Tag: Writing About Writing

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It’s a Foundation

This post’s music is Watsky’s x infinity. The album is an interesting combination of high-powered flows and introspective reflection. They’re powerful words that acknowledge self-doubt and then reminds us of our worth. The album has a special place in my head because of where I was in life when it showed up. I had lost a dear friend and fellow writer in late 2016, and Watsky’s poetry helped ease that burden on my heart and head. These days, the album acts as a sort of rejuvenator to my writing. Unlike other music that inspires specific types of stories, x infinity is of a neutral energy. It sparks me to create, to build, to get pumped up for the work ahead. It makes me remember the past, and the promise to keep going I made to that dear departed friend.

So here we go kicking it forward.

Welcome to March.

Charlie’s been running through my head all month. She’s been rough with me, rarely telling me where she needs to go, and it makes me want to go back and rename the February post to “A Promising Foundation” as that is what the month was. I’ve realized I needed a larger cast than I expected with the story, but they’ve been blossoming into existence rather easily. January’s Hand of Void helped a lot with putting my head into the right place for creating within the Phased universe.

We’re a month out since HoV went live and that means I’m almost to the time to start writing the next short story. We’re awaiting the final tally from the patrons on which setting the April short story will be in and as of this posting there are still three days left before the poll closes. Want to help influence that vote? Join the Patreon at any level and you’ll be able to start reading and influencing what short stories come out going forward.

Speaking of the short stories, I’ve put into place the format that those will go out in the future. Every even story will be put to a vote of a number of settings, and then the odds will be a new story of my choosing. This will help make sure I get to the shorts I’d like to tell while also focusing heavily on the specific entries the patrons want to see grown.

With March we’ll be looking at the finished outline and then working on the April short story. Once that is knocked out, we’ll turn our sights back to Epicus and push through the second novel. I don’t want to give a deadline at this time as that’ll depend both on the progress through April’s short as well as the final steps towards the outline. Keep tabs on the weekly Patreon posts for more details on how we are progressing.

I met a number of interesting folks throughout February on Twitch. We spent a great deal of time with other streamers and trying to improve my knowledge and skills with community growth. As a direct result of that, nine new people have started following the channel, and we’re inching closer to that affiliate goal post.

March is looking to a be busy month in terms of keeping up with titles. The 10th sees the next season of Destiny 2 going live, Season of the Worthy. After last season’s push towards the title, I’m really looking forward to my second full season. Last month saw 5.2 go live for Final Fantasy XIV, and some time later this month more 5.2 content is going live. We’re still pushing against the next tier of the Eden raid, and have had some pretty nice successes two weeks in. Warframe is hinting at new content coming with Operation Scarlet Spear, and I’m eager to get back in there and experience the team work that was promised with Railjack. Monster Hunter World is also seeing new content coming along on PC, with two new monsters and a new region. Further, April will see PC becoming officially synced with consoles, so we can expect more fun in the New World. That’s, what? 4 MMO/MMO-ish games we’re trying to keep up with? Oh, and we’re also doing Space Engineers stuff, because why not? What a time.

Speaking of the Eden raids, the title image for this post includes the preview of Dinner First’s 5.2 desktop image. Rewinding a bit, February saw the first full month of Patreon weekly updates and that included some unique previews including the image above. But, here’s the full image now publicly available:

And that ties it all together. March is now locked in with more streaming progress and writing goals. Stay tuned for more Patreon posts, and public announcements via Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch.

Otherwise, see you in April.

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A Promising Month

I sit down to write this with the sound of cool synths and drum machines on loop in my headphones. Something about listening to retrowave, chillwave, synthwave, whatever-wave feels like the future. A grungy, wonderous future perceived by so much cheesy 80’s sci-fi flicks and imaginative cyberpunk novels. Loud hair, neon lies, and the hopeful grasp of the underdog.

A retro future so bright, you gotta wear shades.

It’s the head space I’m entering as I think about the next project. Rusty ships sailing between worlds, capitalistic stellar empires, strange mental powers, space whales, and a menagerie of diverse aliens dotting the cosmos. Culture drives their worlds, and influence and style are all at the core of what makes Phased and the new novel’s setting thrive.

