2024-W27 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Started the three-sentence-first-thing-in-the-morning (3S1M) ritual that Elizabeth Bear gave C.L. Polk to overcome their writer’s block. Thoughts below.
• July 4th was such a wonderful day for getting deep work done at the office since all the Americans took it off. Came home to grill burgers. We booked tickets to Iceland. Found an AirBnB as well.
• Still stuck on categorizing character arcs. Bought K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs (2016) and halfway through it. Thoughts below.

Project Status Dashboard

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

Writing three sentences a day, but still stuck on understanding the theory of character arcs.

EOW Time Tracking

I started the 3-Sentence First-Thing-in-the-Morning thing that Elizabeth Bear recommended C.L. Polk. So far, my experience is I’m writing high level exposition and observations. Nothing dramatic yet. I think what’s keeping me from fully taking advantage of this is that I still want to work on character arcs before I dive deep into the story, as in create a clear path for the character arc for prj: MINOS. I don’t know if having a clear arc will help me write stories in the way I want – which is with more clarity, more frequently and consistently.

As I said above, I got a copy of K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs (2016). Arrived on Friday, immediately tore into it. Lots of interesting insights so far that I can hopefully convert into functional and useful application. One powerful insight I had already is that what novels treat as BWO at the 25% mark is actually the 50% mark for short stories. BWO is the actual physical crossing of the threshold, or where enough elements have changed the environment, or the scope of the MECH expands enough to show there’s more to this world. Another insight is recognizing that the MID and LOW in a story is collapsed together at the 70-90% mark. About 70-80% in a 4000-7500 word short, and closer to 90% for a <4000 word, which only leaves about 400 words for the CMX/DNM at that length, which tends to be bittersweet wrap up in the short stories I’ve studied.

Percentages aside, I’m also realizing that I misunderstood GWL. It’s not Ghost-Wound-Lie. Weiland uses Wound and Lie interchangably. It’s more like Ghost-Lie-Stasis, where in Ghost is the backstory, Lie is the belief/value that they build their life around, which is their homeostasis.

Theoretically, I am hoping building the GLS is akin to creating the core kernal engine of an story’s operating system, or seed, or whatever metaphor you want to use. The Lie sprouts the WANT, which creates the PROG’s goal. The TRUTH is what they NEED, which creates the ARC. I guess you’d have to throw MECH in there too.

So, it’s GLSM. Gawd I love my acronyms. But yeah. GLSM could be the engine I’m looking for to feel confident enough to produce and finish stories on a consistent, frequent basis. Or this has been a huge distraction and none of this moves the needle forward. But with that said, I spent 12 hours yesterday learning about GitHub Pages with Jekyll, read tons of documentation, opened up the command line and upgraded Homebrew, upgraded Ruby, installed Chruby to override Mac OSX’s strange behavior of keeping Ruby’s version low, installed Jekyll, a bunch of Gems… played with multiple Jekyll themes locally (at one point settling on Hitchens, only to end up with Tale), and ready to commit my git, only to remember they turned off password access in 2021, which then meant I had to look up “fine-grained personal access token”, and I went so far as to picking out permissions when I realized there was at least 20 of them and I was like… fuck this, I’m just going to login into GitHub and drag my Jekyll files over. Was it frustrating? Yes. Was it incredibly fun to chase a singular goal and focus on it in a marathon of deep work? HELL YES.

Which is a long roundabout way of me saying… let’s say I build the GLSM engine and it ends up as a project that goes nowhere. The marathon chase of this deep work was a reward in and of itself. Figuring out the mechanics of how to build it. But let’s hope this actually goes somewhere OK?

• CURRENT STREAK: 7 Days
• LAST STREAK: 5 Days (June 14, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

So we’re booked for Iceland. It was hairy there for a while. Full-time contract means PTO. That’s one thing you can say about freelancing that you can’t at a job. You can leave whenever, juggle your schedule however you want, and tell clients you’re off to Europe for a couple weeks and not have to ask for permission. It’s only one week, but it’s one week that means another family vacation we can fit in. One more before the oldest one may not be able to join us after graudation.

Book Reading

• Finished Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (2023). Commentary here. There was some last minute desperate drama there, I was 90% done when the eBook was due at the FVRL and people had it on hold. I was almost, just almost tempted to buy it off Amazon so I could finish the last 40 pages… but then I got resourceful and checked CPL instead. It’s great having access to two library systems to game.
• But unfortunately David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021) did expire. I’m at 60% and there’s going to be an eight week wait now. I mean, I technically own the hardcover on this book. I just don’t think I have the energy to read-read this book. It’s so dense.
• Have not touched Atonement (2001). But my copy of Sloane Leong’s Prism Stalker Vol. 1 arrived and I burned through that. Great graphic novel on colonialism, the military-industrial complex, identity, tribal exclusionary. Kinda reminds me of Ancillary Justice (2013), which reminds me I need to finish that trilogy. But yeah, yanking refugees, displaced people, and low/fake-level criminals and enslaving them as indentured servants. Destroy their past and social ties, convert them into your guard dog.

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