2023 is fading rapidly in the rearview mirror, and 2024 is upon us like a swarm of rabid boars. Nothing terrible has happened yet (in fact, I had quite a relaxing day today, overall), but I’m not letting my guard down for a few days yet.
Either way, I survived the holidays (such as they were) and am ready to jump back into the swing of things. I’m almost ready to start shooting the opening crawl of the series (it won’t actually be an opening crawl, but you know what I mean), and the novel is poised and ready for me to dive back into editing.
It’s an exciting and busy and terrifying time. What can ya do.
And without the constant barrage of work the holidays bring (working at a game store to pay my bills is an adventure around this time of year), I should be able to get back up to my 3x a week posting schedule! And the novel should be available by March, and the short movie should be done around the same time (assuming I can get the voice actors recorded!).
So until next I post in a few days: best wishes for a healthy and happy new year to all of you. Thanks so much for reading my little corner of the internet.
Happy Holidays!
From me to all of you, the best wishes for a safe and happy holiday season! I’m going to be taking a couple days to recharge my batteries, to visit with family, and to sleep an awe-inspiring amount… but after that? Right back at it! No rest for the wicked!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Scenery
I’ve been constructing scenery for the movie. It’s a neat little exercise in scale and quantity… I’m trying to make a medieval market, and I want it to look like it has a fair amount of stuff, but I don’t want it to be overly crowded. I think I’ve managed a good middle ground…
But now that I’ve built it, I’m probably going to shoot a different scene first (specifically the opening crawl). No specific reason, really, except that I think by getting that one shot finished I can have a better idea of the scope, time, and energy that will go into the full project. Just so I can budget time and resources appropriately.
Oh, and I built some viewing stands, and I’m wondering if I should make them have a forced perspective (like they did with Gandalf and Frodo for the LOTR movies… look that up if you haven’t, it’s a very neat trick). The problem is the minifigures I’m using are a fixed size, so making them appear smaller might be trickier than I’m capable of. But I’m going to think about it at least! Movie magic, ho!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
The Home Stretch
Okay, only a week of insane work remaining and then some time off, and critically a reduction in the general insanity. That will be a very pleasant change of pace!
I keep poking around at the projects I have on the burner, but nothing is making huge progress right now. Which is okay, it’s setting up stuff so I can make more progress later, I get that, but yeah, it’ll be nice to be able to do stuff again, rather than just think about and prep for doing more stuff!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Busy Days!
So I’m working on the stop motion short, I’m editing the novel, and I’m thinking about how to rework my Patreon a little (I try to refresh it every few years). On top of everything else, it’s of course the busiest time of year. Whee!
I’ve also been trying to figure out why exactly I want to be a writer. I mean, I am a writer, but why I want to make a living by being a writer. It’s certainly not fame or fortune… while I would love to be respected and rich, I also know that’s almost certainly not going to be my fate. No, I just need enough money to live on without constant fear of starvation. But there are definitely easier ways to do that! In fact, there are only a few harder ways to do that! So why writing?
A part of me loves the theatrics, obviously. But I think a bigger part of me really just wants people to not struggle with the same things I struggle with… loneliness, sadness, depression, anger. My stories are written to be uplifting. They’re about overcoming hardship and evil. They’re… nice.
Ah well. “If you can do absolutely anything else, do that. If you can’t, be a writer.”
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Building Sets!
One of the nice things about creating a stop motion movie is building the sets that the movie will take place in/on/with. It’s fun! It’s neat!
It’s a lot of work! But that’s okay. I’m currently working on building an archery field and a tournament grounds for the medieval story I’m shooting, and coming up with scenery is a neat challenge. It would be easier to just buy everything, but like everything else in life: money is super tight, and I already have a lot of LEGO, so the real goal is to come up with clever ways of using what I have, rather than doing brand new stuff.
It’s a nice challenge. It’s really interesting working within the limitations of the medium, rather than doing whatever I might want to do. And my vision is ambitious, but that’s just the way I am… I don’t do things half-assed. I only whole-ass stuff.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Back to Once A Week, Apparently?
