Another year has gone by. This one, at least, calmer than the last (though that’s not saying much). But less chaotic and more normal also meant less time to do this crazy nonsense and more time devoted to other things. I’d love to say that didn’t impact my writing much, but it did. Just not quite in the ways I thought it was going to at the beginning of the calming period. But that isn’t the heart of this last year. This last year has been a strange one, filled with seemingly contradictory lessons. A year where I started the most complicated world yet for these shorts, and yet could not manage to continue some simple stories. While it is not an easy year to encapsulate, all in all, I think it can be boiled down to four key elements: The Villa storylines I chose to pursue, the Vyrroltea, and the Wanderers, and the aborted tales.
I haven’t really talked much on the Villa Magistrorum Nostra stories. They’ve tended to be my point of consistency for, well, more than two years at this point. For me, the Villa stories are a different sort of animal to write. I know all the characters well, and I know where I want it to go long term, but I never go in depth into planning. Around the beginning of the ‘Summer’ stories, I pick a character for each month and a bunch of basic, five word descriptions and leave it at that. Sometimes, like An Average Thursday, it sticks pretty much exactly to the brief description. Sometimes, the description ends up a small part of the story, and sometimes it is ignored entirely in favor of a better vignette of the character. For the fifth semester, the stories I chose focus on these characters going about their own lives, doing things independent of the groups these stories have focused on so often. The pair of summer stories were about characters going out on their own, even beyond their comfort zone. Therese, Ike, and Greg, each get a story on them, focusing on living their strange lives, and the problems therein. At a time where there was a lot of newness injected into my writings, somehow even my old, consistent standard went through some changes. And yet it remained, and it is still on pace to go where I want it.
The big focal element as far as new things were concerned that actually succeeded was the stories of what Remains of the Vyrroltea. I wanted to start telling some high fantasy stories on this blog, and that coincided with me wanting a world of swashbuckling adventure. So, I wrote a few quick notes about a world, where a continent was smashed apart by the gods. I adapted older things that I was never going to do anything with to it, and I had my world. The next issue was the sort of story. I ultimately wanted it to be something akin to tabletop adventures, with a small group of extraordinary adventurers doing adventure and interacting. And I wanted the characters to be flushed out before they met. So I started writing individual stories of a series of people with nowhere to go but forwards. Denlo, the fugitive of his own crimes. Renalt, the wanderer with no home. Alessari, the hunted noble forced to flee home. Hilan, the devout knight sent out to learn. And Felazo the restless soul unable to stay anywhere for long. Initially, I wanted them each to have one story then they’d end up meeting each other, but I grew to think fleshing out how they started to meet was important, so they each got their own prequel arcs.
Where the Vyrroltea was something almost entirely new, the Wanderers are a concept I’ve had for a while. I had this concept for a story written up for my friends for a game. Then, on a spur of the moment thing, I wrote the post apocalyptic story A Hunting Wanderer. I will get more depth into the aborted tales part later, but unlike the Vyrroltea stories, this was never intended to be a series. Just a look at an interesting character I hadn’t done enough with. Then, months later, I wanted to do a story playing with time as a concept. And I realized another one of the Wanderers would fit that bill perfectly, and Wandering Nowhen was written. It was harder than most of my stories, partly because of the tense issue and partly because picturing what is happening is an element of how I write and Nowhen is nonsensical by design. But it was also a lot more fun than I expected. So when I wanted to fall back on characters I knew well and stories I liked writing, the Wanderers were a clear choice. I went one by one, telling the beginnings of each of the Wanderers’ epilogue stories. And I am still doing that, because these are characters that I know and can write pretty easily when I put my mind to it.
See those are all fine, and I can go into many other successful things from this year, too, but as has been hinted throughout, that’s not the real story behind this year’s stories. It’s the ones that didn’t launch. Richard’s Refuge was intended to be the start of a whole lot of calm, relaxing shorts about a guy just living life. Burning Inside was supposed to be the beginning of a whole new phase of the Super-Zeros three way war. Two separate months, I started telling stories from a different apocalypse that went nowhere. Twice I also tried to start up a new arc in Galaxy Incorporated about PPPI Destro’s effect on the rest of space. What happened in all those cases was simple. I couldn’t. Some came at the wrong time, where I just didn’t have the emotional or mental state to write any more of that. I was restless and worried, so calm was out of the picture in the year’s beginning when I was trying to get Refuge off the ground. And, in the same vein, that summer, and this year in general, was really not the wisest time to try writing stories about a group of people who have great gifts and absolutely no ability to run their own lives successfully. Others, it was just poor timing. The new GI arc wasn’t a hassle, but I didn’t know where it was going, and starting in September meant planning in October, and October was full. Overfull. I actually didn’t even finish everything I wanted to do in October in October. Then trying it again in November was even sillier, because December I rarely have any time to myself for planning things.
That may seem bad, but on the other hand, it did something interesting. Because of that poor timing on my part, I got several opportunities to go back into my old stories, rework and rewrite them to make them publishable. I had a deadline, after all, and if I couldn’t do something new, I’d settle for a refurbished old thing. And because of that, I got to explore some very fun stories that I would have forgotten about. Heck, even the de Biggore stories are an old idea and outline that I realized would make a good solid tentpole. Maybe, if I have better timing in the future, I’ll go explore more of them even further.
So, what did this teach me? What did I learn? After all, that’s sort of the point of these retrospectives. Well, for one, never count on life to be consistent, bad or good, but that’s not really about the writing. As far as writing and stories are concerned, the real lesson this year was about comfort, effort, and timing. Timing is obvious, and I talked about that a lot in the negative above, but I also learned about timing in the positive. I timed the Vyrroltea stories perfectly and gave myself enough time to do all the prep for them. Effort is another one that shouldn’t be a lesson. After all, I’m pretty sure the first of these retrospectives ended with something along the lines of “If you want to write, you got to write”, but effort is about more than that. When you put the time in, you have to commit to it, the whole time you’re working. Be that planning, writing, or editing, it’s not just about putting in the work, it’s about doing it efficiently. And finally comfort. Doing what is comfortable isn’t the same as doing what you’ve always done or what you used to do. What is comfortable, storywise, is simply what, when you are sitting down in front of a partially written page and writing, feels good to write. Not easy, not hard, not righteous, not relaxing, not cathartic, but what feels good to write. Doing that will always be better than trying to push for something that you dislike writing, even if that thing you hate writing is a better story. Because while your effort does show in your writing, so does your mood. And people tend to like stories that the author enjoyed writing better than those that they hated every minute of, or those that came so easily that they didn’t care about.
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