Category: On Writing

Long Work Days and Writing Sessions

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There are just some days at the Day Job that leave me so exhausted that you say okay fine, I’m taking a day off and passing out on the bed instead of trying to work through this chapter. And as all good writers do, I always feel incredibly guilty about it, even though I should know better that creativity rarely works well during a drain of energy.

It’s been a couple of busy days at the Day Job, mainly due to back to back holidays known to be extremely chaotic in retail (Mother’s Day and Memorial Day), a strong wave of warm and sunny days in the neighborhood, as well as the final days of the local middle and high schools wrapping up, bringing twitchy teens loading up on snacks and drinks.

Usually I can get a few hundred words done despite this, but the deal-breaker this time has been allergies. Those warm and sunny days have brought along several blooming and pollenating plants and trees that have kept me stuffed up and/or handling a migraine throughout my shifts. I look forward to days off when this kind of thing lays me low.

Still…I don’t feel too guilty about missing a few days or doing the least amount of writing work. It annoys me that I have to sacrifice that and not something else, but I’ve made my peace with that some time ago. As long as I’m able to get back to work soon enough.

Those little ‘aha!’ moments

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I’ll admit one of the things that’s been worrying me about the new version of Theadia is that with the new scenes, I sometimes feel like I’m putting in filler. I know I’m not; I’m putting these new scenes in for reasons that will become clear further into the story. Thing is, some of these reasons are a bit, er, vague at the moment because I don’t have a crystal clear idea of how to reveal these plot points.

Then there are the moments where I’m being super patient with the low word count and pushing through, and somehow a shining bit of plot clarity pops in. That aha! moment, so to speak. I’ve just had a few of them over the last couple of days, in which I somehow backed myself into the exact spot the scene needed to be in.

Those are some of my favorite moments in writing, to be honest. It’s the pay-off for all the hard work and the frustration, where I suddenly see all the threads being woven together at once. That happened a lot with the Bridgetown trilogy and is happening here as well.

So I just need to remind myself to remain patient and vigilant, and all will make sense eventually.

Outside

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I think it’s safe to say that the cold rainy season here in the Bay Area has finally come to a close (I hope), which means that I’ll be able to return to something I’ve been wanting — and needing — to do at work for a while now. And that’s go outside during my breaks.

I was doing it for a while there, heading up to the roof parking deck for my ten minute breaks and the back half of my lunches. For a while there I was just heading to our small break room and slumping into one of the chairs and, well…maybe not doomscrolling, but passively reading news sites and social media again. At least I’m not getting myself worked up like I used to, so there’s that.

Anyway, I think heading up to the roof, or even out to the side parking lot for a few minutes can’t be all bad, especially since I have a small notebook in my inside jacket pocket that’s been itching to be used for quite some time now. I’ve been using it to work out a few vague ideas for Theadia, but I think it’s time I start using it more often like I used to in the Yankee Candle days: working out what I want to write for the current chapter, that way I’m not wracking my brain at the start of my writing sessions.

As long as the weather is with me, I think this is a fine idea!

[On a side note, I can safely say I don’t need to head outside to do any exercise, as this day job keeps me on my toes and I can easily rack up a few miles’ worth of steps on my fitness app. I’ve joked with one of the bakery workers that any of the cake slices I buy from them get worked off by the end of the day, considering how much I flit around the store!]

Contemplation

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Still working on distraction. I know, I know…but it’s a lifelong battle for me. Well — I wouldn’t necessarily call it a battle per se…more like an avoidance. In this current case, I feel like the new words I’m providing for Theadia are not working because I’m avoiding going any deeper with the story for some reason.

I mean, I’ll admit that a few of these chapters feature characters in positions I’m not entirely familiar with, and perhaps I’m worried that I’ll make a hash of it. But then again, I’ve written about messiahs, professional musicians and magical girls, right? How hard could this really be? Perhaps it’s not entirely about wanting to get it right, but wanting to get it right the first time.

Now that is one of my best and worst qualities, really. Perfectionism in writing is madness, as I’ve already learned many times.

Anyway…the fact remains that I’m going to need to force myself to do a much deeper dive for these characters. The scenes work…but they’re still far too static. I need them to be doing things, not just sitting at desks talking. And I need to take care of this now before I get too far into the rewrite, or else it’s just going to be a literal rewrite: a transcription with a few things changed and some pretty boring added scenes.

