Life Stuff
It's the most chaotic tiiiime of the YEEEEEAAAARRRRR!!!!!!
No joke, these fall months (September/October/November) have been absolutely bonkers! I'll admit I was kind of hoping that perhaps after the first month or so things would settle down and kids would fall back into the rhythm of expectations and routines and things would calm down... but that doesn't seem to be the case. I don't know if it's the fact that all throughout those three months there were kids in just about every grade level who were absent at one time or another, and so every time they've been gone and they come back, it's starting over from square-one as far as routines and expectations go; or the fact that every month has brought new and drastic changes, from starting the school year at a staffing deficit, to starting small groups which meant we were switching classrooms every half hour, to adding on a Pre-K classroom (requiring some reorganization for the class that was originally using that room) a month into the year, and so on and so forth--there are still several kids that haven't "gotten the memo", as it were, and continue this pattern of misbehavior that makes it stressful for those of us who have to be on high alert to make sure that the misbehaving kiddo doesn't hurt other kids, while also trying to be available for other kids who invariably need help... and, yeah. It's definitely feeling pretty unstable at this point... here's looking forward to the new year and seeing what progress we can make then!
Unfortunately, all this chaos in my working hours leaves me creatively and mentally too drained to write most days... So these last few months have been not as productive as my summer was, but oh well! I've got a pretty good trajectory for other things, so bring it on, 2022!!
Unfortunately, all this chaos in my working hours leaves me creatively and mentally too drained to write most days... So these last few months have been not as productive as my summer was, but oh well! I've got a pretty good trajectory for other things, so bring it on, 2022!!
Words Written:
September--25,783
October--27,250
November--35,105
September--25,783
October--27,250
November--35,105
Books Read: 37/40* (Note: I read the final 3 books for my 40-book reading goal in December!)
Writing
Fugitive Of Crossway
That just means that I'm going to spend the winter figuring out what parts of the story are truly necessary, and whittling things down enough for a second draft, to try and get it all pulled together by spring, so I can see where I'm at! I already have a plan for the first chapter that actually shortens what I originally wrote by a couple pages, at least--or so it seems. I think if I can do that for each chapter, we'll be in much better shape by the time I actually write out the second draft!
Anyway, once I was done with the main draft, I moved on to the short stories. I successfully re-plotted both of them, and got the first one done. For now, "Unlucky Urcellus" has been re-titled "The Curse of Urcellus Marin", and "Yet You are Young" has become "The Mermaid's Fate." (Fun fact: did you know that "Urcellus" is actually a masculinized twist on the name "Ursula"? But nobody outside this blog is gonna know...) I had reasonable success with "The Curse of Urcellus Marin", rewriting it to focus on the story more (as I mentioned in my last updates post) and also including some details and references that I had only just come up with while writing the first draft. Although it isn't necessarily detailed in the main narrative itself, there are some quips and cracks that different characters make throughout his brief involvement in Simon's story that I felt should be described more and actually portrayed in this story--the fact that the Marin family tended to be rather unscrupulous in their pursuit of success, the process that resulted in Urcellus choosing to willfully ignore the customary fishing boundaries, and what happened to him and all his credibility because of it...
The fun thing I realized when I started writing "The Fate of The Mermaid", too, is that it really did happen just after King Theodore banished the fairies from accessing Overcliff, since it was decided that they brought the plague that decimated the kingdom's population--so I'm able to include that as a reference in the story. The troubling part is that elsewhere in Princess of Undersea, I also mention that trade with the Mermaids had ceased long before that... Inconsistency, much? But maybe I can use this story as a clarifying explanation as to why all that happened the way it did, so that it just looks more like I meant to say it the way I did, instead of it being an innocent slip-up like it probably was at first... That's the beauty of being the writer, though, isn't it? As long as I can figure out a decent explanation, it doesn't have to be written off as a mistake!
That being said, I do think that focusing on building a story rather than throwing in as many alliterative words as possible works so much better!
Meanwhile, I won't say too much just now because I'm saving up the news for my plans of 2022 for the NINTH birthday post of this blog (nine years already, how is that even possible??) but I will say that it's shaping up to be a great year!
Blog Serial: Fairies Under Glass
All I can say is that the momentum lasted me about a week. I did fairly well, not quite getting up to the daily word count sometimes, but finding ways to eke out a few more words here and there, and confident that by the weekends, I would be able to make up the difference...
