Joshua Lobdell's Blog: Musings by Joshua - Posts Tagged "joshua-lobdell"

My agent constantly tells me that writers have to write. Mostly I see that as him wanting to make his 8%...but deep down I know he is speaking the truth.

Over the last two months I have kind of gotten out of habit with writing everyday. Somewhere around the first of November I took a break from my writing project because it was really affecting my mood.

Writing a book about your ex girlfriend isn't exactly on the path of mental wellness. After I got the first draft completed I needed to take a break from it...because it was really bumming me out.

It wouldn't be a story worth telling if that wasn't the case...but surviving the writing process has been tough.

Ernest Hemmingway said the first draft of anything is shit...and that is kind of how I feel about this book right now. I had a few ghost readers go over it and some of the news is encouraging but overall the story needs to be polished...a lot.

So for now I am back on the chapter a day plan. This time starting at the end and working my way backwards...because the ending to me needs the most work.

This is essentially the third pass through my novel...book...whatever fancy term we should use to describe it...it is gonna come in at 80,000 words or so and I don't know what that makes it. This is the first work I have written of that length and that has been a challenge in of itself.

I wrote the first draft and then made another pass through it. This pass is being done with notes from Ghost Readers. What I am mostly worried about is flow and story structure. Then it can go to the editors and they can rip apart the grammar and language and what not.

This is the toughest write of my entire career. Length aside the path to being a happy healthy human being is hardly writing a book about an ex girlfriend...and with that being said it is a story I want to tell...mostly because of how many people in the last three years have asked me what the deal was with her.

The hardest part for me right now is tapping into feelings that simply are not there anymore. I don't think anyone wants to read a book about some chick...and for me at times it is hard to remember how much I loved her and how special she was to me...cause now she is just some chick...saying that makes me sad cause for the last three years I thought she was anything but.

More and more every year of my life is defined by the books I read during it. Last year at this time I had found the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik and I and the girl I was dating at the time tore it up and 2015 was the year I found an awesome historical fiction series with dragons.

That was all well and good till that girl flaked out and decided being a dirty skank was more important that being with me...ya I might be a little bitter about that one. It took six months to purge thoose awful memories of her and pick up Temeraire and finish out the series. Now I am very much waiting for the final book in that series to come out.

For 2016 I am focusing on rereading the Star Wars Expanded Universe...for the first time in chronological order...which is really odd because they were not published that way which leaves out key details in some books after Lucas Books went back and published books in the timeline that happened before other books.

I started at Return of the Jedi because my first thought was to compare how the EU was built up verses what Disney is going to expand its Star Wars universe.

That has changed into I just want something to fun to read, and reading the timeline past ROTJ seems like a lot of fun. However, I already know there is a lot of crap in the EU and somewhat surprisingly I have already found some of it.

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor is not a book I had read prior to this, and it underscores the problem with the EU...no matter what they go back and insert there is no drama because we know the heroes are going to survive it...because I already read the book that happens after it and there they were all alive and stuff. Since Mr. Lucas laid down the law that what happens in anyone book will affect what happens in the rest of the books the decision to go back and tell more stories in between stories we already knew is...poor at best. At worst a blatant way to rip off fans for more of their money. Since I bought this book on the secondary market I cannot complain too much.

Rereading the first book to take place after ROTJ surprised me as well. I remember thinking when I first read that story that it wasn't very good. This time threw I enjoyed it...it is not the best EU book by far, but I really got into Leia struggling with being the daughter of Darth Vader...maybe because I wanted to see some of that in the new movies.

For now I am into the Rogue Squadron books which were always among my favorites...such great characters in them.

It is kind weird what things we get use to, what we take for granted, and what we do when we find ourselves without those things.

For the last four years or so I have had a muse...that one special girl who inspired me to write, or who I was trying to impress with my writing. This was actually two different somebodies...one day last fall I woke up and both of them were gone. I didn't think it was a big deal at the time because I had just finished draft one of my first book...of course at some point I was going to have to write draft two and hopefully down the road their will be other books to write and projects to immerse myself in.

Without my muses, without having the feeling of needing to impress some female...my attitude about writing really suffered. While writers tend to have crippling self doubt and what not this was something else...something I did not know how to deal with.

I don't write to make money. I write to not go crazy, and hopefully my agent of business manager find a way for those efforts to turn a profit for all of us. So of course while I felt like my inspiration was gone, and I didn't have a muse...a lot of thoughts started stacking up in my brain and they had no where to go.

That is very bad. Just all around bad...no new things for my team to market, no getting things out of my head for my own mental well being and the depression that follows those two very sad facts.

So I decided to read, and to dive head first into the world of Star Wars books...and low and behold I feel inspired again. Of course that may not last, but maybe it will and my agent can get off my back about my work rate.

It just feels good to feel inspired again, and to not have to depend on anyone else for that inspiration.

Allow me a moment to go full fanboy and release all of my book nerd joy on all of you.

The New Jedi Order series is my favorite set of Star Wars books in the entire Expanded Universe. 19 books and I could not put them down...I read the entire series twice as it came out and as I waited for the next volume to hit stores.

Yes, it is a very dark series. Yes, beloved characters meet their ultimate demise. Yes, it changed the rules for the EU...and that is why it is freaking awesome.

So I had all 19 books at one point. When I moved in with the woman that would become my wife, and then moved again 2 months later into our first home...the box of Star Wars books got misplaced. Totally bummed and never really got over the loss of a great book series...and the loss to my Star Wars collection...a loss that as of today has been fixed. I bought the entire set on eBay and cannot wait to dive back into them.

For now having them on my shelf once more makes me very happy.