2024-W07 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• This week was much stronger in terms of “doing the work”. After a lot of prework on the MINOS project, I did go into a bit of an archeological dig of my older notes on plotting. Most notably, “The Twelve Sequences”. But also three entries on figuring out what I’m calling “Plot Beat Patterns”: part one, part two, and part three. I don’t know if this will actually help me make the “context shift” from MECH-building to actual laying down plot, and then roughing it through dramatization. But we’ll see.
• So I submitted that client project I complained about last week. It was done on Tuesday evening. I have forgotten about the high of sending in a completed project. It has been a while as I’m mostly managing and consulting these days. But what a euphroic thrill. The next day, I was like, woooooo let’s start twenty more new projects. It wasn’t until an hour later, and after reflecting on the energy stuff I talked about last week that I realized… holy fuck, my head is messed up. I don’t actually have the energy to start NEW SHIT. WTF? I wonder if that successive, accretive finishing of projects and hunting client work was what drove my burnout post-2013.
• Waiting for Olivia to set up the Patreon and we’ll be starting the podcast soon.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

The John Cage ORGAN²/ASLSP story prompt from last week sent me down a winding road in my brain. I started with some surreal story idea from my childhood, and then shifted to a retelling of the Greek minotaur. I was struggling to go from idea and MECH-building to actual dramatization and plotting. Later, MRK assigned us thumbnails and retellings of Little Red Riding Hood.

Thumbnails being 150 word “sketches” with beginnings, middles, and ends. Went on a bit of a rabbit hole there and ended up watching YT videos on artists talking about thumbnail sketches and how they used them. One artist talked about how he makes 50 thumbnail sketches for 1m each… then picks 5-6 and spend 10m on each of those… and finally 5 he spends another 20m on each.

My favorite thing MRK said last week (and paraphased/embellished here) was, “Artists doodle, musicians noodle, actors improv, so why don’t writers fool around and make messy thumbnails?”

Project MINOS is coming along with the above in mind. I did end up spending Friday night doing more prework on my drive to my parent’s house, talking to my iPhone… and then had a long convo via Signal with my brother I needed his expertise on.

Daily Tracking

This will be the future space for tracking either daily time spent, or daily word count.

EOW Time Tracking

The following is based on logged productive hours using Timeular. Parameters and definitions in footnote².

In Summary:

• F = 20% (good boost this week)
• X = 35% (still way too much)
• C = 40%
• P = 4%

Four Thousand Weeks

I think in terms of work productivity… this was a solid week. After the detoxing epiphany last week, I’m starting to feel my brain “empty out” better. I’m not chasing every minute with a distraction, I’m not filling every second with shopping for hobbies to escape, I’m not wishing I had more time to play this game or that RPG, or whatever. I am letting my brain get bored on purpose so I can let it breathe and noodle on storytelling. So much so that I didn’t read anything for two days and lost my Storygraph streak.

Book Reading

• Finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). What a really, really fucked up book. Five stars. In fact, I added the “6bat” tag to this book on StoryGraph. The “6bat” tag is reserved for “books I aspire to”. See live commentary on We Have Always Lived in the Castle here
• OK, pledging wise, I couldn’t help but back Leo Hunt’s The Shrike on Kickstarter. It looks so atmospheric and dark and beautiful. So, the spending fast continues, but the countdown has begun. Purple Planet funds on March 5, The Shrike on March 15. I don’t think anything else will come up rest of the year. As Ogrebeef told me, most RPG publishers are holding back on this 50th anniversary of D&D. Why fight the elephant in the room? With that said, Pendragon 6e might go live this year, along with Ars Magica 5e redux for sure. I don’t need rulesets, I know that.
• I am still wrestling with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). It is just so rough. I also started and quickly gave up on The Bomber Mafia (2021). I love Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast… and all his other books… but this, I dunno. I just don’t know. I got through the audiobook intro, the prologue, and all this other stuff… and just found the first chapter… dry? Or I just wasn’t in the right mood to start something new so quickly after We Have Always Lived in the Castle. That’s probably more the case. Yesterday though, I got bumped up for a “cut the line” thing on Libby for Mary Beard’s SPQR. I took it. The problem with Libby is I’m playing a game of timing holds. I have Obama’s book and the second Mistborn both arriving with an ETA of ~2 weeks… and they’re both 29 hours long. I know I’ll listen to The Well of Ascension (2007) at 2.5X just like I did with The Final Empire (2006)… but with A Promised Land (2020), I’m not speeding up the president. That’s just disrespectful. Obviously, none of this would an issue if I just started my Libro.fm membership. But I’m on this “spending fast”, right? I have a long-ass wishlist of WW2 books on there.

Archive of all EOW reports here