We spent January neck deep in that universe. On the 19th we released our first Patreon Early Access Short Story, Phased: Hand of Void. This short represents the quarterly fiction projects I’m bringing to people who sign up for the Patreon, and I’m excited to see the growth the story has caused. April will see the next story show up, but the plan is to start voting on that piece later this month. I’m curious if readers will be hungry for more from Phased, Manta, or seek out other settings I’m interested in playing in.

HoV kept us busy through January, fulfilling our promise of getting a new short story out. Yet working on the short wasn’t a one-time jaunt into that universe. It was meant to be a kickstart, a flavor test, a change to expand the range of the writer’s bible and help that galaxy come to life both for readers and for myself. It was an exploration to prep me for working on Epicus and help accelerate the progress on the next novel. And accelerate it has. During the last week of January, we reclaimed many of the various outline documents for the novel, the light drafts we had put into place, and have begun indexing and merging them into a single unified document. Charlie has a lot of work going for her, but I know her story better now. Soon, so shall you.

Speaking of knowing more, I spent time in January going over plans for expanding how much information I’m sharing and how I’m sharing it. Weekly updates are going up on Patreon every Friday. While the monthly blog post is meant to be a digest of the entire month’s cycle, the Friday updates are meant to serve as a richer experience. More exacting numbers, direct screen shots and minor spoilers of how things are going. It’s an accountability exercise for myself while keeping readers and viewers in the loop. The same can be said for the Patch Notes page that now appears here on the site, both are tools meant to provide accountability to people interested in my works and want to know their payments are being invested wisely. It’s something I like seeing from those I invest it, so it’s more than reasonable to expect others to want the same from me. Future plans for communication include a newsletter that should be launching next week. The newsletter will also be monthly, but will be less narrative and more bullet point. Essentially between the blog, newsletter, and Patreon posts, readers and viewers can decide how much or how little information they want to know about my projects.

We had a good month on the Twitch side of things. Views are up, we’ve attracted some lovely people who are coming about regularly, and we’re now officially at 3/5th of the follower minimum we need on our march towards affiliate. While officially we’re only streaming Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, we’ve started to add more days (Friday and Sunday), which has helped expand that capture net for collecting new viewers. Streams are now regularly at least 4 hours long, and I’ve started to put together a plan for what games the channel will start to focus on over the coming year. On the back end of things, I learned a bit about Adobe After Effects and made a thing. It’s the first of many features I’ll be adding to the stream as I learn more about that program, and understand how OBS’s and Stream Elements’ notification work. I look forward to seeing how the stream will look six months from now.

February holds so much potential after such a powerful January. This week will see the completion of the new outline and production begin on the first draft of Epicus. The rest of the month will include a lot of pushing forward to have the novel sitting at least 50k words deep like NaNoWriMo was rearing its head in the shortest month. Twitch streaming will officially expand to fit the new days, with Tuesday and Thursday being my official “off” days. I can’t say for sure if we’ll hit affiliate in the coming month, but we’re going to keep at it. The new raid content coming later this month for FFXIV will help with that, but the steady hand we’ve been keeping since October has been our greatest asset for growth. The newsletter will go live, and more effects will enter our Twitch stream. New pixel art variants of the Dinner First crowd will appear once I know who everyone is going to be, so keep an eye out for that. I’d also like to do more pixel art in the coming month, but don’t hold me to that. It’s the long plan, not the priority.

That’s it, our February update. I’m looking forward to sharing more over the next few weeks via the Patreon posts. Putting together the newsletter later this week will be a fun exercise, and you can expect updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch for when that goes live. I’m especially looking forward to seeing how the novel goes during it’s first few days of production.

Blog Image Source: Pixabay on pexels.com

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January in Retrospec

It took me quite some time to get used to writing out 2010, and let’s not even talk about the complications of the 19 to 20 conversion ten years prior. Here we are on the dawn of a decade, getting ready to break muscle memory and set our sights forward to a new era.

