Tag: Writing

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I feel good, I feel nervous…

I blogged last time that I had three projects lined up as a part of my freelance work on the Infinity RPG. The first has been drafted and submitted. Yay. It feels good.

Infinity RPG Core-Book

Writing every night can sometimes be a chore. The sense that you just want to do something else, anything else, can creep in and cause you to procrastinate. I’ve had my share of that feeling, the desire to scroll through Facebook or Twitter, to read something, clean up, paint some miniatures, get some games played, watch Netflix or a thousand other things. Sometimes it feels like drudgery, to force yourself to write.

With every night finished though, and that 1000-2500 words written (my current nightly goal), I do feel good. Glad that I made myself do it on those nights when I wasn’t feeling inspired or was feeling particularly distracted. Getting to the end of a draft feels good. It feels really good. Attaching the document and sending it off to my editor, hitting send, it feels great.

Then the waiting begins. The nervous part of the process. I know that some of what I’ve written will need to go, need to be cut or rewritten because of the quality of the words or the lucidity of the text or the relevance to the overall document. This is especially true when working on the intellectual property of someone else. Infinity is owned by Corvus Belli, and Modiphius are producing the role playing game. I freelance for Modiphius.

What I write goes to the line manager at Modiphius, who will comment and edit. It goes to the person responsible for checking the setting at Modiphius, who will comment and edit. I may rewrite at this stage, depending on the number of edits or rewrites required. Or it may go directly to Corvus Belli, the IP holder. Gutier at Corvus Belli will run through the document with a fine toothed comb, and make sure the background and information I have laid out fits the world he has created. He will comment and edit.

The nervous wait comes after the good feeling you have when submitting. I’m not concerned about comments on my writing, those help me get better and can be fixed, but I am hopeful above all else that what I have written serves the purpose of the book well. I am concerned that what I’ve written services the background as envisaged by Gutier well. Those are the things that are the benchmarks for success as far as I am concerned. Making the book good and useful. Making sure it services the gamers who will eventually buy it and read it and play games based on the information it contains. Making sure the words and colour I have added to the setting does justice to Corvus Belli and Gutier.

Fingers crossed they do. Until I get the email back though, it’s pointless to worry overmuch. On to the next thing…

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Infinity and one…

Freelance writing for the role playing industry is a funny thing in my limited experience. Flurries of activity, followed by periods of waiting. I have loved it though, and have loved being a small part of the Modiphius Entertainment team; supportive, geeky, gamerly beasts that they are.

The quiet of the Christmas period has in turn given way to the busy season again. I managed to get a novelette written in the downtime (and begin a short story), as well as blog a bit, but now the clarion call to action has me looking carefully at my schedule and blocking out time to get my freelance obligations completed.

Infinity RPG Core-Book

The next two months are going to be busy, I have three projects queued up, with the prospect of more at the end. I will be receiving sections already drafted back from Corvus Belli and my editors with notes on what needs changing, fixing or removing, and I have also had to turn down a project or two for lack of time.

Last year, around September, I tested myself by writing as much as I felt I could manage over the period of around a month. I wrote somewhere close to 50,000 words that I was happy to submit. It’s not a huge amount for those who are experienced, but it pushed me, and pushed me hard. I wanted to test myself, to see what I could put out, what I was comfortable with, what sort of word rate I could manage in a day, a night, an hour. All told I worked out I can typically manage between 1000 and 2000 words a night. Not a huge amount for many, but comfortable for me. I have a job to go to during the day, and a family I’d like to see, so I need to be careful not to burn too much time, or put myself under too much pressure.

The deadlines, though, are closing, and over the next month and a half I will need to get somewhere close to 50,000 words written to meet them. It could have been more, it could have been much more. But thanks to the month I spent pushing myself I have a better grasp of what I am capable to achieving. There was a time when I would have said ‘yes’ to every opportunity, and even now responding with the occasional ‘no’ hurts. But it’s something I need to do, I recognise that. The one thing I do not want to do is to put myself in a position where I can’t hit a deadline.

Now the challenge is to get my routine up and running again. Last year it was writing at least 1000 words a night, every night. After my schedule throttled back over the Christmas period, and has been slowly ramping since, I need to get that back. Getting my routine going again means only one thing: putting my backside into the seat and typing…

 

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Walk Before I Run

One of the variety of podcasts on writing I have been thoroughly enjoying is the Creative Penn Podcast, hosted by Joanna Penn, indie author and creative entrepreneur. It is a wealth of good advice and information, and I recommend it to anyone interested in writing. I typically listen in the car, which has the significant downside of making it hard to pause, stop, or take notes; something I regularly find myself wanting to do.

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Click on the image for a link to the Creative Penn Podcast

A recent episode (episode number 354) was an interview with Douglas Smith on making money writing short fiction. While the making money part was certainly of interest, the episode covered a range of topics applicable to short and long fiction and was an excellent listen. It also got me thinking.

