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August Already?

Good news, squiders, I do have Monkey Island 3 and 4 in digital form, so it’s just the Telltale 5th game that’s currently inaccessible, unless I find a disk drive somewhere that I can play a game off of. (It’s $15 on Steam, but silly to buy a game that I already own. The bigger, mobile one has an external CD drive that he’ll let me borrow.)

Anyway.

July was…wow. A lot. And it sounds like it was a lot for many of my creative friends. Also, too damn hot.

School starts soon, though, and I know my whole family is looking forward to going back to our normal routine. And I need to buckle down and get to work, so I can reach my goals as well.

So, from a writing standpoint, here’s what I hope to get done this month (admittedly perhaps a little optimistic, but when has that stopped me?):

Continue the critique marathon with Book 1 and make changes as necessary (3 weeks left, including this one)
In-person critique group meeting later in the month
Write a query letter and synopsis (and have those looked at by other people as well)
Make a list of agents to query
Outline and do set up for new SkillShare class
Outline at least four new short story ideas
Hopefully write said stories

Ambitious? Maybe! I just need to make sure to focus. But with the school year starting, there is stuff to do–make the schedule for my Cub Scout den and the pack as a whole, learn new school policies and procedures (the bigger, mobile one is starting a new school), go to a whole bunch of meetings about clubs and sports and what have you.

But nice to be branching out a bit. Once this draft is finalized and the submission stuff is ready, I’ll move on to my next project while I’m querying. Nice to be working on something different, though of course once I finished Book 1 I got a ton of ideas for Book 2, but no reason to touch that at the moment.

How was your summer, squiders?

Game On (Part 3) and Monkey Island

Good morning, squiders! We’ve survived all our summer camps and things can go back to (relatively) normal. Phew!

In case you missed it, I’ve set a video game goal for the year to play through and at least categorize my extensive collection of Steam games (much like my ever growing TBR list, I hoard games without playing them, and that is silly).

Part 1 here
Part 2 here

Picking up where we left off:

May

For May, I picked Cleo: A Pirate’s Tale (continued from April), Evan’s Remains, and Phantasmagoria.

Cleo – A Pirate’s Tale
I kickstarted Cleo, actually! This is an old-school point and click adventure game, and I really enjoyed it. Which may have led to some other ideas we shall talk about shortly. Great game, good story. May have teared up at the end. (Category: Beat the Game!)

Evan’s Remains
Evan’s Remains is part puzzle platformer and part visual novel. I got it as part of a bundle, though who knows which one. I played for about half an hour in May, enough to learn the game mechanics and get started on the story, which takes place on a deserted island with the ruins of a technologically-advanced society. (Not categorized)

I never started Phantasmagoria so nothing to say about it. Whoops. Though I do know exactly what bundle this came with. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Sierra game catalogue that would come in the game boxes. I’d read it cover to cover and wish that I could play all the games inside. (I’m trying to remember what game of theirs I did have. Torin’s Passage was theirs, apparently–excellent puzzler, interesting worldbuilding. I have a copy somewhere–oh, and Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Maybe more. But none of the big series.)

Anyway, when a Sierra bundle came up, you can bet your buttons I bought that. So now I have, like, Space Quest, and King’s Quest, and a whole bunch of other games that I always wanted to play and still have not played. Go me.

June

June I set no goals since we spent three weeks on a vacation.

July

July was a smashing success, game-wise. I played and BEAT all three of my games: A Short Hike (started in February), Evan’s Remains (started in May), and a new game called Witchy Life Story which came in a cozy games bundle.

Witchy Life Story
This is mostly a visual novel, though there is a gardening and a spellcrafting mechanism, and you can build up relationships with the town’s people (romantic and otherwise). I guess there were ways to fail though I felt like it was really obvious how, you know, not to. You play a young witch sent to a town to help with their festival as punishment for some bad choices you made at home. It was pretty sweet, I enjoyed it. Probably would not replay as the mechanics did get a little repetitive. (Category: Beat the Game!)