December falls like a tonne of bricks at my house. It’s not my favourite time of year, it’s among my least favourite weather, and everything is just… worse… until around February. Nothing I can do about it, just buckle down and do my best until it passes.
One of the side-effects is the inability to post here as often. I’m going to focus a bit harder in the next couple weeks, try to keep my strength up and my output consistent, but it’s definitely tricky.
Oh well. Work on the stop motion movie is still moving forward (ha), and that’s nice, and I’ve finished all the most pressing “Other Stuff” I have to complete for the season. I think we might even dodge the horrible “Your brother is coming sometime but we don’t know when but be ready to drop everything the moment he does” dance we usually do, since this year he seems less… awful. We’ll see if that holds out.
Anyway! Moral of the story is that there will be more than weekly posts again, now that I’ve sorted out the Things(tm), so thanks for your patience!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Storyboarding
Sorry for the radio silence for the last few days (although, again, if anyone is reading this it’s almost definitely much, much later). I’ve been doing the storyboard for the next short film I’m working on, and it’s pretty involved. When I get this done I have to dive into the edits for the novel, and I’m still trying to give that time to rattle around in my head, see if I can’t smooth out the last few issues.
I think ideas, to some extent, are like rocks in a rock tumbler. If you leave them long enough you get all the jagged bits out, sure, but you also lose all the sharp bits. It’s kind of like how “Hollywoodified” you want a story… the longer you let it bounce around, the more slick and smooth it gets, sure, but correspondingly the less unique.
Now, “unique” isn’t necessarily a good thing on its own. A unique idea can be unique because it’s bad, after all. But, that stated, I don’t think I need to worry about where I am with my writing… I’m just trying to build a consistent, happy audience, and for that I need good stories that people want to recommend to others. It doesn’t have to be brilliant for that… brilliant would be nice, but I always aim for good, and then sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised!
I should get back to the sketches!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Low Traffic
Not a lot of visitors these days (read: none). That’s okay, I suppose… the blog is mostly my own rambling thoughts on nothing in particular. Maybe someday when I’m successful and less worried about dying a starving artist people will come read my thoughts just to see what I was thinking, to get an idea of what’s going on in the grey matter I have between my ears.
Probably not. I mean, I love Scalzi’s work and I don’t read his blog, so I suspect that even if I become way more successful than my wildest expectations there still won’t be lots of people who come here.
But that’s okay. This is mostly for myself, after all. Sort of like my writing… I hope other people enjoy it, sure, and I’d love to make a living by doing it, but at the end of the day I’m going to write no matter what. It’s a part of who I am. It’s what makes me… me.
For whatever that’s worth.
Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Thanks, Mom
My mother told me that I should give up my writing today.
She means well. She’s worried that I’m working on too many things (true), that I’m spreading myself too thin (also possibly true), and that I should focus on things that pay more than minimum wage (debatable, I suppose?).
It was still really difficult to hear. I’m not surprised… my parents have been politely disinterested in my work since I started writing years ago, and they’ve never really seen “the point” of it. Which is fine, my writing is silly fun, and they’re not silly fun people.
And yet.
Ah well. Obstacles are what we see when we take our eyes off the destination, right? Right. And the difference between a successful author and an unsuccessful author, as far as I can tell, is persistence. And although I am not a great many things, I am most definitely pigheadedly persistent.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Pitter Patter
Today I’m going to start editing the novel. It’s a daunting task, but it’s one that won’t get less daunting as time goes on.
Ooh, that reminds me. Gotta fire off an email to my editor. I’m gonna do that now.
And done! Okay, we’ll see what her schedule is like and that will give me a timeline to get these edits finished. I suspect it will be February-ish, but that’s okay, because gosh do I have a lot of stuff that I need to finish in the next 7 weeks before the new year! A few commission jobs, increased hours at the job that pays the bills (hopefully my writing, one of these days), and more chores around the house than I can list!
