Trying to rebuild a writing habit is difficult after it’s been destroyed by mental health struggles. Things are finally settling down mentally, my medication is working, and I think the dosage is just about right, finally. At least for now, since I know that my body adjusts very quickly to medication and then it stops working. But for now, things are going well. The problem is, it’s like that writing muscle has atrophied again. I can focus for about ten or fifteen minutes before I need an equally long break. Of course, that’s still ten or fifteen minutes that I don’t have to do, progress is being made, but I can’t pretend it’s not frustrating.
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The good news is, though, that with the settling of my medication, my creativity has returned. That means my bestiary plans have been put on hold, and since my music subscription month ended, I’ve stopped being distracted by that as well.
Last month, I talked about my struggles getting into the head of one of my characters: Garrett. There is still a little resistance there, but it is getting better. What’s more though, in working out his full history, I realised I kind of want to write it as its own book. A standalone prequel as a short novel or maybe a novella. I honestly don’t know how long it would be.
Oh, let’s be real, this is me we’re talking about: it’ll be a full-length novel!
But I think it could be interesting to have a standalone prequel that shows the history of three of the four main characters in Legacy of Ash and Smoke. It would show Garrett’s past and how he rose from a nobody orphan to one of the most powerful warriors in the country, and how he was selected to be the personal bodyguard to the crown prince. I feel like it’s the kind of story that could be easily read either before or after the series; if a reader picks it up before reading the whole series, they’ll know who these guys are beforehand and have a good idea of why they act the way they do. If they pick it up after the series, then it can be like learning about it in retrospect, getting an actual look into events that are just mentioned in the series. Of course, I don’t want it to be required reading, but it’s become my fun cheat project. If I get what I planned to write done, then I can cheat on my current series with this book!
I’m hoping that next month will see me finally organising for a writing mentor. The program I’m looking at using has 10 hours of mentorship (plus reading time) for a project. I want to use it for the first book in Legacy of Ash and Smoke, because it’s such a huge project, I want to make sure there are no plot holes or contrivances that AI was unable to detect. Humans are usually better at that kind of thing anyway. If there is left over time after book 1, then we can move on to book 2, etc.
What this means though is that there’s a little bit of a pause on book 3 while I go back to book 1 and add in all the items listed on my “To Do” notes. There’s not too many — I’ve already done most of the work — but there’s a couple things that I thought of as I work through the series.
It’s a good reminder to myself not to rush the process. It will be a lot better if I can write the entire thing and make sure everything is foreshadowed well and that the covers all match and so on before releasing. Then I can also time the releases how I want and have a backlist to be releasing books while working on something new.
The final thing I wanted to tell you all about is a new writing program I’ve been trying out. As some of you probably know, I’m a big fan of using Lore Forge for writing (here’s an article on how I use it). It’s fantastic especially for people who write fantasy series. Where it falls down though is the lack of formatting tools. As you may have read in my self-publishing 101, I formatted my published book Salt and Ice in a combination of Libre Office and Kindle Create. It was a laborious process with lots of research on how to do what I wanted and compromising when I couldn’t do what I envisioned. However, I also didn’t want to pay for Atticus when it was solely a web-based tool; no matter how useful it may be, it still relies on internet and what if we lose internet, something that happens usually at least once or twice a year where I live, for extended periods of time? Or if the website goes down?
Then I learned about a program called Deckle. It’s in early access at the moment, so still very actively being developed, but it seems to combine writing and formatting into one useful program. It’s not perfect — it doesn’t seem to have any ability to link multiple books within a series yet — but being early access, I can shape the development with suggestions. I intend to do a full write up on my experience with it in the near future, so stay tuned.
That’s about it for me this month. How’s your writing going? Let me know in the comments!