Today, I slid down the stairs. Not intentionally, and quite painfully.
It was a combination of factors. Exhaustion from a long, sleepless night coupled to a lack of coffee being contributing factors. It wasn’t super dramatic… I missed the top step, fell back, and then slid down the stairs while coffee went everywhere (I had a full cup in my hand, and I am very grateful that it wasn’t steaming hot, because I was wearing at least half of it by the time I reached the bottom).
I have a few scrapes, and I’m going to have a monster bruise on my leg tomorrow, but I think I’m mostly okay. Lost my favourite mug, though… it did not survive the trip.
Not a pleasant experience, and I’m at an age that I’m going to feel that fall for at least a week or two. Just really bad luck.
Ah well. I should get back to writing… nothing is broken, I didn’t land on my head… I should be grateful.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Paint Fumes
I love painting… most of the time. Sometimes its a chore, but I think that’s true of anything in life. Nobody aside from the insultingly-rich can have fun all the time, every day. Even the stuff we love doing can be a chore sometimes.
Like writing for me, most of the time. I love it, it’s a joy, and sometimes its legitimately a struggle to get a few hundred words down to progress the story. That’s where I’ve been for a few days, actually, but I’m still getting the words down. That’s kinda the point… I don’t write because it’s easy, I write because it’s difficult. “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than for other people,” I think Mann said. Anyway, it’s true! Writing is hard work, as much as I love it.
And one of the ways I try to relax from my writing is by painting, but there are times that that, too, is a chore. Something I “have to do” rather than something I’m excited about doing. But that’s okay! Because those periods of time pass, and then things are enjoyable again.
Okay, going to get back to the novel… argh, so close to finishing, I just want it done…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
So Close!
I’ve reached the part of the novel (ie: almost the end!) where I have to make sure that the ending actually makes sense. We’re on the precipice of the final Big Bad battle, but for the “sudden but inevitable” to work, I have to go back and seed the necessary information in earlier chapters.
I’m never really sure if I should do that now as I’m writing the finale, or after I finish the finale… and so I do a bit of both. Because why do anything the easy way?
Either way, I very much expect that this draft will be done by the weekend. Which is nice. As much fun as this story has been, I’m ready to move on to the next one!
I’m always ready to move on to the next one! That’s one of the true joys of being a writer… there’s always another story to tell!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Deleted Chapters
Well, I’m now slightly further behind than I was on Tuesday… the first thing I did after writing the update posts and all that was to delete an entire chapter! Put me back a few thousand words.
Not a problem: these sorts of things happen during the writing process. And I wrote enough to get very close to where I was before the delete. The trouble is that I think this is going to ripple back into the story a few chapters earlier, meaning I’ll have to rewrite those, which might mean rewriting others…
I want to hold off on the major edits until the story is actually finished (at least the first draft). But the conclusion kinda hinges on those last few chapters, so I have to make sure those mostly hang together on their own before I take ye olde scalpel to them.
All part of the fun, folks!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Hello August!
For those of you who are Patreon subscribers (hello! Thank you!), you already know this, but the novel is officially over 70K words and heading towards the finish line. The conclusion is so close I can almost taste it. Just got a few threads to wrap up, and then a lot of work to get this draft into a viable 2nd draft that I can submit to the editor.
And that feels good. I love getting a novel to this stage (significantly more than I love all the hoops I have to jump through to actually publish it). Just gotta keep my eyes on the prize, as they say, and focus on getting this actually finished (instead of almost finished!).
I’m pretty happy with how the story has shaped up. This isn’t the way I thought it would go, to be completely frank… the characters have taken me for a few very unexpected twists along the way, and the final confrontation is going to be very different from what I originally thought it would be. But that’s great! That’s part of the reason I love writing! I hope everyone who reads this enjoys it as much as I have enjoyed writing it (so far… the editing process, and then the programming needed to actually publish the novel… yeah, those parts I’m not as crazy about).
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Almost August!
Good gravy, where does the time go?
