Writing the Wrong Dang Thing

It's been, I have to say, a long time since I've really felt inspired for an extended period of time. The last time was through the entire latter half of Sylv Vol II in early-to-mid 2020, and it got me through most of that novel and The Unpleasantness.

Since then, it's been... quiet. My progress through Untitled City Novel has been a sort of inconsistent plod - I'm enjoying it, sure, but it's not quite hit the same. There have been other brief flashes of inspiration for other stories or art projects, but nothing lasting more than a few days and a chapter's worth or a single page of art.

That changed about two months ago, when I fairly spontaneously allowed myself to write half a short introductory chapter to a story that has been bouncing around my head for a few years, but which I very intentionally had not been focusing on yet. There are other stories more prescient to tell that are already underway; this one could wait.

But then, very abruptly, it couldn't wait. It had to be told right now, and it was ready and it was not waiting for permission.

I ended up writing fifteen chapters in the space of about six weeks, varying between a chapter every few days, and two chapters a day. Every time I thought the flow had ended and the spigot had sputtered dry, more would gush forth. It consumed me. I had to make the playlist for it; if I sat down I had to write it; my gym sessions and dog walks and drives to work were dedicated to it. I indulged it for the first week, then it just didn't stop and so I tried to make it stop, re-reading recent chapters of City and changing my listening habits, but that didn't help at all. It just left me creatively frustrated and resentful of the other things I was "supposed" to be creating.

So, I cut myself some slack. We missed a week of Sylvpod again, sorry, and I left City for a while. I appreciated the creative flow while it lasted, revelled in how competent and comfortable writing felt, how easy inspiration came. Of course, it did eventually dry up, and that's okay.

It's okay to just have a nice diversion sometimes. There is a long, long slog left of City - finishing the first draft; many more months of editing and reviewing; probably a complete re-write of some substantial chunks; and then the slow build of titles, blurbs, covers, and promotion. I couldn't live without it, of course, but something gentler is nice sometimes.

It's okay to wander down the easy road for a while, I guess. You do not have to repent for happiness.

Crescendo

Last week, I reached a point in City Novel that I had been looking forward to since I started writing it - a twist I had been thinking about and planning for a solid six years. It was as satisfying as you'd hope; this is my primary reason for never "jumping ahead" when writing, even if I'm stuck in a slump and the Good Part feels impossibly out of reach.

I'm not sure if it has been (I am far too tired to count now, at 11.35pm on a Friday after editing a late episode of Sylvpod), but it feels like the longest stretch since I last published a book. I think the effect is compounded by the fact that even if Sylvestus Vol II only came out two years ago or so, I had been writing Sylv for a long time, as three novels in the end front-to-back. I was writing City on and off for half the time I was writing Sylv. Dying Ember was published in 2014 when I'd already started Sylv, so -

Wait.

Each Separate Dying Ember was published nine years ago? Well, dunk.

I guess when you hit your 20s, the years really do start racing by. I hesitate and frown when people ask how old I am now, second-guessing myself - 25? That can't be right. I finished university four years ago? No, that doesn't seem true. We've lived in this house for fourteen months? No, I must be confused.

The best way, I've heard, to not feel like your life is rushing away from you is to fill it with as many new experiences as you can, as much variety as possible. It also keeps the wonder there, stops nostalgia from casting a pallour over the current day to make yesterday seem brighter.

Things are never perfect, but a missing pet is found again, a weekend arrives, a friend is visited, a sunset is watched, an annoyance is forgiven, a moment is savoured, a long-awaited crescendo is written. The wave crashes to shore and slowly withdraws. We ready, once again, to hurl ourselves forward into the new day.

Flourish

I've never made new years' resolutions. Don't see the point. I'm not someone who revels in their bad habits for a short time with the intention of giving them up at a set date; I'll come to it when I'm good and ready, and when I do decide, I typically don't go back on it.

 

It took me a long time to overcome the shame and dysphoria of going to the gym, but I did it when I wanted to and I haven't stopped. Drinking alcohol petered out over the course of two years or so, and when I decided, "okay, that was the last time," I never drank again. I take up new hobbies with care and research, and I often don't announce plans or start projects until I know I can carry them through.

Lent was a big thing when I was a kid. I'm sure it has more complexity, but the way it was essentially taught to us was that Jesus gave up food and water in the desert for forty days and forty nights, so we should give up things we loved but that were bad for us for the forty days before Easter. I never really got it, because Jesus didn't give up wine or Pepsi or kebabs, and we weren't encouraged to give up all food and water while traveling the desert. I always felt like people were confusing it with Ramadhan.

Teachers would encourage us to give up chocolate or crisps, parents would lament their inability to give up fizzy drinks, my peers would brag about how it had been three whole days since they had eaten cake.

