Author Journey (July 18, 2022)
It’s official! I am writing again. It was a crazy week with work and family-related events, but I got started on a new project. I have several unfinished ones that I’ll come back to, but I just needed a fresh start!
July 18, 2022
Hot Topic
I was busy last week with the usual month-end reporting schedule, but that wasn’t all. There were some… shall we call them teething issues with the help from family with the kids. It was pretty much a disaster with me having to juggle watching the kids and work for most of the week. Hopefully, this week won’t go that way. I really need a period of calm where nothing goes wrong. Is that too much to ask for?
Anyhow, regardless of the insane home situations, I managed to do some writing. On Monday, I did a brief outline of five chapters of a “new” project. I put new in quotations because that would be how Doctor Evil would do it. It’s an old project, but a completely new version. I’ll get to that in more detail later in this post. So sit tight!
What have I been watching/reading?
I didn’t watch or read much this week. I did manage a couple of episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood which has brought me even closer to the end. Reviewing this series has been like doing all of Fruits Basket back to back to back. I’m looking forward to finishing because I can focus my time on shorter shows again. It has been epic and I’m glad that I finally got around to watching it though, so I have no regrets on that front.
I have started collecting the issues for my next manga series once I’ve finished reading Sankarea: Undying Love. As is so often the case at the moment, it’s hard to find all the volumes and this series was no exception. It’s a ten-volume series and most are readily available. I did have to order volume six from England and grabbed the only copy of volume eight I can find. I’ll slowly gather the others over the summer and be ready to read in the winter. That series is Harukana Receive.
Anyhow, here’s a quick look at what I posted last week.
Episode ten of Peach Boy Riverside is the penultimate episode and is followed by episode nine. Regardless of the schedule, this was a great episode. If I’m being honest, I think it could have gone last, but they pretty much happen at the same time, so it’s not too big of an issue.
It was another great episode of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (wonder how many times I’ll say that with so many episode reviews still to post). This is definitely not a series you should watch weekly.
More Fire Force season two posts again this week and I think we’ll have this one wrapped up soon too. There were some cool fights and lots of crazy facial expressions and this is just the beginning of this arc.
This was the last of the Magical Girl Apocalypse books available at my library. There was no way I was going to wait for them to stock the final volume after reading this so I bought it. It’s the only book in the series that I own… for now!
I now have a completely new ecchi lineup. Exciting times. My Wife is the Student Council President! is the latest addition and it is crazy. The episodes are only eight minutes long so you should be able to fit them into your schedule if you want to watch along with me.
Work in Progress
Over the years, I’ve written a lot of stories. Just recently, I went through my hard drives and sorted them into a manageable setup. Now, that I’ve got my blogging under control for the rest of the year, I had planned on getting back to writing. Maybe even finish some of my existing projects. The week before last, I tried to get back into one of my existing stories. It is currently sitting at fifty-two thousand words and will likely end up around eighty thousand. However, I couldn’t get into it. I identified the issue and it required a pretty substantial rewrite.
The problem is my flow isn’t where it should be, so the thought of re-editing it again was daunting. So, I decided to put a pin in it and come back once I had rediscovered my writing mojo. I needed a project that was familiar but in need of a totally new approach. Luckily, I had one of those. It is my NaNoWriMo project from 2012. It’s old enough that only the most memorable moments will remain in my mind and I can’t find the original first draft. That means I can write it again from scratch without feeling like I’m not being productive. After the brief outline on Monday, I started writing Tuesday. I wrote a chapter a day until Friday and now have 4.3 thousand words.
The Plan
The plan is to continue writing and see where this one ends up. I’ve already got lots of ideas coming in for new scenes and ways to make old memories even better. I think I’m going to reduce it from four point of view characters to just three, and one of those is a much smaller part, so it’s really two. Ideally, I want to up the daily word count, especially as it’s harder to find time on the weekends. The first chapter took me most of the day, but each day after that was quicker.
I felt like I had a good rhythm with the chapter writing and catching up on some anime. If I’ve done my chapter, I can watch some more and push further into the future. There may come a point where I fill other days and times in my schedule as I don’t want to go too far into the future, but that day has not come… yet!
Posts
- Quarter One
- Author Journey – 13/13
- Historic Anime – 39/39
- Seasonal Anime – 36/36
- Ecchi Anime – 14/14
- Bonus Posts – 18/18
- Quarter Two
- Author Journey – 13/13
- Historic Anime – 39/39
- Ecchi Anime – 39/39
- Seasonal Anime – 3/3
- Bonus Posts – 1/1
- Quarter Three
- Author Journey – 3/13 (+1)
- Historic Anime – 39/39
- Fire Force S2 – 7/12 (+1)
- Ecchi Anime – 39/39
- Bonus Posts – 4/4
- Quarter Four
- Author Journey – 0/13
- Historic Anime – 29/39 (+1)
- Ecchi Anime – 38/39
- Bonus Posts – 4/6
So, yeah. I watched some more Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and completed the reviews for January 2023. That’s pretty insane. I currently have more than 150 scheduled posts and pages.
Writing
- MSR (Paranormal Harem Rom-com)
- Chapters – 0
- Words – 0
- Valiant Lineage (Epic Dark Fantasy)
- Chapters – 0
- Words – 0
- Black Death (Post Apocalyptic Shoujo AI)
- Chapters – 0
- Words – 0
- Asteroidea (Horror Science-fiction)
- Chapters – 0
- Words – 0
- Out of Time (Time-travel Murder Mystery)
- Chapters – 4 (+4)
- Words – 4,302 (+4,302)
It feels good to be able to update this section again. If I can get this going again, I’ll be able to breeze through the other rewrites, maybe even ignoring the original drafts entirely like I am with Out of Time. I think it could be a smoother process in the long run. In the past, I’ve found that over-editing can kill a project, because of the butterfly effect. Small changes have consequences, and then the snowball effect takes hold. It can get messy quickly.
Final Thoughts
Even with a ridiculously busy week, I managed to get things going once more. My goal is to keep it going and not stop until I have finished the first draft of the story. Momentum is so important to my approach that I can’t stop even for holidays and stuff, not that I do normally for the blog. After all, I wrote two posts on Christmas Day last year…
Anyhow, thanks for reading. It feels good to be back in the writing game.
