Category: writing process (Page 2 of 16)

Goal: Finish Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess

January 3, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This one was always going to be a challenge. It’s a tortured history, and I might not be ready to confront it.

I wrote the first Merlin book in roughly 2014-2016 (exact dates are fuzzy because it was so long ago, which is exactly why my goal to finish Ysbaddaden is so fraught).

That was almost ten years ago, when I published The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Not too long afterward, in January 2017, I wrote a Merlin prequel short story, and I started the second book of the trilogy, a book about the giant Ysbaddaden, a chess game between Merlin and his arch-nemesis, and the continued hunt for the treasures of Britain.

Yeah. It was gonna be great. It was gonna rock. I was gonna finish this book and get it out, then write the third one and have a complete trilogy and be awesome, yay, yay, yay.

Then, after I had completed the trilogy (so my plan was planned), I was gonna write more. So much more. Dozens more. Dozens upon dozens. Ideas for more books, more series, more stories. I had so much more I wanted to write.

So, while I was excited about the Merlin trilogy, I also had plans for more. I needed to get “through” the Merlin stuff to get to all the other stuff I wanted to write.

I was excited for Ysbaddaden, yes, but I was also nervous about it. It wasn’t something I had a clear idea about plot-wise. I knew roughly what I wanted to see happen, but I also wanted to discover new things as I wrote. This is my way. Discovery writing.

I started writing, started the journey roughly in 2017, but then life stuff happened. Another pregnancy happened. And the excitement of the Merlin trilogy began to chafe against my unclear idea of what would happen with Ysbaddaden. In those days, I didn’t have a good handle on how to deal with “stuckness” as a discovery writer. And I was stuck. Stuck physically (with the pregnancy), stuck emotionally (also with the pregnancy), and most especially stuck with the story.

I didn’t like the direction Ysbaddaden was going. And I couldn’t find time to write.

This went on for at least a couple of years. Honestly, I have a bad memory, so I’m not sure when things really started going off the rails, but off they went, and soon enough I realized I needed to scrap twenty-thousand words and redraft huge sections of the work-in-progress.

The redrafting was better, and I started to find a good footing with the story, but then two of my side projects started to become main projects. I finished Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion during the time when I was “supposed” to be finishing Ysbaddaden.

By 2023, I had published those two side project books, but I still had a half-completed manuscript for the second book in a trilogy I first started publishing in 2016. And instead of barreling ahead with Ysbaddaden, I decided to start ANOTHER book, Norse City Limits.

So, as I indicated above. Fraught.

This is probably a Critical Voice problem. Fear that the second book will be worse than the first. Fear that my ideas are stupid and I’ll ruin the series.

But even more than fear, I think what’s happened is that I’ve lost the momentum. I can already tell that momentum is starting to wane with NCL too. Turns out, I need to keep momentum going on a project or else risk losing interest. I’m like a kitten or puppy, distracted by every shiny thing that comes my way.

Going forward, with new projects, the key will be to keep the momentum going and not get too rolled by hiccups and life events.

But for these older projects, for the eternal project that is Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, I need to somehow regain the momentum. With NCL, I think I’ve managed it, but only time will tell. My goal is to finish it by March. Then, it’s on to Ysbaddaden, trying to finish it in the second quarter.

Regaining momentum on a long-delayed project is not easy. Frankly, I’m not sure how to do it. The best I can figure is the old stand-by for when I feel creatively stalled: More input.

If (for both NCL and Ysbaddaden) I can start reading and watching and listening to stuff that fuels my creative voice, then I might be able to rev the motor and restart. Reignite.

The NCL input list includes the aforementioned Myths and Symbols book by H. R. Ellis Davidson, as well as a long list of film noir (a list I might post on the blog in a soon-ish timeframe).

For Ysbaddaden, the list includes The Sandman comics, tons of medieval romances like Tristan and Isolde, the Lais of Marie de France, and Parzival. And, of course, the ur-text for all my Welsh Arthurian stuff: The Mabinogi. Throw in some Tennyson, some T. H. White, and maybe even some Susan Cooper, and add a dash of my favorite old fantasy films like Labyrinth and Excalibur, and I’ll be good to go.

