Tag Archives: Joshua’s Nightmares

Challenging myself

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts

Or, really, admitting that I’m a bit challenged. I haven’t decided yet.

I have a headache. It has been a trying, busy sort of day. I’m drinking a glass of scotch that was aged in bourbon barrels because I wanted scotch, I wanted bourbon, but I also couldn’t justify that kind of drinking on a Tuesday. Did I mention I have a headache?

This weekend provided a sort of fine point to a murky, nebulous series of thoughts I’ve had lately in regards to my writing. They have been mean, loud, and generally unpleasant thoughts. This point is actually more of a thought-out, nicely worded middle finger to those thoughts because I’m tired of being my own punching bag, tearing myself down, and fixating on the difficulties of writing instead of the actual craft and the joy I derive from it. Case in point: I’m really enjoying writing this, even though it’s largely unplanned, because I am applying no pressure to myself to get it done. There is no arbitrary deadline, nor is there some comparison to other writers and their work. When I hit Publish, it will appear on my site (with all typos that sneaked past my lazy editorial eyes tonight; you may live this once, typos).  Continue reading →

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Thirty-Six

Posted on by under Joshua's Nightmare Updates, One Hundred Days of Blogging

Today was busy, eventful, and generally good.

However, I’m also entirely okay saying this post is being used as a cheat-day for the sake of focusing on creative writing projects. And because I just had a thirteen hour work-day, and I don’t have an idea I like enough to bother. Especially after the last two turned out so unfortunately.

On one hand, I’m really excited I have a book on its way to being published (FYI: it’s Joshua Harkin and the Wicked Nightmare King, which shouldn’t be surprising).

In closing, I have a question for you all (or at least those of you who comment…so a select few, I guess). How does Joshua Harkin and the Wicked Nightmare King sound as an official book one title? I know I’ve had it listed on the Joshua’s Nightmares page for a while, but I want to know what people think.

Wishing everyone a happy, productive hump day, I guess.

 

Sixty-four (just like one of Nintendo’s best, most carpal tunnel syndrome-furthering systems) days remaining.

Fantastic News

Posted on by under Joshua's Nightmare Updates, Misadventures in Fiction

I had another post planned for tonight, which would argue the validity of fanfiction and so on. I’m sorry, but that’s getting postponed.

Just this once, however, I can say it’s not because of laziness. I’m excited to say I have tremendous, fantastic news. I checked my e-mail, and I honestly can’t remember why, and found this waiting for me.

Hi Phil,
You are the winner of our book publishing contest on Facebook. When you get a chance, please email us your manuscript so we can get started on publishing your book!
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Alexandria White
Collaborative Publishing Manager
CaryPress
~ Your Books in Your Fans’ Hands and Hearts
Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. How do I even react?! I e-mailed them some questions, of course, but now I’m just freaking out. I’m excited, and a little anxious.
The manuscript I’m sending? Joshua Harkin and the Wicked Nightmare King, of course! Mention of it being a two-book series hasn’t come up yet, but hopefully that can be another thing that happens down the road. For now, I’m just ridiculously excited, kind of terrified, and eager to set some even loftier goals for myself. Holy shit, people.
I will probably be completely intolerable for at least the next forever.

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Twenty-Nine

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

This week has been good to me, despite some minor troubles here and there. The good’s outweighed the bad enough that I’m willing to ignore the little frustrations.

I also have to say how I can’t stop thinking about Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s everywhere I look, and for good reason. What a brilliant job Marvel did creating that movie. Tonight’s post isn’t my GotG review, but it ties in a little bit. One of the many, many (so very many) things I loved about Guardians of the Galaxy is how it focused on a group of heroes (move over, Avengers), but it also gave a great deal of love to the supporting characters. Even the ones who were minor in the overall scheme of things were paid their dues. Also, and this is probably my love of villains talking, but I couldn’t help but feel a little bad for The Collector. No spoilers! Just, you know. He seems like the likable, albeit perpetually stoned, doofus of the Marvel Comics Universe movies.

And so it only seems appropriate to show a little love and support for supporting characters. Continue reading →

This Week in Misadventures…and procrastination

Posted on by under This Week in Misadventures

Or “Let’s try this again from my laptop so it doesn’t keep breaking WordPress,” and “there was a topically appropriate subtitle but backspace kept deleting everything on my Surface”.

This week has spanned the good, the bad, and the ugly in terms of motivation and productivity. I could easily say I accomplished a lot of what I’d wanted to, but the comparison of completed planned things versus completed unplanned ones is a bit askew in favor of the unplanned. Hooray, things got done. Boo, lack of discipline and being easily distracted. In light of this post being “This Week in Misadventures…and procrastination” (we’ll get to the procrastination part because I’m not letting myself off the hook there), I suppose I should get to the actual misadventures from my week. Continue reading →

I may have an addiction to writing

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts, Joshua's Nightmare Updates, Warpt Factor

Or “I’ve written over one hundred pages to Joshua’s Nightmares book two in under two weeks time, and I totally forgot to eat a few times during that writing.”

I weighed the pros and cons of getting started on Joshua’s Nightmares book two. I considered how I should probably wait until I get the feedback on book one and make the necessary edits. Friends suggested waiting as well. None of that stopped the ideas and characters from book two from rattling around in my brain, keeping me up at night when I should have been getting much-needed rest for my new job (which I may have forgotten to mention, I’m not sure; I got a promotion and am about halfway into my training). It was unruly, stubborn, and never let me alone until I finally caved and started writing.

