2024-W29 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Dragonlance. I picked up Dragonlance again yesterday. Last time I read these, I was eleven or twelve.
• It’s been a draining and exhausting week at work. Deep into day-to-day operations of script production now.
• Read and took notes on Creating Character Arcs (2016) a second time.

Project Status Dashboard

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

EOW Time Tracking

The 3S1M is still going. Still scattered. But I think things wil be a lot more focused soon.

• CURRENT STREAK: 21 Days
• LAST STREAK: 5 Days (June 14, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

I falling more into the day-to-day whirlwind at my job and I reviewed a lot of copy this week. Some of it had to be completely rewritten, which means more training/coaching is required. Someone unexpectedly quit. But more importantly, I have not had as much time to WRITE FICTION. Now granted, this whole of last week, I’ve been burning through Creating Character Arcs a second time, but still. I need to wrestle time away for lunch and breaks. I came home extremely exhausted Mon-Wed, like zero energy. With that said. My motivation is increasing. I really feel like character arcs was the missing tool this entire time. Or correction, the last tool.

Book Reading

• Finished re-reading K.M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs (2016). More notes. Working on one final pass under the heading “Building Story Kernels”
• Since I started getting back into Marvel comics, I have also decided to regress back to my eleven or twelve year old self and started Time of The Twins (1986), the first in the Dragonlance Legends trilogy. It’s interesting what I’m picking up as a 43yo vs. as a 12yo (I mean, obviously), but also what I’m picking up as an aspiring author. I mean, fuck. The novel starts off with Tika covering for Caramon’s alcholicism. That’s pretty heavy. Considering what I experienced earlier this year. Tanis returns home still carrying the weight of the world, if not more, now that he’s a legendary hero. Everyone’s an adult now and has kids. I wonder… I wonder if Weis and Hickman played and wrote the first campaign as early 20-smths, then had kids, and then wrote this trilogy. Let’s go down a quick rabbit hole, shall we? FIVE MINUTES LATER: And I’m back. So nope. She married, had two kids, straight after college and after a decade, divorced, and ran off to Lake Geneva in 1983 to work for TSR. THREE MINUTES LATER: Hickman was a LDS missionary (why are there so many Mormon fantasy writers???), was 30k in debt and sold some modules to TSR to “literally buy shoes for his kids”, and moves to Wisconsin, then creates the Dragonlance setting. Well, that was a fun rabbit hole.
• I never really go into the “cosmic” side of Marvel. Not the comics anyway. But I really enjoyed the first issue of Stephanie Phillips’ Phoenix (2024). Of course, the wry, sardonic me is like… oh OK, so it’s like a white savior who goes around the planet galaxy saving third world countries and brown people underdeveloped alien civilizations who can’t defend themselves. And I would imagine Silver Surfer and Captain Marvel also have those overtones? I dunno. I’m… not… offended, but also, I can see how this can be problematic. What worked for me (as it seems to be what I’m zeroing in on – as I’ve started to put more attention to tracking this stuff) are the emotional interior and grounded relationship dynamics in a story. Pages 15-17, when Jean is meditating in space, making a psychic long distance call to Scott while he’s making coffee. That quick conversation, that long-distance marriage… that’s the kind of stuff that gets me. Sure, Phoenix can yank an entire prison station out of a black hole and shit… but who cares, right? It’s the strained marriage that matters.
• Atonement (2001) continues to bug me to pick it up. I love you literary novel, but I need superheroes and fantasy legends right now. But also, read the first few pages of Emma (1815), which I also love, but yeah. I just want to read trashy fantasy and comics and inhale my nostalgia right now.

Archive of all EOW reports here