A Short Hike!
I started this game very briefly in February (played like 15 minutes and got annoyed at the controls). See part 1 (link above). The controls were mostly okay, especially once I got some golden feathers which gave me more leeway. (There was still a part near the end where I had to try like 50 times to get it to work, so much that my fingers started to hurt.) By the time I got to the end the game had grown on me, and I briefly considered moving it into a category where I could play some more before ultimately deciding not to. (Category: Beat the Game!)

Evan’s Remains (again)
Man, this one has some story. I’m not sure I’ve been quite so emotionally devastated by a game in a while (though the part after the climax kind of walks back on the whole thing, but I’m not too mad about it). There are a lot of rather long dialogue sections, and the puzzles range from comfortably easy to quite evil, but you can skip any (or all) of them. I ended up skipping 2, one to get an achievement, and one that I messed up and then couldn’t figure out how to reset. (Category: Beat the Game!)

Monkey Island?

Have you ever played LucasArts’ Monkey Island adventure game series? It is perhaps my very favorite series, between the off-the-wall puzzles, quirky characters, and fantastic humor. An online friend mailed me the first game in, oh, 1997 I want to say, but I didn’t end up playing it until a few years later, after I watched an IRL friend play Monkey Island 3 and I remembered I owned the first game. Now there’s….six games?

And I own all of them, though the Telltale Games’ Tales of Monkey Island I may only have on physical media. Actually, do I own 3 and 4 digitally? This may take some tweaking.

ANYWAY I thought I’d play back through the series, starting with The Secret of Monkey Island, which is the first game. It came out in 1990. LucasArts remastered it several years back by animating over the original pixel art and getting the voice actors from later games to do the voices, which is somewhat horrifying, but you can play the game in its original state. (But I do really like the voice actors. Choices.) I’m picking this as one of my games for August, so hopefully I will actually, you know, get around to it.

Play anything good lately, squiders?

(Actually no, don’t tell me, I must stop buying games and I just bought in the Steam summer sale, so….)

WriYe and Ideal Readers

Hey-o, squiders. The summer camps continue to be a disaster and somehow we’re two weeks out from school starting for the fall. Will I remember how much bunching all the summer camps sucks next winter when I am signing people up for summer camps? Probably not.

(In the next 24 hours, I need to go to work, take the bigger, mobile one to a doctor’s appointment, pack people for two separate Scout campouts, take the bigger, mobile one to the middle school for orientation and also probably fencing, and other administrative stuff which must include at least making dinner and doing laundry. Oh, and I haven’t done my critiques for the critique marathon. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.)

July’s prompt: Define your ideal audience. How you do or don’t write to them?

Hm. I feel like we’ve had a similar prompt before.

Ideal audience is something that eludes me from a marketing standpoint. You read marketing books, and they’re like, “Picture your ideal reader. Give them a name. How old are they? What do they do with their life? Where do they hang out? What other things do they like?”

And the theory is you’re like, yes, here is Helga, 36, married with children and living in Minnesota. Aside from my particular type of book she also likes knitting, gardening, and watching Star Trek re-runs. She jogs every morning at 5:30 am and survives on five cups of coffee a day. She can be found on knitting subreddits and a very specific Discord discussing why Jean-Luc and Beverly never got together.

And then once you, in theory, know where your ideal reader is hanging out, that’s where you advertise to, and, in theory, make a buttload of money because you have perfectly defined your reader and brought the book to them.

I feel like there are probably genres where this works great. If I’m writing a cozy mystery series that takes place at a Renaissance Festival, then I can approach Renfaire people, some of whom would probably be interested. Or, like, a sweet romance that takes place at a ski resort in the mountains. There’s definitely places where those two things would intersect.

