Plans and Design Shifts

First, sorry I’ve been out of touch the last two days. Been kind of out of it, even not considering the brain power required by my class.

Speaking of which I am taking DMPC 105, or Intro to Digital Marketing. It’s not a topic I’m very familiar with, and if I ever intend to get more than the automated bots that currently scan my site, it’s something I’ll probably need to learn about that. Last week, I learned about the 4 P’s of marketing, which are Product, Price, Place, and Promote. Price isn’t an issue; the blog is free, and I’m not at a stage where I would set up Patreon or newsletters or anything like that. Place… is definitely an issue (probably the biggest one) but I’m also not there yet. Same with Promote. (We’re actually learning more about those two the next couple weeks, though.)

To my surprise, though, I realized I didn’t have a firm grasp on the “product” of this blog. What did I want people to get out of this? What would they gain from being here, and is there anything here that would interest my target audience? So I spent time thinking about it, and I came up with two general reasons why I, at least, might ever visit a site like this. the first, is to see the writing process in action. Honestly, that feels a bit weak; this isn’t, thus far, a writing blog like K.M. Weiland’s “Helping Writers Become Authors”; I am 100% an amateur, and don’t feel qualified to give advice. I can just show you what I’m doing, for you all to analyze to your hearts content. However it’s something that could be interesting if I leaned into it a little more, so I intend to follow every post with a secondary, “behind the scenes” look at my process. Every day, before I write, I spend 10-15 minutes planning out what I’m going to write, and sometimes letting my thoughts wander. This secondary post would be a verbatim transcription of that (minor typographical errors aside).

Second, I thought people could come here for the stories. With the way I have the blog set up currently, that… would be a challenge. It’s hard to find the major stories I’ve written, and harder to dive into them. So I intend to take time sometime over the next week to include new pages, and focus my writing more so I have discreet chapters or scenes posted regularly, in addition to my daily ramblings. I don’t want to set those on a schedule; life gets weird, and until I’m more firmly established, I can’t honestly promise I’ll stick to one.

Finally, in addition to all that, I decided that once every other week I would include an in-depth review of a story I enjoyed. It will probably be focused on books, but it won’t be limited to those. For example, I intend to do an article on Arcane season 1 at some point. That could be a way to generate new interest, at least once I get to the point where I’m actively promoting this.

As for a timeline… I’m not really sure yet. The bonus, behind-the-scenes post I intend to start immediately. The story-centric restructuring…will not be immediate. It could happen Friday or Saturday, but we’ll have to see how that goes. As for the review articles, I’d like to start that this week; I’d say it’s more likely than the restructuring, but no guarantees.

Update with New Semester

Well… Classes started. And it’s going to kick my butt the next seven weeks, at least. (It’s a block class). It’s going to be a lot of good information, and I’m definitely going to learn a lot, but… Well, the class explicitly says they recommend spending 18 hours a week on coursework to avoid falling behind. That’s 3 hours a day from Monday through Saturday. When you combine that with 9-hour work days from Monday through Thursday, even with the half-day Friday I have no idea how I’m going to squeeze in writing time. It’s already messed me up a bit; I missed the last couple days.

Still, I’m not willing to give up. Just wanted to be on the up-and-up if I’m not as consistent as I’d like to be.

Rapunzel Update

Part of the reason I’m posting this is because, unfortunately, I did not get anything written 7 April. But I also thought it would be good update everyone on where my story is at currently.

To be honest, I was seriously considering scrapping the entire thing, even just a couple days ago. I haven’t made much progress on it the past couple months, either, and I recognized a pretty glaring issue I somehow missed the first time around. The way the magic system works, at least when it comes to fairy gifts, involves stealing from someone’s future to give to their present. That involves setting hard, baseline, quantifiable “norms” for such intangible things as beauty, cleverness, etc. And the harder I want the magic system to be, the more well-defined those limits and norms have to be, especially when we get into the idea of witches stealing those from other people to make up for their own deficits. And no matter how I spin that, no matter where I set those bars, it comes with a great number of unfortunate implications that I don’t intend.

That said, my brother—ironically the same one who brought this to my attention—talked me down from the ledge, so to speak, and I still want to try a few things. If I put more of the emphasis on Aurora’s mindset, and (either as part of her arc, or clearly established from the beginning) make it clear it’s okay even if she does lose those things, that could at least mitigate some of the more problematic issues. Will that work with the story? How does that affect the themes I was already emphasizing? I don’t know yet. It’s possible I’ll still wind up scrapping it. I hope not, but who knows? It has been a great learning experience already, anyway; I just want to make sure I have no regrets with it.

I’m Back

Sorry I’ve been offline so long. Part of it had to do with school; I started my class at the beginning of February, and I’m wrapping up about now. If I’m being honest, though, that’s only a small part of the issue; I also let myself get really, really distracted. Mostly by various video games, but not just that, either.

Hopefully, I’m back for good. That said, I’ve only got a 1-2 week reprieve before my next classes start; if I can keep going through that, I should be good. And I have high hopes, too.

I’ve got one post tonight for Hanako that I wrote last night, and then a couple posts from back in February before I disappeared I need to get typed in still. Other than that, I really haven’t written much. But I’m looking forward to more in the future!

Apologies

As anyone who is currently checking this regularly may be able to tell, but I’ve been kind of out of it the last few days, and I have not posted on here as I should. Since Sunday, if I’m being honest, and even back to last Wednesday I wasn’t at 100%. It’s nothing physical; just a problem with some recurring mental issues and a lack of sleep, I think.