Almost finished the first draft of the novel. I think there’s probably another 10K words to go before it’s done? Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but that’s basically a week of writing.
The end is in sight! Woo!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
My weird little corner of the Internet
I wonder if somebody I will care that I have this website.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind that I have it… I write here three times a week after all, and I get how that’s important. Both to me, and to anybody interested in following my work (hello people!). It’s nice to put up periodic updates (I am now officially over 70K words for the novel!) and to discuss my inner thoughts (I wonder if I can justify getting the new Lego Pirate set because I think I might want to do a pirate-themed short animation?) and all that… but by the same token I have never gone back and read any of the stuff I did previously. I’ve been maintaining this website for years now, and there is definitely at least a handful of posts that I would find terribly embarrassing by my modern standards, I’m sure.
Ah well. I need someplace to keep track of everything I write, and honestly it’s nice to come here a few times a week and update myself (and anyone who reads this… hello!) on how things are going. Maybe someday I will grit my teeth and go through all my old posts, see what kind of thing I used to write about 7 years ago…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Consecutive Days Off
One of the few downsides to being a writer is the rarity of having multiple days off in a row. Usually, if I have a day where I’m not supposed to do anything else, I write.
It is extremely rare for me to have any day that I’m not writing. To have two days in a row where I could be writing and consciously choose not to… yeah, that basically never happens. It could, theoretically, but it doesn’t.
So yesterday (Saturday) I didn’t have a laundry list of things that needed doing, which is unusual for a Saturday. So did I relax? Watch some shows? Perhaps play one of my favourite video games?
No. I wrote. And that’s okay! I broke 70K words, and today I hope to sail past 73K. I’m getting near to the almost-end of the novel (I think another 20K words for the first draft), and then a mountain of editing to remove sections that I don’t think make sense anymore or to add in sections that I should’ve included originally. A lot of work, but work I love.
So with another day that I can do stuff I want… what I really want to do is write. So I’m going to do that!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Some Heavy Lifting
Today, I have to pick up a bunch of stones and some small crushed stones and put those under a rain tank.
This isn’t exactly how I want to spend one of my writing days. In fact, it’s approximately the exact opposite from how I want to spend my day. But it has to get done, so… I’m doing it. What other choice is there?
With some luck, I’ll get a few thousand words written between stupid manual labour tasks (to be clear, people who enjoy or do manual labour aren’t stupid: the task that I have to do is itself stupid). I’m on track to be finished this first draft before the end of the month, and I’d really like to stick with that.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Conspiracies are The Worst
I’ve been caught up with a family member that I love and respect who has gone off the deep end with regards to a few (at least 5) conspiracies that are demonstrably false.
It’s a difficult line to walk. I want to keep engaging with him, to keep seeing if I can get him to accept a few truths so that larger truths can later come through… but at the same time try not to antagonize him too much, or to pick fights that really don’t matter. Harmless conspiracies (Bigfoot! Nessie! Area 51!) don’t bother me. But when they start messing with the way you deal with other people… yeah, that’s a problem.
But one of the fundamental principles upon which most conspiracies rest is faith, and faith specifically requires a lack of evidence (or, even worse, bad evidence… nothing fuels delusions of “Knowing The Truth” like bad evidence). Makes it hard to argue against, because any point you find they specifically use are proof that you don’t understand.
I’m being patient, and I’m trying to be kind, but I’m also being relentless. No way I’m going to let them think they won just because they’ve badgered me into not responding. It’s a weakness of mine.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Getting Caught Up
I was so busy writing today, I almost forgot to put an update here! A perpetual problem… part of the business of writing is talking about writing, where I really wish I could just spend all my time writing!
Well, not all my time. Most of my time, certainly. More of my time than I am currently able to devote to writing (or to writing about writing).
Still, I wrote just shy of five thousand words today, and I think some of those were really good words. Words that will survive the brutal culling that occurs after I finish a first draft. Some of them will be nudged or tweaked, but many, many of them will just be cut.