This the hope, anyway. Maybe this time will be different.

I do know that I need to stay connected to the story once I start writing it again. I have to work on it a little bit every day so that the momentum never falters too much. And I have to keep the whole thing fun. Momentum and fun. I’m learning that these are MY key factors for finishing. Momentum and fun.

I think what hurt me way back in 2017 was that I was overwhelmed with life stuff and the writing was harder and harder to fit into my life. I made the book “important” and put myself under pressure to write it. The importance and the pressure and all the personal stuff just stalled me. And instead of being gentle with myself and going easy on the self-criticism, I went self-critical HARD. I beat myself up for my lack of progress, and that made progress all the harder to come by.

I’ve grown a lot as a writer since 2017. I know how to handle stuckness a little better, and I know that I’m really doing quite a lot, actually, so I don’t need to beat myself up about it. The most important thing is that I haven’t given up.

Ten Titles, Ten Characters (from my notebook, January 2024)

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I was flipping through my notebooks from 2024, mostly to see how many books I’d read in the past year (more than 40, by the way… so not bad, but now I’m thinking I want to set a challenge for myself to read over 60 this year), when I came across an entry from my January notebook that included two “Try Ten” lists.

One was ten titles, one was ten characters. Here are the lists:

Ten Titles

  1. Bicycle Repair
  2. Professor _________’s Guide to the Magically Perplexed
  3. Went Away Sailing
  4. Grandma’s Gnocchi
  5. I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream
  6. Brennivin. Shot. Cold.
  7. Stolen Goods
  8. The Voice in the Heating Vent
  9. Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat
  10. Whenever You Think of Criticizing

Ten Characters

  1. An old cop who serves evictions now
  2. The ghost of a young woman’s dead twin
  3. A boy who is in love with his best friend
  4. A foreign cleaning lady
  5. A tree that can communicate with a human
  6. An old man who stole a fellow soldier’s ID back in Vietnam
  7. The driver of a bus that takes devils in and out of Hell
  8. A middle-aged woman who once got to spend her afternoons with a unicorn but hasn’t seen one in decades
  9. An oracle/fortune teller who has lost her power
  10. A man who must take care of his sick wife in quarantine (he hasn’t seen her in a week?)

I’ll admit, that last character entry doesn’t quite make sense to me looking back at it now. Has he not seen her in a week but now can see her and must take care of her? Or has he been taking care of her in quarantine but she left him and hasn’t been seen in a week?

I really don’t know.

The funny thing is that I used one of those titles and wrote a short story to go along with it. “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream.” It was a writing challenge I did with my Creative Writing students where we had to write a short story in one hour. I participated and used this title.

The story turned out all wrong. I tried writing an unreliable narrator and it was an utter failure. Just didn’t live up to the title at all. And I tried an ironic twisty ending that was pretty stupid, frankly.

But I still like the title. I’m tempted, even now, to use the title again and write a different story. And why not?

In fact, it might be kind of funny to write several short stories, all with the same title, all different, and then put them together into a collection.

Or maybe that would be utterly not funny but just kind of stupid. I have a difficult time distinguishing between the cool and the stupid until I’ve done the thing. Before I’ve done the thing, it seems pretty cool. After I’ve done the thing, it feels pretty stupid. I have two choices, then: either keep doing the cool-sounding thing, hoping one day it won’t turn out stupid, or stop doing any of the cool-sounding things. Which means I’ll have done nothing.

I think I know which choice to make.

Better to write a dozen (or more) stupid stories than to write none at all.

Anyway, some of these ideas and characters and titles don’t sound particularly interesting at the moment, but I often wonder if these little seeds and sparks of ideas might turn out to be pretty great once put into action. It’s the action that matters. The telling of the tale. Because otherwise they’re just a list of words. I could write a dozen stories called “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream” and they would all be different. Who can say, just from that title, what stories may come?

This is why the ideas really don’t matter all that much. I can come up with ten more ideas right now. So can any of us.