If we were supposed to give up those things because they were bad for us, why did we take them back up as soon as the Adult-Mandated Time of Abstinence was over? It never made sense to me.

So, what I started doing instead, when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, was start doing good things for that period. Things that I thought Jesus would be proud of. If it didn't stick, then I had made the world better for forty days; if it did, I had made myself better in the long run.

One year for Lent, I gave one compliment every day. Another year, I said every nice thing that came into my head. Another, I did one helpful thing for someone every day.

I was ahead of my time, honestly; it's the kind of thing that would be shared on Facebook and get a billion likes on Instagram by people who fall into multi-level marketing schemes now, but at the time, those same people just made fun of me for being too weird. Such is life.

It petered out in my late teens, when no-one did Lent anymore and I was too stuck in my own head to give compliments or be helpful every day. I like to think that nowadays, I try to incorporate those values into every day, regardless of whether it's just before Easter or not - hopefully those Lent years were good practice. And speaking of incorporating them into every day - that's really my whole approach to the idea of new years' resolutions.

Why wait for the Socially Acceptable Cue to make changes? Big or small, there's things you can do every day to make that day better.

For the last few years, my goals overall have been bare and simple. Survive. Get through. Recover. Find a way forward. Escape. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a solid ground beneath my feet. A job I can settle into and stick with, a stable happy living situation, sustainable finances... I can plan. I can create. I can think about short-term luxuries and long-term goals.

So, when I was tasked in my LGBT+ church a few weeks ago with coming up with a new years' resolution... I tried not to be sardonic.

So, what's not sardonic? Sincerity, I guess.

What do I want out of this year? To save money for something. To finish writing something. To get better at something. To have a procedure. Maybe my hesitance to finalise these things, to write them down and hand it in to someone who promises to keep it safe for a year and give it back to me in twelve months' time, is a kind of fear as well as a value.

So, I went with something simpler, but... sincere.

Flourish.

 

Let's revisit next January, I guess.

Back and Forth

I feel recently as though I have been struck with an introspective mood, perhaps because for the first time in a long time, things are just... good. I love my job, I love where I live, I'm emotionally and financially stable - little day-to-day things come up, but compared to the past few years... yeah. It's just. Good.

And it's hard, in its own way, to know what to do with that. I don't want to spend the good times just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but there's also this looming anxiety: Is this what it's supposed to be? Is life supposed to be this easy? Am I allowed to just... be happy?

 

That's a pretty tragic thing to say, I guess, but it's true. I feel guilty for how good things are, as if all the terrible before didn't happen, as if happiness should be earned, as if good fortune is an undeserved reward, unrelated to hard work and perseverance.

On a completely different note, it's now just past the ten year anniversary of what I think of as the start of my novel-writing... phase? Experience? I wrote about it extensively here, just before the eight year anniversary, and re-reading that post back today I'm struck by how wise 22 year-old me is. He had a reeeaal rough two years ahead of him, in which he went back to barely writing and making no art, and I feel like I only now have the space to begin moving forward again. And by moving forward, I'm moving backwards: back into who I was two years ago, before I was knocked so hard back into trauma and doubt.

It's okay, my friends keep reassuring me. It's okay to react like this. You spent over a year being deeply traumatised. You're still recovering. You recovered before and you'll recover from this. I fall back into habits I thought I'd left behind, repeat bad cycles I worked years to overcome. Things are a lot better, but I still feel further behind than I did two years ago. And that's okay, that's okay, that's okay.

It's a back and forth.

I think that's where I am at the moment. Back and forth. In time, in my own head. My Chemical Romance is back and listening to them again in some ways brings with it the headspace of ten years ago, when I had barely started writing The Red Prince, and in other ways is a whole different experience shaped by what's happened in that decade. I listen to Panic! at the Disco for the first time in a few years and think about characters I haven't thought about since they slid out of the front of my brain. I see North from Dying Ember in a whole new light, feel my chest clench up with an understanding I didn't have when I actually wrote him. The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is the best time of my life and it cannot stay and what could go wrong and things never stay right. I do not have to repent for happiness.

I do not have to repent for happiness.

Historically, things have always changed for me in September. Between it being my birthday and it being the start of the academic year, it was always a much more significant indicator of change than the meaningless transition from December to January - I even managed to keep that pattern after leaving education, getting my first full-time job in September, then changing it next September. The September after that was quiet and I planned to not change anything else again until the coming one, but things did not work out that way and everything was instead uprooted at the end of March. Like, March? What the heck ever happens in March?

So, I still feel like I'm waiting in a way. Like this is the interstitial period, like nothing good can stay so don't worry lad, just hold on another two months or so and it'll all go tits-up again. I am trying to be more optimistic than that, though. I will endeavour to hold on to what is good, to let go what does not serve me.

Re-playing games I first loved two years ago. Writing the novel I started five years ago. Re-listening to music I loved eight years ago.

Putting away the harmful habits of six months ago. Leaving behind the trauma of one year ago. Planning, for maybe the first time in my life, the future two years from now.

Back and forth.

I should do another digital portrait again soon.

Poem: Community Garden

This poem was written on the 14th June, 2021.

Community Garden:

Weighed down by all of the wounds of

what we had said and what we did not

say, I dragged my body between the

water butts and the rows of vegetables,

wondering how I would keep moving

through the next few days. I looked at

the flowers growing from the soil where

I planted them with my own bare hands,

and thought, If I have done nothing else

with all my life, today I have helped some-

thing grow. And doesn’t that make all of

it worth living?

Just Write, Dude

This post contains reference to spoilers for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise. Spoilers will be clearly marked above and below in bolded text so the rest of the post should be safe to read.

 

People don't tend to ask me for "writing tips", as such, but they do ask me how I managed to finish a novel, let alone five of them, and how I stuck with one story for so long and got through all of the writers block and plot canyons, and to be honest I think that any "tip" that deals with any part of writing other than Just Doing It is rubbish, because everyone's process is going to be different. You can learn grammar and the theory of story structure and good practice for character development, but at the end of the day, that stuff can be edited and adjusted. Experiment and try stuff out - you might find that plot diagrams and timelines and character profiles help you, but they hinder me personally - but don't feel like you're failing because you don't follow the advice of Neil Gaiman or Stephen King. Just look at how different every major writer's advice is from the others.

But actually writing that first draft? That's the most important thing. And as mind-numbing as proof-reading and formatting and editing can be, I think writers united can agree that it's that first draft that juuust knocks you down most of the time.

That's where my only bit of writing advice comes in. It's not the only trick I have, but it's the only one I'd even pretend is helpful to anyone else. And I'm not promising it's universal, but whenever someone protests it, I do kinda wanna just be like... yeah. I know. I have been exactly where you are. And only sticking to my core tenet got me through it.

You probably guessed from the title of this post what it's going to be, and to be honest, it does kind of make me wince to look at it, because... condescending, much? It kind of feels like when you're sat at a desk surrounded by study materials staring off into space for three hours and then when they see your grades someone is like, "just study more", or when the executive dysfunction and depression kick in and you're laying in bed half an hour after your alarm staring at the clock watching the time until you're late tick steadily closer and chanting in your head "just get up, just get up, just get up", and you want to get up and you need to get up and it's not even like you're tired or don't want to go to work, every part of your brain is screaming to just do it, but your body won't f*cking move-

And yet, here I am, bein' all "just write dude idk", so like... yeah, it isn't as simple as that. I know. I don't mean that you should or will be able to just sit down at any time and pound out 5000 words. That's not what I mean.

More... change your expectations about what "writing" means.

We all know how it goes. You have a great idea, you get very excited, you pound out the first three chapters in the space of two days, you infodump to all your friends about the super great plot points that are going to happen right at the end, you make character playlists and consider commissioning character portraits from your cool artist friends, and then... it's gone. You try to write chapter four, and you just have no idea where this story is going or how to get from this boring-ass introduction into the real stuff, and then you've lost the momentum and you tell yourself you'll come back to it in a few weeks and maybe you get excited again sometimes and re-write those first three chapters, but four years later it's buried under a pile of other, equally-abandoned WIPs.

So you want to turn that into a novel? You want to stick with this one, because you know it's going to be the winner?

Just. Write. Something.

Write one sentence today. Even if it doesn't make sense and it's boring as hell. Write two sentences tomorrow. Write one sentence the day after. And in two weeks, you're suddenly at that exciting bit again, and with the boring stuff written and the renewed excitement for it, the words will flow out of you. And in a few days, you'll finish that exciting bit and they'll be gone again.

So write one paragraph. Write one sentence.

Here's the priority, the secret, the thing they don't tell ya in Year Eight English: it doesn't have to be good, bro.

I felt this in Sylvestus more than anything I've written before. Huge chunks of both of those books, the first draft was just... not very good at all. The sentence structure was repetitive, the language was boring, the plot was absent and full of holes, the characters had inconsistencies in name spelling and eye colour, and reading over it again would make me miserable because it would be like, man if I find this boring how the hell am I supposed to sell it to a reader in good faith?

But uh... no-one's gonna read that version, bro. It's okay.

 

Your characters are stuck in the cave and there's a deep emotional conversation you're excited to write to have outside the cave but f*ck the words just won't come today y'know? And suddenly you've lost all the momentum and you don't touch it for months because you just got stuck on how they leave the damn cave.