Write once, cut twice? Something like that? Anyway, it’s a thin analogy, but I love when I hit a good stride and the story just comes out of me. Especially because I think I’m going to have to remove a few entire chapters (or at least heavily modify them)… so getting more words now means I’ll have even better words in a few weeks.
And I got to write a space battle! Always a joy!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and heatlhy!
Balance in All Things
I struggle with the concept of balance in my life. I tend to throw myself whole-body at whatever I am doing until I am satisfied that I have “done” whatever it happens to be. When I competed in Kendo, I would attend 4-5 practices a week, taking hours out of my way by bus and subway to go to gyms and dojos, to say nothing about the weekends spent at tournaments. Same thing for when I got into miniature combat games… I even ran a podcast (because of course I did) that lasted over 250 episodes. When I started practicing guitar, I would practice for hours on end. When I started writing… well, let’s say that 2016 was a very good year for my writing output.
But this has always left me struggling to find balance. To find time for all the things that aren’t the “one big thing” that I am doing at any given moment. And I am trying to be better at that these days. To find an appropriate amount of time for everything, rather than all my time being spent on one thing. It’s tricky! I don’t feel like I’m progressing nearly fast enough as a writer or a film maker or a guitarist or a painter, but I am doing all those things and handling most of the other aspects of my life at the same time. And that’s worth something, right?
Probably?
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Summer Cleaning
Today, I did an “adult” thing, in a sort of weird way. I contracted somebody to come and haul away a lot of junk.
I have accumulated a lot of junk over the last few years, you see. Most of it in the garage, a bit of it in the basement, a smattering of it in the bedroom and office and kitchen. Just bits and bobs, a few pieces here and there.
It amounts to approximately one (1) garage full of crap. And it was too much for me to deal with myself. Hence calling “the professionals.”
Now I suspect they’re going to take one look at the small mountain of crap I have and quote me something on the order of several hundred dollars to cart it away, but as long as it’s less than five or six hundred… I’ll probably take them up on it. They’re just too much stuff for me to deal with unless I had huge amounts of the mythical “free time” I hear other people talking about. And I don’t have “free time,” and so I must pay somebody to deal with my lack of free time. Joys.
Oh well. At least it will mean I have a garage again. And that will be nice. Set up some shelves (which I have already purchased!), get a few crates of random stuff out of my game room… so by getting rid of this pile of stuff, I can organize a whole bunch of my other stuff, and therefore everything will be just a bit better.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Good Dialogue
My novels tend to have a lot of dialogue. Part of the reason for this is that I like character-driven stories, and without lodging the narration firmly in the first person it can be hard to get a sense of the emotional and psychological state of people unless you talk to and with them.
Sure, you can “show don’t tell” until you’re blue in the face, but good writers are often those that write good dialogue, and bad writers are often defined by an inability to do so. Not always… Asimov’s dialogue tended to be very wooden, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say he wasn’t a good writer. But as a general rule, good dialogue means enjoyable books.
So today I’m thinking about the dialogue in my current novel. A lot of it is going to be cut for the 2nd draft, but as it stands most if it I am very happy with. Some of it is too on the nose, just telling the characters things they should already know (but that I didn’t know about them until I wrote it), and that’s the first to go. Other dialogues are going to need to have elements added in, so that the “sudden but inevitable” feels satisfying when it occurs. But for now, I’m just going to enjoy sitting down and listening in as my characters talk to each other in my head.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Economy of Scale
I sell pretty consistently, month-to-month. I have three novels that account for about 95% of all my sales (divided between ebook purchases, Kindle Unlimited Pages read, and physical books), and they will swap which is most popular at any given point. Usually Caitlyn Morcos, Interplanetary Marshal Service is top billing, but occasionally the Queen of the A.I.s or Starconvey EH-76 will pop in for a few days or a week.
I realized today that I “only” have to write about 10 more novels like those three and I could do this writing thing full-time. Here’s the catch… my advertising budget outstrips my sales by a factor of 8. So somehow I have to maintain sales, but not increase advertising at the same time.
