Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "writing"

I just stay awake until petty morning hours, writing. Sometimes I get a lot of good work done like this. But most of the time I jsut sit there and try to meet the day's quota in desperation. People keep telling me that a good night's rest helps, anyway.

I should just go to sleep.

It's rare that I skip stuff ahead when I write. I write the first chapter of a story first, then second, then third, and so forth, get a mostly satisfying draft done of each before moving on ahead to the next. Sometimes, very occasionally, I skip a chapter: this happens when I've got little idea on what a chapter entails, and I already have a clear image in my mind on the chapter next to that.

The current storyline is a bit of an anomaly in this regard. I begun writing from the second chapter, wrote the fourth before the third, and just now skipped no less than three chapters - going straight from chapter seven to ten. I feel pretty weird about this, that's for sure. Like it was directly and maliciously subverting my logical, patterned mind.

But so long as I keep on writing, I don't mind all that much. I'm still going at my best pace and showing no real signs of slowing down.

You ever had one of those days where you struggle to write anything at all, all day long? Like you have no idea what happens next, or how you're going to tell whatever happens, or anything? And then suddenly something just clicks and you power through five thousand words in as many hours?

It's one of the best feelings I ever get as an author - easily in the top five. I think it might be my equivalent of the thing Arnold Schwarzenegger said about pumping iron (if you don't get it, don't ask).

Just happened to me.

That's all. Carry on.

Sometimes my writing surprises even me, even as I go along. A character just flees my grasp and does something completely unexpected and usually lethal.

I'm not always sure whether I should take this as a sign of strong characterization, or weak plot.

Moments before writing this, I finished writing the first, roughest draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea. It packs a good 126488 words and took me only 43 days to finish, which is easily a new record for me!

The previous holder was probably The Vagrant's Wings: its first draft stood at 140743 words and took 62 days. Rather slower, all in all. Here's hoping I can still keep on breaking the record.

So what happens now?

Well, now I'm going to take a break out of this thing. I've hung it to dry for a month, clearing my head and getting involved in other projects and activities. 15th of November next month, I can return to it with an open mind and rewrite the whole damn thing. By new year I'm hoping to have something to throw at my editor, and then barring sudden cataclysms it should be ready for publish sometime 2019.

I rather like how this one turned out, and it's gotten rather good reception in my test group as well. I hope it will find a bit larger audience. It remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.

2018 was a little bit less productive for me than the year before: I spat out Pirates (now Blight) of the Demure Sea in about a month and a half, sure, but other than that there were just a couple drafts I ended up shelving halfway and never getting back to, and a short story or two. The year before, by comparison, I got through with The Straggler's Mask, Chaos Star, and The Vagrant's Wings.

I'll see if I can do better in 2019.

Today I began writing Ivar Stormling of Skar, and all being well I should have a draft finished by April. Then maybe I can get back to editing Demure Sea and Chaos Star, maybe finishing Shadowland and/or a few more short stories, and finish up with The Vagrant's Wings and get someone to slap a cover on it. I did have another idea coming up in my head, too, about mountains and such: we'll see if that goes anywhere.

Keeping my mind in the thing I want to do, keeping it from wandering to other things and getting unrelated ideas, is a regular problem.

I've talked about music before, how I should only listen to things that relate to my current project, but that's only the beginning. There's also movies (I think I named a few that helped with this pirate story I wrote), video games, books and comics, even conversation with friends. I need to essentially overload my brain with related things. They not only help me keep focused, but also give me more ideas on what to do, story elements and arrangements, and insight on how other people handled stuff like this, what they did better than me, and how I could improve.

The real problem is that it works both ways.

I have several video games I've been wanting to play, that people have recommended for me, and that I'm fairly sure I would like - but they've got nothing to do with my projects, and would end up with occupying my mind with unrelated and frankly harmful thoughts and loves and obsessions, making me want to abandon the thing I'm doing now and going off to something entirely different. It's happened before: the short story Loot, which I posted a couple months ago, came from a stray news article and completely killed all progress with Ivar Stormling of Skar. I haven't written a word of that story since then.

Just now - and this is why I'm writing this whole thing now - a friend of mine brought forth the subject of Artificial Intelligence, which made me want to return to that robot story I've been working on for years. Problem is, I'm currently trying to edit a couple short stories for publication, and also heading off abroad in about a week. I can't spare the mind on a major project now, no matter how much I'd want to.

At best, this is probably the reason I can vomit out a doorstopper novel in about two months. At worst, it can completely scramble up my brain and halt all progress.

I've been doing a lot of short stories lately. They need much less time and focus, and are therefore a lot easier for me to manage. But every once in a while, the desire for greater things comes up.

I've been writing little ones lately.




