December 2021 Update

 Well, it’s been quite a long time since I posted here, hasn’t it? The short explanation is that real life got in the way. If we take the scenic route through the past several months since my last post, there’s quite a bit to tell y’all imaginary readers. 

In my last post in August, I talked about getting a job and a couple of my initial posts. Well, I’ve seen two or three other posts since then, and have finally settled at one. I’m guarding for an organization that helps college students in particular majors get work experience and earn money while going to school. Since the office is mostly empty right now, it’s a pretty easy spot to be in. My shift runs in the afternoon, and I leave after 20:00 at night, and my desk is in the HR office, so when this office clears out, I’m alone down here on the ground floor. I patrol the 2 floors of the building where the organization has offices every 90 mins, watch cameras, and generally get to do whatever the heck I want while seated at the desk. This means I can write during the day. 

Due to this ability to write, I’ve adjusted my writing goals. I now write every day, and I’m using the Nano site to help me stay on task. My current goal is 325 words on any Archivos article for Aelyshthar that I happen to be working on, and it’s going well. 

While I’m doing that, I’m also doing series plotting for my Masters of the Schism series, and the Discordant Harmonies series. Final task is going through a general fiction coming-of-age-through-some-adulthood story to figure out where my scene written/outline counts went wrong.

And about my DH series. I’m doing a full rewrite of the first three books. The first novel is going to lengthen a great deal. Different characters are getting sex/gender changes, including Géta. I’m adding more foreshadowing and I have a much better idea of what’s going on behind the scenes of this conflict on Ruphlan’s border. There are hidden agendas everywhere, which means lots of political intrigue. I’m excited about this project and look forward to getting it together. 

The series plotting for MOTS is going well too. Right now, I’m pretty much just plugging things into a spreadsheet to help me see all the threads of the characters’ lives and the plots I have going in this thing. This is working up into a complicated series, and I still don’t know how many volumes I’ll end up writing. However, it is good to get going on this project, and I’m having a great time doing so. 

Long Time No See

Keeping up with my blog (and the posts on my Patreon, for that matter) kind of fell off my task list the past couple months. I've been struggling with my writing since February. 

First, my rewrite of DH01 went off the rails. It got bloated and meandered a lot, and I finally stopped writing on it. When something goes that bad, I usually cut to the last place where I feel the writing did everything I wanted it to, but I wasn't pleased with any of it. 

At the same time, I was working on phase outlines for two or three other projects. Those were going better, but I wasn't happy with those either. My displeasure with these was a little harder to pinpoint until I realized that they seemed too long. I was using the phase outline system that my friend Zette usually employs in the writing of her stories, and while it was easier to progress with this system than it was with the plot-card system, I found I missed the plot cards and eventually gave up on those.

What enabled me to give up on all these projects was my friend J.A. Marlow's Twitch streams. Jam started streaming a couple months ago, and in one of her streams, she shared her plotting spreadsheets. She very kindly shared them with me when I asked her to, and I've been plugging my stories into them since then. Thanks to the plotting spreadsheets I feel I finally have a handle on my stories. 

But doing all this plotting means I'm not writing fresh fiction right now. To fill that need, I've started work on creating a story web in Archivos for my Discordant Harmonies series. It's been going well so far. The pages for each element require a summary and a full article, so I've been setting up files for it in an Archivos Scrivener for the things I need to write in. I don't have artwork for the elements yet, but I have plans for getting it. I'll be posting these on my Patreon, so if you want a sneak peek, come support me!

Since the Move

It's been a while since I've updated my projects list to the right, and I think it'll be a good idea to go into a little more detail here. 

First off, I'm still working on DH01's Developmental Edit/Rewrite. This is going pretty well. I've been using the original draft as a guideline and filling in the stuff that I left out in that first draft. This story is turning out substantially different from the original draft, while maintaining the same plot arcs as that first iteration. For what it's worth, I plan on leaving the copies I have on Wattpad up there unless I get to the point of officially publishing the series. At that time, I'll decide if I want to leave the roughs up. Either way, I plan on giving the books new covers if they get that far.

I'm also continuing to work on the phase outline for the rewrite of The Prophet of Venjhelin 1 that I started a couple months ago. Right now, I've got over 200 phases on it and the ideas are flowing well. Originally, I intended to rewrite this as I am DH01, but that didn't want to go, so I tried the phase outline to see if I could get things moving, and it's worked quite well. My goal on this outline is to get 10 phases a day, though I haven't been as consistent with the daily aspect as I hoped. It's still progressing well, and I'm really enjoying fleshing out the characters and plot.

Most recently, I've started a phase outline of a story I completed in rough draft and have tried rewriting a few times since: Married to the Moons 1. Like with my usual first drafts, even with the outlines I used to do, the story was very much a candybar scene story. The phase outline is helping me flesh this one out too. I've already gotten 60 phases on it, in just one day of working on it. If you'd like a sneak peek of the outline for this one, I've excerpted a few of the phases in a post for my Patreon at the Bicycle level. 

Previously, I was working on transcribing Front: Or My First Completed Story EVAR!!! Since our big house move at the beginning of January, though, I haven't been able to work on it. I may try to do so within the next few months, even if I'm still stuck on my laptop, but I'm not making any promises. 

