40K words in under a month_17 Jun

The speaker just finished a writing session and is excited to have reached the 40K word mark. They emphasize the importance of writing quality words and being consistent. They discuss their writing process and how they have been able to write new material every day for almost a month. They also talk about the importance of reading and how it helps them improve their writing. They mention the content of their latest chapter, which involves a post-fight scene and the main character's confusion and hunger. They also mention using a random page from a book as inspiration for their writing. All right, so I just finished today's writing session, and this was a fun one. Just past the 40K word mark, which is pretty amazing, considering I started this project at the beginning of this month, a little bit over halfway through the month, and 40K words, good words, not just throwing words on the paper. I know I've talked about this before, but a lot of authors are in the, oh, just, you know, get words down, get words down, and I guess, you know, it's a good beginner tactic, I guess, if you just need to get motivated to get words on the page, but that's not me. I'm trying to get to at least 80% solution when I write. Anyway, Gates of Okinawa today was Chapter 47, and the writing method was just typing, just typing away, no zero AI, zero tools, just me and Microsoft Word doing it old school. And one of the things I've found since I've been so consistent this month, I went back to see what streak that I'm at, because I've written a new chapter every day, a new complete, at least complete chapter, even when I was on the road three weeks ago, it was my wedding anniversary at the end of May, and I would get up and write stuff on my phone, write a chapter on my phone. It was the first thing I did, even when I was away from home, so I've been, I'm at almost a month of writing new material daily. And that's new. Because I think in the past, and I think a lot of writers do this, is you fool yourself into thinking you're writing when you write on social media, or maybe you, you're writing a lot of notes or something, or, you know, you're doing everything but writing for the actual project. And I totally get that, because it's, it is a little bit scary to write for the project every day, because you don't know if you're going to come up with anything good, you don't know if you're just going to completely waste your time. Yeah, it is. I mean, that's, I hear a lot of people say writing's hard, and I don't really think it is. I really think it's, it's just like anything else. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And I've never thought, even though I'm in this kind of streak phase right now, I've never thought it's really hard. It's just sitting down and doing it and being willing to, to fuck up sometimes and put shit on the screen. And sometimes it's just that. I had one of those days, a couple of days ago where I just knew what I wrote. I'm like, this is, this chapter is just garbage, like I don't, it's not complete garbage, but I just know, like, this isn't up to snuff. And I was like, I'm definitely going to be ripping this out or ripping it up when I come back to edit. But I think that's okay. I think, you know, you're going to, it's just like anything, you're going to have those off days where you just don't feel like doing it, the ideas aren't flowing, you don't really know where the story's going, you're a little bit lost. And I've done, what's helped me with that is really reading every day too. And that's another thing where a lot of writers just kind of fool themselves. It's like, yeah, you're reading a lot of social media, you're reading a lot of newsletters, you're reading, but you're not reading the stuff that you should be reading. And you know what I'm talking about. You're not reading other fiction, you're not reading in the genre that you write in, you're reading a bunch of fiction, but you're reading stuff that, and of course you can read whatever you want, but the stuff that's going to help you, like when reading really becomes fuel is when you're, you're not just pleasure reading, you're reading as a writer or as a fiction writer specifically. In this case, in this context, you're reading as a fiction writer, you're looking for things, you're looking for interesting plays of words, you're looking for cool combinations, awesome pictures and concepts and styles. And yeah, I've just become really, really open to that recently. And that's really helped me go faster. Because I remember when I was writing Sirius and Lemnic five years ago, my first novel, just getting 500 words, my goal was 500 words a day. And I remember it was even a stretch to get that some days, because I just, you know, just like anything, it's just like running or working out, you just don't have the stamina in the beginning to see that far, to really get to, let alone 500 words, but 500 good words that you're not just going to just chop off, lob out of the story later. No, like 500 good words. And now I'm probably averaging maybe 700 to 800 words a day, even on the days where I use AI writing techniques and tools and things like that. Those days, I can go higher, of course, but days like this, where it's just me writing, I love these because it's just, you just go with the flow and you really get into it. So let me talk about today's chapter when I talked about today. Today was a post-fight chapter, a post-boss battle chapter. So I always think of these as like a cool down, you know, after you've had a big battle. Very much, I think, in video games, like after a video game, a hard boss fight, all you want is a safe spot and you want a place to recover or maybe use new attacks or whatever, hear more about the story and things like that. I think that's a common, you know, just story flow. And so in this one, we find Ethan, who in the previous chapter is presumed dead, basically. He's pretty much out of the fight in the whole scene. He's not even really in the scene, but he's not dead. Or is he? It's one of those things where