It’s the weaving of the story that matters. The particular sequence of the tale is what counts.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if I combined a title from one list with a character from the other. Might be a fun game. What kind of challenge could I make for myself in this new month of a new year. From two lists in January 2024 to ten stories in January 2025…

To do that, I’d have to get over my trepidation. My worry that I’m not up to the task of writing ten stories in one month. Can I do that? Can I get over that hump, that lack of confidence?

My husband said that the word he would use to describe my 2024 was “confidence,” but I just don’t see it. I feel the opposite, like my confidence is slowly draining away. But maybe he can see something I can’t.

I hesitate to even set a challenge like ten stories in one month because what if I can’t do it? What if it stresses me out? What if I simply don’t have the time, on top of all the other duties and goals I’ve already set?

Might be fun though… the old cop serving evictions, entitled “Went Away Sailing,” and the old cop has to serve someone who never seems to be home, who might have gotten on a sailboat and drifted away, and the cop tries to find them, to serve the papers, yes, but also, just to see what it would be like to sail away from everything…

The old fortune teller who has lost her gift… every time she tries to tell a fortune and see the future, she sees her grandmother, bent over the kitchen table, rolling out potatoes and flour to make the gnocchi dough… Maybe she has to talk to her grandmother, and maybe she can’t break through, she’s lost her gift, after all…

The foreign cleaning lady hears a voice in the heating vent…

The driver of the Hell-bus… “Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat…”

(I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. The question I always have as I make up these stories and possibilities, is will my story end up being worthwhile? Will it have any meaning? Any emotion? Will readers enjoy it, or am I simply playing a word-association game with myself?)

To write ten stories in four weeks means roughly two or three stories every week. That seems like a lot, especially as I try to get NCL finished. Maybe the challenge isn’t to do it just in January, but to do a story every week? Or try to write ten stories in the first quarter? Or… I don’t know. Something.

I feel a pull toward this challenge. It’s not a coincidence that I opened my January 2024 notebook to this page with these two lists. I should ride it out. See where it goes.

I always was dissatisfied with that first “Ursula Le Guin” story. Time to try again. And the new year is the perfect time.

“Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe” by H.R. Ellis Davidson

December 23, 2024 / / 1 Comment

When I was reading this book, I was on fire with drafting Norse City Limits. When I stopped reading it (due to other reading obligations), the writing dried up.

Coincidence?

Ideas don’t come from thin air. At least mine don’t. Mine come from what I see, what I read, what I listen to, what I notice. When I’m reading a book that’s bursting with ideas, suddenly I’m bursting with ideas. When my reading is directed toward something related to my work-in-progress, my work-in-progress gets a boost from that reading.

And when my reading or attention shift elsewhere?

The writing does too. It shifts into that other elsewhere or it withers a bit from lack of sustenance.

Donna Tartt’s process seems right to me: read something related to your work-in-progress at the end of the day.

Of course, the lesson here is to get back to my Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe book.

The difficulty, is that I have a growing stack of books I need to read for my winter semester classes, and a book club book, and some library books that will soon be called back to the returns bin. Making time for my weird mythology book is hard to justify.

Still. I need to justify it. I need that sustenance. That juice.

Watching more film noir will get me that juice too. I can’t keep running off the fumes of what I remember from my twenties and early thirties when my art diet consisted of a steady stream of movie noir and hard-boiled fiction. I need to dive back in. Myths and symbols, alleyways and wise guys. More jazz. More Led Zeppelin. More Thor and Odin and trolls.

I started writing NCL because of my love for both Norse mythology and film noir. But that love needs nurturing.

My fantasy writing (maybe all my writing) really thrives from using symbols, thinking about symbols, reviving and trying to breathe life into old, familiar symbols. The Davidson book is full of these: blood, birds, wood, stone, feasts, water, wolves. The mystery surrounding our understanding of these early northern European pagan peoples is part of the fun, part of the allure. Using these half-guessed at rituals and rites, tales and traditions, as the material for my story is part of why I tell stories. I want to remix and re-imagine. I think most fantasy writers do. Whereas science fiction writers are farseeing into the future, we are farseeing into the past. And then we mix it together with whatever else is swimming in our imaginations. Fantasy is a synthesis. Neither old nor entirely new. A bridge between times (and worlds).