Sleep, Writing, and Crafting

 I haven't made as much progress as I wanted on my two stories. This is mostly because the level of my motivation has fluctuated over the past couple weeks. My sleep schedule has gone wonky, and I'm learning to settle into playing Pathfinder on Friday nights, two things that mess with my motivation. Honestly, though, it's mostly the sleep issue. Insomnia sucks.

This year, I'm tempted to enter Nano. To do that, I'd have to work on something I've got enough of an outline on, and that means it would be the gay romance, and I'm afraid I'll burn out on it. It's something I'm thinking about, though, and it would be kind of nice to do this rewrite during Nano since the original draft was written in November during the first week of Nano, even though it wasn't an "official" Nano project.

Either way, I'll be getting my words on DH01 and DOTSC01, and transcribing Front. Oh, and that's coming along quite nicely, that transcription. It's both just as sucky and not as sucky as I thought it was, in different ways. Most of the non-sucky parts come in the form of my technical skill with the story. Though that's definitely improved (along with everything else) over the years, I'm consistently surprised by how well things are written in Front, for one of my earliest works.

Otherwise, the crafting bug has bitten me. I've been working on a new quilt (yeah, I started another project—but this is normal for me) that I found a tutorial about online. It's called Pins And Paws, and comes from a quilt company based in Missouri. I find that interesting, because that's where my dad was from. It's funny how things circle around like that. 

Many Tasks at Once

 So the past month has been more successful writing-wise than previous months. I think this in part is because I've trimmed back my writing to a minimum of 250 words and no more than 500 per session. Before, I was writing as much as I wanted. I blasted through scenes and would write for two, three, four days in a row, be dry for the next week. Keeping my wordcount to a low range helps me remain interested without burning me out.

Another thing I think that's helped is that I've added other writing tasks to my roster. 250-500 words a pop on one project wasn't really enough. It felt like a warm-up, so I added a second project. The second project, DOTSC01, has the same range of wordcount as the first, which works well. It also helps prevent bouncy brain where I hop from one project to another in an endless round of distracted writing. 

That worked so well that I decided that it may be a good idea to add another writing task to my list. Hence working on the handwritten story from years ago. This tale of yore is called, Front, or My First Completed Novel Evar!!!, and it has the seeds of my current writing in it. I'm transcribing it directly—not making any corrections—and adding commentary that makes me laugh at least.

And, as if that wasn't enough to have on my list of writing tasks, I decided to rework an old gay romance I wrote years ago. I think I wrote the original draft of this particular story in November of 2009. At the time, I was not participating in NaNo, but I managed to slam out just over 80k words in about 6 days, if I remember right. It's got some major issues. At the time, I didn't know how to handle conflict, hence this reworking of the story. I'm outlining it in Scapple right now. 

Having a number of tasks seems to be working well for me. My writing mind is calmer than it's been for years, and I feel like I'm making progress on everything. I'm having fun too, which is important to me. And, best of all, writing slow brings out detail I wouldn't otherwise be able to include. I'm quite pleased.

So that's where things stand in the writing world. My mental health is doing well with regular dosages of all my psych meds, which is good, and I'm very faithful with taking them at a regular time. I'm also looking into other ways of earning money, primarily by hawking my handcrafts that I make with sewing and crocheting. Things are going well!

Moving Along Slowly

In the past few weeks, I've made some progress. There's about three or four drafts of the To Do list I planned on making, mostly adding things to it. I've also realized that with things going as they have been with Covid, my job hunt may never get started again. A lot of companies are moving their employees to home-based working, and that's not really feasible right now for me, even if I could qualify for the well-paying jobs I'm seeing. Not only that, I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel with other methods of making money. Ideas I've had before, but never had the courage to consider doing seriously. So, if things work out, writing won't be my only income stream—and it really shouldn't be anyway. 

About that To Do list. I think I have it finalized at last. My attempts at starting on obeying it have failed previously, in part I think because of the depression that is still very much with me, but also in part because I didn't really give myself time to mentally prepare for starting to align myself to it. This week, though, I finalized the list and started on a "schedule" for it starting Sunday of next week. One of the things I'm doing is listing minimum times to do the things on it, usually an hour-range, but sometimes something like a wordcount (for writing) or minimum chapters (for reading). I'm not going to be working on a couple-odd things on it for the first while or so, because I need to get better equipment for the work, and I won't be able to do that until I get all the fabric I need for the quilting projects I'm planning. Writing is definitely on it, though, even if the goal count won't be very high, mainly because if I throw myself into high wordcounts right away I'll burn out and end up not writing at all for a few weeks.

I'm happy to say I'm getting some ideas on how to handle DH03 now. Suffice it to say that some major plot points may change. Beyond that, I'm not going to go any deeper into detail. Overall, I'm enjoying writing and am excited to get back into doing it regularly, so I'm hoping the next several days of psyching myself up for getting into my new "schedule" will work. 

Yes, I'm up awfully early. I slept until around 16:30 yesterday. Was just so tired. I'm probably going to take a nap today, then go to bed at a decent hour. Whatever I do, I'll be setting an alarm for Thursday and getting up when it goes off. I can't get myself on a decent schedule unless I organize my sleeping hours into a much better nightly habit than it has been up to this point. Whatever else happens today, I intend to do some housecleaning and perhaps some quilting—as well as reading through what I have of Géta's scenes so I can figure out how his next scene should go. 

And that is all!

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. 

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.