But at the end of the day, I’m a writer, and writers write! Or in this case, they edit so they can write better, and that’s almost as good!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Cat Is Recovering
So one very expensive surgery later, and my oldest kitten (Donut, who is a brisk 16 years old) is at home and recovering. She gets her stitches out on the 20th, so until then she needs to wear a cone, and she walking with a limp from where they inserted the IVs, but she seems better. Her appetite is solid, and her voice is back, so things are definitely looking up.
Which is a relief! I was worried sick about her… I’m still worried about her a little, but it’s still nice to have her around the house. I wish we could communicate more clearly. I know she is confused by the safety cone she wears and why we had to take her into the vet in the first place (she had a wound that wouldn’t heal due to her scratching it all the time), but by the same token I’m pretty sure she is taking all this in better stride than I would. The joys of a tiny brain.
Other than that, I haven’t started editing the novel yet, but what I have done is kept thinking about how I want to seed the ending into the rest of the work. The “sudden but inevitable” ending that I love so much needs a lot of tweaking in this story… actually, it did in “The Hunt for the Wind’s Howling Rage” as well, now that I think about it, and I am very satisfied with how that one wrapped up.
So! With all that stated, I should probably get back to work!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Exhaustion, Meet Deadline!
Well, ducks are lined up, and I have started editing the novel. This involves a lot of reading aloud, so feel sorry for anyone within earshot of me as I try to wrangle this story into its trim, clean, final form.
The progress is slow, and I’m currently toying with the idea of switching from third to first person perspective. I only have two or three short scenes that aren’t from the protagonist’s point of view, so it shouldn’t be a major change from a story perspective (although, obviously, the rewrites will be more arduous). I think it might help to fix the perspective and give the readers a more intimate and emotional connection to the story.
That stated, it’s a big change for this late in the process, so maybe not? I dunno. I’m thinking about it at least.
Either way, it’s nice to be working on the novel again. Still hopeful that the animation will come out sooner than the novel will be ready, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Picking Cover Art
One of the nicest things about finishing a novel is the other artistic elements that then go into the publishing of the book.
The most enjoyable (although also the second most expensive) is the picking of a cover. There is an artist I am fond of using and doesn’t charge a fortune for his work, which is nice, but I usually also browse a few other options, just to see if there are other covers that might convey what I’m going for better.
The real struggle I’m having right now is coming up with a title. The working title of the novel has been “The Trojan Stars,” which is slightly misleading if you know the science (there are, in fact, Trojan objects in space, but I’m referring to a secret path or attack akin to the Trojan Horse, not the astronomical objects), and if you don’t it’s still not super evocative. I’ll have to think about it more.
Anyway, I’ll have to start editing very soon. It’s already November! Crazy.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Script for the next Brickfilm Done!
So longtime visitors will know that I dabble in Brickfilms (or, more accurately, I have made one). I like the format, because I can be as creative as I want, and then I have to rein it in to something more reasonably possible, which is a really neat creative process.
I’ve written the script for the first episode in what I think will be a ten episode arc, and now I’m in the process of storyboarding it… trying to come up with camera angles and sets and all that fun stuff. I’ve already started rounding up some voice talent, and with some luck I can start filming in a week or two!
It’s still a long, long way from the point it will be finished, but it feels satisfying to get everything lined up so that when it’s ready I can just… do it. I’m going to try a few new techniques this time (animating the mouths so the characters actually speak, for example), and I’m already toying with a couple other story lines to work on (and whether to focus on one world at a time, or to do them in sequence).
Gosh I love writing!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Two Best Words in the English Language
It’s done! WOO!
Man, writing “The End” at the end of a document feels so gosh-darn satisfying. This is true, even though this is nowhere near “the end” for my work… this novel in particular is going to take a mountain of editing to polish up to a level that it’s ready for my editor to tackle. But that’s okay! The first draft, at 81K words, is done, and that’s still an accomplishment.
