2024-W28 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• A lot of “comfort food” reading this week. Theory, comic books, and RPG rulesets. But also my body broke part this week. I hate it.
• Finished and started re-reading K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs (2016) right away. Notes are here
• Met the 2nd MRK Short Story cohort today. It was sufficiently awkward and friendly and punctuated by “who should talk next” silences. Writers. What a weird bunch of people. In other news, no Garage Fiction podcast for a second week straight. Olivia had a rough, rough week. Wish I could be there for her, but this is the nature of Internet friends.

Project Status Dashboard

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

EOW Time Tracking

Still going. Not sure if it’s helping any aside from keeping me somewhat focused. I’m writing these snippets, observations. Three sentences is maybe one action. One thought. One short dialogue exchange. I know I’ll write more once I’m done with the character arc study and I can start applying it like an assembly line to the stories, but right now, it’s just a new habit I’m forming.

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

Four Thousand Weeks

Everything broke this week. It probably started last week when I spent twelve hours building a Jekyll site on GitHub Pages a marathon of deep work. Felt great afterwards, but Sunday, my back is cramping up, not exactly spasming to the point of pain, but it wasn’t good. This continued until Tuesday, when with one repetition of raising my arms above my head, stretching my shoulders, that that broke too. So the back of my neck and trapezius muscles are in pain. That was Wednesday until Friday morning. Thursday night, my right knee gives out for no good reason. I am broken. I’m doing daily stretches and I’m doing an hour of mobility three times a week and it’s not enough.

Book Reading

• Finished K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs (2016) and re-reading it again already. First time, I went through with pen and highlighter marking it up. Second time, I converted notes into this post, but also working on something else to systematize character arcs.
• Burnt through Knave 2e (2024) by Ben Milton. Reading Warden’s Manual for Mothership 1e as well. Also started Sinless: Chrome & Sorcery (2024). I guess I found my comfort food. Graphic novels and RPG manuals. I will most likely never play any of these games, but reading them just to understand how the system was put together, the core engine of mechanics… I dunno. That’s me.
• Jed McKay’s first issue of the new From the Ashes X-Men series feels promising so far. The challenge with comic books is their brevity and built-in continuity combined. You get 4-6 scenes maybe, so it’s technically a short story, but it’s meant for a 5, 10, or even 100 issue arc with intertwining stories. So it’s more like a novella or epic fantasy novel. But you only get one issue a month. So it’s like reading one chapter of a book each month and waiting for the next chapter. I’ve never written about this before because I haven’t bought a “single issue” of comic since, geez, 2002, 2003? The moment I got annoyed with Brian K. Vaughan for teasing me with barely any plot momentum in single issues of Y: The Last Man (2002-2008) was the moment I converted to trade paperbacks and eventually omnibuses as well. So I’m experiencing it all again with this new X-men run, but with open eyes this time.

Archive of all EOW reports here