he's in this place where he has really no idea. He knows he's not dead because he's aware of things. He's conscious. He's in the same place where they were. He's at the base of the mountain and somehow he's gotten down and he has no idea what happened. And he kind of has this flash memory of the creature attacking him from the previous chapter. And he just kind of freaks out. Something else that I tried today that I wanted to, another thing that helped spark my writing is I have a ton of books on the bookshelf behind me. And I like this idea of, I remember reading in another writer's newsletter a couple of months ago that he likes all of his reference books hard copy. Of course, you can get a lot of stuff online these days, but he prefers a hard copy. And why does he prefer physical books, especially when it comes to reference? He rationalized it as serendipity. You give these serendipitous ideas a chance to flow into your mind when you do that. And when you search online, you know, it's typically seek and destroy mission. You go on, you search, you find what you need, and you're in, you're out, you close the window. That's how we search online. But there is something, especially as a writer, to letting these ideas, because your mind is always crunching on these ideas, even subconsciously. So today I chose one of the many books on my shelf. I chose a random book. And the book that I chose was Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And this is a very famous book, of course. And I happen to have it in Spanish, because when I was learning Spanish a couple of years ago, it was a book, one of the first books, actually, that, complete books, it's not a very long book, that I read completely in Spanish. And then what I do is I pick up the book, and then I literally flip to a random page, and I read that single page. And today I was like, okay, to kind of get things going, get in the scene mood, how am I going to structure the scene, what's going to be kind of the dramatic effect? And I turned to a chapter where he's talking about, he's talking about, of course, the despair of being in the prison camp. But the section that really stuck with me was he was talking about the hunger, of just how hungry he was, and how there was just this other guy moaning in the night, and he was going to wake him up, but he decides not to wake him up, because he's like, yeah, he's in this nightmare that this guy's going through, is better than the living nightmare that we're all living, that we're all experiencing. And so I ran with that hunger aspect, and I brought that into this chapter to where, and I'm fleshing out this world element of these soul trials that they're going to have to go through. And I don't want to spoil too much in the story, but there's going to be this element to where, when people have their souls taken, they have a chance to basically get out of it. They can, they can redeem their soul and go to a different place instead of completely dying. And there's going to be a trial associated with that, and I'm still fleshing out exactly what happens with that. But in the in-between, when you're in this kind of purgatory state, I wanted it to where, I wanted to do something interesting to where you're alive, but you're not alive. So you have this kind of pseudo-existence where, imagine a car with, with broken capabilities. Like the car drives, but the air conditioner doesn't work. The windows don't roll down. Basically, you can go into drive, and you can park and stop, but that's it. You can't do anything else. You can't reverse. You can't go into neutral. There's no third gear or whatever. And so I was thinking along that, to where you're in this kind of partial state. What would that be like to where, if you only had one or two default settings that you could default to in this, in this soul state? And in this scene, it's the hunger that, that Ethan doesn't know that he's being afflicted with, but that's, that was the inspiration for the scene. So he has that going on, and then he's, he's being confused, and then all of a sudden he, he sees Zena and Mia, who, the entire story up to this point, Ethan and Mia have kind of been a thing. They're, they're basically going out. It's, it's unsaid, but it's implied that they're in a relationship, and they like each other a lot. They're always together. And so he sees her, and that's when he's like, shit, I got to get out of this, and then he tries to get out, but then it goes from there. So it turned out to be a really good chapter. I liked it. It's kind of just an environmental chapter. There's this mystery going on. Why is he hurt? Can he catch back up? Is he even alive? What's going on? And then at the very end, we get this kind of cliffhanger that confirms that he is not really alive, but he's not really dead, and that's going to be explained in the next chapter. But the best part of this chapter, which I'm so proud of this description, is I described this, this character, this new character that I'm introducing, and I don't want to spoil who this guy is, but he's going to be a pretty important character coming up on the end of the book, and I describe him like this, and I love this. On hands and knees, he, Ethan, turned with care to see the elderly man who'd been watching him before, full white facial hair, a Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of khaki shorts that displayed an overgrowth of leg hair beneath. The guy was a typical American transplant. He reminded Ethan of the old guys he saw walking off base sometimes, oversized belly, sunglasses with a single nut protruding out the side of the crotch in a pair of shrunken shorts. But this guy was at least in shape. I love that detail about the single nut in the shorts. I've seen that so many times. You just got these old guys, retirees over here, and these shorts are way too small. It's been decades, and they're just wearing these shorts, and they don't care. They just got one just lobbing off to the left, and just lolling over there, and I'm just like, this is ... It sure as hell makes for a vivid description, though.