October books: 2/5 (This Must Be the Place and Psych’s Guide to Crime Fighting for the Totally Unqualified)
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I finally finished the first drafts of my interconnected short stories! Freaking finally. Are any of them any good? Well, the one I ran by my critique group but who knows about the rest. That’s a problem for future!Kit. I also sent my older shorts out to markets for the first time in a few months and got my queries out as well.
Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.
So now we’re free to get going on the generation ship planning and writing!
I hope, by this time next week, to have my worldbuilding, outlining, and characterization planned out. Is that wishful thinking? Maybe! But I would hope not, because I have already done a lot of research and brainstorming, so it should mostly be organizing and finalizing things.
So wish me luck!
I hope if you’ve been working towards something, it all comes together for you too.
September Books: 3/5 (Star Shipped and Into the Drowning Deep)
Oops. Oh well. Except I’m in the middle of three nonfiction books and those always take longer to get through.
October Books: 0/5
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Where did September go? (Do you remember? The 21st night of September?) It was a month of such promise and now it’s gone.
(I did get my highest word count of the year, so not a loss. But gone too fast, RIP.)
Now October is here, and I love October! It’s my birthday month, it’s autumn (though we’re back in the 80s today, bleh), and it’s spooky season!
But I’m starting to feel overwhelmed again about how slow progress has been this year. I’ve been working on this short story project literally all year long, and it’s sitting at just under 20K. I’ve barely submitted anything anywhere, including queries. I joined this new community recently and we’re supposed to be writing now that it’s October, and I haven’t planned the generation ship story in detail because the shorts aren’t done.
(I am about halfway through this final story which, should, in theory, be the easiest, because I’ve written it before. It is not going easier.)
Add on to that that MileHiCon is at the end of the month and I am going to go this year, even though they’re still at the new, farther away location. But there is an element of imposter syndrome creeping in there. My last major release was Hallowed Hill, which came out in 2022. Even Deep and Blue is a few years old at this point. I was afraid, when Turtleduck Press went under, that it would negatively impact my output without deadlines, which has proven to be true, even though I know that Turtleduck Press had run its course and reached the end of its life.
But, I mean, there are people out there who write one novel and coast on that for the rest of their lives. And I am still writing, still learning, still trying. We’re just in a more stressful period of life, and we need to give ourselves grace. We’ll get back to where we were.
But the urge to compare, if you know what I mean.
Nothing to be done except to keep on trucking, however.
When I get overwhelmed I tend to shut down and procrastinate (as I think a lot of us probably do), and so I think I need to break everything down into tiny little steps and focus on one step at a time. And we’ll get there, just, perhaps, slower than one would hope.
What are you up to these days, squiders? What are you doing for fun?
September books: Still 1/5 (auuuuugh but close one at least one)
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This week has been…a lot. Yet October looms and while I’m on my last short story for my project (and have written more this month than any other month this year), it’s not done yet and I cannot start the in-depth planning on the generation ship story until it is.
I may be starting to stress out about the situation.
When I first started writing regularly, I did it pretty much anywhere. Laptop. Notebook. Napkins a few times (not recommended, easy to lose track of). I was writing around classes and tests and meetings, all of which were weird intervals of time from each other, and so I had to take what I could get.
After I graduated, my time was more structured. Work from 7-3. Certain nights to hang out with friends. Sometimes I did need to go hang out in labs for hours or weeks at a time, in which case the notebook writing occasionally resurfaced. I got SO much writing done in this period of my life.
And despite the fact that I know–that I teach!–that you have to write when and where you can, I’m beginning to suspect that I have trained myself out of the idea. Of course it’s easier when you can go to the coffee shop for two hours! But in weeks like this one, where there are conferences and meets and theater performances, we need to, and should, break out the less preferred methods.
That being said, I am definitely out of practice. And distractions exist that did not when I was in college. I stuck with my non-smart phone for ages, which helped with my naturally easily-distracted thought patterns. Now there’s always some app I can distract myself with.
But we either need to rebuild the habit, or we need to accept that some self-imposed deadlines might be missed.
(I’ve been practicing by handwriting these blog posts. Still a lot of front end with the pictures of the cards, but at least the thinking is pre-done.)
Any habits you have that you used to do one way and now do another?
Silly me is now in the middle of four books (one romance novel, one horror novel, one silly TV-show tie-in, and a mythology book from England). You would think I would learn.
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Hooray for plot! I also managed to find exactly enough more purple cards for this section.
Wed. night my spouse and I went to an alumni panel for our engineering fraternity. It was in the engineering building on campus, which is a sprawling, mazelike monstrosity. There’s a central eight-story tower and then it just radiates out from there. Our theory is that they just build more as necessary. (There was a whole new wing where there was definitely a wall and windows when I was there.)