At least, that’s what we culturally tell ourselves. That these sets of ten we’ve assigned in the concept of recording the time our rock successfully orbits that big ball of plasma herald new periods on our society’s existence. But change is never quite that fast, is it? As if great change comes with the coin flip of the new year. Changes to culture comes as a patient hunter, a slow-moving glacier that grinds against our sense of identity and self.

This isn’t to say we can’t use these moments to mark milestones in our lives, our cultures, to take a step back and look at where we stand and see what direction we’re going. Our years, our seasons, our months mark the rhythm of our lives. Bills, the phases of our moon, pay checks, biological cycles, how long it’s been since we took care of that bedroom closet and making yet another plan to clean that sucker out; we mark ourselves by these spokes on the wheel, and the year and decade changes are a wider view of those patterns.

So, as has become my tradition, I mark the start of these months with an introspective view of the month in review. With it being January, the herald of the new year, we are tempted to look back at the year and see where we’ve come and gone. And with it being a year ending in that lovely null zero, we fulfill the promise of the greater spiral and look at where the years have brought us.

Let’s talk about here first. A decade ago, we weren’t here. Originally The Hiddennode was my blog, and until 2014 I kept my thoughts, updates and public writing on that site. In 2012 I started using The Hiddennode as a podcast/audio journal and once the written blog fell out of favor, the podcast took over. During my reconstruction phase in 2016, the blog officially moved over to J Samuel Diehl and we’ve intermediately used it as our update/journaling site. Since then we’ve created fifty-three posts offering updates to my writing, podcasting, and creative efforts.

Speaking of writing, the decade saw the greatest two milestones of my writing career to date: In 2013 for the first time I finished a novel, and in 2018 I published my first novel. That first novel, still unpublished, was a challenge to my hand wriggling, start a new project every three months, and never get things done mindset. Writing about Rebin, his challenges, and his growth, was a wonderful experience and let me know I could manage that dream. 2018 saw the publishing of Draco Artifactium: Doppelganger, and let me present the world with my ideas of dreaming worlds. It let me explore Micara’s fight, present shades of grey in a world of good and evil, and to envision some rather dark dragons. Five years was a long time between novels, but it was growth. The next one won’t have such wide spacing.

Podcasting, as a part of my life, rose and fell over the span. I started out as a fan going back to 2007, and stepped into the world of podcasting at the start of the decade. Hiddennode, Five Things We Like, Five Sentence Fiction, and Trans-dimensional Café were all projects I started, and have mostly sunsetted. Hiddengrid became mine during those years, and after three wonderful seasons of The Sixth World Chronicles, it was set to rest. I’m still a cohost on Seize the GM, but that seems to be my last consistent bastion of being a podcaster. Instead, I find my sights set on video and streaming. I don’t have as large of an audience yet as I did with Hiddengrid, but there has been growth since the middle of 2019. Even as a listener, podcasting’s presence has dropped heavily from my life and I find live streams and VOD’s as my choice of entertainment. This came from a change in lifestyle, but I’ve gone from listening to twenty to forty hours’ worth of podcasting a week to maybe less than a dozen in a month. The two are likely tied to one another.

While my health has shifted much in the years of my late twenties and through my thirties, no greater change of health came than in 2017, when I lost useful bioptic vision. The second retina detachment took me by surprise in the summer, and by the start of 2018 I knew I had permeant irreparable vision damage. Now I see the world with a shroud of darkness and blur in that eye. But all is not lost. I still have a “good” eye, and with it I am more appreciative of the beauty I see.

I’ve had family come see me in those years. I’ve become closer to my brothers and talk to them near nightly as we game together. I have plans to stream with one of them this coming month.

I’ve been to lovely Asheville, and fell in love with the place my wife dreams of living.

I’ve been to conventions big and small, and have become closer to my tribe of nerdiness.

I’ve found strength in the serenity of knowing who I am in my gender identity.

I’m the most me I’ve been, a me I never dreamed I could be ten years ago.

