As I promised, here we are with my first writing report, which will be semi-regular posts updating my plans and progress with writing creatively. I thank anyone who is interested in reading these, though I understand that this is less intriguing than my other posts. I want to use these as a way to hold myself more accountable to reaching my writing goals. Even if I don’t always reach them, if posts like these get me writing more often I’ll consider them a success.

Short Fiction

There are a few ideas that have been swimming around my head for years, but there is one in particular that I’ve been more actively working on over the last year (I started it in May 2017). It’s a short horror story tentatively called “Shower Thoughts” about a young man convinced something is standing on the other side of his shower curtain that shouldn’t be there. I’ve come back to it a few times over the past year, but it’s a simple enough premise that I should really get a draft finished already.

I do want to get more into the mind of the main character rather than simply focusing on a physical threat, which ought to make it fairly longer than what I have written already, but that shouldn’t stop me from getting a version of it concluded finally.

I want to set myself a deadline here to have a rough draft of “Shower  Thoughts” finished by the end of this month. That gives me less than two weeks, but hey, it’ll be a rough draft so hopefully I won’t sweat the details too much. What matters to me should be finishing it. Refining can come later.

Novel

I’ve had an idea for a fantasy novel bouncing around my brain for the better part of a decade. In all that time I haven’t thought of a title for it I like, not even a placeholder. Unlike my self-reproach for not writing more short fiction and the like, I’m actually happy I’ve let the bare concept of this book stew for so long.

When I first had the idea I was in my last year of high school and at that time I was only just starting to get back into reading, and for the first time reading a more broad selection of books. What I did read and watch a lot of was Anime and super hero movies. Had I seriously embarked upon writing the story at that time—I did start a few chapters and trust me, it was trash—my novel would have dominantly reflected those things, which do not directly translate well to prose at all.

I’ve become more well-read and mature[ish] since then, and over the last little while I’ve really started to construct the characters and their world into something more robust and concrete. I’ve written innumerable notes about it over the years, and the main characters are pretty well formed in my brain. I’m less concerned with setting a tight deadline with this work, but I should at least get a serious start on it soon. For now, let’s say I try to start writing it by the end of April.