Journal of a Something or Other

Not a lot of progress this past week, though I’ve begun typing up the chapter that will be inserted into The Audacity Gambit. Funny how this month’s focus was supposed to be working on the second book but ended up being equally focused on revising the first. The stories go hand-in-hand, though, so it makes sense in a way.

Regarding July’s focus, there are some big changes at my work that will be taking up a lot of brain space, so that is going to have to be a consideration. At least I’ve regained a lot of traction with writing, so revising the old and writing the new will continue, just at a slower pace.

This month has Chase’s birthday, so I asked him to pick three focus topics and in the end just made him decide which one.  He picked:

1. Animatic for The Audacity Gambit
2. Sewing: clothes
3. Ink comic from last February (Richard III)
4. Nails
5. Photography: make sets, pick direction
6. Library
7. Garden
8. Cooking
9. Painting
10. Fashion blogging
11. The unfinished/begun monographs
12. Final Space Goth chapter
13. Chase and Brenna collabs
14. Miniatures
15. Get rid of old art
16. Printmaking
17. Papier mâché
18. Old photos

Finished:

• Ma-me’ branding
• Airbrush
• Sewing: mending & Old work archive/organise
• Secret show production
• Embroidery
• Next book

In the end, he picked the animatic ‘trailer’, which is sweet of him, since he will be helping me quite a bit with it and it keeps me in the writing world, helping us both finish the tasks we have to in revising and outlining.

We just finished a lovely evening drive where we hashed out the roughest sketch of what will work best.  The crazy thing is now I’ve got to draw Emily for the first time.

So, what’s the status right now?

• The outline of the second book is where it was last week, that’s fine, because:
• I’m about a third into the first write of the chapter that has to be inserted into the first book—which I’m not going to let Chase (my beloved first reader and editor) read until he is further along in going over the edits of the first book. Incentive, folks.

And!

As I may have mentioned before, once he’s gone over the edits and the new scenes are plugged in, I’m getting a couple copies of The Audacity Gambit printed POD, for another read-through. It’ll need a cover though, right? How about this:

This was fun to do and a great image test as well. I’ll probably revisit the visual theme.

So, progress continues.

I have like two thirds of the book outlined! This is a hella beefier outline that what I used for the first book, but I have a lot more characters and tropes to keep track of and fulfil.

I still want to write a flash or two to fill out what gets done this month, but since I’m also revising/editing The Audacity Gambit, we’ll see. I want to print out the revised draft through a POD, for one more read through, but it will need a cover.  Which is why I made this.

You’ll find out why.

• “Immortality or power breeds immaturity.”
• “Needs are what dominate and shape human existence.”
• “In the end, it’s just you versus Sauron.”

This month I got: 5, 6, 16 (by asking Chase this time, not Random.org)

1. Animatic for The Audacity Gambit
2. Sewing: clothes
3. Ink comic from last February (Richard III)
4. Nails
5. Photography: make sets, pick direction
6. Next book
7. Library
8. Garden
9. Cooking
10. Painting
11. Fashion blogging
12. The unfinished/begun monographs
13. Final Space Goth chapter
14. Chase and Brenna collabs
15. Miniatures
16. Get rid of old art
17. Printmaking
18. Papier mâché
19. Old photos

Finished:

• Ma-me’ branding
• Airbrush
• Sewing: mending & Old work archive/organise
• Secret show production
• Embroidery

I am going to admit that Chase bullied me into choosing to work on the next book (a sequel to The Audacity Gambit). I’m pretty much just outlining, I’ve got a lot of notes and weird bullet point stuff right now from a couple of months ago, and it’s time to craft that into the skeleton.

This will not be serialised online. Sorry folks. But I’ll share fun bits and things I’ve learned. Here’s a fun theme that is slated to lie in the shadows and inform things:

The turn away from the earth is prompted, [Zarathustra] says, by a dissatisfaction with life, a dissatisfaction that causes one to create another world in which those who made one unhappy in this life are tormented. The Übermensch is not driven into other worlds away from this one.

Wikipedia. Übernensch, This-Worldliness

Yes! I am that person. But hey, I am also obsessively looking at Eigen plots, Aarne-Thompson, I want the scrolls I put under the golem’s tongue to be right, y’know?

I’m tagging this as another month of writing, I’ll work up some small things to do when not frantically going through my Evernotes, wondering why the shit I didn’t write down a character’s name.