Follow Through

Of course a “Year of Eight” is not really a thing that exists in this world, but the writer girl part of me was tickled by the coincidence. It’s actually a direct reference boldly taken from my WIP The Girl who would be King, a fantasy novel based in a vague pre-Islamic, fantastical version of the Near and Middle East around the Late Bronze Age(ish), that I’ll be shamelessly talking about if not in this entry, an entry in the near future ^_^ However, GK (my acronym for it) is something to be discussed a bit later while I go into a bit of personal stuff for the rest of this entry.

With it being a new year, that usually comes with what people like to commonly call “New Year’s Resolutions” and, honestly, a good 90% of those resolutions are generally broken before midnight on January 31st. However, one of my besties mentioned something the she learned from one of her other friends called “One Little Word” and I’ve chosen to embrace that this year instead of writing down another list of resolutions I may or may not keep. For me, my ‘one little word’ is actually two words “Follow Through”, but it encapsulates one thing “Progress”. Why didn’t I choose “Progress” as my one word, seeing as it is actually one word? Well, in my head “Progress” feels like it’s a lot heavier weight than just “Follow Through”. Following through can mean something as simple as following through on a promise “Yes, I’ll watch that episode with you” or it can be something big like following through on a project you’ve been planning for literal years–or a manuscript that’s seen thirteen different iterations since your originally thought of it back in 2013 (I’m talking about a friend…not me…really–okay, yeah, it’s me…) that you’re finally planning to push to the point where you can actually write [THE END].

So this year I plan to Follow Through on several things I’ve had cooking on my figurative stove for a long time–in the case of some of them over a decade. I’m not sure I’m going to push all the way through to the end on them, but I’d like to at least try. I have a rough plan for the year and we’ll see how it goes. So here’s the plan.

1. January 2024: See The Girl who would be King through until [THE END]
   
   I met a fellow writer on a friend’s Discord and we’ve agreed to exchange novels on January 20th. This means I need to get ALL of GK finished before then and, to that end, I’m going to be taking a vacation from work and spending as many of the days as I can getting the rest of this story on paper. I’ve rewritten Part 1 at least thirteen times and the pieces of Part 2 that I have done at least 7 times, but I’ve yet to actually write the story for Part 3 (but I have a really nice bulleted list of what’s supposed to happen in it written down). If I can accomplish this strike that—WHEN I accomplish this, I will be able to write [THE END] on a novel-length story for the first time since I was about 18 (the story I wrote then will never see the light of day most likely).
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2. February-March: Myriai’s Myriad, get the YouTube Channel out of the dusty idea box it’s been sitting in and get it in order to make a debut. 
   
   I’ll probably be a bit sporadic about updates on it at first as I’m going to be feeling my way through it mostly solo, but it’s something I’ve planned since about 2021 and I want to see it through.
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3. April (~May) 2024: Finish Shade Tree Rest (Or Seventh Concord–the title’s kinda up in the air at the moment) for Camp Nanowrimo. I also have had this (or a variation thereof) plotted out since around 2016 or so and I’d like to finish that as it’s going to be a building block towards my YouTube Channel and its content. Plus, after the sweeping epic that’s going to be GK–I think it’ll be nice to kinda sit back, relax, roll some dice, and write some expansive descriptions. STR is part of Shadows of Kurelinn, which I suppose is an epic fantasy of its own as it’s a trilogy (the next titles are Forges of Lelna Dorei followed by Shadow of the Green Dragon), but since it’s roughly based around D & D I feel like it’s not going to be as big of a world building endeavor.
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4. June 2024: Launch a Twitch Channel (also Myriai’s Myriad) if things seem to be progressing nicely between now and then–this could get delayed until later, but that will be A-OK.
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5. November (~December) 2024: Ashigo’s Shadow is going to come out of the archives and my next goal will be to finish that one. The story was completely written, but like GK, this one has a lot of places where I kind of glossed over things and I intend to write them all out this time and maybe even write [THE END] on it too–it would be neat to go from zero things completed to 3 things completed (at least through the first draft version) then we’ll see where 2025 takes things from there ^_^

There are a few other things that I am looking to follow through on as well that were kind of left on the shelf over the course of the last three years or so (maybe four years, I’m not sure) among these include: get a passport, open an editing side hustle, and get more than two or three books read over the course of the year. I also want to at least check into some medical issues I may have, but those get a little too personal for things like this. This blog is also included on my list, I’d like to actually consistently post at least once a month over the course of 2024, and I also need to take more initiative in my social media posting over on my Facebook Page, on X and BlueSky, and probably on Instagram as well.

Also within that intervening time (as I know there’s a large gap in between a couple of the goals), I intend to write/finish a couple Star Wars fan fic pieces and get them up, likely on AO3. My nephew managed to drag me back into the Star Wars corner of the galaxy with Ahsoka–and, to be honest, if I can avoid parts of Ep IX and don’t get involved in any fandoms too deeply, I do still very much enjoy Star Wars ^_^

It’ll be interesting to see where this year takes me and look back on how this intention to “Follow Through” served me over the course of the next twelve months.

