I finally feel up to posting again. I’m not totally out of
the woods yet but I’m getting there. Things are beginning to look up and I’ve
got some of my old drive back.
With this in mind I thought I’d fill you in on a few of my
projects and how they’re coming along.
First up;
Darkling Watch
I was sat the other day, slowly working through the first
chapter of Darkling Watch (printed off and steadily being covered in highlights
and scribbles) when I came to a realisation. I need to rewrite it. All three
books.
I always knew that I would need to do some extensive editing
when I finally got around to it but as I thought it over I saw the truth. I’d
been putting off and putting off doing the edits or simply going over the same
parts again and again. I gave a quick read-through of the story and finally it
clicked. I knew why I’d been procrastinating on doing those edits. I wasn’t
happy with it. Not in the slightest. Sure there were some parts; a paragraph
here, a scene there; that I was in love with. Parts that, as I’d written them
the words had just flowed and poured onto the page. Those parts were few and
far between though.
It’s not the writing that I’m unhappy with. The writing is,
for the most part, alright. It’s the content, the story, the plot. It’s barely
there. I know what I want to the plot to be and sometimes it does poke through.
Most of the time though it’s hidden by the scenes that I WANTED to write,
scenes that I saw clear as day in my brain and more than likely were reflecting
things that I wished I was doing at the time. These scenes that I had written aren’t
what is need for the story to move onwards. They didn’t do anything, show
anything or even pull the reader in (all things that most scenes are meant to
do but more on that another day). Yes, Darkling Watch had character
development, but barely, it was hidden amongst the fluff, teenage relationship
angst (between a woman in her late twenties and a centuries old shape-shifter
may I just add, yet something else that needs work) and ‘witty’ dialogue. The
character development and the plot and all those other things that make a good
story needed to be yanked out, prised from the grips of the rest of the word
vomit and cleaned off.
I know why these problems came about though. The story was
only beginning to form in my mind when I began to write it. I’d just discovered
NaNoWriMo, just over a week before it was due to start and I had no idea what I
was doing. I got my basic idea, did a ridiculously vague outline and then just
went with it from there. I tried to write as much as I could, more than other
people in my area were writing and I cared little for the quality of what I was
writing. As a result Darkling Watch is very much a NaNoWriMo novel; huge,
vague, sprawling and disorganised. I focused on the word count, rather than the
story. It’s poorly planned and poorly executed and there’s very little I can do
to save it in its current incarnation.
So I’m scrapping it. I’m pulling out the bits I like, the
scenes relevant to the plot or some good characterisation and saving them
somewhere nice. The rest I’m putting into a folder in my Dropbox account where
it will stay forever or until I decide that ‘yes, actually, I can delete this
awful festering turd of a manuscript’ and hit that button. I plan on starting
from the very beginning of the whole process; planning and plotting everything.
I want to track my character development, the main plot, and the sub-plots. I
might even find that fabled theme and message in there. I don’t know. All I
know is that come tomorrow Darkling Watch will be torn to the ground and
rebuilding will begin.
The Web-comic
No, it still doesn’t have a name. My characters don’t have
names. My world doesn’t have a name. It’s just a big nameless mass. And yet...
There are things coming together. I’ve been doing reference
sketches from comics that I find with an interesting art style. The images of
some of my characters are slowly building up. The plotlines are growing within
my mind. I even see, now and then, how a particular scene might be drawn. Hell
I’ve got a theme and everything.
The way it’s all happening in my head is strange though. I’m
seeing bits and pieces and they’re piling on top of each other, slowly melding
together into one form. The excitement is all there, I want to work on it. But
it’s a new kind of excitement. It’s not pushing me to dive right in, to start
churning out pages and pages of comics that I grow to hate and will eventually
throw away. Instead I feel like I’m being encouraged to take my time, to make
sure I’m mostly satisfied with each thing before moving on to the next. I say
mostly because creative things are never truly finished, sometimes we just have
to say ‘enough’ and step back. I’m not focused on what I want the comic to be in
the same way that I did when Project Labolai was a web-comic. Instead I’m
focusing on making the comic the best it can be NOW, using the idea and
momentum to create a story and characters that I can be proud of.
I don’t know when the comic will be released online. I’ll be
sure to mention when it is though. For now I’m just going with my imagination
and slowly creating it how I want it to be. In the meantime I might experiment
with my comicking, draw a few practice pages, write a few practice scripts,
just to get in a comicking groove and so that when it comes to doing the real thing
I know what I want to do and how I want to do it.
Health
One thing that many of us writer-types sometimes let fall by
the wayside is our health. We spend so many hours sitting at our computers or
bent over our paper just telling our story. We get so embroiled in these worlds
we’ve created, manipulating these characters that are almost like children to
us, that we forget that we’re actually real people. We give our characters and
our plot lines more polish and care than we even think about giving ourselves
sometimes.
At the beginning of the year I made several resolutions
regarding my health. I said I would quit smoking. I said I would start going to
the gym more and get in shape. People didn’t think I would do it. They didn’t
believe in me.
I’ve now been cigarette-free for almost two months. I’ve
been going to the gym roughly three times a week for the last month (apart from
last week when I sproinged my ankle [and yes that’s a real word now, I say
so]). I haven’t felt this good in years. I’m getting slimmer, I’m saving money
and I can finally taste stuff again.
I do miss smoking now and then. Usually when I’m bored or stressed
about something one of the family-members is doing to wind me up. Mostly it’s
when I’m on a night out and I’ve had a bit to drink. For me cigarettes were
part of a night out. Thankfully my nights out are few and far between and the
temptation, when it does appear, is surprisingly easy to fight.
Overall I can say that this particular project is going
wonderfully well. Sooner or later, possibly after a few more months of going to
the gym regularly, I’m going to need to buy new clothes. I’m getting excited about
it already. Sure it will be a hard hit to my already meagre funds but it will
just show how much hard work I’ve been doing.
Besides, in the case of the inevitable zombie apocalypse it
means I may actually survive. After all...
You don’t have to outrun the zombies; you just have to
outrun other people.
