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Hybrid Hygge Weekend

I’m diving joyfully into 🍂Autumn🍂 and a brand new “-ber” month. The cool air is giving me my second wind because I’ve got a lot of work to do before Monday morning.

🏈 Kicking Off October 🎃

Autumn’s the mellow time. ~William Allingham

In my attempt to stay cozy, I’ve decided to stretch the work week a bit.

There are things that absolutely need to get done so that I can establish some balance for the next batch of customers.

Add to that the fact that i absolutely must get started on this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance and my cozy weekend is actually pretty darned busy.

Oh well, somehow it’s actually more bearable in the 🍂Autumn🍂Chill🍂.

Actually, it’s right there in the term: 🍂Autumn🍂Chill🍂

I’m naturally more chilled out and things are, somehow, less stressful. To be honest, I’m not terribly focused lately.

Don’t know if that means I’m overdosing on cozy or if I’m on the edge of minor burnout from the extra nonsense I’ve been stressing over all 🌞Summer🔥.

Either way, I believe I can actually get caught up this weekend and set myself up for a successful 4th Quarter.

🤓 Phase 7 Nerd Joy 🤓

HUGE NEWS! The MCU X-Men Plan Sounds INCREDIBLE!

Looks like I’m not the only one with future plans. The MCU is spinning merrily along.

They’re building up to their next blockbuster saga that’s centered around the iconic Marvel villain, Kang the Conqueror.

We got a quick glimpse of one of his multiversal variants in the climax of Loki Season 1. He Who Remains was an example of the type of villain who is bored of being invincible.

The way he plays around with Loki and Sylvie (She-Loki), it’s clear that his command of time gives him a tactical and strategic advantage.

He explained that he had won a multiversal war against all of his variants (versions of himself from other timelines) and established the “Sacred Timeline” that the first season hinged upon. It was basically a fixed loop of time in which he knew every single detail.

He demonstrated this by having a big fat script on his desk. Loki would say something that he perceived to be original and spontaneous. He Who Remains simply paged through the stack of printed pages and handed him the script.

He knew everything about every moment of time until the climax of the season. The novelty of it had not only piqued his curiosity, but presented the first genuinely random thing to come along in ages.

As much as all the whiners are complaining about She-Hulk and the rest of Phase 4, I’m quite intrigued by the way they can weave this storyline together into a massive multiversal cataclysm.

Granted, they have plenty of source material to work from. Much like the stacked scripts of He Who Remains, stacks of comic books from decades of effort by teams of writers, editors and visual artists represent an amazing collaborative effort.

Likewise, the MCU is taking that rich source material and combining the efforts of screenwriters, directors, actors, choreographers, costume, set and prop designers, post-production editors and CGI technicians to create a spectacular collection of intricately interwoven stories.

You’d think I would learn something from that, but (for the time being) I’m doing my work more in the style of dear Professor Tolkien.

🗺️ Lost & Found 🕵️

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. ~Thomas Merton

Okay, at the risk of sounding immodest, doing it all myself is my base setting.

When I was little, I preferred to play by myself in my room. I found other people’s way of playing to be disruptive.

It wasn’t until I discovered role playing games that I found a way around this.

Even in my Dungeons & Dragons, Top Secret, Star Frontiers, Villains & Vigilantes and other RPGs phase, I continued solitary play in my own time in my own space.

I’m sure that sounds a bit juvenile but I was constructing stories. Eventually, I had typing classes in high school.

Certainly, I had been handwriting some stories but my handwriting is rather substandard. Definitely not fit for distribution.

Typing was a great alternative, but typewriters were noisy, brutal, unforgiving things. Didn’t take much to use up the correction ribbon.

Also, jacking up completely meant you had to pull the page and start over, typing everything you’d done correclty and continuing from there. Like my handwriting, this was pretty substandard.

A few years later, the PC revolution kicked in. Suddenly, I could write what I wanted, how I wanted.

I’ve often said that Cut & Paste is the greatest invention of the 20th Century.

No corrector tape. No back-typing over mistakes. You can pick up entire paragraphs and move them around the page.

Absolutely magical.

All along the way, more inventions have made the process so much easier.

Websites made it possible for me to produce or consume information.

Print on Demand services made it possible for me to self-publish my first three Holiday Season Serial Romance.

Virtual editing and formatting services let me polish my works.

Public domain graphics and free design software let me create post graphics and book covers.

I never imagined that any of this would be possible back when I was entertaining myself. Using my bed as a stage and my action figures as the actors and extras was meant for my own enjoyment.

Sure, I had a TV to watch and I did plenty of that, but my imagination overflowed more often than not.

I was compelled to construct complex scenes with massive casts of characters.

Everybody had a part to play. Extras are often seen as mobile props but in my imaginary productions, they had as much agency as the main characters.

That’s how life is.

We live in our own personal circles. We might interact with our immediate family or a close circle of friends, but the cashier at the minimarket, the guy passing you in traffic, the couple walking their dog through the neighborhood, the trash collectors who come around while you’re still in bed all have their own circles, too.

For me, those people are tangential. i don’t know their names. I might never see any of them ever again. I might see them occasionally, but have no idea what their names are or what kind of people they are.

The same is true for them. I’m some guy who’s part of their scenery as they go about their lives, interacting with their family and friends.

That’s the kind of rich tapestry I’d like to have in my series.

Sure, sometimes a barista is just a barista. Maybe she deserves her own novel. Probably she does. Not sure I’m the one to write it. There’s plenty of room on the shelf for other authors.

So, that’s a loose definition of the target.

Some writing experts might say it’s way too broad of a target, but that’s because I nutshelled it.

I’d like to tell intricately woven, believable, rich stories that people would enjoy reading.

I have a few milieux that I have created as a byproduct of my own imagination, my RPG experiences, my consumption of prose, movies and TV.

The Sentinelsverse is its own unique world for me to tell contemporary stories in. This is where my superheroes do what they do and my annual romances unfold at Christmastime.

I’m not much of a horror guy, but if I ever did something with monsters or supernatural entities, it would probably take place in this world as well. It’s my fictional “real world” where unreal things occur.

Olde Auringia is its own unique world for me to tell fantasy stories in. It started off as a D&D campaign world and may very well become one once I have it fleshed out a bit more. I have only the vaguest notion of what this high fantasy setting consists of. It’s still a work in progress.

What I do know is that it’s not going to be a long, continuous storyline like the Sentinels Saga. There will probably be a lot of stand-alones and trilogies. Some characters may appear in the stories of others and some will never meet despite their apparent proximity.

Far-Flung Reaches is its own unique setting for me to tell sci-fi stories in. Like the Tales, these will be a bunch of stand-alones and short series that are spread over vast expanses of space and time. Some may be set a century in the future somewhere in our Solar System and others may be thousands of years in the future on the far side of the galaxy. This is still pretty vague for me.

I’ve got some ideas of what I’d like to get around to writing but it’s not as pressing as The Sentinels and Tales Of Olde Auringia are for me at the moment.

Currently, the big drives are getting some things wrapped up for work and laying my plans for Merry 🔔 Bells.

How To Outline A Book Series