Challenge for 2025

December 22, 2024 / / 0 Comments

What’s the difference between a goal and a challenge? Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t know if it matters.

Call it a goal or a challenge, the point is, it gives me a kick in the pants to write more, make more stuff, etc.

The perennial goal/challenge is TO BLOG EVERYDAY. I always say I will, and I never meet the challenge.

Yes, it helps me “fail to success,” but for 2025, I really want to hit that success. It would be cool. A weirdly neat accomplishment.

(And maybe I miss a day or whatever because a kid broke his arm and we ended up in the ER for twelve hours or something. But even if I miss a day, I can’t miss more than two in a row, per James Clear’s advice in Atomic Habits.)

The reality is that I need a set time in which to do this blogging. Can’t be ad hoc. My mornings are for writer’s notebook and usually fiction writing. This is the quiet time in which I am alone enough to actually get things done.

The seemingly obvious answer is to do it at night. Blog about what I worked on during the day, blog about something cool that happened or something I read. Blog about “input.”

The seemingly obvious object is that I’m dead tired at night. Also, it’s the one time my husband and I are alone and can hang out.

Maybe there’s another option?

Finding that “habit time” is the secret sauce, at least for me. Whenever I’ve moved away from designating certain times for certain habits, it hasn’t worked.

The great part about early morning writing is that it’s the one thing I can (mostly) control. Unless a child wakes up sick or I have a weird doctor’s appointment at 7:00 a.m., I can control my wake up time and my quiet, alone-time in those pre-dawn hours.

The trouble is that I can’t add daily blogging to those early-morning hours because I don’t get up THAT early. I have enough time to wake up, stretch, make school lunches, write morning pages, and then work on my fiction for, say, thirty minutes or so.

Adding blogging to that mix seems like the proverbial straw on the camel.

In the spirit of “experimentation,” I’m going to try the night thing and see how it goes. To make sure I don’t get lost down in blogging-land, I’ll set a timer and try to write in the time allotted. Fifteen minutes. Then it’s back to the living room and hanging with the hubs.

That means my blog posts might tend to be on the shorter side. Maybe that’s okay. I can write some thoughts about a topic and then return to it the next day. Serialization!

Maybe I’ll blog more fiction too. Maybe.

I don’t want the daily blogging to be tedious, boring stuff, though. That’ll be a challenge. Gonna try to “show my work.” Share my influences. Share process and quotes and ideas I’m working through (that might end up turning into Substacks). Share my solo-RPG attempts. My input.

I’m not even sure why I want to challenge myself to blog everyday, except it would feel good to do something that forced me to get a little uncomfortable, to be a little more disciplined. I need a challenge because I need to grow. It’s as simple as that.

“Rule 4: Consider Everything an Experiment”

December 21, 2024 / / 0 Comments

This is one of my favorite “rules.” When I’m struggling or in doubt, I remember to think of what I’m doing as an experiment.

Case in point: For the last novel I’m teaching in my British Literature class, I decided we needed reading quizzes to keep the students honest. Earlier in the semester, I could tell that they weren’t doing their reading for Beowulf, so I knew we needed reading quizzes for our study of Frankenstein, otherwise they’d blow it off too.

I could come up with reading questions, but the difficulty with any class in which there are multiple sections AND students have a tendency to be absent (in general) (and especially when they know there’s going to be a quiz) is that I need to make multiple quizzes to avoid the plague of cheating. This means coming up sometimes with an A, B, and C quiz (and even a D quiz at times). That’s a lot of reading questions!

I have done one-question quizzes in the past to solve this issue, and three-question quizzes, etc. But it still fell to me to make multiples and that meant more work, and I’m just not as interested in making more work for myself simply to stop students from sloughing off their work.

So I experimented.

This time around, for Frankenstein, I wanted a way to ensure they did the reading–and read carefully–while also not putting a burden on myself.

Enter the “word map” quizzes.

I pick a word or phrase that has relevance to the chapter and then students have to make one of those word map/mind map spider-webby, bubble-connected thingies with all the things from the chapter that relate to that word or phrase. For nearly every chapter or group of chapters, I can think of several words/phrases that have relevance, so that solves the “multiple quizzes” problem, and this form of quiz rewards students for careful reading: I let them use their books with their annotations to do the quiz. Instead of punishing students for not reading, I reward students FOR reading and taking careful notes.

