Tag: writing

Future plans…?

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First off: Just another quick reminder that it’s that time of the year again! ALL SEVEN of my books are here FOR FREE from now until the end of the year! You know you want ’em!

You can find my books right here at this link!

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So it’s usually about this time that I start blogging philosophical, thinking about what I’ve done this year and what I plan to do during the next. Anything different this time out, then…?

On a personal level, I spent a lot of time giving myself a bit of long-awaited mental and emotional stability, especially after a few personal events early in the year. I put a lot of things to rest and allowed other things to come to the surface. Writingwise I spent a lot of 2024 finishing and releasing Queen Ophelia’s War and focusing on Theadia…and mainly reminding myself that it’s just fine to focus on one or two projects and let any others come when I’m good and ready. The end result is that I felt even more grounded than I’d ever been in years, and that’s all I really asked for.

As for 2025…? Again, writingwise I have three somewhat concrete plans: to release Theadia, to start MU4, and release a “remaster/remix” of A Division of Souls for its tenth anniversary. The former I’m working on as we speak, and I’ll be starting the latter two in earnest come the new year. [I mean, it makes sense for me to work on two projects from the same created universe at the same time, right?]

As for personal…? That’s a very good question. I’m in a good place right now. Sure, I have some ideas I’d like to try out, some personal choices and decisions and whatnot. But I think what’s different this time out is a feeling of trust and confidence. I mean, that’s a big part of what I’d been working on over the last couple of years, and I’m finally at the payoff end of things. So if anything, I think I’m ready for something new. Something I’ve been wanting to do and haven’t given myself time or permission for.

Do I even have a plan? Who knows? We shall see…

A new approach…?

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I’ve been thinking about why I’ve never been entirely happy with all the versions I’ve attempted with my long-simmering Walk in Silence (the book) project, and I think I’ve finally clinched it:

It’s too positive.

Or more to the point, there have been two different stories I’ve been trying to write all these years, semi-memoirs if you will, that never sat right with me. There’s the original semi-fictional story with various titles that I started writing my junior and senior year in high school, originally wrote in second person (inspired by Jay McInerney, natch) and tried reviving several times over the years…and then there’s the music overview bearing the WiS name that has two versions itself. Version one attempts to chronologically review what I felt were important ‘college rock’ albums that shaped me during those years, and version two (which ended up as the ‘Rockin’ the Suburbs’ series on my LJ back in 2005 and reprised here on this blog some years back) was a personal memoir with music added.

These two different projects have always led separate lives. The fictional one has lit-fic levels of personal trauma and emotional spiraling, while the musical one is a list of my favorite albums with a few personal memories attached. But they’ve also both been inextricably tied to each other as well: both are stories about growing up and being obsessed with music, specifically 80s alternative rock. But more importantly, both are about not fitting in with the mainstream. Both are about finding a special place in life where you feel a part of something special, where you feel like you can be yourself without outside influence or conflict.

And out of all of this, I realized, there’s got to be a perfect opening line for this story I’ve been trying to tell all these years.

Conformity is a hell of a drug.

I use that line a lot these days when I talk about politics and social media and other things that frustrate me, because I can see a lot of its negative issues stemming from (or relating to) the willingness to conform to something that may or may not be a good thing for society. But this was also something I’d thought about back in those days, in similar ways.

As always, this new take on the Walk in Silence project could end up the same as all the others, crashing and burning and never getting finished despite Best Laid Plans. But who knows…? I’d rather give it a try anyway, on the off-chance that it may just be the perfect approach I’d needed all these years.

We shall see, then.

Post-Thanksgiving Wind-Down

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Winding down, you ask? When the Christmas season is kicking into high gear? Well, yes. It might be crazy busy at the Day Job, but on a personal level, it’s time for me to wrap things up, take stock in the year to date, and think about what I’m going to do the following year. And it’s certainly been a bit of a strange year for me for varying reasons. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it’s definitely made me rethink a lot of things.

In working on this hopefully successful draft of Theadia, lately I’ve been comparing it to the days when I’d first started the project, way back in early 2020. Comparing the toxic-level stress I’d felt at the Former Day Job with the temporary exhaustion but shockingly minimal stress I feel at the current one. The managers I had then and the customers I worked with at the time versus the ones I have now. Two completely different lives. And those two years spent unemployed and working on a long overdue rewiring of my brain. All of that has definitely influenced my writing in certain ways.

I no longer worry about running out of ideas like I did then. Sometimes the stories come to me with unexpected inspiration — like Queen Ophelia’s War — and sometimes they’re something I have to actively work out from a much smaller piece of an idea. I very rarely try to force myself to write something new. I still need to relearn how to use my writing as something fun that I could work on at the 750Words site, but that’s something I’ll plan out in the new year.

In the meantime, I’ll be spending the next month taking stock in what I’ve done this year, continuing with the Theadia project, and deciding what I’ll be working on next.

Darkness and Light

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So on Sunday morning as I was lying in bed, having just woken but too lazy to get up and feed the cats just yet, I started thinking about a new way to approach writing MU4. I’ve written at least three or four different openings, and yet none of them felt quite right. The current one is close to what I need…but the scene itself happens way too early in the story. I needed something to build up to that.

The good thing about lying there and letting my thoughts quietly meander for a bit is that I wasn’t trying so hard to figure it out this time. And that’s when it occurred to me: I needed to return to the original theme of the trilogy in order to move forward. That theme, of course, was balance. One character playing the role of spiritual balance to another. One action balancing out another. One dwelling in darkness, the other in light. This story focuses more on internal balances than spiritual or religious ones, even though those two still play an important part in the Mendaihu Universe.

The focus here, then, is on my two main characters: one whose life is chaos and wishes for order, and one whose life is rigid order and wishes for freedom. Both have a common goal of mental, emotional and spiritual balance, even though they’re coming from complete opposite ends of the spectrum. Which of course inspires the same question I had for Denni and Saisshalé in the trilogy: what is the red string that bonds them together? Are they enemies or are they allies? Are they bound to negate each other’s strengths, or are they to work together to become even stronger?

The good thing about this, even as I lay there with one cat staring impatiently at me and my brain in dire need of caffeine, is that this has gotten me even closer to the story I want to tell here. And that’s what I’ve been waiting for. All I need to do is start it.

I…think I figured it out?

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I think I finally figured out how to end Theadia! I always knew it would end in a spectacular yet unexpected way, but as I’d said before, it was the getting there that was stumping me. But earlier this morning — as I was showering of course, just like it always happens with us writers — the answer finally came to me, and I’ve been thinking all day about how to make it work. (Which is why this post is late!)

I realized that I’d been coming at it from the wrong angle: all these scenes were building up to a crescendo, so you’d think the answer is a Big Hollywood Finish, right? Nah. That’s not how I roll. I wrap up my novels by taking all the separate plot threads and weaving them into a much bigger pattern. And in this case, I had to figure out what that pattern was. And that’s what I finally figured out this morning.

It wasn’t the pattern I was expecting…but it’s the one that’s right, and that’s the one I’m going to go with.

In the end it’s just love

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I might not be doing nearly as much writing and revising as I should these last couple of weeks, but fear not, I am not avoiding it. Merely just waylaid by Day Jobbery and trying to sort through the plots of two major projects in my head at the same time. And I’m trying not to make it all complicated.

The ending of Theadia might feature several characters doing several different things all at the same time to achieve one singular goal, but the important thing for me to remember is to take it one step at a time. There’s a lot to juggle but if I already know where all the pieces fit into the larger pattern, all I need to do is carefully and patiently put them all together. I learned that with the Bridgetown Trilogy.

And speaking of which, I’m also prepping myself to start (restart?) MU4 which, like the trilogy, has a lot of moving parts and patterns. I’ve worked and reworked them in my head for probably far too long, so I think it’s time to just start writing it. Put pen to paper and move. And to remind myself that despite the darker moments of this particular new project, there must also be moments of incredible light. That’s always been the theme of the Mendaihu Universe: the yin-yang balances of the world around us.

Every now and again I still need to remind myself of that. Not just in my writing projects, but in life as well. The Day Job might be stressful lately, but it also remains a place I’m proud of working at (and that in itself is something I very rarely admit to).

Binding off…?

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I’m willing to admit I kinda sorta know how Theadia is going to end? Maybe? It’s very much like how I finally finished The Balance of Light a few years after stalling: I have a handful of chapters to go with an extremely vague idea of how it will all wrap up, but it’s the getting there that’s eluding me at the moment. And thankfully unlike that novel, it won’t take me another four years to finish.

