Back at the keyboard ...

I'm not sure how many of you have had the flu this season. I caught myself a Alien nest sized bout of flu that required antibiotics. That was two weeks ago. It lingered and moved into my lungs.

Yes, it's fun. As in not at all.

The good news is I've had studies, music, writing and family to pass the time. It's proven that having something to focus on helps you distract from how sick you feel. Let's see ... progress markers:

Sliver of Light manuscript: 82% (Assuming 45 chapters, 37 of which are complete)
Music remastering: Two tracks ... of, about 150. Realistically I'm not going to remaster them all.
Studies: Math and Religious studies (if you hadn't already guessed), lessons 5 of 14 - 35% complete
Games in progress: Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, Fault - Milestone One (completed), Ori and the Blind Forest, Pony Island (stuck on a puzzle), Fairy Fencer F, Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, Undertale, Evoland 2, Crypt of the Necrodancer.

The big trick, of course, is deciding what to finish. I'll probably play through Fault - Milestone 2 in a fit of curiosity, so I'm not scheduling that one. Reviews are another matter. I have a list that I'm working from, and that's progressing rather nicely.

Fiction writing can be fickle; you have to give it your all without "tryharding", as my nephew would say. That's where I'm at.

Comments 2

honestgamer Staff Feb 1, 2017

Are you writing your novel from an outline? It sounds like you must be, since you know how many chapters there will be. For years, I had myself convinced that I was one of those very rare writers who can produce quality work without an outline. And while the stuff that I wrote during that period was better than average, I can look back at it now and find a lot of weak points that were clearly the result of not writing from an outline, making up too much of it as I went along.

hastypixels Blogger Feb 2, 2017

Actually, that's been my method for years - writing from the hip. I have an idea I want to explore, so I begin to explore it. I'll start with a scene and see how everything fits together. I was able to put together an anthology of those stories, but I self published them. That's another issue.

Sliver of Light is the first time I've known exactly how the story goes from beginning to end. I've had to actually rewind the start point, so it's presented another issue ... what do I write about when I could ostensibly write day to day? That's where my experience of what's interesting came in, and how the synopsis I wrote for TOR rounded out the end.

I had to work through the last few chapters of the book, and ... I've had to guesstimate. Given that each chapter is less than 3K words, and usually no more than three scenes, I figured I know how many it will take to conclude it. Of course, and editor could make mincemeat of all that.

Having read a lot of writers, most of the best don't use outlines. They just have an idea of what's going on, isolate themselves and then let the characters work it out. I don't thinking knowing the events makes a difference, either, because you still have to focus your writing lens on the subjects. Just like a director does.