Upstream Updates 2020: August

Life Stuff

Whew! This has got to be the craziest year on record... and I lived through the Y2K scare, and the 2012 Faux-pocalypse--at least all of those times, the world went crazy for about two months, maybe three, tops--and quieted down pretty quickly.
But this? It's my seventh year as a public school paraeducator and I was never this uneasy, even as a substitute! At least I knew that once the school year started, I was definitely going to have jobs to pick up! This is something else. Extra training due to racial and social unrest, extra training due to new regulations for physical contact and sanitation... And absolutely zero preparation for what a wholesale overhaul on the entire system means for someone in my position. People keep asking me what I'm going to be doing when school starts next week, and I have no clue. Based on what went on when they closed schools three months early? Let's just say "Outlook not promising." In a normal school year, I'd be looking forward to spending an entire day before school starts finding out where my position is, what my schedule could look like, and familiarizing myself with the duties involved. At this point, I'm not even sure there is a position for me in this new model. The academic requirements still being held in place are just not feasible--teachers who have spent years perfecting their craft aren't even sure how to plan for even a month of this folderol!

The one thing that I count on to save my sanity is my ability to still write--and write a lot!

Monthly Stats:
Words written: 30K+
Books Read: 3/4

Writing

Princess of Undersea: The Cover Reveal!

Augh! I've been talking about this for a few months now, and it's finally here! Stay tuned... this new cover is going to show up everywhere! (At least, everywhere I've digitally inserted the original cover... unfortunately, I can't do much about the pictures of the "first edition"!) Friday, I started off the weekend by revealing the cover for the "second edition" of Princess of Undersea, and posted the "highlights version" from the two-hour takeover on the blog here. << Follow that hyperlinked text for the post, if you missed it! I had a whole lot of fun!

I've also got info on that post about the rest of the series that's happening--there are going to be four books, which more or less connect, and potentially involve some of the same characters. Since it's not really a linear plot--like there's no over-arching big event happening, it's basically encapsulated between the events of this first book, and the last one (which comes, timeline-wise, only a few years later)--it's not going to feel like you're just following the same group of characters along the plot... but still hopefully it's going to be a lot of fun for readers!

"Priscilla Sum"

It only took a couple weeks of really pushing myself to get on top of it, but we're finally on the way to the end!

The hardest part was building up the surrounding characters who were supposed to be the antagonists... so you wouldn't exactly know who they were at first. But also doing it without a whole lot of "story delay" time, because hello I have been working on this for like almost an entire year and I'm kind of done with it. (But also I hope that this kind of attitude does not leach through in my writing!) The five friends got away from the camp successfully, and they're on their way across the island to the hidden "inner temple" on the other side... I think I've sprinkled allusions to the climactic battle to come in enough. The tricky part is getting them through the obstacles of the inner temple without stalling out the story, making them detailed and interesting enough without derailing the plot entirely.
The most important thing you all should know is that I'm only going to post it on Saturdays till I have enough of the "Clan of Outcasts" series to start posting that regularly on Saturday. Once "Clan of Outcasts" starts, "Priscilla Sum" is moving to Fridays until it ends.

Coming Soon: "The Clan of Outcasts, Season 3"!

Speaking of "Clan of Outcasts", I've been madly working on a second (third-ish?) iteration of the installment outlines! The early seasons were easy to plot, because each installment that moved the story forward in the present always started with a flashback introducing a new character who would then have that part of the story told from their point of view. This one is a bit more tricky because yes, I have some new characters, but it's harder to work in where exactly their introductions are going to go, because they're not involved in the story all at once--I had gotten pretty far along in my first outline, but in the process of whipping through the exciting bits, I came to realize that it was a bit disorderly and a few important points got left off the beginning, so I decided to start over again and reorganize... Now I've got a couple plot lines going that I need to really work hard to advance and resolve them adequately... and all of this has got me thinking, "Jeez! How did it happen so perfectly the first time around???" Ah, the struggle of sequels!

The Last Inkweaver

Ever had that feeling that you start walking to go and get something... and then halfway there, you just forget what you were doing, but you can't stop, so you just keep walking around and around... until you remember your original destination, but now it's a ways behind you, so you have to walk all the way back to get there?
That's kind of how some of these scenes are turning out nowadays. I'm so excited to write it in a new way, with other motivations and additional details I missed the last time... and then as I'm writing and developing the characters, I think that I've hit a bunch of "checkpoints" in my outline... only to find out that I haven't, and I'm about a thousand words deep and getting deeper and I need to figure out how to stop this runaway train of words and get back to, you know, the plot, but now I'm worried that the scene has gone on too long and my readers are going to get tired halfway through, but it's so good that I don't want to fix it just yet...
Yeah, that's mainly the reason this is taking so long. Combining Tark and Ronni was definitely the right idea and it's working splendidly--but maybe that is to say it's working too well--I'm having so much fun honing in on this one aspect of the whole sequence that maybe I've extended the timeliness of the story (as in, stretched the minutes and hours it would usually take to fit this much talking in) too far, and I'll end up having to go back and re-do it yet again. Who knows??
At any rate, there's going to be a key moment at the end of this scene that will serve as a marvelous segue into the next scene, and at that point we're pretty close to the end, so yay!!