It’s not even really a quiz in that sense, but a way for them to find one of the main ideas of the text and relate as much of the text as they can to that idea. It’s a good activity for preparing them to discuss the chapter, and it’s easy for me both to create (just pick a word/phrase that goes with the chapter) and to grade.

It was an experiment–one I wasn’t sure would work–and I tried it anyway. The worst that would happen was that it flopped and I had to try something new.

But it worked, and now we have a tool that helps all of us get more out of the text than we had previously.

Students are often surprised when I do different things year-to-year. But this is because I don’t want to my classes to become rote or stale. Yes, I keep certain lessons and texts because they continue to work, year after year, but I don’t keep everything the same. I add new writing experiences or new texts or new ways of presenting information or new activities. I try something, reflect on it, maybe try it again with some tweaks, and keep iterating until it either works or until I let it go and try something else.

What’s funny about all this is that I can experiment in the classroom–and not get too upset when an experiment falls flat–but when it comes to my creative work, I often get a bit more cautious. I want to experiment in my writing, but when it comes time to experiment, I worry. Maybe my creative work matters more (to me)? Maybe I’m worried about rejection? Maybe I’m not sure whether my experiments will work or not? (Which is kind of a stupid worry because it wouldn’t be an experiment if you KNEW it was going to work…)

When I experiment in the classroom, I get almost immediate feedback from the students. I can tell when something works, when it partially works, or when it fails. I can then adjust or try something new.

But with my writing, I don’t always get that immediate feedback. How do I know if an experiment was successful or not? How do I know if I’m banging my head against the wall or doing something that surprises and delights?

I tend to be overly critical of my creative work; I’m not always the best judge of my experiments. I suppose this is why writers like Dean Wesley Smith adhere so closely to Heinlein’s rules. Another “Rule 4” in fact: “You must put it on the market.”

We can’t judge whether our creative experiments work. So we must release them and let the audience decide.

Sr. Corita’s Rule 4 doesn’t say anything about judging your experiments. Even putting one’s work out into the world is an experiment if we take Rule 4 literally: “Consider EVERYTHING an experiment.” Sharing my work is an experiment. Making my work is an experiment. Doing something else, trying a new way or the old way but differently: all are experiments.

The Rule doesn’t care about success or failure. Experimentation is an action not an evaluation.

This week, in my writing time, I tried to experiment not just with what I was writing, but with the process itself. I decided to let my whims direct me. If I felt like working on my solo RPG campaign, I did. I made some NPCs and did a little world-building, and then I decided, purely by instinct and desire, to start a short story using the prompt from this Lunar Awards Prompt Quest. Then I let myself shift to jotting down a few stray ideas for my NCL novel. Then I worked on a blog post.

Instead of trying to control my creative output, I let my Creative Voice go wherever it wanted. I found myself energized, excited, and strangely productive. I wrote a lot of words, felt connected to all my ideas and projects, and most importantly, had a lot of fun.

My experiment was to let go of what I thought I was “supposed” to do during my writing time, and instead did what felt good and was fun.

Could this be interpreted as being “undisciplined”? (I’m already looking ahead to the next Rule…)

Maybe.

But it felt less like lack of discipline and more like an embrace of the playful spirit. I let go of “shoulds” and focused instead on “wants.” It turns out, I WANT to make creative stuff and write lots of words when I abandon what I “should do” in favor of what feels fun in the moment. I didn’t waste time on the internet. I didn’t procrastinate. Instead, I followed my interests and created work in several different projects. And each of those projects fed into the other.

I allowed myself that same experimental freedom for this post too. I didn’t know I was going to write all this. Instead, I felt like now would be a good time to jot down some thoughts about Rule 4, and before I knew it, I had written 1,000-plus words. I let my inner creative desires guide me. I let the spirit of experimentation take charge. I didn’t know where this post was going to go (and maybe for the reader it’s a disorganized mess), but I let myself go there and see what would happen.