I was so wrong. After that first week, my creativity took a hard nosedive, and I struggled to keep up with everything for the rest of the month, battling some days when I didn't even write at all! Most of that I think was due to a lot of work fatigue that set in over November. Like, September was a bit chaotic, and October a little more so--but a lot of things started happening one right after the other in November, and that culminated into me being too drained and too busy during my off-work hours to do very much writing, if any at all. Long story short, I "failed" for the first time since 2013, really, and only managed to get just over 35 thousand words by the time November ended. (And, quite frankly, I've spent the whole of December just making up for everything I didn't write during November, so it's been a quiet month...)
But all that is to say, I didn't start posting Fairies Under Glass right away because I didn't have it all together far enough in advance, so it's coming in January!
But all that is to say, I didn't start posting Fairies Under Glass right away because I didn't have it all together far enough in advance, so it's coming in January!
I will say, I've done a fair bit of changes to it that seem to be working quite well. I'm stuck naming the main character "Casey", but I've given him a few friends that he hangs out with, just because I'd painted him as such a lonely character in the first draft... and that is only because at the time, I distinctly remember that I didn't really know how to balance character dynamics! I have a better handle on it now, so here we go!
The one thing that I'm still not sure about is whether it should be in first person or third person. I originally wrote it in first person, but I thought that for the serial, just to change things up, I'd switch to a third-person limited-omniscient, the way I'd written Priscilla Sum--but something about that isn't sitting quite right. Unfortunately, now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised to realize that this might be one of the things that was holding me up so much over the course of November--the downside of third-person means it's a bit harder to get into the characters' "headspace"!
At the same time, to go back now and switch everything to first-person, only to decide to switch back later when first-person doesn't fix the problems I'm having... Yeah, that's the biggest reason you haven't seen this serial yet!
Wattpad
It came to my attention in December that I hadn't touched my Wattpad stories since August, when I was really getting into writing the "Clan of Outcasts" serial and the thick of trying to finish Fugitive of Crossway, in spite of the fact that a lot of my most popular stories are still getting comments and adds and upvotes--still is pretty awesome! But it inspired me to get back to updating my stories again, so Priscilla Sum is on there, and I've started posting Season 3 of Clan of Outcasts as well, to... not much fanfare. But it is what it is, and it brings my total number of works on there to a nice round forty, so there we go.
Reading
And now we come to a more encouraging part of this post!
I checked out a few books from the library at the beginning of October, fully intending to read them... and then as time went on, I didn't manage to read them... and then it came time that I ran out of renewals, but I still hadn't read them... I finally finished them by the beginning of December, so I am no longer in trouble with the library lending services!
Anyway, in four months I managed to finish four indie books--three of them were ebooks, and one paperback! It started with Petra by Cheri Lasota--a very steamy Italian vampire romance novel by a local author. Those who know me know I'm not very often in the mood for anything overly smutty--but I will say that Lasota at least kept things outside the sexual scenes interesting enough, and generated plenty of sympathy for her characters that I didn't mind it so much! From there I moved on to The Night Alphabet by David M. Donachie, a book that I'd won in a giveaway a few years ago that had been sitting on my queue for a while--and wouldn't you know, it turned out to be a bunch of short stories in an A-to-Z Challenge style, similar to what I've done before! By this time, I realized that I was just moments away from my 150th Reader's Review. Not the 150th title, of course... I've had double- and triple-features when the books are short. But that distinctive spot I reserved specifically for You're Not A Real Goth Until You Sack Rome by Katherine Perkins and Jeffrey Cook. Cook is an author from the north end of my state, and he's been a huge support in my author networking endeavors, as well as a brilliant author whose books I've loved--unfortunately, he passed away before I'd even read the book, but at least Perkins got to receive my review! Most recently I finished Spirit's Lullaby by J. E. Mueller, a signed copy I'd had since many years ago that I finally got around to reading--and wouldn't you know, that was the 40th book I've read this year, so with the end of that one, I also achieved my reading challenge goal for 2021! You can follow the hyperlinked text on each of those titles to read the full reviews.
I'm currently reading Pendragon by D. J. MacHale at last, and also I couldn't resist cracking open one of the books I got for my birthday: Archenemies, the second book in Marissa Meyer's Renegades trilogy. I'll admit it took me a while to get into Pendragon, because I didn't quite understand what was going on at the very beginning, but I'm definitely in the "rising action" now, and things are moving quite quickly!
So there you have it, the last update of 2021--and as we close out the year, I'm looking forward to 2022, and I hope you are too! Next time I post, it will be the Upstream Writer's NINTH anniversary! Stay tuned! And as ever...
Catch You Further Upstream!
