Tag Archives: planning

Nearly NaNoWriMo, and More

Posted on by under Misadventures in Non-Fiction

It’s almost October? No, no. I distinctly remember August just ending yesterday or so. Right?

It’s almost October.

Oh. Oh no.

I posted a poll on Twitter asking which of a few ideas I’ve had rattling around in my brain for a while should be used for NaNoWriMo. All three were stories I have a special place for in my heart (and in numerous notes across numerous notebooks).

A Princess, A Lich, and Some Murders won, and while I’m excited I’m also a bit terrified. I haven’t worked on that story in several years, and this is a near-total reboot. Keeping the core concept, more or less, but revamping a lot of it with knowledge acquired from years of more writing, developing an understanding of the community, and so on. It’s a story I’m looking forward to writing.

The flip-side of this? This isn’t a story I just want to charge into without planning it out first. I’ve got my Kickstarter Edition of the Page One notebook ready to go for this…as soon as I start putting thoughts to pages.

Which brings me back to the fact that it’s already nearly October. Which means November, and NaNoWriMo, are practically here.

October should also be interesting for the serials. I’ve gotten into a relatively decent, somewhat bordering-onto-nearly-late schedule of rotating through the four stories. They’re terrific fun for me to share, and it seems like people enjoy them which is really just an added bonus.

The bad news? There is no real bad news just yet.

The good news? The plan right now is to write ahead in October so I have November’s installments lined up. The most work I’ll have to do is manually sharing on Facebook. Unless I make a Fan Page for my writing, which is something I’ve actively avoided for a while now because that requires a level of ego or confidence that I absolutely lack.

So November will be pre-written in October, but before then I also have a bit of Halloween spookiness in store for these stories. Tricks AND treats, folks. It’s going to be fun. Hopefully.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping busy and trying to stay sane through the continued horrors spewed forth from the Hellmaw that is 2020. Hope you’re all surviving, and perhaps even thriving, despite all of the excitement that 2020 has provided.

On Notebooks: Breathing Life into the Pages

Posted on by under Misadventures in Non-Fiction

I’ve absolutely got a problem, and that problem is I love buying notebooks. Pocket-sized notebooks. Large notebooks. Notebooks so big you can use them as makeshift tables. Plain or decorated. Notebooks of sorts.

Don’t even get me started on notebook brands. I’m a reformed Moleskine addict, though I still buy their products from time to time. Targeted ads call out to me, showcasing brands of notebooks I’d previously never heard of and immediately want to try out for myself.

Suffice it to say: I love notebooks, and my collection of various notebooks–many barely filled if used at all–is a testament to this. But what, I recently have wondered, is a notebook for without actually filling it with something? Is it not then just a rectangular footprint of space occupied by so much potential?

These are the thoughts that actually keep me up at night, when I am trying to drown out the world at large.

I have long treated notebooks like sacred objects, only worthy of the perfect notes to be entered into them. Once I commit to cataloguing one idea in a notebook I could not bring myself to shift gears and use it for other things. That would be blasphemy. Instead, I needed another notebook. Let’s not discuss the notebooks I didn’t even use as they were just too nice to deface and defile with thoughts made manifest by way of words in ink.

This past week included organizing, somewhat, a number of these notebooks as well as purchasing the second of three Legend of Zelda Moleskine notebooks. They have Limited Edition nonsense to them, and they are very nice, so naturally I was paralyzed initially as to what I’d use them for other than display purposes.

Over the course of a conversation with a friend on Facebook, it hit me. I had, as Smee once said, an apostrophe. An epiphany. Lightning did, in fact, strike the Notebook Center of my brain.

I would use the Zelda notebooks, all three once I finished the collection, to fully reboot and revamp the Roger & Silence trilogy, a name that makes little sense to many but was a labor of love that I want desperately to revisit. Three very snazzy book ideas deserve three very snazzy looking notebooks, no?

As writers, I think we romanticize notebooks too much. They become these sacred objects instead of empty vessels to be filled with ideas and stories, characters and far-off places poured freely from our hearts and imaginations. They are treated as perfect objects, not to be marred by the words that could easily be kept track of within those pages.

Use the notebooks. Free those thoughts and fill those pages. In doing so, those notebooks are given a soul and a story. One day they will, if nothing else, be a treasure to sift through and a source of warmth on difficult days.

Happy writing, folks.

News, Present and Future

Posted on by under Misadventures in Non-Fiction

Happy nearly-Friday, everyone! Unless it’s already Friday when you read this, in which case Happy Friday! Or if it’s another day or if you’re a time-traveler, in which case I invite you to stop making things so difficult for me. What should’ve been a simple greeting became something far more convoluted because of you. Especially you damn time-travelers.

