It’s no secret that for the past few years, I’ve been in a fallow period when it comes to my fiction writing. Hell, reading too, though I feel like I’m finally turning a corner with that. But the writing, well… I haven’t really turned that corner, and it’s pretty frustrating to me. In the past, I found that when I struggled to write something new, I could always remain productive by revising older work, but I’ve found that isn’t working for me at the moment.
It’s not that I’ve written nothing: I’ve published two full RPG books in the last few years (Fermentvm Nigrvm Dei Sepvlti and Isle of Joy), and have a third one sitting in a publisher’s queue of submissions after a rewrite request. I also self-published a pretty sizeable hack of Brindlewood Bay titled Something Tookish! over on itch.io. Last but not least, my wife and I have done a pretty prodigious amount of translation since the start of the pandemic, though not all of that has seen print yet. (We’re in the finishing stages of a book-length translation, no less!) Besides that, there’s all the other stuff I’ve done, like releasing an album of music over on Bandcamp and starting work on another, writing my first string quartet, and getting back into practicing saxophone.
But when it comes to my own fiction I’ve written very little since sometime in 2019, and it’s been frustrating. Earlier this year, I took the two novels I have (mostly) drafted—A**hole Island and Zymurgic!—and printed them out, ring binding them to make it easier to go through them with a red pen and cut, cut, cut. I started on A**hole Island, but found it quite frustrating how much junk and cruft there was, and how much I ended up cutting from the first hundred pages of manuscript. I keep them on my desk, hoping to dig in again during the long breaks I have between classes, but somehow there’s always something else to do.
So, anyway, here’s what I gonna do about it: I’m changing tack, by committing to a couple of new low-intensity writing projects. For one, I’ve started working on a collection of poems. Taking a cue from Bryan Thao Worra‘s Demonstra and Bryan D. Dietrich‘s Prime Directive and Universal Monsters, these are loosely narrative poems about geek-culture-related stuff, but in the style of modern poetry. I’m not going to say more, as I don’t want to spoil it, but I’m committing to carving out the time to write one poem a day until this book is done and ready to send out. (I’ll also be looking for magazines where I could submit oddball poems like these ones.)
The other thing I’m committing to is posting here on my blog at least once a week, barring major emergencies. I probably won’t return to the frequent posting I did in the past—and does anyone really want me to? I don’t think so, and don’t think my opinions on Korean politics or current events warrant publishing here—but I will at least try to write about something weekly.
Of course, I’m not sure that doing these things will necessarily help me get back on the horse, and I reserve the right to bin either or both projects if I decide they’re not worth it, but this is what I’m trying now, to see if I can get the juices flowing. Maybe 2025 will be my year. Maybe not. A lot depends on whether our son crosses the Rubicon into reading alone in English, which we’ve spent quite a bit of time on trying to make happen, and how much time I can carve away while he plays with friends, or while I’m on breaks at work. I plan on making other little changes—like picking up a much needed set of headphones for the office—and I’m hoping I can get the snowball rolling. We’ll see, though.
Battle Time!!!! That is so cute!!! And he made the game autonomously. My, well, the apple don’t fall far from the tree, does it??
HA, I suppose it doesn’t. Battle time was pretty cute. I wonder if he’s still got it? That post was actually written last year and I didn’t meant to post it as if it were new. (I just somehow didn’t get around to posting at the time.)
The poem collection sounds like a good thing to sink your teeth into. People out there don’t read poems in general, but it’s a good way to put your states of mind into alchemical formulae that other alchemists may decipher a mere two or three centuries later.
Well, I’m hoping that with the geeky theme it might appeal to a broader audience than your usual book of poems, but I guess we’ll see. I wrote another one this morning, so I’m still on track with it. I think I’m going to add a counter on the site here, and set it for 80 poems.