Which I think might require witchcraft? Possibly sorcery. But some fell-magic of some variety, because I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it works IRL, as they say.
Still. Maybe I can shift the ad budget around a bit, and as I publish more books the sales of my new books won’t negatively impact the sale of my old books? The dream is that each work encourages people to check out previous works, but I’m really not sure how realistic that is.
Anyway, just some idle marketing thoughts as I continue to strive towards being a full-time writer. I think I can do it…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Running In Circles
I think I’ve mentioned before, but I’m a casual runner. I compete occasionally but only to see how I do, not because I expect to do well (and I never do… I’m firmly middle-of-the-pack for my age-range).
But recently it’s been hard to motivate myself to go running. For a while it was an annoying knee injury, and then it was a lack of good running shoes. At my age, proper gear is important to stop getting injuries (like that knee injury I mentioned above).
However, I now have the shoes, and my knee isn’t bothering me any more… which means the only real hurdle is exhaustion and time, and those kind of tie together. If I wasn’t exhausted all the time, I would have way more time, and that would help me go running.
That stated, I’m going to try and get back into it starting Thursday (assuming it’s not raining, which according to the forecasts, it shouldn’t in the morning). Now the trick will be to not push myself too hard for the first few runs until I get back into my usual stride. But one step at a time.
Am I looking forward to it? No. But I think it’s important to stay in shape, and I’ve been slipping the last few weeks. Time to get back at it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Happy Canada Day!
I’m always kind of at odds with Canada Day. I love many things about my country, but at the same time it’s easy to see that there are also a lot of problems with it. Nothing that can’t be solved, but there is often a lack of will to solve it.
So on a day like today when we settlers are supposed to celebrate something, I’m often pensive and quiet instead. What exactly is it we’re celebrating? The good that Canada has done? The potential it has to do better in the future?
I honestly don’t know. I’ve never been comfortable with it.
On the other hand, it is a day I get to relax, maybe throw something on the BBQ, and get lots of writing done! So that’s always a good day, regardless of the excuse for it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Food is Expensive, Yo
I know it’s gauche to complain about stuff when I have a lot. I have a roof over my head, I have a functional car, I have friends and family.
But man. Food is expensive.
Today I spent half my weekly income on groceries. Half. Like… 50% of every dollar I earned over the last 7 days has gone to feeding me for the next 10 days. So I’m slightly ahead of the curve, but slightly.
And that’s terrifying. I don’t need to make a lot of money through my writing… more than I currently make, definitely, but I’m not looking to be a Stephen King or a John Scalzi or whatever. I just want a semi-comfortable living… but part of that involves being able to eat without having to count every penny I spend.
Maybe that’s just not realistic any more. Maybe I will spend the rest of my life in terror of grocery receipts. I don’t know. But gosh, when I was young I honestly never expected that being so terrified of not being able to afford food would form so many years of my life.
Ah well. Hopefully the next book will sell well enough that I can stop being quite so scared all the time. That’d be nice.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
A Few More of Those, Please
On Sunday I wrote almost 8,000 words. It was, I would like to say, a very good day.
Today I’m hoping to do it again. No idea if that’s reasonable, but be damned if I’m not going to try.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Sprint for the Finish
I can feel that I’m drawing to the close-ish of this novel. Which is good, because I really would like to be finished the first draft by the end of the month.
I’ve been asked how I know the length of a novel before I write it, and the short answer is that I don’t, really, but you kind of get a feel for how long a story will take to tell. I usually write a lot more than ends up in the book, and the second draft of my novels usually drops ten to fifteen thousand words in the process of refining and removing a lot of “She nodded” and “He smiled” and things like that. Brain-filler-words, not necessary to the story, but necessary for me to keep the story flowing out of my head and onto the keyboard.
But, either way, I have about twenty to thirty thousand words still to go, and only a week to write ‘em, so it’s head down, fingers on keyboard for the next while. I think I can get this done… and then get started on the next project!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!