Saturday, August 13, 2011

Bubbling ideas -- The Bradshaw Story

In the next couple of days I'm going to start posting bits of information on my current project, "The Bradshaw Story." I don't have a title for this thing yet...right now it's all sketchy outline, a few thoughts on character and setting, and a couple of short pieces written to get a sense of who the characters are and what the place is like.

The story is an urban fantasy set in faerie-haunted Bradshaw, Arizona, a place loosely based on my hometown of Prescott with choice picks from other places in the state and, of course, the introduction of the fey. Most of what I'll be posting is very rough, just ideas in vague shape and snippets of info. I'm very much in the place of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. It'll be fun. Hopefully.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Monthly Update -- Writing in cycles

My new job has been pulling a lot of my time away from writing, so not much progress has been made. I'm doing a bit of writing, but it's with a different setting and characters. The pendulum will swing back to The Tale of The Exile, but for right now it's on hiatus as my creative energy is pulled in a different direction.

I notice that my creative energy seems to do this every year. In the spring and fall I get locked on one idea (whether it be in gaming, writing, or what have you) but as it gets into summer I feel the need to start doing other things creatively. That seems how I work as a creative person.

But it's frustrating to get pulled like that. I'll have a project steaming along, then find myself stuck or find my attention waning and jump ship to something else for a few months.  This leaves a lot of literary debris in my path, and I don't like being that way. I can't seem to quite nail anything before the cycle flips. Gar.

Still, it's not something I can change about myself, so I need to learn how best to harness things. Harness the energy when it's there, work around the blah feeling when the energy ebbs.

Having a near full-time job doesn't help with the process. If I were making money of my writing talent, then it might be a little different, but at this point I'm not and I just have to live with it. I've heard, however, that you can't become a professional anything just doing it part-time, and writing is no exception. So it's a struggle of picking up the keyboard and typing something, even if it's just an email to a friend, to get some writing done.