The 20’s, these new 20’s, do not come with the promise of ease. It comes with the promise of a fight. It comes with a promise of new dangers; social, political, technological. There’s been dark times this past decade; struggles, fights, losses, and hurts. New terrors are visible on the horizon, and perhaps more shadows ahead. But shadow comes with light, and with it comes the chance to grow and temper ourselves.

To strengthen myself.

To know myself.

Ten years have gone behind me.

I look forward to the challenge of the ten to come.

.

.

.

Shit, wasn’t I supposed to review the year?

Uhm, *checks notes*

*paper shuffling sounds*

*deep sigh*

Yeah, I think we sort of did that up there, didn’t we? Kind of covered the highlights worth mentioning. Guess we move onto the month.

It is January, and thus the start of a new month. The two big projects currently underway are the short story for Patreon, chugging along, and the streaming. The rest of December’s works took collateral damage in the holiday season. Teaches me a lesson about promises in the holiday season and I know to prep December’s offering earlier in the year. Other projects mentioned last month had work done but not to the degree I’d hoped.

The core of the month is going to be a schedule. I’ve done well with keeping to it for the streaming, but now I need to make sure to stay on top of other projects. It’s not done yet but as I develop it, I will hold myself to posting about it. Let’s say the 20th. Mark the day. That gives me two weeks to develop and get it written up for sharing.

That sounds right.

Alright, back to work on the short.

Want more? Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. If you’re really looking to help out, check out the Patreon for earlier news and updates.

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Status Update

I started today with a strange dilemma. My work day typically begins with loading up a stable of programs I use in relation to writing or editing the current novel project. Word for the core writing content, Scrivener for compiling, OneNote for my world building Wiki, Excel for a few of the math world building factors. It takes a few moments to get them all situated and where I like them on my displays, but in the past two years of work I’ve become adapt at getting started. Today, however, I’m having to pause because the routine is broken. You see, that novel is currently done.

I started the novel (Let’s just call it code name DAD for now) years ago, when I started braining storming a setting had started high fantasy but moved into a cyberpunk timeline. It wasn’t a copy of our own world, but many of the events that happened in our world would funhouse-mirror inside of Manta, just with the added factor of elves, orcs, dwarves, and elemental deities being a factor in world events. The threads of the story are almost a decade old, but the story of Micara, and her struggles in the city-state of New Castle were born back in 2014. By 2015, we had already created the first part of the book, part 2 came along in 2016, and March 2017 was the day the book was finished. A year came and went, and several surgeries later I was able to get back on task in March of 2018 to start the first full edit. Finally, after more than 4 years of writing, editing, world building, and podcasting, the book’s first edit draft came to fruition on July 2, 2018.

Is the book done yet? No. No, it’s currently at the editors, getting reviewed, poked, prodded, and overall ripped down and apart. I’m trying to not think about that too much because I’ve been in that book for so long. It’s hard for me to not want to think of the book as precious, but I have to distance myself from it. There will be more books in the future and I’m sure this will become an easier practice, but it’s the first one. That is special in its own right.

What next, then? Well this is a status update for July, let’s see what we’ve accomplished in the last month compared to our goals from May.

June Review

  • Writing – We accomplished the most important task here; finish the novel edits. Everything else was tertiary to that task. We didn’t do much here in the blog, nor over on Hiddennode, but that’s fine. Now’s the time between big project moments to get rolling with that.
  • Streaming – This has gone… poorly. I’m just not getting the population I want in here, and we’re coming up on our three-month deadline. It disappoints me, but I’m determined to not be broken by that disappointment. I’ve got a few new single player games I’m going to running with this week. Let’s see how they do (see below for details).
  • Podcasting – Hiddennode went the way of the blog. That’s okay. We’ll be picking it up soon. Hiddengrid/Codex podcast… That’s a long story, but one that I need to address in another post. I had ideas that didn’t work. That doesn’t mean I’m stopping.
  • Overall – We accomplished the most important task, but we slacked heavily in everything else. July is the chance to bring that forward. So let’s set some goals!

