Last week, I talked about how the pieces of my life are slowly, but surely, falling into place. That’s still the case, but I’d like to point out that word “slow.” I feel like I’m doing so many things on a weekly basis, and they’re all moving forward glacially.
I started a Let’s Play series of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption yesterday, which is a game I’ve been wanting to go back to for quite some time now. The video will be up on my Twitch page for the next couple of weeks, and forever on YouTube. Twitch is a remarkable place to me, because of the proximity to my audience. People are a great love of mine, and getting to engage with them directly in the ways that Twitch allows has been a marvelous experience. I’m itching to grow my audience, so that I can engage with more people more often.
One of the main ways I like to engage with people is on Discord, and the server for my Twitch channel is open to the public. If there’s a game you want to see randomized or played by a first-timer, come drop in and let me know! Everyone there is really cool; you’ll have a blast.
Now to turn to the subject of my fiction. It’s painfully obvious that around six months ago, I hit a big, solid writer’s block. I ran up against the end of what I had planned, and shifted my focus to other facets of the project as a whole, but none of them really took like pushing the plot of To Save What’s Lost forward. Since then, I’ve done a heap of worldbuilding, written some scenes which currently float disconnectedly in my characters’ future, and composed a couple rather solid short stories which belong on the periphery of TSWL proper. Like I said, though, none of these things really captured my attention like writing the book did. So the question began to nag at me: why can’t I continue it?
The answer to that question, as it turns out, dovetails perfectly with the answer to another question—how long are these people (some very young) out in the cold listening to this story? Surely, there’s a limit to how long they’re willing to be outside and how long a nine-year-old’s attention span will hold. The answer is thus: break up the story into multiple sessions. These sessions will become “Parts” of the book, and the point at which we find ourselves in the novel is the end of Part One.
This realization has catapulted me back into progress in the novel. I’ve already begun writing the framework ending to this Part One, which will represent the end of the first day of the festival (the exact nature of which is under review) and a time skip for Kari and Tomas. But I get a bit ahead of myself; my next milestone will be the actual recording of the audiobook of Part One. To get there, I’ll need to write the wrap-up, then read through it all to ensure consistency and clarity (making specific changes along the way). It’s more than a few steps, I recognize, but having them laid out will get us all there faster.
Frankly, I’m excited to finally be able to see the way forward. I still plan to read my book aloud live on Twitch, but I don’t have anything resembling a guess as to when I’ll be able to do that. I won’t have to have the whole Part updated and proofed in order to start reading it, so that bumps the timeframe up a bit. I’ll also be updating the AiA website as I go, and keeping you all filled in along the way.
Gee, I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today. Guess I figured it out. Have a good week, everybody!
Umbrella Terms 