Day: December 13, 2024

4000. It isn’t where I expected to be 3 days before I wanted to be done. It isn’t even close. However, this too is part of the ramping up period. Turns out I won’t be done by Sunday. I’ll take Monday and Tuesday as well to get this thing good and turned in. Still, being able to churn through a project in that time alone ought to make me feel good–at least better than I’ve felt about past work. The focus is future forward. I need to know–I need to decide–who I mean to be as a writer. To that end I plan to follow up this work with a turn to fantasy (as previously hinted at) and, perhaps at the same time, a nod to the near future. Both projects are entirely independent. I want to get them going and hopefully I can get the future forward project done and put up online somewhere. I am not sure what that looks like yet, because I haven’t found the voice of the MC. I don’t think I know that there is one persay. I think there is. I think we are seeing this slice of American life through the eyes of a handful of representative individuals all looking at their impressions of one person in particular. It ought to be good… It ought to get done. It hasn’t at all.

I’d set aside this space for fiction. The plan was to write stories every Friday to keep my mind churning and capable. Over the past few years I’ve become less and less capable. I don’t know what that is about. It isn’t that I can’t tell stories so much as I don’t tell stories or trust myself to do so. I’ve lost the thread of narrative in a way that worries me. I’m constantly looking for excuses why it is happening and finding nothing. I don’t want to believe that I don’t have it in me anymore. To wit, the project I am engaged in includes a 3000 word short story that I have zero plot for. I do have a character or two that I want to delve into, but I haven’t told the story because I don’t have more than that–a couple of characters headed towards a city… to do something? Plot has been my academic focus for so long that I’m losing the ability to tell stories organically. This historiography of the fantasy world is meant to provide a reset of sorts–help me find the stories. I need to find the stories in the world, in myself.

To be honest, it seems to all come back to surroundings. In New York I was hungry. I was inspired by the grind. Out of New York the want and the inspiration dim to unrecognizable levels. Leisure being the norm makes story hard to discover. Stillness being the goal makes motion hard to conjure. All of these things–these excuses–conspire with me to leave me in a state of ineptitude. I gotta break myself out. One. Word. At. A. Time.

Some Thoughts:

1. End of the semester time. I’m looking forward to not thinking about teaching for a few wonderful weeks… Then its back to the grind.

I started with the image because it is on my mind. Is NYC Gotham? It feels so obvious but once you start to factor in other things I had questions. The answer is no. Sure, Gotham may be based on an Idea of NYC, but Gotham (and bludhaven) are in New Jersey. That is a wild revelation to me. Not only that, there are under 300,000 residents in the city. Bludhaven (Nightwing’s ‘jursidiction’) is under 80K. I’ve long thought the cities were larger than that. I suppose it show that I have a very warped sense of how large these places are/should be. Random, to be clear, but it is something that has been on my mind in terms of world building. I gotta get better at realizing the size of things and thinking about what size things should be. I am going to spend some legitimate time world building the fantasy world’s history so that I can reach an understanding of that world and the conflicts and the stories I actually want to tell in that world. Unlike Tolkien, this is not going to be a direct comparison to RL places and races.

Some Thoughts:

1. Found myself a really solid ASMR dude voice. Not quite Bob Ross level (who has been less effective as of late), but lacks the rampant oversexualization that really makes me feel odd enjoying the media.