So today, write:

"They left the cave."

And tomorrow, write the scene outside you're excited about. And maybe when you come back in a few months or years, you'll have the experience and energy to turn that into a whole 'nother exciting chapter about the adventure as they left the cave. Or maybe you'll still not want to do it, and you can turn it into:

"It took some scrapes and a little effort, but in a few hours, they had escaped the cave. "I hate bats," Character shuddered."

They're out of the cave, the reader still gets a little insight into that something happened in the cave, and you probably didn't need those extra eight pages anyway.

Or maybe the whole plot is going to change, and they never got into the cave in the first place, and aren't you glad you didn't waste six months of your life frustrated about that one chapter that you ended up cutting?

The transition from A to B can be frustrating and disheartening and uninspiring, but as long as it happens, it doesn't have to be great first time. It just has to happen. So often we get bogged down and lost over one line of dialogue or detail or sentence, and it's so freeing to just be able to take the pressure off, lower your expectations, and write.

 

Major spoiler for Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise in the following paragraph.

 

It's not just those transitional boring bits that can bog us down. Sometimes we have such high expectations for a chapter - the conversation, the kiss, the betrayal, the battle, the death - that it's that part we struggle on. And that can be heartbreaking because this was the bit we were so excited about from the beginning and was motivating us to do all the boring bits and now it's sh*t and it's all ruined.

Yeahh you know what I'm going to say. Just do your best. No matter how good it seems, what you write now won't be the final draft of a part so important - which takes the pressure off to make it that good this time!

Lavi's death in Vol II was a huuuge example of this for me. Technically, it was very difficult to write (the fast action versus making it clear what's happening versus Sylv's disassociation versus all of the emotions versus reality conflicting with delusion), and it also has the huge pressure of being a controversial and upsetting plot-point. So, it went through more re-writes than any part of any book I've written so far. I have entire documents on my old Sta.sh of drafts of it, when normally for me a re-write means literally writing over the original in a No Going Back determination. I originally wrote it in 2016 or so, and it annoyed me a lot because it just wasn't right. Each re-write I did approached it from a different angle - focusing on the fast action or the clarity or the disassociation or the emotions or the reality or the delusion - and none of them were good enough. This amazing character and the very serious and traumatic nature of her story deserved more than I could give.

Because I just wasn't a skilled enough writer then. It bogged me down and annoyed me and made me feel like I could never do her justice.

And maybe I'll look back in a few years and realise that I didn't anyway - in fact, I hope I do, because it means I'm still getting better - but I definitely learned and grew and became a lot more skilled of a writer the second (or uh, eighteenth) time around. In the new first draft of Vol II, I just wrote it one clumsy bold go, rather than getting caught up and delayed in expectation and hesitation. I got over myself and wrote something that wasn't very good, and then I finished the novel, and then I left it alone in a proverbial drawer for a few months, and then I went back and re-wrote and re-wrote and edited and edited and crafted and crafted until I had something that I could truly and confidently say lived up to the standard Lavi - and the story and the reader - deserved.

The same could be said of the reveal of Sylv's history to Lavi in the silver pool a few chapters before that, but that's a conversation for another post.

End of spoilers.

 

There's other stuff alongside that.

You really, genuinely cannot figure out what happens next? Make that one sentence something buck-wild or unexpected or random or inconsequential.

"Lavi was upside-down." There's one. I wrote that one day, and the next day I wrote:

""Lavi, why are you upside-down?" asked Sylv."

And the next day I wrote three sentences about Lavi being upside-down, and the next day I wrote the rest of the conversation they were having, and the next day I wrote the rest of the chapter, and I like it quite a bit.

Kill a character. Bring a new one in. Have someone walk in and say "what the f*ck?" and figure out what made them say it later.

 

You're completely jammed into a corner and hate where your characters are and the whole thing? Do something drastic. Delete the entire chapter where they got into the cave in the first place. Send them to a shop or a lake instead. Sometimes they need the change of scene.

And so, to be fair, do you. Get up, walk around, stretch, make a cup of coffee, then sit down and write that one damn sentence and then let yourself off the hook for the rest of the day.

 

If you set a daily goal of 1000 words and you're never hitting it and hate trying, make the daily goal 100 words. Sh*t, make it ten words. Achieve something every day, and realise that what you have done is still an achievement.

Maybe just don't write this novel at all for a while. Write a self-indulgent few chapters of something unrelated that you're more excited about. If it becomes a chore, you're not going to want to do it, and the more resentment and anxiety you build up around not being able to write well, the less you're going to want (or be able) to go back to it when you do have the inspiration again.

I read a thing by Terry Crews a while ago where someone asked him for gym routines and tips, and what he said always stuck with me. His advice wasn't to work until it hurts or to have body goals or to stick with discipline and all of those parts of the diet and fitness industries that normalise exercise as self-harm.