For now, I need to go get some sleep as my day job during this time of year is rough and tends to eat up large chunks of my creative spoons without me realizing it until I get home and find myself staring at a blinking cursor on a draft and see the word “The…” as the only thing typed in the past three hours.

♥ Myriai

It’s me, I’m the problem

So as I alluded to last month, one of my other muses has finally awakened and I am hard at work on The Ashes of Hanazakari with plans to take it into Nanowrimo 2023. I did toy with the idea of making it into a Trilogy I. The Girl who would be King, II. Sea of Mists, and III. City of Gold, but I don’t think each section is gonna be long enough. I anticipate each part is pretty easily going to hit 50,000 words in this draft. That’s gonna bring The Girl who would be King to a whopping 150,000 words–not exactly an ideal length for a first novel according to this infographic I found at http://writersdigest.com:

…BUT this is a draft and not a final manuscript and so I’m not terribly worried about it. I’m pretty sure alpha and beta readers are going to be able to tell me where I have too much going on or I’ll figure out how to condense it. Maybe I’ll even have less words than I think–I’m not holding my breath on that one, I cannot do short no matter how I try. I’ll also be saving for a professional edit before I start thinking about submitting it.

Throughout the latter half of August, this month, and into Preptober I am working on fixing up some things in one of my newer drafts so that I can enter Nanowrimo with a clean slate, some solid world building, AND maybe finally nail down something that’s been bugging me since about halfway through draft…uh five or six of The Girl who would be King. I think the 2023 draft is going to be #12 and I’ve still not managed to write it to the point I can confidently finish with “THE END” though I’ve written a variation of the full novel draft (there’s a lot of brackets with “cool stuff happens here” in the draft, but at least I’ve brainstormed it out to the end) that I’m working with this time.

My project from August 18th to September 6th was to work my way through some events in the distant past that shape things for the present day in the novel. I then wound into timelining The Bird Empress’s life (the main character’s corrupt ancestor that nearly destroyed the world) and writing a full synopsis of each part of the story. I made my goal word count, if not exactly the way I planned on doing it, but it’s helped with a few things I’ve been struggling with. Namely the series of events in the third part that leads to my ending (and lead-in for book two), but it didn’t help with another issue I had.

One of my trio of main characters.

In the initial drafts of writing this story, I created this interesting country and King of the Country–or at least it was interesting in my head, but when it came to writing him out it fell a little short of what I was hoping for. I was going to make him into this Pirate King type character then I changed him to just a straight up King of said interesting country and started working on things from there. In my latest read of the draft I got frustrated with what I saw as a lack of character for him and so I sat down and wrote down everything that I had in my head for his character.

It turns out he’s a pretty awesome character–there’s a lot of depth to him when I look over everything I put together. He has motivations, flaws, and a solid backstory.

The problem it turns out was me.

While I had all of the cool stuff I knew about him in the back of my head, it never came out in the writing. The way I wrote him was very two-dimensional, a man who did everything for a girl he couldn’t have (that part gets a bit long and complicated) and abandoned everything else. While one of his flaws is that he’s on the selfish side of things (definitely not a good thing as a ruler), it isn’t everything that made up his character and that’s where I failed as a writer–and where I aim to improve as I embark on what I hope is the final first draft of the story.

While I know that massive deep diving into characters isn’t everyone’s cup of tea as a writer, I think sometimes sitting down and just writing everything down is supremely helpful. I feel like when you put a character in writing whether you’re writing paragraphs or just doing a bulleted list of things that make up the character it helps immensely with how you depict them in the story.

With National Novel Writing Month on the horizon, if you’re participating there’s going to be a lot going on in your head, but figuring out your characters a little bit before you put that first keystroke down at 12:01 AM on November 1st may help a bit.

♥ ~ Myriai

PS This post was actually started, oh about September 20th or so I think and should’ve been posted about a week ago, but better late than never right?

It’s 2/22/22

Sadly, I must report that I have not done well on my reading ambition (I read a chapter of one of the books which is admittedly more than I’ve read in the past month). Though, honestly, I kind of expected it.

I did, however, fall down a Wiki-hole and did a lot of reading/research on The Late Bronze Age Collapse and several adjacent categories (this is why it’s a Wiki-hole—it’s like a black hole, but you keep opening more and more articles until you have eighteen tabs open on your desktop and another twelve tabs open on your laptop) and I have gone through almost an entire junior legal pad’s worth of paper jotting down notes. I suppose that is reading of a sort, but either way it’s kindled a lot of good ideas for one of my current projects “The Ashes of Hanazakari” and given me a lot of stuff to work with as I go through the major world (re)building in March.

My intention for today was to have a short story of sorts ready to go that is a prequel that takes place roughly 1,000 years before the beginning of The Girl who would be King. However, the story is still in progress so I figured that I would share what I have. Thank you for reading!

The story is entitled (currently) “The Pact of the Nightingale”: