This last week taught me a valuable lesson: I really shouldn’t make huge goals for January. With the holidays not quite ending for me until around the middle of the month, I found myself feeling just generally overwhelmed over the last few weeks trying to fit everything in. Since my last #WriteTuesday post, I spent a lot of time continuing to straighten up my place; I sorted through a lot of old documents, both physical and digital. I finished scanning all the old notebooks I’ve been wanting to scan, and shredded/recycled their pages. By Sunday I was feeling like I was actually on top of things for the first time this month (and wasn’t feeling so overwhelmed by all the things I had to do anymore).
So yesterday I finally turned back to the story I’m working on for the Make Your Way anthology. I’m not going to lie: over the last few weeks I started wondering if I should even bother to finish it because it was stressing me out a lot and I’m not quite sure why. I know a lot has to do with getting all the different branches to work on the story. Another part has to do with my intention of making it a game book, but it was sort of stuck as a regular choose your own adventure story (so a branching story but without the game elements built in). And I think I just didn’t plan it out as well as I should have, so I was getting a bit stuck while trying to figure out how the story should flow. But I know I’ve had a lot of trouble finishing things in the past, so I’d really like to persevere and get this done. But I think I need to take the pressure off myself a bit with it; with that in mind, I’m not going to be fighting to get it finished by the end of the month (not that it would be – I still have to finish writing the first draft before starting edits).
But it is slowly taking shape! Yesterday afternoon, I got all of the threads of the story to the same point: the player has found what evidence they can, so now they’re going to go and confront the person they suspect is behind the disappearance you’re looking into. Check out the new graph:
The red and purple colours show different endings points for the story so far. The blue and turquoise colours show different RPG choices the player can make.
As you can see, I’ve added in about 10 more sections since last week, so that’s definitely progress! I’m actually rather excited to get started on the endgame stuff now – I had ideas for it long before I planned out the middle stuff!
Also, I’m not quite sure why section 30 is just floating around in space near the top. I connected it to section 21 after saving the graph, so it isn’t unconnected to anything anymore.
So my plan is going to be to keep working on this in February. But I think I’m also going to work on another short story (I was eyeing up another market and had an idea for it, so I’d like to work on that, too). I know I’ve had a hard time sitting down and working on this story all month, so I’m hoping that if I’m feeling blocked, working on the second story will help get me unstuck. We’ll see!
Oh and in case you’re wondering how my lucky bamboo is doing, here’s a picture I took of it on Sunday:
It’s still turning yellow a bit, but not nearly as fast as it was previously. I’m going to leave it alone this week, then change its water next week as my friend instructed me. We’ll see how it’s doing next weekend. 🙂
An Acquaintance with Letters 