest. Even if I were inclined to pursue traditional publishing, I wouldn't be able to because of these depressive phases so it's good I've latched onto the independent/self publishing track like I have. This depressive phase may last another day, a week, a month—or longer. I don't know. All I can really say is that I'm glad I don't have these phases more often. I'd never get anything done.

What I'm Doing with the Discordant Harmonies Series

Clipped Header Designed by J.A. Marlow

Years ago, when I finished the third book of the Discordant Harmonies series, I thought I was done-done with them as well. I never felt like they were what I wanted them to be, but I couldn't figure out how to fix them to make them what I wanted them to be, so I went ahead and posted them on Wattpad. And then I proceeded to ignore them, not even reading through them because I have this issue with reading works I don't feel fit my image of them. 

Well, back in March, I figured out what the issue is with the series. DH01, A Pitch of the Scale, is, plain and simply, incomplete. I employed a lot of handwavium and Because I The Author Said So to complete that story as well. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense—like, an institution as old and well-established as the Temple of the True Gods in the Édalain Empire would, long ago, have set up an intake process for new members of the Temple. I also needed a better excuse for Géta not to report the bullies' attacks on him, and I needed to set that reason up well. 

I'm not sure about DH02, Severe Notes. It may be fine pretty much as it is. I'll take a look at it when I get to it. One thing I do know for certain is that I'm going to move some of DH03 to the ending of DH02 so it's not such a cliffhanger. What appealed to me in the first draft no longer fits the vision I have for this story.

And DH03, Measure of Resistance, is, really, quite bloated. I need to condense it, cut stuff, and generally rework the entire book to make it less cumbersome. 

So this has led to me starting the process of performing a developmental edit on the entire series. I'm changing quite a bit. Some characters are getting sex changes. Others' names are changing. I'm bringing forward characters who don't actually appear until the next book in the forms of letters they 're writing to Asthané and changing things in Géta's background, as well as setting up events for future books.

Oh, and I've finally realized "DH04" was never meant to be. At least, not as the series was originally conceived. There may be a DH04 after I'm done with the developmental edit, and the books afterward have changed substantially enough in mere conception that I'll be kicking off a brand new series to handle those stories. 

As of the writing of this blog post, DH01 stands at I think ~52k words in its developmental edit. I'm having fun with this, and feeling enthusiastic about working with Géta and Asthané again. I'm not much referring to the original draft and am focusing on fleshing out and showing more of the stuff that I glossed over and merely told in the first draft. Aside from that, I'm writing scenes that I want to keep from DH01's original draft from memory, using them as signposts on the way through this new draft. 

Overall, I'm happy with what I've got. It's a much more interesting story so far. To those who are wholly wedded to the original drafts of this story, I'll be leaving those versions up on Wattpad indefinitely for you to revisit whenever you want. The new books will have all-new covers and, I hope, will be published for sale once I'm done with them. 

My Writing Companion, Hendrix

Hendrix napping

I adopted Hendrix from the Salt Lake County Animal Shelter in I think October back in 2017. Or, I should say, he adopted me. 

The cattery at the animal shelter has an odd setup. There's a main room with kennels, with a short hall off of it with more kennels, all for individual cats and young kittens. In addition, there are four colony rooms for cats who get along with other cats, and most of the cats there were in the colony rooms. I was with my mom that day, and she told me to take my time, there was no rush. I looked at a lot of the individual cats, and ended up down the little offshoot hall considering two neighboring kitties. Mom came down and advised me to look in the colony rooms.

Well, one of the colony rooms didn't have many cats—that was the one right next to the hallway. Across from the hallway were colony rooms One, Two, and Three, from right to left. The cats in Number Three looked sort of listless, just lying around doing nothing. An elderly couple was in the process of entering room Number Two, so I moved toward Colony Room Number Three.

The doors to all the colony rooms had windows in them, as well as the walls beside the doors. To the right of Colony Room Number One's door was its window, and in that window was a funky looking cat tree with horizontal posts covered in carpeting attached to a vertical post. A yellowy cat climbed that cat tree as I approached, yowling continually—though I couldn't hear it, the cat's mouth kept opening. 