Squiders, I lived in this building for four and a half years. I don’t know how other majors work, but as an engineering major, there were always classes, office hours, projects, meetings, study groups, etc., all just inconveniently spaced enough that it wasn’t worth it to go anywhere else. I had a key that would let me in any exterior door in the entire building. (I don’t remember why or where I got this key. Was it from my time in engineering student government? Was it because the fraternity had an office on the second floor? The details are lost to the haze of memory.) I used to shower in the secret bathroom in the first basement after crew practice, and I explored the building for fun. I made scavenger hunts for the fraternity (“Find the secret staircase between the 7th and 8th floors.” “Find the entrance to the catacombs in the second basement in the electrical engineering wing.”)
My point is that I was intimately familiar with this building. For years I explored every nook and cranny.
You see in fiction where someone goes back to someplace they knew and it all comes back to them. I call bullshit.
Now, to be fair, the engineering center was familiar. The hallways still look the same. The classrooms still look the same. The labs and the staircases and even the lobby for the most part (they moved the coffee shop).
But navigating? Hoo boy. I mean, as I said before, the building is a maze, added on to due to necessity and not forethought, and the numbering system for the classrooms is haphazard at best. There’s three dozen staircases and none of them are in the same place section to section or even floor to floor.
But to be in a building you knew so well, that looks similar and familiar (if you ignore the giant new wing that doesn’t match anything else), and have only a vague sense of where you are and where you’re supposed to be going…well.
Memory fades. Places change. You change.
Nothing is ever, truly, the same.
(Also, after I got home I realized that the kids we were talking to were mostly born after I graduated from college. In my head I’m eternally 28 so this always throws me for a loop.)
Had a place you revisited, squider? What was the experience like?
I got the card story outlined, but I did run out of purple cards with this iteration. I may have a plan moving forward.
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Hm, I’m out and about, and the glare on the pics is worse than I thought. Oh well!
Outlining the card story did set me back, though. When I actually got to sitting down and finalizing the outline, it didn’t take me too long (though I did need to do some very brief research on parallel universes in the middle of it), but adding it onto my to-do derailed my productivity for days.
Now, did I also add on some tasks for planning the generation ship story? Yes. Yes, I did. See, my brain was like, oh, well, if I can spend 15 minutes on outlining, then I can also spend 15 minutes on a couple of less intense generation ship things for my bingo card for my writing community.
And that was apparently too much for my poor brain, and nothing got done for three days until I finally sat down on Monday and did the outline (which took longer than 15 minutes. My brain is bad at time estimation).
I’ve re-centered at this point, but I am annoyed at myself about the time wasted. For most of my life, I’ve been able to work on multiple projects at the same time, but varying what steps each project is on (card story – outlining, short stories – drafting, generation ship – planning) and by working in discreet time periods (one writing session a day for each project). In general this has worked fine for me for decades, but does not always work and is not working right now.
Now, I have two options really. I can continue to put multiple writing-related things on my to-do list and hope my brain gets its act together, or I can hold off for now and focus on a single project and try again in a week or so. (Or, related to the latter option, I put a single option on my to-do list and if, and only if, that gets done and I have additional writing time, I work on something else. A secret goal, if you will, though sometimes my brain will count secret goals as normal goals and then the whole thing breaks down.)
The card story is outlined, and so it’s out of the normal purview at this point, and I have managed to get a few easier generation ship things done (set a daily writing goal, for example, and came up with a working title), but I really do need to focus on getting my short stories done before October so I can focus on writing the generation ship story at that point. But I also need to remind myself that if a writing challenge isn’t working on my time frame, it’s okay to not do it. Not ideal, what with having joined this new community, but no reason to cause myself undue stress.
What do you do when your projects aren’t getting done, or aren’t playing nice with each other, squider?
August Books: 6/6 (The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society and Murder at Teal’s Pond)
Success on the reading front! I won’t update my book list for the month ’til Thursday but maybe I’m caught back up to where I need to be.
As I mentioned last week, I’ve reached a point in the card story where I need to plan out until the end. So I’ve put all the cards in order, and have gone back through them and made myself notes of what’s happened/important plot points, and now the plan is to plot out the story to the end.
The current stack of story cards, plus Taig lurking in the background in angry mode.A portion of the outlining document.
I have a couple of different ideas for the rest of the story, but I need to write them down and see which is going to make the most sense (i.e., not be obvious and also be doable in the card format). Shouldn’t take too long, but I do need to sit down and see it through.
