Status Post: 7 September 2019

ACHIEVEMENTS THIS WEEK: I’ve set up my workspace to deliver really loooooong stretches where I have no internet, just to see how it reshapes things. It turns out, quite a bit. I cleared my average weekly draft count in the space of three days, and I’ve started rethinking what that might mean for workflow.

I also hit the point in Project Stairwell where I needed to stop throwing words at the draft and actually stop to figure out what I’m doing. I was sixteen thousand words in at the time, and still not heading towards anything approaching a structure, so I broke down what I’d done and rebuilt it.

Definitely not a short story anymore. When I sat down and looked at what I’d done, then extrapolated outwards to figure how every subplot could be expanded and resolved, the result was approximately 37 major scenes I’d need to hit over the course of the story. At time of writing, there are 32 scenes left to write.

CURRENT EARWORM: Runway by Stunna Girl, the first four lines of which have been permanently embedded in my subconscious courtesy of being nearby when my partner goes on a TikTok binge. It’s kinda weird to look it up on youtube and hear the rest of the song.

CURRENT READING: I’ve midway through a whole bunch of novels at the moment, but the most interesting is reading though the original Jaws novel by Peter Benchley. I’ve been taking an interest in this particular subgenre of animal-attack thrillers of late, and it’s surprising how many writers seem to pull from Benchley’s playbook.

BEST SCREEN MEDIA OF THE WEEK: It’s been a surprisingly light week on the screen media front this week, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the first two episodes of The Order because it’s basically hoovered up a bunch of Spec-Fic property names and cast them as secondary characters.

I am down for anything that casts Matt Frewer as an obsessive lunatic. I will be even more down if he turns out to be werewolf by the time the series is done.

Good enough that the rest of the season has been set aside until I’ve got time to watch it with my partner in trash crimes.

INBOX STATUS: 3 Emails. Mostly reminders of fees due in the coming weeks. Which is a terrible idea, as the inbox is a terrible place to store such things, but I’m being lazy.

WHAT I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO RIGHT NOW: We’re heading into the tail end of a ten year RPG campaign in a few months, and my brain has started to ponder what I’d like to do next. With that in mind, I poked around at some of the newer RPGs on the market to find something interesting and bought my first non-superhero RPG books in a decade.

Right now there’s a copy of Blades In the Dark sitting on my to-read pile, waiting for me to poke around at the rules, but its whet my appetite incredibly well with this description of the setting:

You’re in a haunted Victorian-era city trapped inside a wall of lightening powered by demon blood.

I’m incredibly excited by the possibilities of that set-up, and really want to run this game now.