But I feel like once you get more subjective, where you don’t have a distinct hobby or location or piece of media or something else to tie the marketing to, the whole thing kind of falls apart. If you write fast-paced thrillers set in, oh, Davenport, you could maybe interest the people of Davenport in said stories. But if you write said thrillers in a variety of places, with a variety of different characters, what do you do?

Lots of different people like thrillers. It’s not like only white men in their 50s like them, and even if that were true, you’re not going to find all white men in their 50s in the same place, doing the same thing.

Speculative fiction–fantasy, science fiction, paranormal-based horror–can have things you can tie into. But they also tend to be broad genres enjoyed by many different types of people. I mean, just look at the variety of people who like Star Trek. Or D&D. Or Star Wars. Or Stranger Things.

All this to say, when I try to do this exercise, I get a fat lot of nothing. Unless I assume my ideal reader is someone exactly like me (after all, I like my stories). But that doesn’t really seem to get me anywhere–I’m already hanging out in the spaces I hang out in, after all.

I think it’s kind of a silly exercise, but I’m glad it works for some people.

How about you, squider? Had any luck with this sort of thing?

I Finally Finished Draft!

Hi, squiders! We lumped all the summer camps together in a three week time period because of Reasons and it is not our finest hour.

BUT

I finally finished my draft of Book 1!

Hold on, I’m going to scroll back through and see when I actually started. It looks like I “started” in Feb 2022, which is at least when I dug up the draft and re-read it. And then I didn’t touch it again until Nov 2022, when I re-read it and went over beta comments from the last time it went through the critique marathon, and then I spent Nov-Feb doing all the prep work for the revision (I try to do the majority of the work before I start the revision, so I have clear goals in mind and know exactly what to change).

And I started the actual revision in Feb 2023.

So. 15 months. A bit long, honestly, but I think I’ve talked before about the amount of emotional baggage this particular story always brings along with it. I’ve been working on it on and off for twenty years. It is my magnum opus. Or at least the story I care most about.

(I did take April 2023 off to write a novella, July 2023 off for a trip, and just last month for another trip, so I guess it’s really like a year. Ah well.)

This is the third or fourth time I’ve rewritten it, and I feel like, this time, we’re actually getting somewhere. Almost the whole book has been run through various critique marathons (we’re on Chapter 26 there) where in general the feedback has been positive, and my critique group has also liked it (they’re through Chapter 27. There’s 32 chapters total).

I mean, there’s still changes to be made. I will run the ending through the marathon and my in-person group and make changes as necessary. But I’m also going to put together submission materials and hope that, finally, the story is ready to go out into the world.

Scary! But exciting.

Part of me wants to jump right back in and move on to Book 2 (the oldest existent draft, and hence needing the most work), but logically that makes no sense. No reason to spend a ton of time on sequels until Book 1 goes somewhere.

(The trilogy timeline goes something like:
2004-2005: First draft of Book 1
2006: First draft of Book 2 (abandoned about 20K in, story was broken)
2009-2010: Second draft of Book 1
2011-2012: First full draft of Book 2
2014-2015: First draft of Book 3
2017-2018: Third draft of Book 1
2023-2024: Fourth draft of Book 1)

But yay! It is complete! Confetti and celebrations!

So, what now? Well, submission materials. I’d like to get those done while I’m still actively thinking about the story.

Then maybe a month or two off to work on other things (new short stories?) while I start submitting.

Next on the revision slate is Rings Among the Stars, which is a scifi horror novella.

With all the Nano drama I don’t think I will be participating this year (and unless they get their act together, probably never again) but I may do a new project around that time period.

Hope you’re having a productive week as well!

Oho! (Related to the Shannara Readthrough)

Evening, squiders. Why is summer so hot? Ugh.

I’ve been reading through Terry Brooks’s Sometimes the Magic Works, which is part writing how-to and part memoir, for the past two months. It was written in 2003, and is one of the many writing books I’ve inherited from my mother each time she moves.

(I’ve just finished it, actually.)

