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Even More Good News
This has been an absolutely wonderful week and I’m looking forward to many, many more as we enjoy an abundance of 🍂 Autumnal 🍂 and Holiday Season goodness.
⚕️😴I’ll Happily Sleep Through It 🛌💤
Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
So, we had a couple of procedures scheduled that I was absolutely dreading and then 🌈 a miracle happened! 🌤️
Kelly got a call from the eye doctor’s office and they can do the whole thing in the hospital under full anesthesia.
🎉 Huzzah! 🥳
Well, that’s a great relief because I was absolutely terrified of the notion of having to watch scalpels going into my eyes. Seriously, y’all, just no. Hell, to the no.
So, that’s one existential horror off my plate for this lifetime. Sure, I have to wait until February but I’m sure I would have been in the psych ward until at least April if I had to be awake for the process in November. I’ll give it a miss, thank you.
🍂 Autumn Ambience 🍂
♫ Cozy Autumn Coffee Shop Ambience ♫
♫ Relaxing Jazz Music & Rain sounds ♫
♫ for Sleep, Study, Focus, Wook ♫
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I used the same video on Wednesday but I’m still feelin’ the ambience.
I’ve been so busy getting my Datacor work done that I haven’t had much energy left to get back to writing my Holiday Season Serial Romance.
Hey, that’s what weekends are for, y’all. Like any good arch-procrastinator, I put these things off and get myself keyed up on being behind. Actually, what I need to do is handle this like it was a Nanowrimo challenge.
While all the folks who actually do NanoWriMo are busy with their Preptober activities, my schedule requires that I start in October.
Also, NaNoWriMo targets a 50,000 word novel as the target while the length of my Holiday Season Serial Romance is keyed to the number of days between Thanksgiving and Epiphany. This year, there are 43 days, of which 41 get episodes while Thanksgiving gets an Intro and Epiphany gets an Outro.
My Preptober must necessarily be condensed in order for me to reach my goal of being done by November 20th. That’s ambitious enough just writing the story, but I also have to format it in my typical serial style.
Each daily episode gets its own header image and whatever other doodads I’m inspired to include. For instance, if there’s a particular song mentioned in the episode I’ll typically link a YouTube video of it being performed.
Problem is, I still only have the most vague inkling of what I want the story to include. Obviously, sisters Holly and Ivy are central to the plot but I’m still unclear on what I’m going to have them do. But, hey, that’s what this weekend is for. Today and tomorrow are my Preptober.
🎭 Unrehearsed 🎭
All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. ~Sean O’Casey
Of course, even though I’ve been trying to turn over a new 🍂, it’s basically how I roll. I’m naturally a discovery writer (aka a pantser).
It’s the nature of my creative process. I delve into an imaginary world and observe the goings on as if I was watching a movie or watching some pivotal event in the multiverse like Uatu the Watcher from Marvel’s What If?. That’s my process.
This has been honed by years of solitary play growing up and DMing in high school and college. Making stuff up on the fly plays reasonably well to my imagination.
That’s great for randomly playing with action figures or running an RPG, but not so great for creating a piece of coherent fiction to be published for mass consumption. This is where I need to make the leap from impromptu story creation to fully structured story publishing.
My Holiday Season Serial Romances are all standalones, so I only need to concern myself with the beginning, middle and end of any given story. The Sentinels, on the other hand, are a long arc series involving the entire superhero team over a number of years. These require more planning in order to get the whole thing to make sense from end to end.
Foreshadowing, promise/progress/payoff and other aspects of long arc story structure are nearly impossible to develop if you’re just writing the thing in story-watching mode.
Sure, you can just lay that out in a first draft and retrofit the foreshadowing elements, but that still feels terribly unnatural to me. I’d prefer to know about these things ahead of time so that my story-watching process can incorporate them organically.
Yes, I imagine that seems weird to you but I believe that’s going to be the best way for me to get this series written. Maybe it’s more like plantsing than plotting or pantsing.
Whatever term you might like to apply to it, I’m working to get my mind into that particular lane. Hopefully, that will happen sooner rather than later. I’ve got books to publish and I’m not getting any younger.
That’s the end of a truly lovely week. I hope you had a wonderful week, too.