The Happiness Dilemma

I haven't been able to rekindle my writing streak over the last week.  To be honest, I haven't done much of anything besides spending time with my wife and son, and going to work.  What I've also been doing is thinking, and one of the conclusion I've come to is that I would probably be happier if I didn't want to be a writer.

Life would be a lot easier.  I could devote more time to my family.  I would probably be satisfied with where I am in my job.  I'd be able to get a good night's sleep for once.  Most of all, I wouldn't have that constant voice nagging me at the back of my skull.  You could be writing now, instead of wasting your time.  You could be doing something productive.  Why aren't you?  Why are you wasting time working/sleeping/gaming/eating/etc.?

There are two solutions, of course.  The first is to abandon writing and just try to relax and enjoy life.  It's tempting, but impossible.  I have to be working on something, and I don't want my obituary to just say "Well, he sure did read a lot of comics."  It's a condition that I have to live with, even though at times I wish that I didn't.

The second solution is to write more, which sounds simple.  The trick is squeezing it into the cracks of my life.  I get up, I go to work, I come home, I spend time with my family, and by the time I can write it's close to midnight and I'm operating on about four hours of sleep from the night before.  Mental exhaustion and the act of creation don't mix well for me.

So that's where I am right now.  No doubt I'll try to struggle through another week, squeezing out as many words as I can in the wee hours of the morning.  Perhaps I'll do better, perhaps worse.  Perhaps I need to stop obsessing over word-count, and just be glad that I'm making some progress.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES

What I've Been Reading
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

What I've Been Watching
Game of Thrones season 4
Resurrection season 1

What I've Been Playing
The Game of Dungeons (aka dnd)

'The Hound of the Baskervilles' by Arthur Conan Doyle

I've been on holidays for the last week, and I used some of the extra time on my hands to polish off The Hound of the Baskervilles, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for a couple of years.  You shouldn't need me to tell you that it's a very good book, but it is.  This book is tight.  Every single thread of the plot is essential, and not one detail given is extraneous.  It's easily my favourite of the Sherlock Holmes stories that I've read.

What's striking, though, is that Holmes himself is barely in it.  He's there at the beginning, as the plot is being set up.  He comes in at the end to solve the mystery.  But for about a hundred pages in the middle he's absent, and we follow Dr. Watson's efforts to unravel the mystery.  It's a bold choice, but I feel that in a story of this length it was a necessary one.

It should be noted that most Sherlock Holmes adventures are short stories.  The Hound of the Baskervilles is a novel.  Not a long novel, but a novel nonetheless.  Getting rid of Holmes for a large stretch of the book was essential to maintaining that length and still keeping the character's integrity.  This may be stating the obvious, but Sherlock Holmes is smart.  Most of the time he solves his mysteries within twenty pages or so, and The Hound of the Baskervilles isn't that much more perplexing than other Holmes stories I've read.  If he'd been present, the story should have wrapped up in half the length, or else Holmes would have felt uncharacteristically stupid.  Doyle solved the problem deftly, by taking Holmes out of the equation and allowing the reader to piece together the details of the mystery along with Watson..

At first I was a little miffed at the absence of Holmes, but in retrospect I realise that it's the only way for the novel to have worked.  A writer doesn't always need his star attraction front and centre.  Sometimes what a story needs is for that character to stay in the background for a time, and let the story unfold without him.  It's something to especially consider when writing stories with hyper-competent characters.  Such characters can make life difficult for a writer, in that they can solve a lot of problems with little effort.  This book has taught me that moving them offstage for a while isn't necessarily a bad thing.

False Starts

I've been trying to restart my consecutive writing streak, with minimal success.  I've done a day here, and a day there, but always with a day skipped in the middle.  I'm still making progress on The Lightless Labyrinth, but being on holiday has messed up my schedule quite badly.  I'm back at work tomorrow, and I aim to use that as a steadier to get my schedule back on track.  I really want to beat that 17 day record into the dirt.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK
The Lightless Labyrinth - 1,521 words
CRPG Adventures - a final blog entry on PEDIT5 (aka The Dungeon)
Your Adventure Ends Here - a blog entry on the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
The Marvel Saga - the origin of the Fantastic Four
Save or Die - a continuation of my series on the AD&D Monster Manual

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES

What I've Been Reading
The  Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

What I've Been Watching
Game of Thrones season 4
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

What I've Been Playing
The Dungeon (aka PEDIT5)
The Game of Dungeons (aka dnd)

The Twelve Days of Listless

I haven't written anything for twelve days.  When I last posted here, I was on a 17-day streak.  I had written something every day, for 17 days in a row.  It wasn't always something substantial, it wasn't always something good, but I was creating.  Just two days after that I stopped, and I haven't started again.