His advice was just to enjoy going to the gym.

He said he sometimes just takes a magazine and sits in the changing room for half an hour; he doesn't work out if he doesn't feel like it. He uses the machines that make him feel good, he goes because he enjoys it. When you have the pressure of hating your body and comparing yourself to other people and wanting to lose weight or get buff or any of that sh*t, you aren't living for what your brain and your soul need: you're making it a chore.

I've tried to run, I've tried to use ellipticals and do yoga and push-ups and punches, I've tried to force myself to enjoy it because everyone promised that the dopamine hit would override the pain eventually. It never did, I was just hurting myself and hating myself because people told me I should and it was another way to self-harm without visible scars (and one that was praised by people around me, no less), and like writing without love, I stopped as soon as I skipped one session because of a bad brain day or an inevitable injury. People say that you should write every day as discipline, like you should work out regularly as discipline, but that's not true. You don't need discipline if you love it.

I love swimming, I can bring myself to get up an hour earlier in the morning when normally I can barely drag myself to the bus on time if I know I have a session booked before work. I go four times a week now, and if I wake up in the morning and don't want to go... I don't go.

I don't swim to lose weight or build muscle - I love my body as it is and have no desire to change it in those ways and won't let anyone try to convince me it should be changed - I just do it because it makes me happy.

And that seems to confuse people. The idea that if I didn't want to go one day, I just wouldn't. That I'm not doing it to keep fit or slim or even to "exercise the depression away". People have such a hard time living for the joy of life, I think.

Similarly, I don't write to be famous, or to spread a message, or for discipline or therapy. I write because I love it, because the stories bubble up inside and want to be shown to the world, because the characters push their way out and I love giving them the stage.

Go to the gym to read a magazine. Draw a small frog in ten minutes and then put the art stuff away. Write one sentence.

Just write, dude. Not for discipline or because you have to. Because you love it, and you want to see where this story goes, and because even if it's a sh*t sentence, at least it exists now, out there in the world, and you can make it a better sentence later.

See? You made a thing! You tangibly impacted this world! That's amazing, bro. Take the afternoon off for all that good work. You get to write one more sentence tomorrow.

[Image ID: a digital painting of a small dark green frog wearing a hat. The painting was clearly done in less than ten minutes. The frog is smiling benignly and has big eyes staring blankly off past the viewer. There are clearly no thoughts in its head. The hat is a purple party hat with gold spots that is secured around the frog's head with string. End ID]

Leap Before You Think

I was obsessed with the game Okami for a significant chunk of my childhood. It had everything: wolves; mythology but not Greek or Egyptian; dry humour; beautiful stylised art; gameplay that was challenging but accessible to an eight year-old; women with huge badonkahoongas who turn into murderous foxes; being on the Wii so I could actually play it; a story that made me cry; wolves; women who no, seriously, really gave me a challenge for my sexuality at eight years old...

I was. Obsessed. With it. I played it again a few years ago on the PS4 remaster, and it fully withstood the test of time. It was equally as fun then as eight, ten, twelve years before. And thinking about it, my obsession then opened up so many doors to what would come in my life later. Before Okami, my internet usage was limited to Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Neopets. My desperation to consume more of the game than the game itself had to offer led to googling pictures from the game, which led to looking at fanart of the game, which led to deviantART, which I joined (with parent permission, to be fair) at the tender age of ten.

The internet was a much more lawless place then; before five big media corporations owned every website and it was all about social media, forums and small home-grown websites grew their own jungles. The other huge impact on my internet usage was Warrior Cats (much the same story, except it led to writing RP forums rather than dA), but specifically I was thinking about it earlier, and. Well. Maybe I'd have made my way there on my own eventually, but I joined dA well before the existence (or at least, the spread in my age group) of Tumblr or Facebook, and connected with millions of people and hundreds of communities, for ah, good and ill. I was exposed to things I shouldn't have been, but eh, that builds character. I knew enough to keep myself mostly safe and when to click off things I didn't like. Nothing had content warnings or age barriers or tags in those days, y'know.

My writing itself was heavily influenced by those forums that all came from Warrior Cats obsession, but I would never have progressed remotely as far as I did with my art or other parts of my writing if it weren't for deviantART. I'd never have written The Red Prince if it weren't for the art I did alongside it. I'd never have finished writing Seeking, the first novel I published, if it weren't for the small community of writers on dA that inspired me and gave constant feedback and encouragement, and I'd never have published it if not for them, and the same for Each Separate Dying Ember, and while I stopped posting my stories chapter-by-chapter online after that and left dA behind for good, I'd never have written or published Sylvestus without those.