I discovered a very interesting chapter in my reading yesterday, however. In a chapter entitled “The Word and the Void” (which is the name of the first trilogy in the Shannara series, and the one I’m currently in) Mr. Brooks talks about the dangers of writing outside the series/genre you’re known for, and he uses the Word and the Void as an example, as a separate series from Shannara.

Yet here I am, twenty years later, and the Word and the Void is included in every list of Shannara books you can find on the Internet.

So I can only assume that sometime between 2003 (when he wrote this memoir/how-to) and the publication of Armageddon’s Children (2006, the first of the Genesis of Shannara trilogy), the decision was made to include the Word and the Void trilogy as part of the Shannara universe as opposed to its own, and that the Genesis of Shannara trilogy is the bridge between the Word and the Void and the later Shannara books.

(Also an interesting note, while the Word and the Void and a few related-ish short stories are included on the lists of Shannara books and reading orders, Mr. Brooks’s own reading orders for Shannara do not include them.)

All my questions are answered. The Word and the Void books don’t feel like Shannara, and have no obvious ties to the later Shannara books, and the magic is all weird, because they were not written as part of Shannara.

I wonder what happened. Did Mr. Brooks have an epiphany that tied everything together? Was it a marketing thing, where someone was like, well, you know, these books take place hundreds (thousands?) of years before these other books, so why not just kind of shoehorn them in? They’re close enough?

I guess I won’t know for sure until I get farther in the series.

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. See you Thursday, squiders!

Shannara Readthrough: A Knight of the Word

Howdy, squiders. Hope you’re doing well.

I’ve finally finished the next book in my Shannara readthrough (I read the last book–technically the first book chronologically–in spring of 2022. Making excellent progress, she says sarcastically.) and thought we should probably talk about it.

To catch people up, because it’s been awhile, The Wishsong of Shannara was the gateway book that got me into adult fantasy, a genre that continues to be near and dear to my heart all these years later. In 2020 (?) my spouse and I watched the first season of the Shannara Chronicles, which loosely follows the events of The Elfstones of Shannara, and I had the thought that now that the series is complete, I should read through all the books in chronological order.

You see, the original Shannara series is pretty straight fantasy. But as time goes on and you read more books, you go on to realize the entire series is actually science fantasy, with this happening on a future Earth in a post-apocalyptic time period. I read the books in the order they were published so my understanding of how this came to be is spotty.

The Word and the Void trilogy (Running with the Demons, A Knight of the Word, and Angel Fire East) act as a prequel to the rest of the books, taking place in more or less modern day, before whatever apocalypse happens that creates the fantasy world in the later books.

They’ve been…not what I was expecting, to say the least. Magic exists pre-apocalypse, though in a completely different form, and it’s not clear how we get from Point A to Point B. (None of the magic that exists pre-apocalypse seems to exist afterwards, with different magic instead, though I’m hoping that as I go through the books things will make more sense.)

A Knight of the Word takes place five years after the events of Running with the Demons, following Nest Freemark and John Ross again. The entire book takes place over a couple of days, with a few flashbacks. John Ross has attempted to renounce his title as a Knight of the Word after a traumatic experience where he failed to save children, and Nest is sent to help him realize that he can’t give it up, and if he continues along this path, he’ll fall to being a servant of the Void. (In this world, the Word is “good” and the Void is “evil,” and there’s been more or less a shaky balance between the two for time immaterial.) And if he falls to the Void, the apocalypse that is coming will come faster and so forth.

Arguably not a lot “happens” in this book. It is very much an exploration of trauma and people’s responses to such and how we choose–or not–our own identities. Aside from the occasional demon battles and a handful of other supernatural creatures (sylvans, which were also in the first book, and tatterdemalions, which are a strange conglomeration of dead children’s memories), it could be contemporary fiction in many parts, dealing with issues of today. Not that that is a bad thing. The pacing is still good and it didn’t feel like it dragged in any parts.