Writing

Focus: Short Story development

  • Bloggy activity
  • Short-Story-a-thon
  • Novel Concept

These three goals are meant to dominate my July. The blog content is meant to be the lifeline to my works to the rest of the world, or to sound more poetic “All roads lead through the blog.” The second goal focuses on the creation of short stories meant to sustain myself between the novels. While the novels are my flag ships, the shorts are meant to be teasers of content, tastes of my world, writing style, and way of thinking. I’m only supposed to write one per month, but hey if I can create a couple of them, I won’t be upset. Finally, I need to decide what to work on for the next novel. August is intended to be the month we outline and start book two. By the end of July I need to know what that concept will be.

Important links:

https://www.patreon.com/jsamueldiehl – sneak peeks, weekly updates, and more.

https://twitter.com/jsamueldiehl – Announcements and thoughts.

Streaming

Focus: Get on Schedule

  • Back to work
  • New Games
  • Schedule in place

The biggest problem with Streaming lately is I don’t keep to my schedule. That’s a flaw on my part I’m correcting this week. I’ll put out a post later this week with the new schedule listed. I’ve got several dozen games sitting in my Steam Library that I haven’t streamed yet, and keeping to my schedule will help me get through these. That’s really our goal for the month. The achievements I spoke about in May aren’t as important as just getting on schedule.

Important links:

https://www.twitch.tv/nulloperations – The official stream

https://twitter.com/nulloperations – Stream announcements and schedule changes

Podcasting

Focus: Hiddennode activity

  • The weekly audio -or- video log. We’re doing both on occasion.
  • StGM is going strong
  • New RPG content is delayed

June was a rough month for podcasting. July will have our Hiddennode return, but Codex and Hiddengrid needs some serious rethought. I’m iffy about those these days. I’ll have a workshop post later this month.

Important links:

http://www.hiddengrid.com/ – the podcast that was

http://www.hiddennode.com/ – the podcast that is

http://codexpodcast.com/ – the podcast that will be

https://www.patreon.com/hiddengrid/ – change is coming to this

July Goals

  • Short Stories
  • Weekly episodes of Hiddennode
  • Streaming Schedule
  • Weekly blog posts here
  • Weekly updates on both patreons

There’s a lot of good that happened in June, but we slacked here and there. July is about catching those issues and bring them back to the forefront. I’m not too panicked about those slips though because they took a back seat to the important editing project. That’s our flagship, and so it’s vital to be make the call to slice those off if they’re in the way. The flagship is currently docked through August and September, so it’s time for the skiffs to dot the lake.

I’m not sure where that metaphor is going. Boats I guess?

Okay, off to work. Have a great July and we’ll be back soon.

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Status Update

Let’s say it’s early May 2017. My wife is recovering from her hip replacement nicely, I’m still taking care of her but she’s getting stronger every day. I’m in between projects at the time, the plans being put on hold while I perform the important duties of household caretaker during her healing. One night, as I’m indulging in the grind for video game supremacy (really it was just trying to max level all jobs in Final Fantasy XIV before the Stormblood expansion drops), half of my left side vision drops. It’s like a curtain falling before my face and a cold fear fills my gut. I know what this is. I’ve seen this before.

It’s a retina detachment.

I debate what to do. Trish is recovering, but she still needs my help. If I go down for surgery I won’t be able to help her move about or take care of things around the house. I’ll be useless as caretaker and instead need a separate caretaker of my own. I’m quiet for the first few hours, but in the end I reveal my fears to her in the morning. She insists I go to my eye doctor. I relent, I go, but the doctor declares it’s just likely map dot fingerprint dystrophy. Nothing to be concerned about. Schedule an appointment with a retinalogist for next Friday and we’re good.

Cool. Nothing to worry about despite my vision darkening over the weekend. Nothing to worry about except that growing fear in my gut. I see the eye doctor at the specialist. Trish comes with me. She’s there when the gut punch come.

It is a retina detachment. No mistake this time.

There’s complications, issues with getting the surgery planned (What doctor can’t do surgery at a hospital?), and delays. I don’t have my surgery until early June.