Goal Update: November 2024

November 25, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s been five months since I posted my ridiculously long list of goals, and I figured it was time to do an update. Mostly for my own reflection. Maybe this is the teacher side of me, but reflecting on my work helps me see where to go next. It’s a taking-stock process. Let’s me know what steps to take next.

I set a huge number of goals in the hopes of “failing to success,” figuring that if I kept working at a bunch of different things, I’d make more progress than if I limited myself to only a few. Does this make any sense? Who knows, but it makes sense in my own head. I tend to do better and feel better when I have lots of creative projects going on that I can toggle between and work on bit by bit. Sometimes a particular thing takes over and I obsess over it, but other times I flit back and forth like a butterfly.

So, how is my flitting these days?

Hm.

That’s the short answer. Here is the longer answer:

Finish writing Norse City Limits (urban fantasy novel): I am not finished but this is the goal I’ve probably made the most progress on. As of right now, I’m roughly 40k into the story (maybe 45k… not sure because I handwrote a bunch of it and am now typing it up). I’m a bit stalled, however, so I’ve decided to go back to the last moment in the story when I was still really excited and start redrafting from there. That means that my most recent three chapters will be entirely new material as I scrap the old and start again. I’m not too upset by this because it means I’m getting excited about the story again and seeing where it heads next. I’m still hopeful I can finish this before 2024 kicks it.

Finish writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess (second book in Merlin series): Haven’t done anything with this one yet. I’m focused on finishing NCL. I have a bad habit of losing steam in the middle of a novel and jumping to other things, and I don’t want that to happen with NCL, so I’m holding off on another big project until that one is finished. NCL is where my energy and imagination are at the moment too. Not that I won’t get to Ysbaddaden in 2024, but it’s probable that 2025 will be the year of Merlin’s Last Magic.

Finish a short story set in my sword and sorcery world: Not yet.

Finish a short story about a mother who learns a terrible secret about her son: Not yet.

Finish a short story set in my Children of Valesh universe: Not yet.

Publish my short story collection: Embarrassingly not yet. I have the cover art, I have the stories, I have them mostly copy edited, and now it’s just a matter of finishing layout and proofing. Getting those ISBNs assigned and uploading to markets.

Why have I stalled on this project? I think because when I have time for creative things, I tend to put my energies into writing and creating and not into the publishing. Publishing feels too much like “work,” and when I have free time, I don’t want to work, I want to play. This is good for my writing but bad (obviously) for my publishing. I should make a more concerted effort to get my writing out to readers, but in order to do so, I must steal time from my writing sessions, and I’m loathe to do that.

If there’s one goal on this list I really want to achieve before the year is out, it’s this one, so I MUST block time into my schedule and get this book out to market. I haven’t felt much urgency until now, but the pressure is starting to mount. Hopefully, I have a short story collection to announce in the coming weeks.

Finish a novella in my City of Ashes series: Not yet. Still focused on NCL and don’t want to switch to any other bigger projects.

Blog everyday (this one again!! LOL!): I am not blogging everyday… but I am trying to blog more and seeing some improvement on this measure.

Send out Substack newsletter every two weeks: Ugh. This is the one that hurts. I just haven’t been able to get into a rhythm. Since I’m really trying to finish NCL, I don’t devote much time to other writing pursuits. It should be obvious, then, that the Substack will suffer. But I hate that it’s being neglected. I don’t want to neglect it, but non-fiction takes longer (at least the kind I do on Substack), partly because it takes me longer to generate ideas and evaluate whether they’d be good enough for a newsletter essay.

I can write shorter thoughts and musings, and those tend to go on the blog, but for my Substack readers, I feel like if I’m sending something to their inboxes, it needs to be more substantial. That desire for a more in-depth and lengthy piece of writing puts the pressure on, and I shut down when there’s too much pressure. My ideas dry up. My fears and critical voice rear their heads.

The answer, such as it is, is to devote more time during my writing sessions to working on the Substack: generating ideas, drafting, researching, etc. This is a process that requires a good chunk of time. If I don’t schedule that time, it ain’t happening.