And for me, it all goes back to typing Oki and Amaterasu into Google Images every single day, and following the link on one of the paintings there, and ending up in this mysterious world where people made art and other people looked at it and everything opened up ahead of me.

But there's another way Okami has stuck with me all these years, other than a general fondness and whatever latent effect childhood obsessions have on adult personality.

The wolf/sun goddess you play as, Amaterasu, has a very small companion, Issun, a wandering artist and moderate lecher, who provides all of the dialogue for the non-verbal Ammy (with his own twist, and sometimes in opposition to what she actually wants). One of his catchphrases was a surprising balm to a kid with severe anxiety: uttered on the several occasions where you are required to quite literally take a leap of faith into the next area (into the lair of Orochi the Eight-headed Serpent, or (after being shrunk down to Issun's size) into the throat of the sleeping emperor, or straight off a cliff into the ocean), he would spend a few moments airing his anxieties and bemoaning how he was too young and handsome to die, and then shrug and say:

"Like my momma always said... Leap before you think!"

It was a neat way of resolving his internal dilemmas of this mildly selfish yet equally reckless character, while also convincing kids playing the game that it was okay to mess up or jump off the edge of the map and just see what happens. The game also rewarded those leaps with beautiful graphics and a certain joyous flourish, an immediate reward for your courage: never a tough boss battle without some spectacular landscape and quick comedy first.

It's a simple mantra, and I still pull it out - I have since I first played the game too many years ago. I'm not at all that impulsive when it comes to the important things - I'm careful with money, I spend months or years planning and debating tattoos, I'm good at carefully planning a trip or a move or a big purchase - but equally I've learned to enjoy the spontaneity in things too. Get on the back of a motorbike with no helmet going 60 mph through Marrakech morning traffic, leap before you think! Make that scary phone call you've been putting off for three months right now with no script or planning, leap before you think! Drop everything and go and visit your friend who's in a bad mental place right now, leap before you think!

Some things you can build up and debate over for months, thinking and building ladders and establishing timelines and drafting plans. You can save money by booking early, you can avoid disappointment by preparing in advance, you can manage your expectations by doing research. But so many things in life will always, in the end, be a massive hole in the ground that leads straight down into the dark with noxious purple smoke pouring out of it. There's no other way into Orochi's lair. You can go around it a few times to be sure and stock up on health-restoring bones and equip your favourite weapon, but if you keep thinking about it, you're just going to be walking around the edge hesitating until he awakens and destroys the whole of Nippon.

Sometimes you have to shrug, kick off your shoes, and mutter, "Leap before you think," to yourself.

 

Join the art website that will change your life, giving you new skills, many years of anxiety and negative social interactions, and the motivation to follow your dreams and publish your books. Press the "finalise publication" button even though people might not like the book and it might get bad reviews and there might be typos you missed and once you do this you'll start losing Sylv again. Walk onto that stage and perform the poem that will officially excise you from the good graces of people who want you to keep your mouth shut about the things they did to you.

Make that phone call.

Are you standing at the edge of a new area today?

[Image ID: a screenshot of the original Okami game, showing a blurry gameplay screen of Amaterasu, a white wolf with red markings and a fiery shield on her back, looking over the edge of cliff. Below is a historical Japanese village and beyond it, the ocean. All of the artwork is in a traditional Japanese style as if painted with ink and brush. End ID]

A Year in Media

It's a post about all the sh*t I made and did this year. Idk, I thought it would be interesting.

Like, you don't have to read it.

I would I guess like to preface that if you didn't get anything done this year, that's more than okay. You survived! You made people smile! And those are worth infinitely more than a wordcount or new job. But even if I repeatedly failed at stuff like "reply in a timely manner to important emails" and "do the washing up", I did make a fair amount of sh*t, and watch and read and play stuff too, so I'd like to celebrate those. It was a pretty phenomenal amount of stuff, too, more than I've done since I was in high school, which conclusively of course proves that capitalism stifles creativity and innovation.

Anyway.

Compared to all the artists I know, I barely made any art, which is one of the reasons I think it's important to gauge and celebrate only yourself, without comparison. Especially considering that I recently tried a bit of the ol' self-flagellating woe-is-me "I'll never be as good as you" on an artist friend I admire, and he retorted with the exact same thing at twice the intensity about his own art. It really do be a pointless circle of comparison and imposter syndrome. So here's a thing everyone was doing in like November: all of the art you did this year, and how you felt about it (obvi, red is "oh bad", yellow is "yeah that's aight", and green is "this is an acceptable piece of art" (jk, green is "this is good", but that's still a thing i struggle to accept)):

