These past two weeks have been a roller coaster… The day after my last post, my desktop computer began to malfunction and wouldn’t boot up correctly. It’s now under repair, and I’m back to my old laptop, which has been working well for itself, even if it still has some of the heating problems from the past. Thankfully, I can still get work done and progress on the book is still moving forward. I’m not entirely sure how much I’ll have done by my self imposed November 1st deadline, but over the next two weeks I’m going to get as much of it done as possible. The good news is that even if I haven’t been able to write much down about the plot, I keep up on more conceptual work, chief among them is working on making my characters more interesting. Other than that, there isn’t much left to say that isn’t obvious, the world is stressful and no one is really certain about what the next two weeks will actually bring.
Computer Trouble
I think it’s kind of funny that I mentioned in my last post that I was having wrist trouble, and the next day my desktop breaks down forcing me to take a break from work. So my wrist doesn’t actually hurt as much anymore, so I have that as a silver lining. The computer is currently in the shop right now and it will get repaired at no extra charge thanks to the warranty. What this tells me is that in the future I should split my time working on my tower and my laptop, since it looks like it doesn’t put as much stress on my wrist. I’ll be keeping this in mind even after my desktop comes back. Unfortunately there isn’t much more I can do about this, just wait for the repair to finish.
Character Work
One of the problems in my early writing is that several characters were too flat and lacked the depth I’d want from a story. It felt much more like names running around and doing things rather than actual people living their lives. The worst was the main character, Agra, who was pretty much just a vessel for the plot to move forward, most scenes with him were very boring. My only fear when working on a character is that I’ll just start inadvertently writing, “Look at this quirky character! Look how interesting they are!”
So I’m not doing that. Instead, I’m giving him more work for him to involve himself with. Without going into spoilers, I originally wanted Agra to join the Opposition, a group that arose in the aftermath of the Estrelin-Reyalen Civil War. This plot was far too slow, by the time Agra was in the group and doing cool things, no one would have read that far. So instead, he starts off in the Opposition from the start and has already done things prior to the story’s beginning. The two important things this does is that he already has an interest in the outcome of the world, and he’ll have secrets that he keeps from the rest of the cast. I hope this raises questions for readers as they try to understand who he is and what he wants in life, as opposed to going down the check list of cliches and quickly figuring out everything that this character is going to do.
Up Next
The November 1st deadline is fast approaching and whatever I have written is going to get sent out to beta readers for feedback. Afterwards, my next deadline will be in another two months on December 20th. That will be when the next big content drop goes out before I take a break for the holidays. Since November is NaNoWriMo, you can bet that I’m going to be putting out as much as humanly possible. If anything, it will be a distraction from the inevitable drama that is going to surround the election this year.
For the website, come November I’m going to be changing the home page so that it explains more about what the site is and what my current project is. This includes plans for starting work on the Celestial’s stories once again. No promises on that one though, my motivation is limited these past few days and I try to dedicate my energy all to writing my book.
In other news, I’ve been playing Endless Space 2 by Amplitude Studios. It’s a fun 4x game like Stellaris, and I would recommend it to anyone who are fans of the Civilization series. I’m also probably going to boot up Factorio again since I’m limited to games that can work on my laptop. But if that happens I might not be writing again for a few days…
Thanks for reading! Take care now, especially with these next few weeks coming up, I imagine they’re going to be a real drain on everyone.
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