At my absolute best, I can vomit out the first draft to a doorstopper in just a couple months - my personal best is 133k words in 45 days. But I can only pull it off successfully a couple times a year, at best, and it's just as likely that I end up running out of steam halfway there and the story just peters out. The rest of my time is usually spent on revising and editing those raw drafts, gathering up new ideas, or all too likely, just faffing about.

And in the event that I do succeed and pull of one of these, the withdrawal is insane. Can you even imagine what it's like to write three thousand words every day for two months, then suddenly just run out of shit to write? The floodgates of imagination left open for so long, then losing their purpose and needing to be shut down after a habit is already formed? It's more unpleasant than you'd think.



Maybe if I learned to write like Stephen King and just immediately jump to a new project after finishing the last, but I'm not sure I could pull that off. I'll look into it.

For now I think I have a much better time doing short stories, on the whole. It only takes me a week or two to put one on paper in full, even when not on full steam - or just a couple days at my absolute best - which is nowhere near enough time to form a habit out of it: once I'm done, I can just stop writing and don't feel so terrible about it.

Now I've got about half a dozen of them written this year. There'd be enough of them to clump together into a reasonably-sized collection that I could throw in here for you.

Problem is, they don't really have anything to do with one another.



A story needs a theme at its heart - something to run it, rather than just a bunch of things that happen. That's difficult enough on its own, but I think that the same is true when a bunch of different stories are joined together under same covers: they would need a shared theme among them. Something to connect them all together.

Right now I'm writing of the queen of a small kingdom, fighting a megalomaniacal conquering prophet with the power to control weather. After this I'll probably write of the last lifeforms in the dying universe looking for a way to escape the inevitable by going back in time. And then there was the one I wrote earlier, a satire about modern video games. They don't even have the same main characters, or take place in the same world.

That said, I think I could continue some of them. Write more short stories and link them together. Watch this space.

I've started up three or four short stories, and one rather the large and complex series of notes for a longer book, in these past couple months - only to grow weary of them and abandon them halfway. They always start so strong, too, like five thousand words the first day when my mood is still high and I think it might go somewhere! And then it won't. Alas. Until now!

Total word count is 18,816 words - since 14th of the last month, averaging to barely 800 words a day. It's not too fast, perhaps, but I am extremely satisfied with how it turned out, thinking like it might feature some remotely unique worldviews, a bit of good character growth, and Inverse Ninja Law applied on skeletons.

...And of course as soon as I take a break, I feel all weird and like I had to get back to writing again. I might return to one of those unfinished ones.

I've been feeling like picking up drawing again - I haven't so much as picked up a pen in more than a decade. But I remember why I stopped, I know what I'm like, and I know there's precisely zero-percent chance I can keep it up. It's a passing whim that I'll have forgotten by tomorrow.



What hurts is knowing that if I had kept it up, I'd be pretty good by now. No way I'd suck at anything after some fifteen years of doing it. And I'm probably going to look back at this very moment another fifteen years from now, wishing I'd picked up drawing again after all and stuck with it. I wish I could get back all that wasted time - the years I spent doing nothing at all, just sitting there and staring into space - only this time with some clearly written instructions and a whole lot of reference books to make sure I wouldn't just waste it all over again. It would be enough time to learn not just to draw, but also - the true aspirations of my dreams - to animate.

I'm convinced that the very medium of writing is now dead. The modern world has no place for it. Two reasons.

One: anyone can write - just open up a new word file and get to typing - yet almost no one can distinguish good writing from bad. There's not a single publishing agent or short-story publication in existence that doesn't have to deal with dozens if not hundreds of daily contacts by hopefuls with high aspirations and no skill to back it up with - and when their stories are inevitably rejected, they can still self-publish it on their own. End result: thousands of stories out every single day, most of them never read by anyone, any nuggets of real merit drowning in an endless evergrowing ocean of garbage with no one ever learning to appreciate them.



Why would anyone with any measure of true determination and willpower stand for this? Why would they not struggle to break through their confines and learn something real, something more tangible, easier to appreciate, with less competition? Learn to draw at the very least, to make a comic book. Then you can learn to animate it and get to the business of cartooning. Or you could go ahead and do something entirely different, such as coding a video game or perhaps direct a movie. Join together with friends and form a whole company to cover each other's backs. That's the second reason writing is dead: we all have the tools for pushing to greater heights now, and no real excuse not to. If you don't struggle and improve, if you just do your own thing with no one to help you, you'll make it nowhere.

Sure, then your comic or cartoon may not be written or plotted out that well, since you didn't learn to write quite as much. But what does that matter? As I've said above, no one can tell the difference anyway! Follow the current trends and you'll be fine.

I beg you now - don't make the same mistake I did. Don't build yourself a future filled with regrets and remorse and ruined dreams that you can no longer change. Flee this accursed place. Learn something real.



It's always easier to tell others to change, than it is to change yourself.