Starting Again
Howdy, folks!
Been a while since I’ve blogged for real, as my life’s been consumed by finishing up my degree for the past year or so. I had a glorious flurry of writing while I was on disability from work, recovering from bottom surgery, and despite my hopes to try and find a workable pathway forward of maintaining writing and school while back in work, it was just not tenable and I had to set writing aside. It was a bitter pill, but I did only have around a year left of school, so the negative feeling that I’d been carrying around of “not being able to write again until I’m out of school” wasn’t as bad. Just a year left before I was done, then I could write again.
Well, time has passed, it’s about a year later, and on June 4 I turned in my capstone project for my capstone class and completed my Bachelor of Science in finance. I was done with school! Time for writing.
Well, I mean, not immediately, there was some collapsing first. And the beginnings of a flurry of job applications submitted to internal positions at my employer to try and leverage that degree into something less soul-destroying than my current position (first job interview of the batch was last Monday, fingers crossed). And also as should be expected of me, I sunk into a depression as the forward momentum of having a life-advancing project like getting a degree had vanished, as I am someone who is far too anxious and goal-oriented to actually handle relaxing day-today. But on the plus side, I did pull up an in progress novel and started to poke at it.
Poking has been slow going. I have gone over the outline (which tells me the novel’s gonna be fire), reread much of what was there already (which is fire), and reworked the last chapter that I’d started last year, which had a glaring issue in its structure I needed to fix. Basically, the purpose of the chapter was to establish the protagonist’s interior motives for something, but the character she was talking to fundamentally agrees with her motivations. As a result there was no tension because she was keeping something to herself that the other character was basically trying to encourage her to do anyway. Just didn’t work and meant recasting the role of that conversation to a character who felt anxious and worried about it, giving her reasons to be cagey. Did that, reworked a good chunk of it with recasting and editing, and got to the point where it’s time for new writing, and, well …
I want to give myself grace here, as it has been a lot recently. College was all online work designed to be self-paced, but it wasn’t a gimme, I wrote something like 50 pages of technical papers over the final two classes, and my mom, who lives with me due to mobility issues and frailty as she’s gotten older, recently had back surgery and needs even more care than normal. Plus work hasn’t ever stopped, and my job’s always demanding and draining. I haven’t sprung back all the way as of yet to where I was at while on disability, or before that when I was working and writing Dangers in Fiction, an Owl House fanfic, and why should I have gotten there in just two and a half weeks? Still, it’s at least a little discouraging. The real bitch of it is that I know that getting back to writing regularly is itself something that would make me feel better. If I was doing that, my mood and drive would improve, and it would be easier to continue writing. Just gotta get there first.
As I said, trying to give myself grace. My mother’s recovery will gradually lessen the load of stuff she needs help with, and the further I am from school the more I can recover from the burnout I was feeling and will be more capable of rebuilding the writing habit. In the meantime, I’m going to write a little bit about what I’m writing, and other creative stuff going on, to try and jumpstart the brain juices.
For the novel project, this is original fiction! I wrote this little blurb about it previously, so to reshare:
Every year, when the gods go to sleep, the cold weather returns and blankets the kingdom in Vorstnacht, the long winter. Gwendolyn, a Regal Mage, spends her Vorstnacht on the outskirts of the kingdom in the little town of Dessel. Dessel is a settlement that just grew big enough for the Regal Mage Academy to send out one of their members to shepherd the people through the harsh weather. Regal Mages can do a lot to brace against Vorstnacht by using their abilities to spin the threads of reality while the gods are asleep and human magic is at the height of its power. Her assignment is almost over, but just as winter is supposed to end, the warm weather doesn’t come, and wolves are howling at the doors.
Vorstnacht started its life as an untouched outline for a My Little Pony: FiM fanfic from something like 2014, and in saying that, folks who are familiar with the series might be able to spot the bones of that outline in the concept. That fanfic never got written back then, partly because of other projects I was working on (or not working on, as the case often was), and partly because the plot felt good, but not necessarily that pony, if that makes sense. It’s a high fantasy adventure story, with action and gay romance, and would explore a magical mystery using largely invented lore. It was a prime candidate to rework to be original fiction with its own setting and magic system, and with original characters instead of ponies. And I think I made the right call with that, because while it certainly would have worked as a ponyfic, the outline is stronger as original fiction, I think, and while the original characters in it might be a little reminiscent of the ponies who originally played the roles, they have strong voices that I really like. I’m excited about this one.
There exists about 20k words of Vorstnacht so far, and what’s there is rather good, in my not-so-humble opinion. Just a matter of writing what happens next to Gwendolyn, the Regal Mage, and her unlikely travel companion, Isa.
In addition to the novel, I’ve also got the beginning brewing of a comic! I’ve always been a big fan of comics, and have rekindled my love with some recent collecting and reading of some indie and non-mainstream stories. With that rekindled interest came along a desire to create my own. This is also original fiction, and I have two projects in mind, though one of them is much more of a case of “if the first project goes well.” I’m less confident this will get off the ground, because I’ve had a lot less success keeping up with ongoing visual art projects than I have with writing. That said, I’d still like to try. That proof of concept story is called Tales Told in the Desert. Here’s a blurb:
Camped out in the desert with a gun at his side, Jim isn’t sure that starting a fire is worth the risk of attracting unexpected guests. The one guest he gets, though, is a mangy, one-eyed coyote, looking for a pan of water … and maybe a story or two.
Tales Told in the Desert is a fully written short story in my repertoire, about 8k words long, which was written for a story jam about a decade ago. It’s probably my strongest original fiction short story I’ve written, but I haven’t done much with it, because wtf does one do with short stories, really. It’s been sitting waiting for me to maybe write enough other short stories to put out a collection, but I don’t write short stories very much and don’t really enjoy them compared to novels. It might end up in an anthology at some point, if the right anthology comes along and wants it, but otherwise it’s just sitting and collecting dust. It is also, I think, something that would be very vibrant and engrossing translated to a graphic novel, with the right art style. I have some good ideas on that, and if I can get through some art tests have a pretty straightforward adaptation on my hands. The problem is, y’know, working through the art tests and setting to the work of adapting it.
Top priority is Vorstnacht for now, though I’d like to work on both, if I can. Vorstnacht is calling me, though, it really is a great outline and will make a great book, once I put words to paper. Part of writing this blog is to try and just decompress from the past few months, and then hopefully I’ll be able to move forward with actually writing. I’d like to share words with people soon.
Anyway, think that’s all I got for now. TTFN.