The eye does not do well.

I’m out of sorts over the next year. Fear of loss of sight, the depression that sparked, my muddled mind between recovering from the anesthesia and pain meds after the surgery; it all adds up to a mess of creative garbage.

October comes, I have another surgery.

January comes, I have another surgery.

My vision isn’t restored. The eye isn’t dead, but it’s not working right. Daylight, bright lights, anything beyond a dimly lit room is rough for it. I wear a patch these days. Things are spinning.

But March comes. March brings with it desires for creativity. I start editing the book again, I start wanting to play role-playing games again, I want to do more than what I’ve been doing in the quagmire that’s been the past year, and I’m doing more. I’m doing this.

So after almost two years it’s time for a status report. The last one was July 2016, but it’s never too late to start back up. Because we’re starting back up we need to develop what we’re going to make the status report. I want this to be something valuable to me as well as followers of my content, so we’re going to start each report with a blotter on a given a section then thoughts on that section. Afterwards we’ll have a round up of what’s to come in the next month. Consider this our June 2018 update.

Writing

Focus: Editing Novel for publication

  • 61,515/136,966 words edited
  • We’ve completed part 1 of 3, and part 2 is editing smoothly
  • The blog is now relaunching

March saw us start the editing of DA:D, and the first third of the book held us up in April. We’re going to be doubling down in the coming days as I’d like to see part 2 finished by the beginning of June and have part 3 ready for Alpha Reading/Editing by no later than mid-month/the 15th. Once that happens we’ll pass this along to a few interested parties and then get started immediately with another novel. I’m still debating if I want to work on the TA.M. stuff or if I want to work on the J Samuel Diehl content. We’ll see.

Important links:

https://www.patreon.com/jsamueldiehl – sneak peeks, weekly updates, and more.

https://twitter.com/jsamueldiehl – Announcements and thoughts.

Steaming

Focus: Reaching Twitch Affiliate

  • Completed 2 of 4 needed achievements.
  • Completed 2 of 3 needed achievements for partner.

In early May we began streaming. This week marks our fourth week at the project, but it’s been slow going. I’m looking to expand my advertising of the stream over the next few days to try and draw people in. I also want to look into joining a community that might be able to assist with getting me into a group of active streamers. Admittedly this might mean pulling away from some of the normal folks I game with to get this occupation rolling.

Important links:

https://www.twitch.tv/nulloperations – The official stream

https://twitter.com/nulloperations – Stream announcements and schedule changes

Podcasting

Focus: Hiddennode reboot, StGM assistance, Starting the new RPG project

  • Hiddennode has been silent since November.
  • Seize the GM has reached a nice biweekly schedule
  • The New RPG podcast announcement is coming in a few minutes

We’ve been out of podcasting really since March of last year when Trish went into surgery. While we did some NaNoWriMo and Dog Days of Podcasting work, we couldn’t find the focus we needed to complete those projects. The Seize the GM work I’ve participated in is helping me to get back into the grove and the software I’m using for streaming will help me get recordings out the door quicker.

Important links:

http://www.hiddengrid.com/ – the podcast that was

http://www.hiddennode.com/ – the podcast that is

http://codexpodcast.com/ – the podcast that will be

https://www.patreon.com/hiddengrid/ – change is coming to this

http://www.seizethegm.com/ – Affiliated show, great RPG discussions. My voice returns in June/July

June Goals

  • Complete editing of Da:D
  • Weekly episodes of Hiddennode
  • Weekly episodes of Codex Podcast
  • Develop and stick to Streaming Schedule
  • Weekly blog posts here
  • Weekly updates on both patreons

The next six weeks are about getting on schedule. I’m cleaning up my language too going forward. I notice while writing these I say we, we’re, etc. I use a plural for myself when I should just say I, me, mine. I’m also taking out words like trying, going, or other “maybe” statements. The lack of definitive statements gives my mind the chance to “cheat” goals. I’ve built myself an out. So that’s two new June goals.