Wattpad

Adding to my stories on here has been going pretty slowly. I thought with all this "extra writing time" I'd be able to get around to the unfinished fanfictions I started posting... maybe even start a new one! But no dice. As the White Rabbit in Alice of Wonderland says, "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get." Since finishing Once Upon Love (A Modern Cyrano de Bergerac) and The "Return" of MacPherson (Warehouse 13 Fanfiction), I've been posting Red, The Wolf on there, and also I just started posting Poor Unfortunate Soul, the Once Upon A Time fanfiction that was basically the "sloppy copy" (as we call it in the educational field) destined to become the first draft of Princess of Undersea! You'll see a lot of similarities--I changed a little (kind of like the show writers were doing, at the beginning!), but the origins are definitely there!
The "Wattys" annual story-judging contest is still going on, and pretty much the only eligible story I had (requirements were "over 50,000 words" and "complete") was The Clan of Outcasts, so I submitted that... There's no telling whether it will be accepted, though. I haven't had a whole lot of feedback on it! Whereas fanfictions like PotterLock Down and Since We Found Serenity are still getting added to reading lists and votes and running commentary (my favorite!!), and even The Dragon's Mark is still getting votes! I'm not mad about that, at all!

Reading

I think I didn't really read a whole lot of books this month because I was so behind on my writing so frequently.
I only got through one ebook this month, and that was Broken Empire: Aftermath by E. A. Copen. I already knew I liked her urban fantasy, so it was fascinating to see her breaking out into the more "space-opera" vibes. The first part of the book is a whole lot of classic political machinations and intrigue and peril--very Isaac Asimov feel to it. Then the twist came, with the addition of a subplot involving some supernatural entities, and there was her signature style in grand form. She has an incredible knack for keeping her characters central to the story, so it's not like they have these grandiose settings and cataclysmic events happening all around them, and the people are just incidental or collateral--she writes in such a way that the reader is drawn into the lives of these characters--the good, the bad, and the morally grey--and you end up staunchly rooting for one or a few characters who might not be the "main character" but they support the protagonist in a lot of ways and you feel like they're just "good people."
In the realm of library checkouts, I've finished two of them: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness and Ghostly Echoes by William Ritter.
As far as Knife is concerned... "Heck, Heck, HECK!!" is what I say to Patrick Ness and his emotionally-charged writing. He puts you right into the narrator's head, like Jonathan Safran Froer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and the whole novel is just one big stream of consciousness after the other, blending all together, the over-scribbled "Noise" contrasting with the typical text, the constant use of misspellings (due to the character's lack of regulatory education) like "stayshun" and "destruckshun." I had to pretty much turn off my "English Major Brain" to read that, but I did because I was so hooked on the story that I couldn't bear to stop reading!
Echoes was a really fun and fascinating trip back into the world of Jackaby and his Victorian-era monster hunting. Beautiful and piercing, this one focuses on the bygone life of Jenny Cavanaugh, Abigail's getting to know her, and in the process, learning ever so slightly more about her employer, Jackaby himself. A prime mystery, a stellar resolution, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to read next: more "period urban fantasy" in the form of Throne of Jade, the second Temeraire novel by Naomi Novik, or contemporary urban fantasy with Blood Rites, the next Dresden Files book by Jim Butcher. Maybe I'll just have to do that thing I used to do all the time, where I read the first few chapters of a few different books, and then see which one I feel more compelled to read.
Meanwhile, I'm still plugging away at Hercule Poirot's Casebook by Agatha Christie. It helps, I think, that I'm also watching through the Poirot TV series (again? I don't remember how far I watched the first time around, and only every other episode is looking familiar to me) and a lot of those stories were made into episodes, so I can skip the ones I've seen.
The last book I'm going to talk about (that I haven't really "finished" because I'm still mining for information from it) is The INFJ Writer by Lauren Sapala. Between that one and The Anatomy of The Soul by Curt Thompson, I've been learning a ton about how the brain works, how different brains process information, and especially in the former, how specific personality traits (as defined in the Meyers-Briggs Types) affect the perspective and where a person gets their creative energy from, and the optimal environment for creative expression. Golly-gee! There's just something that feels really good when an "experienced person" (not necessarily an expert, but definitely more knowledgeable than average!) lays out these trends and traits they see in common with a certain group of people, and the realization kicks in: I'm NOT abnormal! There are other people who think like me! Somebody's actually gone and figured out how to fit someone like me into the "narrative" of life, and how they can be most effective for the world around them! The whole idea of "finding one's niche" has always been a deep-seated desire of mine, and so to finally know how to use my own psyche within those spaces is particularly liberating for me!

So that's where I'm at by the end of August! What a year this has been... I never anticipated it would turn out like this, that's certain! Now there's only four more months and we're out of 2020... Who knows where I'll be by then? But in the meantime--

Catch You Further Upstream!