Burn Out & Recovery

It's been some time since my last blog post. Work and life have consumed my time and while I always mean to come back here, it's never been a priority. Gonna change that.

I hit a wall in December after NaNoWriMo. Burned out. Disinterested in my big novel project. Zero passion in writing. There was a real struggle to get any words written for two months. I could blame the holidays and work, but it boils down to me in the end. The past couple of years I've been focused on short stories and this novel is a whole different beast. A demanding, needy beast that consumes everything. Add in a self-imposed deadline, mix, and watch it implode. By the end of the month I'd let it go, writing when the mood struck and poking with disinterest at other projects.

March got me back into the writing mood, letting me finish two short stories and do a revision to the third. So far I've gotten one acceptance and one rejection with the other third at the beta readers. Feeling much better about things, my head's in a good place and things are rolling along.

I finished the first draft of the novel and it needs a lot of help to be honest. Too many characters, lacking in focus on the central conflict, and there's no single "face" to the enemy. Lots of minions, but no boss or lieutenant to chew up scenery or truly menace the protagonist. I'm diving back into prose and starting to restructure the first chapter. I know who the enemy's stooge is and can plan around that fact. Plus I get to use more of the side-story idea to show what's going on behind the scenes. The cast is down to a handful now and been shuffled around so it makes sense why certain events happen. And tension. If there's one thing that comes back time and again from the beta readers is that I need to racket up the tension. So I did. The protagonist has to deal with two issues of a very personal nature.

On a non-writing related note, I've been impressed with Jurassic World, Avengers 2,Inside Out, and Mad Max: Fury Road. Looking forward to seeing Ant-Man, the new Stars Wars movie, Minions, Terminator Genisys, & the Fantastic Four reboot. Been quite a good year for movies and hoping that 2016 is just as good. I did see that we'll have to wait until 2018 for the Godzilla sequel from Legendary, but there's Pacific Rim 2 & a Japanese Godzilla in the meantime to fill the Kaiju / Giant Robot need.