Progress #IWSG

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and I only managed to make this post because a friend texted to remind me. Whoops.

I’ve made significant progress on my companion novel. That is to say, I’ve made it past chapter 2. After all my worries about chapter 1 lacking tension, I ended up rewriting it again, added a bit more fun (in my opinion), leaned more on my character’s limited resources, and made implications toward her personal feelings early on. And then I went and added a brand new chapter 2, pushing out the multi-day jump I lamented about last month. This was fun for me, because I got to throw in all the ways her immediate antagonist makes her angry, including things I’d removed from chapter 2 five versions ago. Even though it doesn’t move the plot forward much, I think it helps the story, giving the reader a grounding on why my character is so reluctant to take this antagonistic character on as her mentor later in the story. I’m currently on chapter 11, nearly 30K into this story. Based on the structure-in-a-nutshell text file I have saved after a gchat conversation with my buddy Jim, I’m in first plot point territory. That probably means my story is going to be about 120K, if I manage a well-structured story, that is.

I’ve also delved back into the realm of art, finding inspiration after messing with Dream by Wombo and plugging in “blacksmith smelted molten metal” as the prompt and choosing blacklight as my style. Here is one of abstract generations, that I plan to use as a color scheme.

I’ve had lots of fun playing with Wombo to create visual candy for my different environments. I’ve generated several iterations for my five main provinces, figuring out what to put in the prompts to get something along the lines of what I want. There’s Halqua to the east, Aerwether to the north, Geotellus to the south, Embrathael to the west, and Lumenor smack dab in the middle.

I’ve also been drawing, working on my main character for the companion novel, aiming for a style somewhere between semi-realistic and cartoon. It’s not done yet, but I’m hoping I’ll stick with it and be able to show it off next month.

IWSG Question of the Month – Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

Ha, yeah, that pretty much describes all of my books. I’ve got bad stereotypes, frowned upon tropes, and poor representations of mental illness and disabilities. The thing is, that’s how the story is in my brain, and if I changed the core of who these characters are, then I might as well throw the whole story out because they wouldn’t be my characters anymore.

I’ve simply resolved to write the stories. I’m not going to pursue publishing, because though there’s a strong sentiment of “there will always be people who don’t like it, don’t let them ruin it for you” and “people need to stop being so sensitive” (those are responses I’ve gotten when I’ve explained my stance to people), I personally don’t want to contribute to the problem. I’m not going to stop writing, but I’m also not going to unkill that one character or change the way this other character talks or make that other character not a cannibal. So I’m going to write my stories, as messed up as they are, still run them through my critique group and critique partners because I do want them to be well written, and then print and display them with pride in my office.

Now if only I can finish them within my lifetime…

Have you seen progress with your stories lately? Have you ever played with Wombo art? How do you feel about controversial subjects?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.