With that out of the way, some news about Misadventures In Fiction and my current projects!

If you’ve been keeping up with this page at all lately, you’ll have noticed I’ve settled into a regular rotation of posts – Fantasy Fridays and Sci-Fi Saturdays. I have two serialized stories for each, which I’m alternating (Fantasy Fridays switches between A Puzzling, New World and Wanted Adventurers, while Sci-Fi Saturdays consists of Warpt Factor‘s triumphant return and Follow The Ashes). It’s been a wild ride keeping up with those self-imposed deadlines, but I love the stories I’m writing and they’ve gotten quite a bit of love especially in these dreary times. I have each of them outlined quite a bit ahead, and so thankfully there shouldn’t be a hiccup for some time.

I say for some time because time is a strange, broken construct in 2020, and before we know it November will be here (and here I am speaking such a time-leap into existence). I made the mistake of suggesting I may participate in NaNoWriMo this year and my wife, Steff, has thrown all of her support behind that very bad idea*. To balance my sanity and not burn myself out, I’m deciding well enough ahead of time that I will be on a hiatus from all other stories during that time. Sure, I may jot down some ideas here and there, but I don’t think it would be wise. Additionally, a wise friend from Twitter (Nisha) suggested such a hiatus and she’s one to juggle projects with ease while knowing a writer’s limits. So great minds think alike, but also if I don’t heed her advise she might kill me in a short story. Which isn’t a bad thing, really? I don’t know, I lost my train of thought since it’s very nearly midnight and I work in the morning.

*NaNoWriMo eats me alive each time I participate, but that’s partially because I let it and I’m too hard on myself for not meeting the word count each day. Yes, I’m finally admitting to those things.

Now, as you’re reading this you may also notice something else different. There aren’t ads currently! Huzzah, yeah? I opted to take advantage of WordPress’s sale and so the domain name is mine until next July now and I also have an ad-free site. Sure, it could use work in other areas, but this feels like a step in the right direction for someone who often…neglects his site entirely.

At any rate, those are the serials I’m working on, but there are short story ideas ready to get drafted so hopefully I can share good news about those in the semi-distant future.

For now? Take care, stay safe, wear your damn masks when going out, and be sure to pause and find magic in the world when you can. It’s still out there, still brilliant, and available to any who seek it. Until next time, fellow Misadventurers!

This Week In Goals: Week One Recap

Posted on by under Misadventures in Non-Fiction

One week into the new year, and one week of goals tackled. It’d be easy to say I did great or poorly, but I’m stepping back as far as I can and trying to assess my progress this year in terms of efforts made versus efforts that could have been made.

Similarly, I’m also trying to give myself distance from my goals because I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a third Hundred Days of Blogging, but almost immediately realized that is a horrible idea that will only end in misery and sleep deprivation. Lord knows I need less of both of those things.

Continue reading →

New Year, New U(niverse)

Posted on by under Misadventures in Non-Fiction

Same bad puns. Honestly, it sounded better in my head than it reads in the header, but I also originally planned to write it as “You(niverse)”…until that looked dumb, also. So here we are.

Happy New Year to you all, since it is now late enough that everyone has crossed the arbitrary boundary between 2017 and the three weeks of incorrectly writing 2017 on things. I’m sure I will be among those people. I hope you all had a lovely night and didn’t wake up with hangovers today, or if you did wake up feeling hungover I hope it didn’t linger too long. Like many, many, many other people, I am using the new year as a means of setting goals for myself in an effort to talk less and do more. I still refuse to call them New Year’s Resolutions, as the moment that label touches something it transforms into an impossible goal for most people. Continue reading →

Finding balance in work and play

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

Today was a suitable counter-balance to yesterday, I think. I cut the grass at my new apartment, moved a good deal of things in (though there are still many box-loads to go, I’m afraid), and decorated a little. It certainly was no day of playing World of Warcraft and relaxing in my current home, but not every day can be like that (I mean, they could but I would end up very unemployed, very fat, and quite unhappy, among other things), and so the work was both a necessary evil and a nice change of pace.

However, as far as daily balances of work and play (or leisure or whatever) go, I am not particularly good at finding such a nice equilibrium. Some days are very work-oriented, with me accomplishing a great deal of productive tasks. By nighttime on those days, I am tired but I feel fulfilled. It’s all very positive, really, ignoring the exhaustion and that there are some such days I still feel like I fell short of where I should have been. There are other, very similar days, when I have shirked responsibility in favor of relaxing and recovering. Days filled with video games, movies, books, and so on. They don’t really serve a practical purpose, but they leave me feeling rejuvenated and prepared for the next day of hard work.

It’s very possible to make those two days into a daily thing. I realize this is all very “hey, that’s obvious” territory, but I excel at the obvious.

