Hello everyone. Today, a slightly different kind of update.
First, however, I’ll quickly start with the regulars. IFF has seen perhaps 100 words or so written, so not much. I poked at the next lore post, and wrote about 500 words there. This month was busier and more stressful than I anticipated, so work on IFF suffered correspondingly.
I have a deadline this week, which has been pressing me for almost a month, now. However, past this deadline lies at least a week or two of planned company-wide chill time. Still work, but not concentrated crunch work. Rather, work on whatever pleases and interests me, and keeping more regular hours. I hope this will prove a boon for writing, as I can get away with being more distracted at work.
With that out of the way, let’s get on with it…
The Unholy Trinity
I think I am finally beginning to really grasp the reasons why I’ve been at a standstill for so long. I’ve talked about some of this before, of course, and mentioned certain experiments trying to counter it. But now I’m laying it out: this appears to just be how it is, at least for now.
I see a trinity of reasons that interweave to block my efforts: 1) quality, 2) complexity and 3) concentration.
Quality
After a few attempts at writing more IFF this month, I decided to try to kickstart my writing process back up by just writing literally whatever came to mind. So I have, this past month, written the first chapters of two self-inserts, three Worm fanfics, one Harry Potter fanfic and two original stories. All told, this is easily about 15-20k words (at a guess, I haven’t counted), written over half a dozen late evenings.
So, what gives? Why isn’t that 15-20k of IFF right there? Well, these stories were all objectively horrible. I just hold IFF to a higher standard than I do these stories, which means that writing it is much harder and requires me to get a groove going of far higher quality than usual. It’s very difficult to think “well, I’ll fix this in revisions”. It’s a mindset I haven’t managed to get down yet.
Complexity
The next arc is kind of complicated. I’ve tried to trim it down a lot, and even wholly removed one party’s involvement that I decided I could do without, just to simplify things. I’ve spent hours and hours with a beta, going over everyone’s motivations and actions, trying to ensure it all made sense and that nobody was holding an idiot ball.
But even so, it’s still not exactly easy to credibly pull it off. I even fear it might seem rather straightforward. It’s not that bad, on the outside. At least, I suspect it won’t appear as such, reading it. I might be overthinking the behind-the-scenes happenings, of which there are a lot, but nevertheless, here we are.
So, in short, if past-me walked up to present-me and suggested the current plot, present-me would punch past-me in the face and go, “You’re trying to be too clever! Haven’t you ever heard of KISS?!”
I do, however, still think that writing this would be completely awesome, so I am still totally going to do it.
Concentration
Back when I was really pumping out words, I was doing nothing but that. The first draft ~50k words of IFF were written pretty fast, and the ~130k version before that went even faster. I constantly walked around thinking about the story and how it would go and how everything fit together. I can’t do that right now; my job just takes up too much mental space. I am out of working memory.
It remains challenging to keep the entire plot in my head while writing, especially since practically every time I try to write, I have spent the hours immediately prior preparing pitches, or mulling over marketing material, or worrying about funding, or trying to hold an entire program architecture in my head while I solve a weird bug, or trying to fathom the oddities of the user’s mind. It’s a difficult context switch to make. At least, I’ve yet to master it.
Essentially, I need an entire day or two of peace, doing nothing but ruminating on IFF and going over old material, before I can actually start writing properly. I know this because the few times I’ve done it, the words began flowing much more easily and previously impossible-to-write scenes were vanquished before my keyboard like so much dust.
The problem is that I very rarely get this time. A weekend is not quite enough, and I have not had a consecutive three days truly off more than once or twice going on almost a year, now.
Prophesying the Future, or Some Such
So, you ask me: “What does all this mean? I simply sense more authorial excuses and whining about being busy.” And, well, yes, in a way you’re quite right. Trying to predict solid IFF progress is trying to predict to predict my future work environment.
But it turns out that even I don’t have a clue where my future work environment is going right now. Trying to start a company is busy work. Trying to start a game company is very busy work, and completely insane on top of that. Every time I talk about my much-desired vacation year, my partners wince. And so it is put off by another month. Or made implicitly conditional on whether funding for this or that project is forthcoming or not.
And that sort of thing is rather difficult to predict.
So I suppose, in the end I can only shrug and say, “Well… I’ll keep writing when I can, because I still want to. And I’ll keep updating the blog, because that’ll keep me on my toes and assure whoever cares that I am not gone.”
That’s really all I can promise for now. And really, that’s essentially what I’ve been doing so far anyway, so the status quo hasn’t changed. This is simply me informing you of the reasons behind the status quo.
And there they are.
And so, whoever you are, reading this, I’ll see you next month, for your regularly scheduled IFF update.
The Forge 