  • Stop using passive “maybe” language
  • Use definitive self-identifiers in my statements

I’m set to have a strong showing in June with these goals. With that the June Status Report is good to go. I hope you’ve stuck around long enough to read this, and if you have please leave me a comment. Feedback is something I’ve sought but haven’t asked for a ton. This time, I really mean it. Let me know if I’m reaching anyone out there. Let me know if my textual voice is carrying. I want to succeed, and I need your help to do it.

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The Beginning of the First Drafts

In early 2012 I finished my first novel. The working project name was the Key Worlds, and I think of it as a pretty solid story in the way I like to stage my three-act tales. I learned a lot about how I outline, how I write, and how I revise when I’m stuck from that book and three years it took me to write it. Six years, two months later, I’ve completed my second First draft novels and I’ve learned more about my process and what it takes for me to finish a story. This time I’m looking to do more than finishing a first draft. This time around I’m looking to get this sucker cleaned up, edited, and published. I’m about to make a number of mistakes, newbie flubs, and other screw ups I’ll have to fix on the back end, but I’m excited about it. So, excited that I want to share exactly what my plans are for the coming weeks. In Mile Markers, I talked about what some of those steps will be. I’m hesitant to give a time table for these events as I explain them but I will anyway just to give myself a bite of accountability.

Let’s talk laying a foundation first. Before I’m willing to let the book be edited or sent to anyone else to be read, I need to make sure the story is where I want it to be. Think of this as a skeleton. Do all the bones make sense? Can the creature even hold itself up? Can it walk? Run? I’ve got to make sure the base foundation for the story makes sense and that there’s not too many vestigial bones. A few of those are fine, as they can help lead to other stories, but there shouldn’t be too many that the story feels bogged down from them. That means step one is reading the book as is and seeing that these issues are handled. It’ll require some rewriting and cleaning but that comes later. First, we’re just identifying what goes where. Time table for this is to be done by the time this post goes live. I’ll add a comment to let you know if I knocked it out of the park.

Muscle comes next. The snappy strength that helps those parts move. Flavor and style of writing basically. Scanning what I have of the book and with previous micro-revisions, I know I’m solid with much of my exposition. When my narrator talks about the intricacies of New Castle, she presents a solid world that’s a character unto itself. I’m already pleased with those, and it means my fine motor control muscles in the story are strong. What’s lacking is some of the snap; the fighting, the conflict, the sex. I get too into the expansion stage with some of those scenes, and my narrator spends too much time explaining versus snapping into action and getting the fight done. Combat needs to be fast, dirty, and over. Guns end fights fast, and real fist fights aren’t delicate. They’re brutal, and she’s not Sherlock sitting there explaining the math of what’s happening to the combatant’s bones as she is twisting his arm off. Forgot the dissertation. Just hear the pop and scream. Fixing these scenes will come with the second draft. As I’m identifying where the bones need to go I’ll string the muscles along the joints and tendons to make sure the creature moves as a smooth jogging pace. The time table to conclude this step is early May. For fun, we’ll say the 1st for now.

Now can that creature sing? One of the things I noticed with the first draft was the inconsistency with voices for some of the characters, and that’s an issue I’ll be addressing after the second draft is set. This dialogue pass will have me go through the revised novel and make sure each character sounds like who she or he is meant to. I’m not suggesting the way a character speaks can’t be adjusted but I want the slang of someone born in New Castle to be true, versus someone who travelled a lot as a kid, or someone whose first language isn’t Central Speak. It will also give me a chance to work on dialogue for those other parts of the world and to find ways to make the world’s culture stand out more. I don’t expect the dialogue patch to take too long, so I’ll give myself a week. Due date will be on the 8th.

After that it’s grammar and flow checks, and for those we’ll outsource. I’ve got an editor lined up and several people eager for the first read through of the story. Here’s where I pimp things out a bit. If you’d like to be one of these alpha readers, jump over to my Patreon. While not the only way to become an alpha reader, you’re guaranteed a spot if you jump in even at the starter level.

Okay, that’s it for now. Time to get to work.