I often have trouble pinpointing why I can't sustain a regular writing habit, but in this case it's not a mystery.  I've been having some personal problems.  They're not something I want to delve into on the blog, but I've been experiencing a down period.  It's not depression; I'm perfectly functional in my day-to-day life, but even so I begin to wonder what is the point of writing anything.

The thing is, I've been perfectly capable of making my word count every day.  There's no reason that I could not have done so, no reason that I haven't banged out three or four chapters over those twelve days.  At some point I have to accept that not writing is an active choice.  There will be times when I can't do so, and that's fine.  But when I can, I should.  Time to get my streak going again.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

Nothing.  Nada.  Nil.  Diddly.  Zip.  Zilch.  Zero.

Oh, wait.  I did blog about PEDIT5, the earliest CRPG in existence.  It's over at crpgadventures.blogspot.com.  That counts, right?

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading:

The CRPG Addict blog by Chester Bolingbroke

What I've Been Watching:
Resurrection season 1 (it's sentimental nonsense, but my wife enjoys it, so...)
Game of Thrones season 4

What I've Been Playing:
The  Dungeon (aka pedit5)
Rogue 

Jack Manley on Smashwords

One of my goals for 2014 was to get Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity published on Smashwords.  I accomplished this weeks ago, but for some reason I never got around to mentioning it on here.  It could have been during one of my hiatuses, or it could just have been a general lack of excitement on my part.  As important as it was to get my book out on some more platforms, it kind of paled in significance to its very first publication on Amazon, so I wasn't quite as gung-ho to share the news with the world.

For those who don't know, Smashwords is an e-book distributor that takes your work and gets it out there on a heap of different platforms.  Basically, if it ain't Amazon, Smashwords covers it.  I'll admit that I didn't do as much research on how the site works as I did with Amazon, so I'm pretty hazy on how they pay royalties and the like.  But I do think they provide a valuable service; if it wasn't for them, I dread to think of how many different ways I would have had to format the book.

As it was, the formatting for Smashwords was a bit of a nightmare.  It's understandable; they need a file that can be readily converted for use on a lot of different devices.  It makes sense that they ask for very specific formatting, but the process really was a bitch.

I followed the instructions provided, which recommended going for what they call the "nuclear option": cutting and pasting my novel into Notepad, then back to Microsoft Word.  What this did was get rid of every little bit of formatting that had already been done on the file, to make it easier to go through step-by-step and configure the document to the Smashwords specs.  Most of it was simple, if a little time-consuming: setting page margins, paragraph settings, etc.

My biggest problem came when I tried to format the indents at the start of my paragraphs.  I had originally done this with two whacks of the spacebar, but Smashwords instructed me to set it up as part of my paragraph settings.  To fix this I went through and erased every instance of a double space in the document.  The problem was that I also used a double space after every full stop, and those got erased as well.  I tried to solve this problem with the Find/Replace tool, adding a single space after every full stop.  This in turn caused problems with my dialogue, particularly where a full stop was followed by a quotation mark.  It was a long series of problems followed by solutions followed by more problems, and took me a few nights to properly sort out.  I even had to read the whole damn book again (one thing that writer never tell you is how many times you'll have to read your book over; it can get pretty excruciating).

Nevertheless, it's up, complete with a spanking new cover design.  Check it out!

 

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth: 2,080 words

I was on track for a cracking week, until some personal stuff came up and derailed me completely.  That's going to happen; life won't ever stop kicking me in the nuts, I'm afraid.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading:

The CRPG Addict blog by Chester Bolingbroke
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching:

Wrestlemania I

Resurrection

What I've Been Playing:
The  Dungeon (aka pedit5)
Rogue