I wrote in my last post about setting the goal of writing a novel manuscript over the course of this year. While this is certainly my end goal, I have been wondering, since listening to the Creative Penn, whether I should start the year by writing some shorter pieces of fiction.

Almost all my writing over the last five years has been game related. Some technical writing, working on rule sets such as Halo Fleet Battles or Dystopian Wars Fleet Action. Some short fiction, working on the background stories for the Proteus Prime and Return of the Overseers games for Spartan Games, and a whole lot of background or setting material for the Infinity Role Playing Game.

While there has been some fiction in there it has been vastly dwarfed by the other types of writing. Coming back to writing fiction again is somewhat daunting, even though that’s where I began. I am thinking of writing a couple of pieces of short fiction to kick things off and get back into the feeling of writing fiction again. It should let me experiment a little and play around, without me worrying that I am ruining or struggling to manage what ‘should be’ my novel. I’ll go through the plotting process I am thinking of using for my novels too, and this will let me get a feel for what works for me and what doesn’t. What skills and thought processes I need to build up, and where I feel comfortable.

I am thinking of this as ‘walking before I attempt to run’. The end goal is the run, of course, but the walking will hopefully help me sort through my processes a little before I make the larger attempt.

 

 

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First Steps

First post on a new blog. This blog dedicated to writing. This year I have set myself the goal (somewhat lofty perhaps) of writing a novel manuscript. This blog is my reflection space, not just for my journey as I write this, but also a place to record the challenges I face along the way, the failures, the successes and the resources and sources of inspiration that help me push forward. I’ll also be writing about the freelance writing I do from time to time (and if you’re interested, you can see what I’ve worked on on my Bibliography page, link in the menu above).

2018. A new year. It is traditional to set goals at the start of the year, and for the last few years this is exactly what I’ve been doing on my other blog, Castle by Moonlight (which is mainly a space I spend my time writing about games).

As I wrote above, my goal for this year is to write a novel manuscript. This is something I have done before, I have two or three novels on my hard drive in various stages of completion. This year my aim is to start, and to finish. With the emphasis on the finish. I have ideas, too many in fact. Like many I flit from one to the next, landing only briefly before flying to the next shiny idea on the horizon. This is where my first steps begin.

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I’ve been listening lately to a lot of podcasts about writing, reading books about writing, writing freelance, and thinking about writing. It’s time for me to pick an idea, expand on it, and write it.

The last book I read on the subject of writing was Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder. If you are an aspiring or experienced writer you’ve probably read it too, and if you haven’t, go and order a copy. It’s worth it. Admittedly it’s about screen-writing, but it is, nonetheless, an excellent book.

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I’ll spend some time writing some thoughts about this book in another post, but with the novel I am planning to write this year, I’ve decided to follow the lead of Synder, and plan the story structure out in greater detail than I have before.

So what have I done in my first steps toward this goal of mine? First, I wrote out the most recent set of ideas I’ve had for stories. Some are science fiction, some fantasy, some… I’m not sure how to categorise. I picked three, which ended up being six, and fleshed them out with a tag line (a single sentence or two that summarises the story), and a few paragraphs on the plot outline. I added some description of the main characters (whether they be protagonists, antagonists, heroes, villains or whatever), and some thoughts on the themes and ideas running through the stories.

Then I annoyed some friends. I asked politely, and they agreed through gritted teeth, to listen to these six ideas as pitches. They asked questions, I answered as best I could (and sometimes couldn’t), and generally chewed them over in discussion. I have to admit I was nervous at doing this, not that my friends were going to be cruel and laugh and point and say terrible things. But that they would find them lacklustre, uninteresting, dull, stupid, and that they wouldn’t tell me.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t ask whether they thought they were brilliant ideas (what a thing to ask a friend), but I did ask them – ‘if these were books, or movies, which would you prefer to see/read?’

The general idea here wasn’t to gather some platitudes and compliments, some hazy non-committal but always polite confirmation that all my ideas are wonderful – I know they’re not. Just the act of saying them out-loud to someone else was enough for me to grimace and pull a few from the list, and nearly all have been revised since. The idea was to get a feel for which I could explain the best, which I was most excited to talk about, and which I had most answers for. The idea was to gather any criticism and look at it, and modify accordingly where I felt it was required. Lastly the idea was to cut six ideas down to one.

Well, I haven’t managed that yet. I have cut six ideas down to three, though; so I’m halfway there. My aim in the next few days is to expand the outlines a little and settle on one to write.

Once I have the one, my next step to to start working on the plot outline, the character arcs, and the story beats. I even bought myself a shiny new pin-board to help me lay it all out, to see it, to play with the structure and change it, tighten it and hone it. Once I have that done, it will be time for the next phase…