- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Well I suppose hinting wouldn't be too troublesome. Alright here goes:
Chapter 20 will be released sometime within the next....
Okay, moving on.
I've received several 'conspiracy theory' PM's lately, and I found them to be wholly amusing so because of that I'll be responding to them here. They're not about the story per se, but do reflect on my writing habits.
First off, no, contrary to some people's beliefs, I'm not the kind of guy who can just sit down at any time of the day, pull out his laptop and just start hammering away. If I could do that, this story would have been completed back in January.
A lot of the times the last thing I ever want to do is sit around for hours on end and just pound out 10 or so pages of this story. While I wouldn't go so far as to say I actually have ADD, my attention span is very short. This is further accentuated by the fact that while I'm writing, there are about a billion other things literally at my fingertips that I could be doing.
So basically what I do is I set goals for myself. When I first bought a PSP and Lumines, I told myself, "You can't play this game until you write 5 pages." Sometimes this works, other times I get home, open up the Word document, strum my fingers for a few minutes, then shut the laptop off and walk away; pretending that absolutely nothing happened.
That strategy there is kind of how I work myself through a lot of the menial tasks. Like the action elements in this story. I get bored to tears writing them, mostly because I have to try too hard to make them non-repetitive, even when I'm having a repetitive fight scene (Johnson's rematch with Gravemind for example).
The other half of the work is done when I get huge bouts of inspiration. These come literally at completely randomized times. I had been playing a round of Lumines for about two and a half hours (700,000 points or so), and my brain had fallen into this kind of incredibly lucid state. If a neurosurgeon had been monitoring me I'm pretty sure he would have declared me brain dead. As the flashing blocks and wonderful music blared around me, I had an epiphany.
It was that event that helped me nurture and create my main theory for this story, the one that I'm sure will rock everybodies socks off.
When I get super-excited about stuff like that, I completely blow through chapters. Other writers probably understand that.
Nowadays since pretty much 99% of this story is resolved in my head, and there's really nothing left but to write it out, my enthusiasm for doing so dwindles. Forcing myself to write doesn't really work. I might as well handcuff my hands behind my back and try to write a chapter using my tongue. Everything will come out uninspired and tedious, which has happened a lot in this story I readily admit. I've been stopping myself from doing that lately though, we're in the final act of the story. I don't want people to be reading the culmination of so much work and thinking, "Damn that's a cool theory, too bad the writing sucks..."
So yeah. There you have it.
I don't sit around for months at a time, look over at the calender and go, "Crap! Its been a month since I've updated!?", then rush over to the laptop and churn out 30 pages in an hour and post it. I'd be a literary genius if such a thing was possible.
I said Chapter 20 wouldn't have a month long wait this time, and I certainly can see that it's going to take some effort. I've been laid low with a rather tenacious cold lately so I haven't been leaving the house that much, but I am heading out to go to the Klondike Days festival. Should be fun, provided I don't die on any of the rides.