Author Journey (January 25, 2021)

The Otaku Author Journey January 25 2021

I’m still no closer to having a definitive plan for the future, but I did manage to get a bunch of work done, which may give me a better idea of how that plan, whatever it might be, will pan out. That’s right, I have no idea…

January 25, 2021

The main thing, I’m trying to work out is how to make time to fit in my writing and blogging. Ever since I took a full year off work to raise my son, I switched my focus to blogging as it was easier to do in short bursts. Since then, getting back into writing has been a struggle. Then NaNoWriMo came along again and I decided that I would do it. To give me the best chance to complete it, I worked double-time to get as many posts scheduled ahead of time. It worked. So, how could I keep making that work?

That was part of my thinking when I decided to revisit older shows. On one hand, I knew what I was getting into and wouldn’t be stuck with a less than impressive series that I would then be forced to continue… I’m looking at you Plunderer, Gibiate, and Shironeko. Nothing saps your energy more than feeling like you’re being forced to do something. Sure, I could have dropped those shows at any moment, but I’m a completionist and find it very hard to walk away, especially when I’ve already reviewed a couple of episodes.

The other reason for doing some older shows was that I could push ahead, and I’m seeing that work for me again. This last week, I’ve been able to watch and review three episodes a day. Since I’m covering four older shows, that means I’m able to push into the future and schedule my posts ahead of time. If I can keep that up for a little while, it’ll reduce the pressure on my time. On top of that, I started posting my reviews of the seasonal shows later. It can be anywhere from a couple of days to a week later.

Dr Stone Stone Wars Episode 1 Senku and Gen explain the plan to Chrome

I remember when I was originally covering Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and would be trying to get the review out the next day. It was a ton of pressure and took a lot of the fun out of the process. So for now, I’m going to continue like this, building up a schedule of posts for the future and keep on top of the seasonal shows, all be it a little later than most. Plus, there’s a chance that more people will have seen the episode I’m talking about. It’s a lot of effort to watch everything the second it’s released.

At the moment then, I have Harukana Receive, KonoSuba, Goblin Slayer, and Record of Grancrest War as my older shows, and if things keep up as they are right now with my schedule, I may do something similar once I’ve done these. In an ideal world, I would like to, there are so many shows that I think deserve a second watch and would provide lots to discuss.

Then, I have The Quintessential Quintuplets, The Promised Neverland, and Dr Stone from this season and all are single cour shows which makes it nice and easy too. I’ve got all of my Akame ga Kill posts scheduled so that’s awesome to finally have that series all done and ready to release. It’s one of my favourites and I was disappointed to have put my series of posts on hold while I struggled with the pandemic.

Goblin Slayer Episode 8 Priestess and Goblin Slayer

So, did I do any writing last week? No! I didn’t do any new writing, but I have got through a lot of editing for the Black Death trilogy. At the moment, I’m working on the timelines in the books and trying to order the chapters appropriately. For one of the threads, it will require a bit of a rewrite and some additional scenes, but I feel like I have got a good handle on the timings and I think it will be a much stronger book if I get this right.

At the moment, there are three books, each with about sixty chapters, so as you might imagine, there’s a lot to go through and everything I change will have a knock on effect throughout the rest of the book. Editing is a funny process because it is nothing like writing and writing is nothing like editing. Both use a very different set of skills and if you try to use the wrong one at the wrong time, it all goes horribly wrong.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I still don’t have a plan on exactly how I’m going to organize my time to ensure I hit my goals, but I’ve taken some big steps in the right direction, and I’ve done all this while maintaining the day job and helping my eldest son with his virtual schooling. No one said it was going to be easy, but I can’t help but think it’ll be worth it once it’s done!

Harukana Receive Episode 7 Akari exhausted


7 Comments

  1. From what i’ve read here is that you’re dividing your time and energy around multiple projects. I don’t think that’s a good idea if you want to finish a writing project. Writing novels, let alone series, demands all of your focus, time and creative energy. From one author to another, I recommend dropping some of your projects, I.E. the anime shows you watch and review. There will always be people who will do that job. Limit those to just one and write a few short stories to help get some footing. There’s a website called writing.com that you can join so you have someone review your work and probably get some ideas on how to improve. Good luck.