Still, I want to be consistent about posting everyday, and more importantly writing every day. I haven’t done any writing since Monday, and even that was half-baked. I can’t improve if I don’t work at it. So I’ve been thinking about what has caused this recent relapse, and ways I can avoid it in the future.

I think the reason it happened comes from two converging sources: first, I got distracted. I’ve been playing a few too many video games the past few weeks (specifically the Trails in the Sky and Dark Souls III). No matter how good they are or how amazing the storytelling, I still need to do what needs to be done. I have some plans to scale back on that, though.

Secondly, I completed one major goal and did not set a new one to keep that momentum rolling. Some of that’s intentional; Nanowrimo’s a bit too intense to do consistently all year. That’s why it National Novel Writing Month, after all. But taking it easier shouldn’t equate to slacking off, and so I want to set specific goals regarding the stories that have most caught my interest at the moment, like Hanako and the Orphan of Hamelin. Perhaps set aside time on the first of each month to plan out what I want to accomplish that month? That might be a good goal. I’m also going to give myself permission, if I have long brainstorming sessions, to count that as my daily writing. I’d been resisting the idea ever since I started the blog, since I’m hoping people will read this and I want to give them something worth reading, but if I need to sit down and think, I need to give myself permission to do that without stressing myself out.

That said, I’m not sure how I’m going to handle posts covering this week. I’ll keep posting what I’d written before, and things will even themselves back out eventually, but I may double post one day or write a couple extra scenes another to compensate. Anyway, thanks to anyone who’s been following the blog; it’s appreciated!

1 December 2022

Stuff I wrote while reflecting on Nanowrimo.

I felt like I should take some time, now that Nanowrimo is done for the year, to look back and reflect on what I’ve learned and what I’ve accomplished.

First off, wow. This was the best Nanowrimo I’ve had since my first one, and possibly even that one, despite a slightly lower word count. I’m still parsing through why I feel that way; part of it definitely has to do with how committed I was.

I learned a lot about myself and my writing process, too. First, I need to give myself the freedom to wander around my story. If I try to force myself to write things in order, for whatever reason, it stops being fun, starts stressing me out, and my motivation gets shot. This is a bit frustrating, since I feel like having everything nice and organized would be so much simpler, but if that’s the way it needs to work for me, so be it.

Closely related to that, for the first time, I figured out how to work around outdated bits of story without being compelled to immediately rewrite them. I’ve struggled with that in the past. There’s one story I started that has 10-15 different versions of the first chapter, even though I’ve yet to finish it. (That story’s been shelved for now, but I do intend to finish it at some point.)

That wouldn’t have worked with Rapunzel. Because it was part of Nanowrimo, it felt like I couldn’t, even, and that wound up really good for me. It let me find the whole story, not just the next piece of it.

The most surprising thing I learned, though, was how much it affects my day, in a positive way, when I get up early to squeeze in and extra 20-30 minutes of writing. That wasn’t easy for me; I have to start work at 6 AM, so I needed to start getting up at 4:30 if I wanted to do that. But generally speaking, rather than feeling extra tired, I was strangely energetic and a lot happier while I was at work.

There’s also a lot of work I need to do, both to improve my writing in general and for Rapunzel specifically. In particular, a lot of my sentences were far too same-y. “So-and-so verbed X.” Part of that was because I was rushing through and put no effort into trying to make it sound better… but there’s also the fact that no other alternatives immediately sprang to ming. That’s something I’d like to work on in my daily writing over the course of the next few weeks; I’ll try to think up exercises I can do for that.

Key to that, I need to read more. I think that’ll help a lot, especially if I’m proactively paying attention to sentence structure as I read… Not that I’m good at that. It’s far too easy for me to get sucked into the story and forget everything else.

More specifically to Rapunzel, there are a lot of concerns. Isaac, for example. I want him to feel like a cool, proactive younger brother with a bit of a stubborn streak. (That part seems to run in the family.) I worry that instead, I made him too annoying or stuck up, maybe inflexible, with the added insult of general being “right”. I’ll need to think on that. There may be nothing I do about it until I get the story more polished, and get feedback from other readers to see if there actually is an issue at that point.

Another is Rapunzel’s loss of her fairy “gifts”. Supposedly, she’s been given extra beauty and cleverness, pulled from her own future. Which means once the bonus is gone, after Hannah’s sacrifice, there should be a noticeable difference. And there isn’t. I never address it, it has no consequence on the plot… It bugs me. I have a few ideas, but nothing solid yet.

The battles are also going to need a lot of work - possibly revision after revision, just to try different things out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually fairly happy with what I came up with, and even a bit proud of it. But there are a lot more factors that I need to take into account that I forgot (like rain), and Gothel in particular should have a lot more options for things she can do in battle. I don’t want her to feel like some bog-standard D&D dragon, or worse, a brainless giant lizard. I want her to fight like it’s actually Gothel in a dragon’s body.

There’s more I could nitpick; I could probably spend hours ripping my story apart piece by piece. But those were the big things that weigh on me even now. My plan is to set the story down for the next couple weeks, maybe all of December, and pick it back up come January. I think I’d like to get the next draft done by the end of April, though I am starting online courses in February, and I don’t know how that will affect things.

I don’t know if I’ll post any of my revision work on my blog or not. I think this should be separate from my daily writings. But if that’s the only time I have to work on it, I may sneak bits in here and there.