So I think what I need to do is get rid of this habit of avoidance. Let myself contemplate what goes on in the minds of these characters. Why are they doing what they’re doing? Who are they in relation to their surroundings? How are they able to do what they set out to do, what are the possible obstacles, and what are the possibilities of them being stopped?

I need to work this out somehow.

Acceptable Terminology

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One thing I’ve been doing with Theadia is playing around with the terminology of things. Considering it takes place at some unknown point in the far future, I’ve decided that I’m going to experiment with some technological terms so that perhaps some of it is anachronistic while other terms are more generalized.

Computers, for example will rarely be referred to as ‘computers’ (the term just feels so 80s in my head even though it’s universal these days) but rather as things like databases, tablets and monitors. The same with phones; the tech has changed just enough in my story that I don’t see them using cell phones as we know them, but more like mini-tablets as we do know them. They don’t take a call but answer hails. My terminology is supposed to hint at familiar devices that have slightly different names and appearances than what we’re normally familiar with. And to be more nerdy: the internets are less about websites and social media (though they do exist here) and more about useful connection points to what you want or need to do at that moment. And yes, that does in fact include reading social sites and reading news feeds. The same, just slightly different. [Part of this is to underscore the way our two heroes view their work and what will happen to them in this story; the tl;dr is that their jobs are such that they understand what’s under the hood here and see their tech in that way.]

Do I really need to do this? Well, not exactly, but it’s part of my worldbuilding that I enjoy playing around with. I did the same with the Bridgetown Trilogy — there were cars (‘transports’) but there were also driverless lorries and such. It’s just part of the background color that makes the story a bit more real and intriguing.

Hrrmm…

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Yeah, I think I’m more than a bit out of practice when it comes to writing bigger stories. It’s been far too long since I’ve written in this style, I think. But I’m being patient and hoping that it all works out eventually. It’ll come back to me.

Over this past week I’ve been trying to write an all-new chapter for Theadia that introduces an important secondary character, but I know that this very rough draft is coming out a little, well…rough. I know I could do better, and I’m thinking I might need to give this another go-round before I move on to the next chapter. I think I’m more annoyed that my word count plummeted to about three hundred words a session when usually they’re an easy eight hundred or so. [It doesn’t help that I’ll find myself easily distracted by music and, er, blogging things like this.] But I’m not giving up.

I’m reminding myself that I’ve been in this situation several times in the past, where my word count can fluctuate at any point in time, where I might struggle to get a single scene done one day and breeze through another one the next. It’s just how the writing biz is. And no, I’m not going to use AI to help me, as this is actually my favorite part of writing! Heh.

I’ll get through it, one way or another.

More on not holding back

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The last time I talked about this sort of thing was four years ago in this entry, but a lot of things have changed in my life since then. I wrote that entry in the first year of the pandemic, about a year after I’d been forced into heading thirty miles west into the office, ten months after I’d originally come up with the idea for Theadia, and six months after I quit that former day job.

Reason I bring it up is that I’ve been talking with some coworkers at the current Day Job about personal things and surprisingly they all say that I’m probably the most got-their-shit-together person they’d ever met. Which is kind of mind-blowing, considering my past. Ask me how I was four years ago, and I’d say that I was in a much better place than I’d been even a few years before that, but I still had a hell of a long way to go.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I work on the Theadia rewrite, because I’m once again at the point where I feel I’ve still been holding back. I’ve just gotten so used to doing it over the last couple of decades for varying reasons. Getting my emotions under control, ensuring my mental and emotional health (and in the process my physical health) was no longer going haywire because I’d just been reacting to everything for most of my life.

So now I’m thinking: yeah, maybe it’s time to trust myself a bit. Far past time.

What does this have to do with my writing? I think it’s that I’ve always felt that my payoffs weren’t as grand as I want them to be. I mean, other than the epic roundup at the end of The Balance of Light where the fate of everyone is held in the hands of two characters, Denni and Saisshalé. I love my books but there’s always this feeling that I could have gone so much further with them plot-wise. Raised the stakes more. Sometimes I feel my personal avoidance of conflict in real life infiltrated the conflict in my books to some degree.