    • Thanks for your insight. I’ve certainly considered some of those things in the past too, however, and this is just my experience, short stories are fun to write but don’t do much else. I’ve built a good platform with an ever-increasing number of viewers by reviewing anime and manga. It also helps me to break down the tropes and elements that I like, so it’s not a wasted enterprise in that sense, because I am studying the story.

      With my goal to release my next book as a web-novel, this fits perfectly with the anime side of my branding. I don’t intend to pick one over the other, instead, I want to find a way to do both. Maybe, I need to slow down a little… I’m not entirely sure yet, but it’s something that’s always on my mind.

      My biggest problem of late has been the ever-changing demands on my time, which is mostly down to the COVID situation. I don’t see that changing for the time being, so my goal is to make the most of what time I have and finding a way to balance all of my creative endeavours.

      Ultimately, I am in a position where I can take my time to build the foundations so that when I’m ready to start releasing, I can do it the way I want to. Thanks again, for the tips.

  2. “At the moment, I’m working on the timelines in the books and trying to order the chapters appropriately.”

    Man, I’m glad to hear that! I’m only 24 chapters into the book I’m writing now, and already, I know I have few chronology problems — and that’s after laying out the plots ahead of time!

    Sequencing is hard without being obvious!

    DonP’s suggestion is the same one my wife gave me. The reason I can’t take it, is that my family situation is what prevents me from writing a novel more often. I can some short periods of time I can write during the week, but they aren’t long enough for novel writing. But they’re long enough for blog posts.

    I like posts like this one because it helps us talk shop and look at the issues we face from multiple perspectives.

    • Yeah, the timelines are even more interesting with three arcs all written by different people at different times. There’s some fun oddities that I need to iron out, but once it all comes together, I think it will be awesome.

      Sure, in an ideal world, I would just write novels, but then I wouldn’t have a platform or an audience. Not to mention all the benefits I get from analyzing anime and putting my thoughts down in a coherant manner.

      I also think that summarizing the show with a short tweet-like tagline is practice for coming up with blurbs and advertising copy. To me this isn’t just a hobby, but it has tangible benefits. Not to mention that I enjoy it.

      I find these posts are also helpful for me trying to get things straight with my own processes too. It helps to put it down and makes me think about what I’m doing on a more regular basis.

  3. I understand what both of you are saying. My only concern is quality. The reason I suggest writing short stories is not just for enjoyment, but to get an idea where you stand in your writing style. The worst experience for most authors is writing a full-length novel and the quality not being as good to someone else. Then you have to start all over again from square one. I had this experience with my first novel which I had to go back and rewrite the entire thing from beginning to end. This time, I posted each chapter on writing.com and was heavily critiqued on show vs telling, grammer, sentence structure, metaphors, ect and it improved my writing. There are some authors on this very website who built a large following just writing short stories. Fictionspawn is one of them and ill post a link to his website in the comment section. I want every aspiring author, including myself to succeed in this business. I respect both of your hard work and effort in the content you guys create. Good hunting fellas. https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/51583456

  4. I like a lot of the points people are adding here to this conversation, and honestly agree with them so I’ll try not throwing out too much other suggestions or something. But I wish you luck in managing your time and schedule! Of course, everythings up to you and how you want to go about it. If you need to take a break from projects or writing, no one will hold it against you! Ive taken way too many hiatuses from writing on here mainly because of college so I feel like I have to prioritize life over being an weeb most of the time, which sucks. Still glad to see youre still writing and doing your best!! Im glad a lot of us are here to encourage and support eachother as writers too!

    • Funny thing is I though that this weeks update was more hopeful than the last one where I was getting pretty frustrated. This last week felt like I was progressing well, even without a clear plan in place.

      Guess, I better check my tone… It’s definitely a bit of a balancing game, and there is a lot that I want to get to. The biggest hinderance has been the pandemic and how that’s changed all of our lives, so I can’t really get too annoyed about things, as I have no control over things like that.

      This week so far has been even better, although my router appears to have decided that my website needs to be blocked, so I’m having to hotspot off my phone to do any work while the internet people try to work out why??? There always seems to be something.

      Thanks for the advice. I have lots to think about, and having these weekly updates helps me to get things out of my head, where I can try to look at them differently.

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