As someone who read several of the “later” books (chronologically), it’s hard to look at this initial trilogy and see how we get to where we’re going. There’s not a lot of threads stretching between these books aside from the characters and this potential looming apocalypse (which must come to pass at some point). No overarcing plot for the trilogy or anything along those lines.

But we persevere. Next up will be Angel Fire East. I’m not going to commit to a time period on that, because we see how that goes.

Have you read the Shannara books, squiders? Read through these prequels? Does it make sense eventually?

Halfway through 2024

2024 still sounds like a science fiction year to me. Oh well.

Sorry for the delay in getting this posted, squiders! I got back from a long trip on Wednesday. I’d originally planned to pre-write and schedule a post, but the subject I was going to post about didn’t come to be (I’d hoped to finish my revision before we left, but alas–still a chapter and a half to go), and then I thought I’d just post when I got home (*laughs in jetlag*), and then I thought I’d post Thursday or yesterday, but oof, real life is taking some adjustment.

BUT HERE WE ARE

The end of June looms, so I thought I’d take a quick look at what how I’m doing for the year versus how I thought I’d be doing.

(Oh, as for SPFBO, as of RIGHT THIS SECOND, Hidden Worlds is still in the running. Fantasy Faction, which is the blog I was assigned to, hasn’t done any cuts yet, though some of the other blogs have.)

Oh, first, in celebration of SPFBO, Hidden Worlds is free at both Smashwords and as part of the Enchanted Escapes bundle at Prolific Works, if you want to pick a copy up!

So, goals and such. They look something like this:

Finish revision on Book 1, create submission materials, submit to agents
If that gets done, work on revising my scifi horror novella (and creating submission materials, and submitting)
And if THAT gets done, revise the first book of my cozy paranormal mystery series (Not So Bloody Murder) and so on and so forth (slightly complicated by the fact that I’ll be using a penname for mysteries and also that I don’t quite know what I’m doing yet)
In non-revision goals, Turn Deep and Blue into a novella and publish it
Go back to writing RaTs prompts (one a quarter)
Finish reposting SkillShare classes and make a new one over the summer
Spend a month writing short stories
Write a new novella project

So far, we’re here:

Book 1 revision is ALMOST done. A chapter and a half, as I said above. I’m hoping to finish out the book in the critique marathon happening during July/August, work on submission materials in July, and start querying in August (or maybe September depending how the marathon is going).
Since the other revisions rely on that being done, nothing on that front. Though I am thinking of switching Not So Bloody Murder out for a different revision project. BUT LATER
Deep and Blue was published in May! It’s a weird length though, which I think is hurting sales/reviews.
I’ve done two RaTs prompts thus far, so I’m right on track (doing side characters for the Book 1 revision, so it’s killing two birds with one stone)
All the SkillShare classes got reposted, and I picked a subject for a new class (though I’ve forgotten what it was, but this is why we keep notes), which I may work on around the critique marathon here
No new stories yet but sooooooon. August, I think. The small, mobile ones will be back in school.
See above about new novella projects too.

All in all, we’re doing pretty well!

I did spend some time pondering publication earlier today. With Turtleduck Press closing, I don’t have a market for my novellas that I have control of, unless I self-publish them, which is an option. But with TDP I got two rounds of editing that anything I do myself will be lacking.

Nothing to do about it right now, and we can see where we are when I have something new ready.

How are you doing, squiders? Having a nice summer? Hitting your goals?

WriYe and Distractions

Happy Wednesday, squiders. How are you?

This month WriYe’s prompt is: Define your biggest distraction and how you deal with it.

Ha. Haha.

I don’t necessarily have a specific distraction that draws me away from writing. What I have is a mindset issue, where I self-sabotage.

The self-sabotaging is frustrating on many levels, because it stops me from being as productive as I would like, and also the things I self-sabotage with are usually stupid things that aren’t worth my time.