What I’m talking about in this case is a total revamp of my schedule as I know it. It’s probably going to be Hell for a while, but I think if I can pull it off that it will provide me with tremendous benefits. That’s what I’m going for here, by the way. A Phil who can find a daily balance of hard work and relaxation time in the face of working eight hours five days a week and trying to become a writer, all while pretending very well at being a responsible adult. A lot of this will revolve around me making a number of relatively large changes over however long it takes, and I imagine it will involve a great deal of swearing along the way. Continue reading →

The good, the bad, and the ugly of down-time

Posted on by under General Writing-Related Posts, Misadventures in Fiction, Misadventures in Non-Fiction, One Hundred Days of Blogging

Well-known fact: I have poor time-management skills for someone who works a 40+ hour a week job but also wants to become a relatively well-known writer. Or maybe it’s a little-known fact for some of you, in which case I’ll take a moment and appreciate my good fortune that not all of my readers readily identify me as a terrible, lazy slacker.

Let me ruin that for you. I came home from my first day back at work and napped, off and on, for about two hours. My body doesn’t always appreciate naps, but it seemed like a particularly necessary evil tonight for some reason. Probably because not being at work for eleven days and then returning after a day of furniture shopping makes for a rather tired person who can’t stop thinking “I need a vacation”. During my vacation, which had been filled with plans of creative time while Jason worked and potentially drunken shenanigans while we hung out, I accomplished far less than I had hoped to during my plotting of said vacation. My world-building for the still-unnamed novel project found some good points here and there, and a couple characters were really fleshed out more than I could have hoped. However, this was not nearly what I envisioned myself getting done.

I’m only somewhat okay with calling this more of a success than a failure, if only because failure seems to indicate there was absolutely no movement towards my goals (which included writing multiple short stories, sending them off for consideration, and accomplishing a great deal towards the page count of the previously mentioned novel project). I can’t, even in my magnificent self-loathing, call last week a complete failure, anyway.  Continue reading →

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Forty-One

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

This is my two-hundredth post on this WordPress. Let’s ignore that I took several month-long hiatuses, and that my posting is spotty at best, and focus on how awesome this sort of milestone is. The only major disappointment I have is that this isn’t also day forty-two of my One Hundred Days of Blogging. Oh well. I’ll just have to celebrate like a hitchhiker traveling the galaxy in tomorrow’s post.

Now I could very easily talk numbers about Misadventures In Fiction, but that would be a pretty short and sad post. And it would interfere with my vacation prep week posts. Can’t very well let that happen. Mostly because my viewing figures are actually on the same level as some reality TV shows, and that’s a little soul-deadening.

Quick update to the intro before I continue (I have methods to my madness and I don’t like deviating from them) – Apparently, as part of the contract I won through Cary Press, I’ll be having a book release party? So that’s mind-blowingly exciting stuff. I have no idea how to react right now other than “Oh wow, holy shit”. Probably the appropriate reaction, right? More details on this, and Joshua Harkin and the Wicked Nightmare King‘s release, as possible. So exciting! Continue reading →

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Thirty-Eightish

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

My focus is more on the little red notebook, and still slightly directed towards the oh-shit possibility of a bat getting in. Again. More importantly, I feel I should bow out from last night’s topic idea, if only because I don’t think I could handle it in a way that would read well. The short version, simply put, is there is nothing wrong with seeking help. Life will take you on magnificent journeys, but sometimes you may end up in dark places. Those are the times seeking outside aid shows true strength.

I’m happy to report I’ve added a good bit of detail to my new unnamed novel project, which has its own notebook…and is the newish topic of tonight’s post. Continue reading →

One Hundred Days of Blogging – Day Twenty-Seven

Posted on by under One Hundred Days of Blogging

My laptop returned home today, and the actual problems were far worse than initially thought. Instead of my graphics card being dead, it was apparently a bad motherboard and hard drive disk. The BestBuy employee asked if I had an unexpected power outage or something, but it was just my laptop very suddenly and violently shitting the bed. Yikes.

Thanatos has been renamed Wheatley because 1) it better fits the Portal and Portal 2 themed names I have for my Surface 2 (Aperture Surface) and my desktop (GLADESKTOP) and 2) it’s a more fitting name given how derp my laptop has been so soon. I’m not looking forward to resurrecting all of the files from my external hard drive, and I’m fairly certain I lost a couple short stories and other projects forever. Like my forever-backburnered first episode of the Misadventures in Podcasting podcast.

As a quick aside: it’s very difficult to type when a small kitten keeps hopping onto the couch and dancing across my laptop keyboard. She wandered back into the living room just as I was typing that and did it again. Precious little bundle of mischief.

Anyway, time to get moving on this. I’ve got my standard Monday headache, like clockwork. Continue reading →