ID: a watercolour of a magpie in flight with a red squiggle over it; a digital painting of an elf's face with a green squiggle over it; a digital painting of a an elf with a bow with an orange squiggle over it; and a digital painting of a qunari and dracolisk from Dragon Age (a tall grey-skinned person with horns, and a creature the shape of a horse with a dragon's head), with a green squiggle over it. End ID

ID: a watercolour of Sylv from Sylvestus, a white man, in a bath with a tiger leaning around him, with an orange squiggle over it; a marker pen drawing of an orc's head with an orange squiggle over it; a marker pen drawing of three elves and a tiefling walking, with a red squiggle over it; and a marker pen drawing of Sylv illuminated by firelight seated on a throne, with an orange squiggle over it. End ID

ID: six marker pen drawings of Cillian Murphy, with a red squiggle over it; a digital painting of the She-wolf from Sylvestus, a white woman in a pink dress and long brown hair looking down onto the camera, with an orange squiggle over it; a digital painting of Sylv with contrasting shadow and light huddled in the dark, with a green squiggle over it; and a digital painting of a man's torso with the heart replaced with a moth, with a red squiggle over it. End ID

ID: a digital painting of Sylv and Lavi, a southeast Asian woman, from Sylvestus back-toback, with a green squiggle over it; a digital painting of Romulus from Sylvestus, a cream and brown dog, running, with an orange squiggle over it; a digital painting of a gnoll, a hyena-person, stabbing a sword into a giant heart, with a green squiggle over it; and a digital painting of a tiefling, a person with grey skin and gazelle horns, holding a flame, with "have you heard the news that you're dead?" written behind them, with a green squiggle over it. End ID

ID: a digital painting of a bald dwarf woman wearing heavy grey armour and black tattoos on her face, with a green squiggle over it; and a digital painting of an elf woman looking over her shoulder, with an orange squiggle over it. End ID

Overall, I'd say I'm happy with how my year in art went! It feels like it's been slow progress, but also I do feel like I made a breakthrough in like... technical skill in the middle of this year, developing my style and stuff. I'm excited to continue and try and develop more skills and create more art. That can definitely be seen as the general vibe moves from orange interspersed with red, to green interspersed with orange. Even if my art doesn't look like all of the "artsy animal paintings" artists I follow on Instagram, or the ten minutes of fanart in the Critical Role streams, doesn't mean it's not good, it's just different and mine. Someone called it a "unique style" and I took it as a compliment.

Of the pieces of art I've done this year, therefore, eight were related to Sylvestus, five were related to D&D, four were related to Dragon Age, and one was... literally just a bad painting of a magpie.

Obvi, the big one is next: a year in writing.

This year, I wrote just over 90,000 original words of Sylvestus Vol II: The Rise, as well as about 10,000 stray words in other projects. I also re-wrote and edited large chunks of Sylv, but that's much more difficult to quantify. I've also read it more times than I care to think about.

This is phenomenal compared to previous recent years; I have less of a clear division, but I believe I wrote about 55,000 words in 2019 (just over half of this year), and maybe 30,000 in 2018. Before that it gets shaky as I was spread across a much greater range of projects over multiple platforms (now I write almost exclusively on BigHugeLabs' Writer software, which is perfectly minimalistic for my needs, but before that I skipped between dA Sta.sh, Word, physical notebooks, and more).

In poetry, I've actually gone down from the two years or so previous; I think I moved away from novel-writing into poetry in a big way 2018-19, but have since migrated my focus back to novels, though I still retain love for the format. I'm going to avoid word counts for this one, but I believe I produced nine original full poems this year, which isn't bad going, even if half of them were about the same thing (see: the entire previous series under the "actual poem" tag on this blog). More than volume, though, I'm genuinely quite happy with how my style has progressed and become cemented. Compared to what I had previously considered my best work, Churchyard, my more recent pieces have, I feel, a more... Like, the format looks better without sacrificing flow. They retain my narrative style and colour without being just sprawling trains of thought like my earlier work. I like that.

Finally (for the creative side), I published 23 (including this one) posts on this blog, the first one ironically when first lockdown hit and everyone was publishing new creative stuff, and somehow managing to keep up almost to that pace even when I started working again. Four were readings from Sylv or Dying Ember, eight were poems (though several of them had been written in 2018-19 and only published this year), three were housekeeping/life/Sylv updates, four were fun Sylv things, and two were general unquantifiable talking to myself about myself. One was this, obvi.

This is up from four posts in the entire of 2019 and three in 2018. Lmao. We ignore 2017 bc even though it had even more posts than this year, they all like... Sucked.

Onto stuff I did when I wasn't working or creating!