If anything, my use of knitting references all over the novel kind of comes into play in a stereotypical way: everything that’s gone on is a part of something bigger. I’ve woven all these other patterns (read: character arcs) together and now I need to ensure that they all fit together in a coherent fashion. That’s one of the big themes of this novel: we’re all in it together. As long as I keep that in mind, I should be alright.

Anyway, I’m being hard on myself right now because I’m worried that I’m going to get to the end and have loose and miscounted stitches everywhere and it’ll be a big knotted mess that I’ll have to rip apart and start over. That may or may not happen, but we’ll see.

I guess I just need to have a bit more confidence in myself and in this novel. It’ll get there eventually.

Meanwhile, in Bridgetown…

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I’ve got two projects in my head related to the Mendaihu Universe that I’d like to work on once I finish up Theadia. The first one, of course, is MU4. The second one is a ‘remaster’ of the trilogy. I’ve been itching to work on them for a long time now, so as you can well imagine, it’s affecting my focus on Theadia just that little bit. Heh.

A remaster, you say? Well, Next September will be the tenth anniversary of the release of A Division of Souls, the first in the trilogy as well as my first self-published book. And while I think it still holds up really well, I feel like I could revisit it again as an author with a few years and many more books under my belt and make it even better. I don’t plan on any major changes or revisions, mind you. Perhaps a bit of tightening and cleaning up, a few rough patches that I could fix. And maybe some fun extras to add in at the end, like the official soundtracks, some annotations and explanations, that sort of stuff.

And then there’s MU4. That one is just as old, now that I think about it: I started writing some of it longhand while working on prepping ADoS for self-release. It has multiple outtakes and versions that are interesting yet remain unfinished due to focusing on other projects. The story itself is a continuation of the theme of spirituality found in the original trilogy, though this time it focuses on a slightly different angle: what happens when that spirituality is tainted or mishandled.

And that’s a story I think will need a lot more focus and dedication than I can give it while working on other lighter projects. Which means that I’d better get cracking on finishing and releasing Theadia, yeah?

It’s going to be quite the epic project, but I am definitely looking forward to it.

Reading at night

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I was doing pretty good there for a while. I was going through a number of books on my TBR pile (or alternately catching up on my shopping list by reading library copies on Hoopla), but that seems to have fallen by the wayside again. I’m back to rereading my WIP again, and I think that’s doing more harm than good right now. I did this before with Queen Ophelia’s War…I was revision-reading so often that I kind of burnt myself out with the story for a little bit and had to distance myself for a while before picking it up again.

Mind you, I find revision-reading one of the best tools I have when it comes to writing novels and prepping them for self-publication, but I sometimes need to learn that overdoing it leads to hyperfocusing on the problems and rarely getting any further. There has to be a balance.

Not that I’m burnt out on Theadia yet, thankfully. Just that I need to put it aside for a time at night. I need to read things that aren’t my own work. How else would I happen to discover new things that might inspire newer ideas? And not even that, sometimes it’s fun just to sit down and do a bit of enjoyable reading at the end of a long day! It’s a perfect wind-down activity!

So maybe what I need to do is dust off those books in the TBR pile and start cracking them open!

Too Darn Hot

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It’s been uncomfortably hot here in San Francisco the last couple of weeks, seeing record temperatures and ridiculously clear skies. Thankfully I work in a place where temperature regulation is kind of important, so I’m spending most of the day inside where it hovers somewhere at a comfortable sixty degrees or so.

Unfortunately, Spare Oom has been a bit of a sauna at times, meaning I can’t always get a lot of work done until it cools off in the evening. Which means revision work on Theadia is falling a bit behind, but I’m not too worried about it. It’ll get there when it gets there.

It did remind me of my Boston days, especially when I lived in the Shoebox, which could get unbearably hot and stuffy during the summer even when the window wide open. The Allston apartment was a bit better, given that it was a north-facing apartment and thus never got direct sunlight, but without any AC it could still get uncomfortable. Those days I’d usually hang out elsewhere, like at a library or a record store until sunset, then stay up far too late enjoying the cool of the evening. And of course there were the summers in the Belfry…I’d often start my writing sessions after dinner when it was already cooling off.

Mind you, this is not normal weather for San Francisco. We’re more known for being firmly stuck in the upper fifties and low sixties on the good days, with the addition of consistent fog cover out here in the Richmond District. From what I hear, the weather will be dropping back down soon enough, then I’ll feel comfortable back here again.