Writing and Life Update July 21

Update time:

1. Press Start has been getting fewer comments on my blog, which is only significant in that there are so few comments in the first place, so the disparity seems bigger than it actually is. I've been exploring Kotaku to get a bit of a pulse on what other gamers think, and though the site does a good job of making most of the comments worthwhile (instead of typical fanboy flame), it doesn't explore things the way I'm trying to do in the essays. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but it's something I've noticed. In terms of actual content, I've broken the 20k mark on the essays. Currently, the grand total for it is 21,382 words. I haven't received much feedback on my writing style for the essays, which is kind of a surprise. I thought that the language was a little more obtuse than I generally write. This stems from an attempt to be theoretical (so the verbiage is natural in that form), but also in trying to imbue more significance to what I'm trying to say. The essays, for the most part, have been too abstract to be really powerful, I fear, though I'm basing that off of my wife's response to one of them, which boiled down to not fully reading (and therefore not really understanding) them.
   
2. Words of the Silenced ended up being a larger beast that took a greater amount of time than I expected. I spent a good portion of time last week doing revisions. This lead to more progress on it: I finished chapter 16 out of 44. This is encouraging, since that puts me within striking distance of being half way by the end of the summer. I can't complain too much about that.
   
3. Tales took a major detour this last little bit. With so much emphasis on WotS, I didn't get a chance to focus on it like I would have preferred. It doesn't help that I realized just a couple of weeks ago that I will need to actually drop about 20% of my story since I had it narrated in a different view point than the story needs. It came about when I discussed one of my chapters with my writer's group. They helped me to see that I was losing some of my narrative clout by the repetition that comes because I had this whole other group that participated in the story. By dropping their narration, I'll tighten the whole thing up. The hard part is, how much do I retcon for this? And should some of the other major changes I'd like to do come in immediately, or should I wait until the revision? This has been, really, the only down side to having a writing group: wholesale changes can be really difficult to come to grips with, since there's actually an audience for the work in progress, and saying, "Just imagine that the president isn't dead," or whatever can be very frustrating for them. This also heightens the issue of not getting a true reading, since so much is being tweaked outside of the story itself. Anyway, I should hit my goal of 100k words in the story (a lot of them aren't being used, but they're written anyway) by the end of July. I stand, as of this moment, at 96,896 words. Again, a lot of them are repeat words, deleted words, or just failed scenes. Still, it's good that I'm working toward that big goal of 100,000 words. WotS is over 130k words, and this story isn't actually close to closure yet. I might just force the ending on it, learn what I have from the writing of it, and then move on to something else. I'm not sure, yet.

So that's the writing update. As for life, summer is unofficially over for me. Wife and I got back from Utah Shakespearean Festival, one of the major highlights of my year, and it was delightful. I wrote about some of the fall season and other thoughts about eight months ago, and though the plays were different this year (we saw Henry V, Comedy of Errors, and As You Like It), some of the thoughts are still pertinent. I just love Shakespeare, and I love the festival. I've kinda been on a downer since we got back (made worse since Peter was a pill the first couple of days home). But I'll get over it.

Part of what's helping me get over it is that school is around the corner. I still have a few weeks to enjoy, but my brother is getting home from his mission, I have an awesome concert that I'm going to attend in August, and school will be a lot of fun. Also, because I've been readmitted to UVU, I'll be a student again! It's kinda intimidating, but I'm pretty excited.

Now if only Peter would sleep the whole night through.