In other writing news, I finished another of my short stories for my project. Two more to go! Taking me much longer than expected, but such is life, I suppose. Not sure this most recent one is working as planned, but that’s what revision is for. I took my longest one to my critique group this past Sunday and they had mostly positive things to say about it, which makes me happy because I feel like that one really came together the way I wanted it to.
In other other writing news, I joined a new Discord writing community a few months back as all my other writing communities (ones focused on the actual writing–I do have a publishing community that is active) have more or less died, and while writing is a solo activity, having a community really helps for motivation and so forth. This community writes in cycles (plotting-writing-revising-break) and I came in at the end of the revising cycle. But September starts the next cycle and so I should get on it and make use of the community. I picked a bingo sheet and printed it off, and it makes sense to work on the generation ship story as that is my next planned novel project. HOWEVER I am a little concerned about getting into a ton of prep on that while still working on the shorts and outlining the card story. I may leave off on everything til halfway through the month and get everything else (hopefully) done first.
How are you doing, squider? I love autumn and am glad we’re getting closer, but it’s still in the high 80s/low 90s here which is RIDICULOUS.
I think the time has come to actually outline the card story to completion.
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I finished reading a book the other day (The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard) and got me thinking about genre tropes again. (A million years ago, in the early days of the blog, I did a Subgenre Series, where I looked at what made a subgenre that particular subgenre–focusing on speculative fiction subgenres, of course. Feel free to go look at those.)
I did one on time travel, which is a subgenre of the science fiction genre, but looking back at that particular entry now, fifteen years on, I can see that even back then it was irking me. When I was doing the Subgenre Series I kept finding that there weren’t really hard and fast rules on what made something a particular subgenre–tweak things a bit and you could argue for a different subgenre, or you’d find that one person would shelve a book one way and another would shelve it differently. (Take Science Fiction Western and Space Western, which are two different subgenres that look near identical on first glance.) Genre in general is very fluid and enough to make an analytical person want to tear their hair out.
But while genre tends to be fluid, there are some things that are Genre Root Beer. (Oh goodness I’m going to have to find the Root Beer Analogy. Nah, I’ll just write it out again.) When I was a kid, on the rare occasions I was at a restaurant with a self-serve soda machine, I would often mix different types of soda together, which generally created a weird, sweet but not unpleasant conglomeration of flavors. But the moment you added root beer into the mix, the whole thing tasted like root beer. Even if you only put in the tiniest amount.
Time travel is a genre root beer. You put time travel in a story, and it is science fiction. Which is kind of funny if you think about it, because time travel is not (currently) scientifically possible and is theorized to never be scientifically possible (aside from maybe things like wormholes or black holes or just good ol’ time dilation and…never mind, not important). But often time travel is just a plot device, and it feels like its inclusion should be more…up to interpretation.
(Hold on, I have to check what genre something is shelved as.)
(My point stands.)
Take The Other Valley for example. The premise of the book is that the world is set up in a series of identical valleys. The valley to the west is 20 years in the past, and the valley to the east is 20 years in the future (and the valley beyond that is 40 years, etc.). Each valley is the center of their own world, and travel is strictly regulated between the valleys, with precautions taken so travelers can’t interact with the citizens of the other valleys.
No devices. Nothing the characters are doing. This is just how the world is. Where is the science fiction in that?
(Now, if we want to be very pedantic–my favorite–we can talk about how science fiction doesn’t just focus on science but also on social projections, and arguably this world could have been built on the premise of “what if you could travel to the past/future just by walking to the next town over, and how would that society look.)
The book I went to check on was Outlander, which, if you are somehow not familiar through the general cultural zeitgeist, is the story of a WWII-era nurse who goes through a stone circle in the woods and finds herself in the…1700s(?) in the Scottish Highlands. (I made it through a third of the first book and have not seen the show, but my Scottish clan ancestry is Fraser of Lovat and so it is everywhere.) From my understanding, it is mostly historical romance, but when I checked it is still listed under science fiction even though the time travel is arguably magic and should be fantasy, and also is not important aside from the initial inciting incident.
Genre Root Beer is fascinating to me. But I guess this is just one of those things we shouldn’t think too hard about.
August Books: 3/6 (Giant Sequoias and Floating Hotel)
Sigh.
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Someone at work used one of my purple cards for something else, which is tragic. Also starting to run into the limitations of the medium, which was always going to be an issue.
I finished all possible research for the generation ship story, took lots of notes, and now I’m leaving it to percolate for a bit and have back to my Trilogy-related short stories, which are also going fairly well, despite my vague routine plan I talked about last week not working as well as one would hope.
