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National Puzzle Day 2025
If you’re looking forward to a lazy ❄️ Winter ❄️ Hump 🐫 Day, you’re in luck. Today is National Puzzle Day, so shake that box and assemble a work of art with your favorite person.
Every day is a 🧩
Every day is sort of a jigsaw puzzle. You have to make sure that you’re putting the most important things first. ~Julia Hartz
Haha, all the more so when you’ve got my kind of random cat brain.
Picking the priorities of any given day is as puzzling as trying to construct a 5000 or more piece jigsaw puzzle.
Even when I have a plan, an agenda, even a vague idea of what I might like to do, it pretty much comes to nope.
It’s been like that for a bit too long at this point.
I need to be able to grab the reins periodically and actually steer back to the realm of work / life balance.
The time for self-care is every day, but sometimes you have to just suck it up.
Suck it up, buttercup, has been the standing order for longer than can be justified.
February is a great time to force things back into balance.
Expert 🧩 Tips
10 Expert-Level Tips for Doing a Jigsaw Puzzle
Actually, I enjoy putting puzzles together, but I almost never take the time to do it. More’s the pity because it’s quite relaxing.
Of all the things I could be doing instead of working, writing, cooking, eating or sleeping, puzzles ought to be in the top 10.
I’ll never be a puzzle-holic, but it’s a wonderful change of pace when you’ve been busy, busy, busy for entirely too long.
Whether you’re the kind of person who breaks out the puzzle glue at the end of a puzzle or whether you dissemble it back into the box, puzzles are a marvelous, leisurely pastime.
🧩 Through It
I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it’s an abstract thing that’s felt differently for all the characters. ~Phil Klay
For me, writing is a puzzle to be solved. I am not a plotter in the traditional sense.
Some people break out their stories ahead of time in bullet point form. I couldn’t if I wanted to.
Sounds haphazard, but I’ve got 6 stories done in 6 years with a full-time job.
*Ouch*
Sorry, just a little pain from patting myself on the back there.
Nevertheless, I’ve finally found my groove. I start with a situation and puzzle my way through to the end.
That works particularly well for a genre with a set destination like holiday RomComs.
On the other hand, a series based on comic books is more of a challenge because comic books are inherently like Soap Operas.
They literally never end. Arcs may start and conclude, but Peter Parker has vacillated between high school kid and post-Grad young adult since before I was born.
Captain America has been fighting the good fight since ol’ Adolph was around to be socked on the jaw.
Superman, Captain Marvel/Shazam, Batman and Wonder Woman have been doing their thing since the waning days of the Great Depression.
These characters are as engaging as they were from day one.
Across the various “Ages” of comic books, lore has accumulated and the various writers and artists have given us iconic villains, epic storylines and more than a few failed experiments.
Early comic book publishers had to push their content out at a dizzying pace.
In some cases, genius was inspired by the pressure.
In other cases, people were simply throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck.
Catwoman as a memorable long-term nemesis, inspired. Batman in a pink suit, spaghetti that didn’t stick.
In any case, comic books are designed to never end. As such, one can commit an arc or collection of arcs to a prose series, but the whole story can never really be told in its entirety.
Star Wars has a beginning, a middle and an end. The rebellion opposes the empire. The empire opposes the rebellion. Somebody wins. End of story.
Harry Potter has a beginning, a middle and an end. Voldemort kills Harry’s parents. Harry learns to be a wizard so he can fight Voldemort. Somebody wins. End of story.
One would think that a series in a genre that is designed to never have an end would be inherently problematic.
Not so. The endlessness and the scatter factor are net benefits.
So, I have a set collection of arcs in mind, but some of those stories suggest others. Those other stories can be written as companion pieces in-world.
Some may find my choice of third person, omniscient not to their liking. Modern prose seems to revolve around first person or third close.
Phooey. It’s been done to death. Even so, I can envision character focus pieces done in either of those points of view.
If there are some fan favorites, you can count on stand-alones featuring those characters.
There’s room enough in the main series for such works that supplement or complement the primary narrative.
If you’re not as much of a fan of third person, omniscient as I am, the bad news is that my fantasy series, Tales Of Olde Auringia, will probably also be written in that point of view, too.
I’m not sure. It could vary from book to book.
It’s not going to be one enormous arc like The Sentinels.
This series is intended to be a 13 novel series covering a variety of arcs beginning with when the team gets their second chance at relevance through an interdimensional war to a new status quo. That’s a big piece of work to get through and it’s going to have that soap opera feeling that decades of comic books encompass.
The fantasy and sci-fi series will be less contiguous. I have an idea for a basic fulcrum in the fantasy series, not so for the sci-fi.
Both will have a consistent milieu, but stories will take place in various eras of those places.
I’ve got lots of ideas and decades of imagination to explore, so the future is looking exciting and I look forward to sharing that with you.
That’s all for today. Come back on Saturday for something totally worth waking up to.