Welp, I’m back at it again. It’s been six months since my last confession.
My hands still hurt, despite a fair bit of physio and other work to help improve them. I’ve got a new desk coming next week because I finally let myself buy a thing I need. Dunno what all that says about my psychology. Would rather suffer than spend money, apparently.
Too much oversharing! But hey, that’s what a (scarcely used) blog is for.
Writing has continued to be a thing I do. Since the last post, I finished off all the short stories on my list and moved on to writing a novel. The short stories don’t exist anywhere, yet, as I haven’t been sending them out to publishers because of my focus on the novel. And work. And being a parent. And trying to live. Etc and so on.
The novel has been a fun experience. Challenging, for sure. I still procrastinate, even by writing this when I haven’t done my daily words. But hey it is what it is.
Does feel a bit like I’ve got a few things I’ve wanted finally moving along. Daily driving Linux now on this old HP laptop. Omarchy breathed new life into what was otherwise a piece of crap windows machine. It’s a big learning curve, but I’m getting there. Part of the reason I’m back on this blog is because I was noodling with the OS today, setting up cloud backups and ways to cross post to Mastodon and Bluesky simultaneously, and found myself wandering back to the blog, wanting to do more computery things. So here I am in vim in terminal typing away. Will push in git and post all in terminal. It’s kinda piece by piece the workflow I’ve been waiting for. Kinda.
So the novel. I don’t want to talk about content too much but I can talk about the process.
See, I’d plotted the thing out and wrote about 50,000 words, mostly in the 1st and 3rd acts. Then my words per day slowed to a crawl. I was stuck. Had been stuck for weeks. On the last night of our trip to New Zealand earlier this month I thought about evaluating the thing by compiling it. Taking each of the separate files (I’ve written the novel in Obsidian, one file per like story beat or chapter or character). Which was useful because in the process I cut like 14,000 words and had a shitty first draft.
This I gave to a beta reader (my mum, who reads just so many novels) who had plenty of questions, which I dutifully noted. The process of having someone else look over things was really helpful.
I then took the compiled draft and broke it apart into the constituent characters so I can do each arc separately, tell each character’s story on its own. Plus answer the questions. And this week I’ve been writing one story and I’ll do that until hers is done. Then I’ll do another character’s. And this way feels a bit less strict than trying to conform to story beats, to pre-defined chapters, and it feels more like I’m telling a story.