I managed to make some progress on Chapter 18 of TWH. I wanted to make quota, but a fuzzy someone sent me to bed before I could finish. Still, it was more progress than I was expecting, so that’s something. We’ll see how much more I can get done as the week goes on. Stay tuned.

I had to go to the office for a few hours and didn’t really have anything to do, so I was able to make some progress on Chapter 7 of RttW. I need to be switching over to TWH, though. Stay tuned.

I managed to pretty well finish up Chapter 22 of EM3, so it’s more or less ready to go when its turn comes up in two weeks. Of course, it’s TWH that’s up next and I’m going to have to hop to if I want its next chapter ready before the deadline. Fun to come. Stay tuned.

Wednesday kept me hopping, so no progress then, but yesterday I had some downtime between grading entrance exams and the staff meeting before we could go, so I was able to make some progress on Chapter 22 of EM3. We’ll see what can get done on my comp day. (Don’t hold your breath, but I may surprise all of us yet.) Stay tuned.

Monday was another day of me making minimal progress on Chapter 22 of EM3 before conking out and yesterday would have been even worse, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even get to making a simple post like this, but I actually did better than you might think, making some nice headway in Chapter 22 of EM3 while working on the outlines for the WttW series during my free time at work (enjoying it while it lasts, which isn’t long).

I believe I’ve mentioned before that my most recent projects have taught me that writing by the seat of my pants is terrible and a major contributor to all the delays we’ve seen in those projects. I want to avoid that in the future, so I want to go back to putting the proper planning back into the process. That can be a little tricky when I’m pushing myself to consistently release new content, but in the case of RttW, I already have a good headstart that affords me some time to get things sorted out. How well all this works remains to be seen, but if you want to achieve a goal, you’ve got to set it first. Stay tuned.

I consider my primary goal as a writer is to entertain the reader (and myself, as I first set out to write a story I can enjoy and then hope others can share that enjoyment). That being said, I don’t want to just go the safe route and write the SFF equivalent of Hallmark movies (not that I don’t have some respect for the simple business model of delivering what the target audience wants). I do want to challenge both the reader and myself sometimes, and that leads us to the topic of today’s post. I’ve talked before about how my early novels tended to have more Boy Scout-type protagonists, but my protagonists have become more morally grey as I get older. I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly cynical sort, but no matter how sour you think you are, age has a way of souring you further and that gets reflected in the characters I write. Somewhat related to this is the idea I’ve floated before about creating an unlikeable character that the reader is nevertheless invested in. How many bad things add up to a bad person and how bad does a person have to be before it turns people away?

I bring all this up because it’s about time to debut the Welcome to the World series and I plan to be going into some dark territory. That’s not to say I haven’t gone into dark territory before, but there are lines I haven’t crossed with my protagonists that are going to get crossed here. I’ve had my doubts about going forward as planned, but I want to experiment with the audience’s tolerance for a character’s moral failings. Will the character’s good be only seen as hypocrisy or is it part of a more rounded and nuanced individual? Ultimately, this isn’t something I’ll decide but rather the audience. It may be rejected, but I’ve decided to give it a shot and see what happens.

I’ve drawn some inspiration from Westworld (Season 1, at least) for WttW in that there’s an environment where there’s a power imbalance that encourages people to indulge in their lesser nature. People succumb to temptation with varying degrees of enthusiasm and I want to see how they deal with their own internal moral conflict and how that either resonates or clashes with the moral core of the reader. As a creator, I’m dancing in a minefield of my own making. Here’s to it yielding a better result than just me getting gibbed.

There’s definitely going to be a followup post when the aforementioned line gets crossed, so we can have a chat then. Until that time, though, stay tuned.

Ugh. This is starting to drive me crazy. I can’t get more than a couple sentences in before I’m out like a light for some two hours. Well, so it goes. One day I’ll get lucky and enjoy an unbroken spell of writing without my body shutting down on me. Anyway, a little progress was made on Chapter 22 of EM3 and maybe I can drive forward and get it finished before switching over. Stay tuned.

You might be wondering why I’m posting about Thursday’s progress on Saturday. Well, I crashed so hard Friday evening that I couldn’t even get to writing this post, much less making any further progress. Thursday wasn’t that much better. I couldn’t get all that much written on Chapter 22 of EM3 before crashing out then, too. Can I turn things around in the course of the weekend? Don’t count on it, but I’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned.

Between bouts of unconsciousness, I almost made quota working on Chapter 22 of EM3. If I could actually stay awake, I might be advancing leaps and bounds. Also, I’m getting close to wrapping up the latest round of checking papers, which should help give me a little more time for writing as well. Anything to move things along, right? Stay tuned.

Right when I was going to start writing Monday evening, the mascot insisted that I go to bed. Apparently someone told her that I had to get up earlier than usual the next morning because of our school’s entrance exams. I didn’t think I was going to fare any better yesterday when I conked out right in the middle of the evening, but I was able to get a second wind and got some writing done on Chapter 22 of EM3. Not quite meeting quota (as I conked out again), but more than what I wrote Sunday. Baby steps, I suppose. Anyway, we’ll see what I can get done from here on out. Stay tuned.