And then I deleted the first ten pages completely. In a little under a week’s time, I found myself with over one hundred pages of the first draft completed (most of which had been critiqued by my entirely remarkable editing-friend, who has been invaluable throughout the writing process of Joshua’s Nightmares overall).

However, because I’ve been plugging away so tirelessly on whimsical fantasy, I decided it was time to try my hand at something far more serious: whimsical science fiction. Someone with a mouth, and probably something similar to a brain, once said that fantasy and science fiction are both antiquated genres, but that did little to my interests in them (and god help that smug bastard if I’m ever published on an even remotely decent-sized scale).

More importantly (or, in the spirit of sounding like an infomercial: Wait! There’s more!), my misadventurous journey to write boldly where many have written before will be one I share with you, dear readers.

The short story series: Warpt Factor. The plot: young Izzy Warpt dreams of one day joining the illustrious ranks of the Spiral Reach Academy, seeking out new and exciting discoveries among the stars. Her unbridled enthusiasm proves problematic at times, but nothing in the universe can stop her on her great adventure, even if she has to steal a ship to get it started.

I plan on posting the first installment relatively soon (think some point this weekend, probably), so keep an eye out.

The what-to-do-now of the waiting game

Posted on by under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

My brain is still processing that the first complete draft of Joshua’s Nightmares is finished. That the little red notebook of world-building has grown into a two-hundred-and-ninety-three page behemoth. I’m still really geeking out over all that, actually. In terms of page count, it’s four times as long as the story I wrote for my Thesis Seminar at Edinboro University.

And now what? I’ve sent off copies to friends I know will really dig for anything that could use fixing, and I find myself floating in a sort of limbo. I would go so far as to say this feels like I just sent my only child off to college, and I’m being that awful parent who started sobbing before I’d even gotten off the campus after saying goodbye.

My question to you, fellow writerly-folks, is how do you cope with that sudden absence of something where there was once a big project?

I could, theoretically, get started on Book 2 while the characters are fresh in my mind, but is that the best possible way to go?

All things considered, I am very happy with how the first draft turned out. It grew from a couple paragraphs that got stuck back last year, before I moved, to what it is now. There was something very energizing about getting back to writing regularly, and feeling good about what I was creating, so now I’m just wondering where I’ll channel some of that wild and crazy energy until the time for the bulk of the editing starts.

A short post with tremendous news

Posted on by under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “I really need to get to bed, and I’m sorry for posting such a tiny post on something so big, but here’s some good news to follow the Oscars.”

Tonight, after about two months of very serious, dedicated sessions of writing, I have completed the first draft of book one of Joshua’s Nightmares. That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of editing ahead of it, and I’m sure it will be incredibly taxing to get things just the way I want them, but this has been such a thrilling, fantastic process for me, and I had to share the news. What happens next? We’ll have to wait and see.

I’m sure I’ll be very busy with the editing, once I pick it back up to look at the story with fresh eyes. Mine are currently bloodshot from the hours of staring at MS Word, so that’ll be a few days at least. I’m trying to not even think about the horrors of looking into publishing just yet, because that is all very foreign and scary to me still. I wish I were kidding.

The final stats for the first draft are as follows:

  • 293 pages in standard manuscript format
  • 79,575 words
  • 316KB in MS Word 2010 docx format
  • a total editing time of 57,781 minutes

I’d apologize for all the rambling I’ve done about this story (I feel so odd calling it a novel, because that just seems smug somehow? I don’t know), but I’m not actually sorry. This has been so much fun, and it really revived the joy I find in sitting down and just writing like crazy for hours on end.

And now for bedtime, because I have to be at work at my new job tomorrow. At the ungodly (read as perfectly reasonable) hour of 8a.m.

 

Updates, excitement, and justifying laziness

Posted on by under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “I finally fixed my description for Joshua’s Nightmares, I have big writing news, and figured out a way to explain some of the laziness in my writing that makes sense.”

Over the course of the past month or so, I’ve written over fifty-thousand new words in my first draft of Joshua’s Nightmares. That’s a NaNoWriMo’s worth of words. Almost a metric shit-ton, or perhaps more than a metric- shit-ton (I honestly don’t know how to properly quantify that much, but I know it’s a lot). It’s been an extraordinary adventure, and I still have a fair bit to go before it’s over. Again, I want to apologize to, as well as thank, all of the people who have to endure me talking at great lengths about this project. I almost apologized to my journal a couple nights ago because I keep writing about writing this, and that’s when I realized I need to calm down and just enjoy every little bit of the writing process as this idea gradually grows into its end stages. It’s the longest piece of writing I’ve ever worked on, and it’s the most excited I’ve been to work on anything in quite some time (since before Thesis Seminar at Edinboro, which was certainly a thing that happened). It’s fifteen pages shy of hitting the 200 page mark, and that seems pretty amazing to me. Continue reading →

Reimagining the Bogeyman

Posted on by under Joshua's Nightmare Updates

Or “How I unintentionally transformed a villain whose sole purpose was to act as a plot device to something I think turned out pretty cool.”

Sometimes, and by sometimes I mean more often than I probably should, I create characters out of need to move the plot forward. Don’t give me that side-eyes look, now, because I’m sure it’s not an even remotely uncommon practice. I’m also, after a bit of fun personal experience, certain it can result in some pretty fun ideas. Continue reading →