But it’s here and now, and I’m definitely not as avoidant as I used to be. And that’s another reason I want to rewrite Theadia: I can make this story a lot bigger, grander and stronger than what it currently is.

I don’t want to hold back this time.

On being unconventional

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I’ve said this before: Theadia is an unconventional hard-SF story. It’s not entirely about the spaceships or the combat or the high levels of tech intelligence. It’s more about the characters that are put into that world, whether they want to be there or not. I’ve also said this before as well: Theadia is about doing the right thing when no one else is bothering. But what it’s not is completely uber-serious or heavy on the military grimdark and the perils of deep space.

I love writing unconventional stories. They appeal to me and my mindset. I mean, come on: I’ve been listening to indie music since the mid 80s. My favorite stories are the ones that don’t go in the direction you expect. I’m a sucker for books and movies where you can tell the writers did their homework in weaving the plots in all sorts of unexpectedly creative ways. It only makes sense that my own writing leans the same way.

While I’ve been talking about how Theadia‘s sprawl is somewhat similar to the Mendaihu Universe, I’d say characterwise it’s more similar to the Meeks sisters in In My Blue World. There’s certainly a huge world out there (in this case a galaxy) but the story is mainly about these main characters I’m writing. I always love the idea of that dichotomy: a tight focus within a larger landscape. To me it gives the background life, and in the process our leads get to act or react accordingly to it.

I suppose this is partly why I’m still an indie author that’s self-publishing rather than going the pro route. I may have once had rose-tinted dreams about getting my novels released by a big name publisher, but the more I thought about it over the years, the more I realized that avenue felt more restrictive to my own creativity. I don’t know how to write commercial fiction, let alone genre fiction that would sell commercially, and I’m not sure if I’d be able to succeed if I managed to learn.

I just write what I enjoy the most, regardless as to whether it’s highly popular or not. And I’m quite happy with taking that unconventional route.

Coming close to the end

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As of this week I am revising the most climactic scene in Act III of Queen Ophelia’s War, which means that one, I am coming close to the end of the book, and two, that I am on schedule to get this thing out into the world by late spring! Woohoo!

Finishing this one does feel a bit like how I felt when I finished Diwa & Kaffi…a sense of satisfied completion mixed with an eagerness to move ahead with the next project. In a way, QOW is a very personal book in that I’d written it during the pandemic and post-leaving the Former Day Job, but there’s also the fact that one of its themes is about the willingness to completely change one’s life, and how far one might go to achieve it. I kind of feel like this is my way of signing off many parts of my old life and embracing where I am now. I’m ready to move on to the next chapter now.

This is also one of the last standalones I’ll be working on for a while, and that’s something new to deal with as well. I’m eager, almost impatiently so, to jump back into an extensive created world again, this time with Theadia. I’m ready to move on to that style once again, to the point that I’ve been preparing myself for it over the last month or so.

We’ll see where this new universe takes me…!

here we go again

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So the other day while I was at work, I’d started playing around with ideas for Theadia, and I started thinking: well, as much as I love it, I still feel I’ve left a lot out. Too many moments where important things happen but only seen from one person’s oblique points of view. Conflict with muted payoff. Too many actions that lack the backstory other than “…then this happens but no one yet knows why” that deserve a much deeper examination. In other words, it’s great, but it certainly could be a whole lot better. And I want to put in that extra work to make it the best.

In other words, this is exactly what I’d done when I’d rewritten The Phoenix Effect as the Bridgetown Trilogy. It went from something that was good and I’d turned it into something great that I’m proud of.

In other words, Theadia may end up another large-scale, extended-cast trilogy if I play my cards right.

Sure, I still need to finish off Queen Ophelia’s War first — I think I’m about two thirds of the way there, so I’m on schedule for that one — but I’m already starting to do the pre-writing paperwork for Theadia now. Extended storylines and subplots for certain characters. I may not know how to successfully write a space opera, let alone write characters that serve part of a military role, but I already know that this one isn’t going to be a dense war-in-space story, and nor is it going to be a uber-savvy tech-nerd story either. It’s its own thing in its own reality, just like the Mendaihu Universe. And I think I’ve gotten pretty good at creating that kind of thing. And those are the things I love writing.

Will this end in tears? Who knows. But I’m willing to put in the work.