I opened the door and took two steps in, still with the door open, and turned to face Mom and tell her I was looking in this room first. Now, I had a messenger-bag style backpack on and it was kind of hanging by my left side under my arm, and that yellowy cat put its front paws on it, meowing. I chuckled a little, amused by this cat's friendliness, and the cat hopped onto my backpack, then proceeded to climb up until it could circle around the back of my head. My sound of surprise drew the attention of the family with young children who were looking in a kennel across the way at kittens up for adoption, and Mom laughed when she saw the cat climbing all over me.

Mom said, "I think you found your cat!"

While I wrangled the cat, Mom went to fetch an staff member and we went through the adoption process. And that's how I ended up with Hendrix!

Triumphant Dream

I've been dealing with a pronounced depressive phase of my bipolar recently. Recent days, I typically stay in bed all day and don't get up until the evening. And even then, I don't feel like doing anything until I've been up for several hours. Until that time, I generally zone and vegetate, doing nothing except hanging out in writers' chats waiting for my mood to improve a smidgen. 

When I'm depressed like this, the dreams I have just before waking play a big role in how I'm able to face the day. I typically recall how positive or negative or neutral my last dream was before waking, and often I actually recall the dream. When I'm experiencing a pronounced depressive phase like this, any dreams that are even just neutral tend to induce me to roll over and go back to sleep. Decidedly positive dreams make me more willing to face the day, though they don't lift my depression, and occasionally even enable me to want to be productive much sooner than average. 

Now some background for the dream:

Several years ago, I had a frustration dream. In this dream, I had just gotten hired on at a school of some sort and part of my job was to take home the receipts from the meal sales in the cafeteria to tally them up. To transport these receipts, I was given a lockbox with a long key. To unlock the lockbox, I was to insert the key in the back end of the lockbox (it was a hidden lock). 

In the original dream, the first time I took the receipts home, everything went as it was supposed to. I was able to unlock the box and do my job. The second time did not go quite as well, however. No matter how I tried to unlock that lockbox, I couldn't get it open. I had family members try. Took it back to the school and explained the problem, and the principal himself tried to unlock it without success. Just before waking up, I ended up taking the lockbox to a deserted room and trying to open it one last time to no avail. Frustrated, I jammed the key in halfway, I think so it wouldn't get lost. I then woke up, and after a few days, forgot about the dream. 

Fast-forward to today. I went to bed this morning after finishing up figuring out some issues with this blog. Didn't sleep deeply, but I did get a good amount of time in bed. 

The last dream brought me back to that lockbox.

Apparently, I returned to the school and found the deserted room with the lockbox, with the key sticking halfway out of the backside of it. In the dream, I thought, "Well, I remember leaving this here in frustration. Maybe it'll work this time." I went up to the table the lockbox was on and took the key out of the lock, then reinserted it—all the way. 

And this time it turned.

The lid of the box popped up. Now, years had also passed in the dream, so these receipts were pretty useless, but I opened the box. I shouted in joy, and family members and the same principal who was there before came in to see what I was crowing about. When they saw I'd gotten the lockbox open, they cheered too. We had a little celebration about my success, and I woke up.

So, while I'm still feeling depressed, I'm in a better frame of mind. I wonder if this is a symbolic way that my mind is telling me it's unlocked something within my psyche that I need. Maybe something to do with my writing? LOL 

Ashe Elton Parker's Online Move

Well, the wall I was afraid of hitting came up. My funds ran low and what money I got from the government stimulus fund had to go to other things, which means that "frivolous" things like my website had to be abandoned. If you've found me here, Yay. I'm glad you're here. Welcome to my resurrected Pen and Keyboard blog on Blogger, where I originally started blogging way back in the mid-aughts. 

Right now, with job hunts and stuff going on, I'm not going to promise a regular update schedule. I'll update when I can. What I'd suggest if you'd like to keep up with my posts but not have to constantly visit the site is to sign up in the Follow by Email box. 

I have all my old posts from my AEP website saved. Not sure what I'll do with them, however. Honestly, I'm inclined to just let them molder. It's all old stuff, and doesn't really apply to my life as it is nowadays, and I'm not sure I'm up for sifting through the old stuff to excavate the writing-related posts.

So there you have it.