(Some things that I do instead of what I am supposed to be doing: scroll memes, play repetitive flash games or Minesweeper, watch YouTube, read fanfiction, color on my phone app, troll tumblr and/or reddit and/or AO3, etc.)

(Each of these activities are fine if you want to do them and/or plan to do them, but when I do them they are almost always a procrastination technique.)

Now, arguably, some of the self-sabotage does stem from me over-taxing myself. I work and I have the small, mobile ones to raise, and often I am just tired, and sometimes despite the best intentions I simply do not have the energy to do whatever creative thing was on my list.

BUT I would argue that that is not the main problem.

Another part of the self-sabotage is avoidance. Let’s say I have to make a phone call I do not want to make. (I have no idea why phone calls are so anxiety-inducing. And I’m fine with them in general, but if it’s something weird or something that may have an unpleasant aspect to it, I have a really hard time working up to doing it.) So I need to make this call, but I don’t want to, and so I don’t, but I also can’t do anything else useful with my time because I feel guilty about not making the call, and so I procrastinate the hell out of everything (and then invariably by the time I work up to the call, the place has closed).

But some of it definitely stems from from…burnout? Self-doubt, like we talked about last week? Something where I am like “what is the point, no one cares, no one likes my stories and I am never going to get anywhere” which is frustrating on its own.

Sometimes I can just power through these moods, sometimes I can trick myself into it for a short time. Timers helps (work for so long, take so long of break), as do to-do lists. It helps if I just kind of stay in my own lane and don’t look at what sort of attention other people are getting. (What is the phrase? Comparison is the death of…? Hold on. Comparison is the thief of joy.)

But, man, if people have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

How about you, squider? What’s your distraction?

The Troll of Self-Doubt

Good morning, squiders! I meant to say last week (and didn’t) that I’m going to be moving to a once-a-week posting schedule for June (and maybe July, but definitely June). Now you are aware! Hooray.

I went to two sessions as part of my writing retreat a few weeks ago. The first was on beating self-doubt, because I have run into issues where I avoid opportunities because of fear or imposter syndrome or, to be completely honest, just being tired of not getting anywhere.

The other was on plotting because I just find people’s writing processes fascinating. (A couple of interesting bits there that I might give a go, but nothing mind-blowing. Also I did think we were going to go over different ways to plot instead of just hers, so I misread something somewhere.)

The self-doubt one I went to because it felt relevant, and also there was the promise of getting trolls. (I named mine Giuseppe. Why? Who knows.) It was run by Corinne O’Flynn who in addition to being a bestselling novel is also an entrepreneur coach.

picture of a troll doll with purple hair — Giuseppe

As part of the session, Corinne led us through a thought experiment. Basically, you pictured your goal(s) on the top of a hill, but when you head toward the goal, there’s a river in the way that’s too big and deep to cross. But a little ways down, there’s a bridge.

But when you try to cross the bridge, a troll appears and blocks your way.

Corinne’s point was that the troll is a defense mechanism. It’s there to stop you from getting hurt, because reaching for your goals will expose you to failure, and maybe other bad things like ridicule or depression. This troll echoes back all your doubts to convince you to not go on.

Now, as part of the thought experiment, you were supposed to be able to talk your troll into supporting you, to change its negative messages into something positive.

I couldn’t do this part. I still have nothing. Not encouraging, whoops. Everyone else in my group did not have a problem with this so I assume it’s something with how my brain individually works.

But I did find the exercise useful, and I did come out of the session with some thoughts on how to push through my own self-doubt, and some ideas on how to increase my confidence, and a pretty good idea why I find it harder now to be as productive as I was in my 20s (basically, it boils down to being more easily discouraged now, whereas when I was younger I hadn’t really faced any criticism or failure when it came to writing, and so thought I could do anything).

What do you think, squiders? Do thought experiments work for you? What would you name your troll?

May

June

July

Monkey Island?

Books by Kit Campbell