According to Roll20, I played just over 160 hours of D&D this year, although that doesn't account for the fact that one time we played a non-D&D game. Including the one I'm gonna be playing on NYE, this was with five characters (an elf cleric, a gnoll warlock-ranger, a tiefling warlock, a tiefling cleric-rogue, and a goblin artificer, for those curious) across two campaigns and three one-shots. I also ran five one-shots and one campaign which is still ongoing. I wish I had like... Been counting how many dice rolls I did and how many crits I got. Might do that next year cos that'd be pointless but joyful, innit.

Further, I played about: twenty hours of Mass Effect (one playthrough); 45 hours of ME2 (two playthroughs); forty hours of ME3 (one and a half playthroughs (second ongoing rn)); ninety hours of ME: Andromeda (one playthrough); forty hours of Dragon Age: Origins (two playthroughs plus Awakening); 25 hours of DA2 (one and a half playthroughs); and like ten hours of DA: Inquisition (dipping back into my third playthrough of 2019). Stepping away from BioWare, I also put about ten hours into God of War (2018), five hours into Amnesia Rebirth (i wanna go back but too spoopy!!), fifteen into Dream Daddy, nearly a hundred into Stardew Valley, and maybe twenty hours into Among Us and Jackbox Party Pack 7 with friends. There were also negligible amounts into a dozen PS2 games and bored forays back into games such as Hollow Knight and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, that I have previously blitzed but couldn't quite pick back up when I was so dang busy with BioWare RPGs.

Spotify Wrapped had, as usual, its time in the spotlight, but I do not desire to share the intricacies of my listening habits with everyone, so you can just have my total listening time:

ID: a blue square with "minutes listened: 30,534" in green, with the Spotify logo in blue against a green rectangle below. End ID

This is much less important to me, however, than my Podbean listening stats:

ID: a screenshot saying "Listening Level" along the top. Below, it says "2014h 46m, Total play time" and "3h 5m, Intelligent speed saved" in green. End ID

... yeah. That's all since December of last year. I like podcasts a lot. In case you're curious, that amounts to about 5.5 hours a day. This year, I wanna say those were mostly Sawbones, My Dad Wrote a Porno, Hello from the Magic Tavern, The Besties, This Week in Parasitism, The Adventure Zone, Wonderful!, My Brother, My Brother and Me, and very recently, Dungeons & Daddies.

Watching is less quantifiable, so I'm gonna go for impact rather than volume. My biggest associations for watching habits this year are Community (all of it, twice), Critical Role, Awful Squad, Gill & Gilbert, Taskmaster, Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Aggretsuko. I really moved into YouTube and back into Netflix this year, having never been huge on YouTube before, and not having really touched traditional ""telévision shows"" since like 2016.

Finally, I read I think seven and a half books in the entire year: The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss in the space of eight days (which lemme tell you is a helluva feat); Tevinter Nights, a collection of short stories from the Dragon Age franchise; The Sight by David Clement-Davies, which I read over and over again as a kid but couldn't finish this time around; A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows by VE Schwab (i love them but this was my third re-read so i lost steam before hitting the last book in the trilogy); The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, also by VE Schwab; and Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers. I'd say that I kinda wish I had read more, but in truth I tried to and just couldn't get into it (as evidenced by getting halfway into The Sight, and two thirds of the way through a trilogy by one of my favourite authors).

And I think that's the thing with rating a year by how productive or whatever it was: it's always subjective; and it's never enough. Many people, including Younger Me, would count reading seven and a half books in a year as an appalling display of anti-literary laziness; just like many people can produce a piece of art like the ones I've rated as my rare I'm-actually-happy-with-this pieces as a warm up sketch every day before doing their real art; and many people play a diverse range of games rather than seven RPGs by the same company over and over again; and many people count 100,000 words in a year to be the low side of average...

But many more people read no books, because it just isn't their thing, or produced no art in 365 days, just looked at other people's and wished they had the talent, or are kind of ashamed of how many games they played and TV shows they watched, or wrote 10,000 words in the entire year and are still happy they managed to write any at all.

And those are good too.

'Cos you made it. Even if all you did was play Animal Crossing for 400 hours, showered eight times since January, and play D&D once a fortnight. Even if you didn't get out of bed, or get a job, or do the dishes. Like, I'm kind of proud of listening to over 2000 hours of podcasts in twelve months, even if objectively it's Not Really an Achievement. Despite the fact that most people would count it as much more important, notice that I haven't yet mentioned I got two jobs this year, as well as passing an exam and doing most of a professional qualification. I'm not really proud of those, they just kind of happened because they had to, because capitalism. I enjoy parts of my job and it's important and stuff, but my year for me has been defined by it being the one where I got back into D&D, and made a breakthrough in my art style, and played ever so many Mass Effect and Dragon Age games.

So, what did you do this year? It doesn't have to be "an achievement". It doesn't have to have advanced your career or been impressive. You're alive, so it was enough. Go forward with kindness. Try playing a podcast in the background.