As usual, I’m going to step away from it for a few days, and then dive into the edits… oh, probably early next week, since I finished it yesterday. In the meantime I’ve already started the next project (a short stop-motion animation I’ve been punting around my head for a bit), and have a draft of the script ready to go.
But yay for finishing the longest part of another novel! Maybe I can get it out in time for the holidays… probably not, that will depend almost entirely on my editor and her schedule, but maybe!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Writing the Denouement
Ah, the final chapter. Just a little bit of tidying up to do, a little bit of exposition (a little bit), and then a satisfying-but-sequel-implying level of conclusion.
That last part can be a bit tricky. I don’t like cliffhangers and refuse to write them as a matter of course. It’s silly, but it’s sort of the same reason I don’t write dark sci-fi or fantasy where the bad guys win (or the good guys turn out to actually be bad guys). It’s not the kind of fiction I enjoy reading, and it’s not the type I enjoy writing.
But I still want the conclusion to be good enough to stand on its own, and I want to be able to return to the universe. Which, coincidentally, I think I’m going to be doing in my next work… I’m a big fan of the Caitlyn Morcos book I wrote and the universe I built around her, and I’m excited to go back and see what she’s been up to! That won’t be the next immediate thing I’m working on, but it will be the next novel, I think.
That’s the plan, at least. But I have to finish this one first… and honestly? It’s close enough to taste. Until I start editing… it is going to be a lot of edits to make this one a satisfying story. The bones are good, but everything else is gonna need work. But that’s part of why I love writing! Because when I finish polishing this up, I think you’re all going to love it!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
It's Working!
You know, writing a few hundred words every day (sure, for the last three days only, but still) has been working remarkably well.
It helps that I “figured out” the major sticking point a week ago (October 9th, so 8 days!), but regardless, I’ve still managed to plug away at the novel more effectively and added more words in the last week than I had in all of September. Woo!
I can’t wait to be finished with this novel! I have so many other projects that are just waiting for this one to go off to the editor!
With that, I’d better get back at it… fifteen minutes of writing a day. Turns out? Real useful!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Shift in Perspective
I’ve been listening to some writer-focused podcasts recently, and one of them said something that resonated with me quite nicely. The basic thrust of it was that when we (writers, artists, ‘creatives’) set goals, we often set such insurmountable ones that we are doomed to failure before we even start.
The example they used, since they are both writers themselves on said podcast (“Unpublished”), was having a ridiculous word count expectation, or waiting for a good day to write. Instead, they do 10-15 minutes of writing every day. Every day! Consistent, without fail effort to result in consistent output.
Most of the time I’m writing novels, I’m aiming for 2,000 words a day. The idea was that at that rate, I could finish a draft in about two months, polish it up for about two months (including professional editing, obvi), and then get 2-3 novels out a year. Bam!
The reality has been closer to one novel a year, even at that rate, and the reason being is that it’s really hard to sustain while also doing all the other stuff I have to do to not starve to death. So I would write 10,000 words a month instead of 14,000 words a week, and I’d feel like a failure.
But 10-15 minutes? A few hundred words? I can do that.
I’m calling it now. Starting today, I am absolutely writing for 15 minutes a day, every day, unless I’m bleeding out of my eyeballs.
And even then I might just write with my eyes shut…
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!
Ahsoka
I’m really enjoying the new Ahsoka show. I loved Andor… possibly the best Star Wars ever made? But Ahsoka has also been a pleasure. Whoever is in charge has been cranking out top-notch stuff recently… even Boba Fett was okay. Not great, but certainly not bad.
Ahsoka herself, as a character, is probably my second favourite of the Jedi? I like Rey a little more (although I liked her a little more than now when she was the daughter of nobody… her being… well, who she is… is more disappointing, but I still think she’s a great character). She’s got depth and nuance that Jedi often lack. The white sabers is still an interesting choice… I kinda wish they had gone with yellow or orange or something with colour, but that’s probably a petty complaint.
Anyway. I’m up to Episode 4, so no spoilers, but I am really enjoying it. Highly recommend to anyone on the fence!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!