But to block time for the Substack means to lessen time for my fiction. This is the Sophie’s Choice I’m loathe to make.

Anyway, the Substack goal is a conundrum. Not sure how this is going to go other than maybe reassessing my goals and making a few hard choices.

Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: Have played more with the kids, but not where I’d like to be. We’ve played two sessions of Hero Kids RPG, but I’m itching to play more. The kids like it, but it’s hard for me to muster the energy some evenings, so we end up not finding time to play.

I need to block time for playing into my schedule (this is a recurring theme, isn’t it?). I want to try playing solo as well, and I’m currently reading the Emirates of Ylaruam gazetteer from the old Basic D&D TSR stuff. I’m planning to use the rules for Cairn and run a little solo campaign to explore the setting and get my role-playing fix.

I’m not sure I’ll get to play more with family and friends. No one seems particularly interested; I’m by far the most enthusiastic of the group. So perhaps solo gaming is the way to go.

Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last Magic: Not yet.

Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet.

Make other zines: Not yet.

(Zine-making still excites me, but like with my other pursuits, I feel like all my focus should be on finishing NCL and writing fiction. If I had all the time in the world, I would do more with these side projects, but when my time is limited, I feel like I have to make the choice to write fiction. Can I find more time in my day? Can I schedule more time for these pursuits? I suppose I can, but what will be sacrificed to get this time? My walking? My reading? Time spent with my kids?

Maybe I try to fold my zine-making into time spent with my kids… we can all make zines together. This is worth a try…

Of course, I’m doing this to myself by having so many flipping goals! I realize that there’s simply not enough time in the day to do all these things to their fullest. But the seed of desire is still there, so for the moment, I’m going to continue looking for ways to do all my goals.)

Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): Yes, a little. We are reading The Hobbit, and we’ll be starting Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone soon.

Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): Not yet, but I’m going to try committing to doing this in the evenings. Christmas is coming up and winter too, so now is the time to get it done.

Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): I did practice drawing cartoon owls (to turn into an Isabel-story zine…?), but that’s all. I have some drawing books for as sources, but despite identifying them around the house, I haven’t gathered them to use. As a family, we sometimes spend Saturday morning drawing, so maybe I can make that a more regular and deliberate thing.

Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: I’ve started a long-form essay about decluttering to share with my students, but it’s in very rough draft form. I wrote a couple of models earlier this school year, but not nearly as many as I had planned. This goal sounds good in my head, but when it comes time to actually do it, I find that I resist. Just as my students resist assignments because they are assignments, I resist writing that feels like an obligation. I know I need to work on the mental attitude here and see these as fun and practice and a chance to try something new. But I’m still battling a lot of critical voice in my fiction and for-fun writing, so doing writing that’s more obligatory is an even harder hurdle to jump.

So much of writing is a mental challenge. Yes, craft matters, and learning how to do different techniques is important, but the real challenge (at least for me) is battling the ennui and the critical voice and the lack of confidence. I’m forever fighting the fear that I’ll make a mistake or write something bad.

My goal of writing more model texts for my students is no different. I’m afraid I’ll fail, so I resist doing it in the first place. After all, what if I’m trying to model a certain technique and I do a bad job of it? I’ll embarrass myself in front of my students. What if I set a goal to write a certain kind of essay and it turns out all wrong? The students will see I’m a fraud.

And on and on the negative thoughts spiral.

I know that I need to treat every creative act as an experiment, but this requires a mental shift that I’m still working on making. To see everything as an experiment means to have a certain kind of fearlessness and courage that isn’t always readily available. To be okay with failure.

This is perhaps the overarching goal for everything: to break through mental fear and go into every enterprise with an attitude of experimentation. All my 2024 goals are really the same goal, then. To experiment freely. To cease hesitating and go for it.

Bonus achievement: I wrote a short story about walking and bird-watching that came out of nowhere. It wasn’t planned, but I got excited about it and rode the wave until it was done. So despite not making progress on planned short stories, I spontaneously wrote one anyway. This is a good example of “failing to success.” I ended up writing something even though I failed to write something else. Having lots of irons in the fire, so to speak, meant that I was ready for when a new, unexpected iron needed shaping.

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