Tuesday Update: Language Learning + Character Brainstorming

Hey everyone, how’s your week been? I set myself a few too many goals and didn’t get through them all. But that’s okay; I had a feeling I was being a bit too ambitious when I set them. So going forward I’ll have a better idea of what I can accomplish in a busy work week during this pandemic!

While I didn’t accomplish all of the goals I set for myself (I completely forgot to look through older stories I’ve written…), I still feel like I made good progress on the language front. I read a few short stories/chapters in both French and Ukrainian. I played around with a language-learning game on Steam called Influent – I need to work on my Ukrainian vocabulary, so I’m hoping it will help! And I even managed to finish watching season 1 of Les Revenants, which is a super good show in French (I watched it with English subtitles because my French is not good enough to follow media yet – I tried watching a movie without subtitles awhile ago, and if not for the visuals, I would have been totally lost!)

One thing that I was also very happy about last week (that was not a goal) was that I sat down and brainstormed a couple of new characters! I have a very vague idea at this point for what could be a series of stories set in a pub on one of my worlds. While I still have a lot of things to figure out about these characters, I was just happy to actually sit down and write a bit over the weekend. 🙂

Oh, and one thing I decided to add to my goals for this week: read for fun! I haven’t read a book in awhile (other than the French and Ukrainian books I’m making my way through), and the last few books I was reading were all for an article I was writing at work. So this week I want to make a point to at least start reading a fiction story of some sort with no pressure on myself. I’ve heard really good things about both The Gown by Jennifer Robson and The Alice Network by Kate Quinn, and have been planning to read them for weeks. So hopefully I’ll actually start one of them this week! We’ll see how it goes.

So how about you? Any plans for the week? Reading anything fun? 🙂

 

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Last #WriteMonday (It’ll Be #WriteTuesday Going Forward!)

Just to warn everyone, this is going to be the last #WriteMonday.  I was thinking about it, and since I generally work on things on Monday (and so never really have a consistent time when I post on Mondays), I’m going to move the weekly update to Tuesdays instead.  That way I can do all my writing without trying to remember to post on here simultaneously! 🙂

Fitting in with this change, I also decided to move the monthly Tuesday Book Talk to Thursdays.  So starting this month, that will now be happening on the last Thursday of the month instead of the last Tuesday.

This last week has been full of brainstorming and worldbuilding and plotting, all for the Make Your Way Story I’m working on.  As I mentioned before, the story is going to be set in City of the Dead.  After finally finishing bingeing through the Pitch Meetings on Youtube (they’re by Ryan George for Screen Rant), I started thinking a lot more about this story.  I don’t know why, but I was having a really hard time working on it, so I forced myself to go over things and see what the matter was.

My thoughts led me off in some unexpected directions: the original story I envisioned had a man looking for his betrothed, but I wasn’t really clear on how he realized she was missing.  Thinking through that, I thought it made the most sense that they separated because of an argument and he realized she was missing when he went back to apologize to her.  But the more I thought about their argument, the less sense the story made as I had originally envisioned it.

What made more sense within the story was to have the lady looking for her betrothed instead. That meant I had to change some aspects of the characters I had originally envisioned, too.  At its most basic, she was originally going to be a revenant, but now he would be instead (revenants are the soul that remains when a zombie is made – I talk a little bit about it in this post from 2015, and wrote a short story dealing with revenants and zombies for Apocalypse Madness).  Making that change led to some unexpected worldbuilding problems within City of the Dead that I had to work through (specifically whether the world’s magic is capable of affecting a revenant).  That question took an unexpectedly long time to answer (about two days!)  But that was okay, because now that I have answered it, I feel a lot more confident about this new version of the story.  And now that most of the worldbuilding is out of the way, I’ve been able to start re-plotting the story.  That has (of course) kicked up a few more worldbuilding things I need to think about, which will hopefully take a bit less time than the last one did.  But no matter how long it takes, once I’ve figured all of this out I think both the story and the setting will be much stronger!

Once I’m finished with working through the plot and the few worldbuilding kinks, I’ll get back to actually writing the story.  Unfortunately the changes I’ve made mean that most of what I had already written will be scrapped.  But that’s okay, these things happen (remember when I was working on that story for the Dark Crystal Author Quest? I wrote 5+ drafts of that story, many of which involved huge structural edits like this!) The main thing is that no matter how many drafts this takes, I end up writing the strongest story I can! 🙂