The problem is not the routine itself, but that the routine is not happening due to non-routine things gumming up the works. We’ve had a full week of school, and in theory each day had three potential blocks of productivity.
Monday went fine. Proof of concept. I did have a meeting I forgot about in the middle of one session, but it wasn’t too disruptive. I still got everything planned done.
Tuesday I had to take the dog to the vet (just her semi-annual checkup) and had a meeting at the younger child’s school. Stuff got done, but it was a little fiddly.
Wednesday I took my mother to an appointment, the older child missed the bus home after school, and the spouse and I had a five-hour EDM concert.
They should not put EDM concerts on Wednesdays. We got home at 1:30am because we were not in a state to drive for a while.
Thursday was a mess because we’d partied too hard Wednesday night. I think I did my morning workout about 5:30pm.
Also at the Tuesday meeting I’d volunteered to help with my younger child’s cross country meet on Thursday. Thursday I was less happy with past!Kit but I went and volunteered. It was 95 degrees out and the kids had to run two miles.
Yesterday I in theory had my sessions but I was still a little tired from Wednesday, so I’d say…75% of things got done. There was a nap in there somewhere.
Now, of course, nothing is ever perfect. Your mother calls right as you hit a flow state and talks to you for 45 minutes. Your car needs new tires. You slept like crap the night before and need a nap.
All we can do is do our best and not beat ourselves up about it.
I will say that with the three days I worked on my story last week, it bumped August up to the third highest word count of the year. So it’s not all bad.
I did not, in fact, finish any more books in July, so now I’m behind schedule for the year. Yay.
Oh, squiders. I did these cards last week. I even did the pictures last week. Yet the jump from doing the cards to posting the blog continues to be a huge hurdle. Got to consider how we want to move forward. Move the card story to every other week? Shall have to ponder.
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I think we are definitely reaching the “we are procrastinating by researching” phase of the generation ship planning. I watched a two hour YouTube video. I read what a whipple shield is. These things are not important from a plot standpoint.
To be fair, part of the focus on the research aspect is because I haven’t had a lot of time to do much else. I can read an article here, watch 15 minutes there. But the kids started school today and so my hopes are that I will have more time to focus and can get back into more of a routine.
I have, in theory, three periods of time throughout the day in which to work. My plan is to use two of them for writing and the third for working out or for playing video games. Because, if you recall, I am trying to work through my backlog of Steam games. Did I buy more? Possibly.
And, assuming I can properly use my periods to get things done, I think I can add my art goal back in in the evenings.
That would be something.
But yes, we must move on from the ship. I need to consolidate my thoughts into a single place, outline, and then we can get going on that, though I do hope to finish my short stories before I get too far on that.
July books: Still 3/5 (but I foresee finishing a few here shortly)
Why is it so hot? auuuuugh
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I told you last week a little about my generation ship idea. Well, I have been doing my researches, and, well, wow. People get really into this. Or, alternatively, you can find 50 million YouTube videos about how generation ships are a terrible idea and we should never ever do them.
(I have, actually, about twenty minutes ago, thought of a good reason to use a generation ship versus other methods, so that’s at least partially sorted.)
When worldbuilding, you can always run the chance of not worldbuilding enough, so your world feels flat and unrealistic, or you can worldbuild too much, spending months or even years building every minutiae, things that would never in a million years show up in an actual story.
I do think I need to err on the side of more, here, though, and even do some math (speed calculations, distance calculations, how fast the ship has to rotate to get the right amount of gravity vs. how big is the ship, as a bigger ship would rotate slower) but some other things I think can probably be a bit fudgier, such as how recycling and repair systems function.
(People have made three hour long YouTube videos about generation ships. I started one but got, like, ten minutes into it before I got bored.)
As I said last week, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve had to build a world from scratch, and my normal method has traditionally been to get a bunch of books related to my subjects and read through them. This is generally slow, as you can imagine, but often results in interesting facts that I wouldn’t have otherwise come across or thought of, which then make it into the worldbuilding. I have been unable to find any relevant books thus far, as my searches are mostly giving me fiction or vaguely related engineering books that are far enough off that they’re not going to be helpful. Normally said books are about mythology or folklore or forest biomes or 15th century sailing ships, all of which already exist, and not theoretical spaceships.
So, hence, the YouTube videos, though they’ve not been very useful thus far, and also tend to all involve the same sort of ship design. I’m having more luck with websites and blogs, including some generation ship contests where people actually go through the whole engineering process (though this is, I believe, getting a little too in the weeds).
I do feel like I’m nearing the end of the information gathering phase, though, and then can move into the actual designing soon.
Anyway, hope things are going well for you, squider, and I’ll see you next week!
