Life Update: Where I've Been & What I've Been Doing

 So, there's a phrase that goes "man makes plans and God laughs" and another phrase that says "life is what happens while people plan" or something like that. This is just a way of me saying that life got busy and depression began hitting me a bit so my writing didn't happen much. But, things have gotten...well, life happens and things change. 

We've lost our little chicken, HennyPenny, back in September. That was hard and, even though it was expected due to the injuries, I still didn't take it well. 

Medical appointments kept us busy throughout October all the way to December (my wife's appointments and my mom's appointments). There was Hurricane Helene, which hit friends and coworkers, but not us. 

Throughout all of this, I kept writing summaries my serial killer series. I hadn't started writing the first book yet. I just kept writing out summaries for the titled books, figuring out which book would fit where in the series, and how things worked. I worked on character lists for main characters, killers, side characters. I worked on keeping the ever-increasing number of books so I'd know which title went with which number. I wrote down notes on events that would happen so I'd have a record of it for when I reached that point in the series. I started the outline of the first book and when I stalled on that one, I began the outline for the second one only to stall very quickly. I still hadn't started writing the first book. 

I worked on other projects, other ideas. Got a new computer (well, new to me--my wife's old one). Could use Microsoft Word, but that's neither here nor there. Maybe I'll get it for Christmas or something this year because Microsoft 365 just isn't the same and Google Docs is great and all, but not the same as MS Word. I discovered Copilot AI and chatted with it for advice about different topics, ranging from Dungeons & Dragons campaigns to help creating images of characters. I chatted with different AI chatbots because why not? It was a break from my routine.

We went to the circus. First time I've been to one; second time for my wife. It was fantastic. Met Mom's coworker and his family. Pretty cool dude. Planned on a game night. Played Cards Against Humanity. My wife won that first time. Second time, he did. But we'll have another game night eventually.

I discovered animatics for songs from the musical EPIC and fell in love with the entire album. Still obsessed with those songs and longing to write a Greek Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I watched Transformers One, loved the movie, though a certain voice acting choice for a certain well-known Decepticon was certainly a choice and not one I'm too sure works, though that could just be me. I thought D-16's transition to Megatron was fitting and the foreshadowing with his eyes going from gold to orange to red orange then finally the iconic red was fantastic. The movie reminded me that I'm a Transformers fan and I proceeded to bother my wife with my Transformers knowledge. 

Politics happened, voting, election. Nothing much to say there.

My wife's computer desk moved to the extra bedroom so Mom wouldn't complain about how cluttered it was. We made plans for that spare room and for the stuff in storage, planned to move it from expensive to cheaper storage or from cheaper storage to the organized shed we have in our driveway. We had plans and that is where I think everything all went wrong.

On January first, my stepbrother told us he'd been told by his ex-wife that he needed to leave. He had nowhere else to go, so he's now living with us. There's been some...growing pains, I suppose you could call them, and I've got some mixed feelings about him being here. Initially, I was happy having him here, but now it feels like he'd rather my wife and I weren't here--you know, in the house that we own. 

Since I've been feeling a bit unwelcome in my own house, I've not really felt like doing much of anything. I agreed to beta read a fanfiction for a friend since I've fallen into a routine and that fanfiction ignited a fire within me. Her writing reminded me of why I write, why I read, why I want to be an author. Her first chapter had me enraptured from the first sentence and desperate for more like a drowning man desperate for one more breath of life-giving air. 

Her writing reminded me of the passion I'd lost during my sentence as an English major. Her writing reminded me of why I wanted to write in the first place. Her writing brought back the fire that my time in college writing soulless works that professors demanded had nearly smothered. 

After reading her first chapter, I began working on the beginning of the first book of my serial killer series. 

An Update on Life, Writing, & A Discussion About the Significance of Character in Writing

Unpacking. Unpacking never ends. We're still unpacking and moving stuff, but at least the old place has been sold. 

I'm learning German on DuoLingo. This isn't related to any of the writing projects, but just for fun. Once I've got it down, I've got a whole host of other languages I plan to learn, also for fun.

Now, for the biggest update: I've been working on the series I mentioned in the last post and it's got a title now. All the books (well, nearly all) have titles and I'm writing out the summaries for them. Well, more like the blurbs that you would read on the back of the books if you picked them up in the store. 

I'm also doing something I don't usually do when it comes to writing. I'm making an outline. So far that is helping with the first book of the series, where I know the ending but didn't know anything else. Thanks to the outline, and talking about the characters with Myrrh (my lovely wife), I now know the beginning of the book and details about the killer. Even though it isn't planned for the killer to be caught until later in the series, it is important to know these details.

I'm not going to be sharing too much about the series since things have already changed a fair bit from the last post when I mentioned it. I will say that as I've worked on writing out the blurbs/summaries, I've learned things about characters that I didn't know when I initially thought of this idea and, while that might seem to some people as though I'm just making it up as I go, I'm not. These details and information are all things that when I look back at the titles of the books and which ones were going to feature which characters, made sense. Nothing that happens, happens just for the sake of pushing the plot forward or because the plot demands it. It happens because it makes sense based on the characters' histories and personalities. 

I feel that that is something that authors forget. That characters are people, with a history and personality and a level of intelligence, not just props. If a character wouldn't do something because they know it doesn't make sense, then the readers are going to realize that the author has started puppeting the character around, jerking them like a marionette, the moment the character behaves out of character for the sake of advancing the plot. It can ruin immersion and believability, and just disappoint readers in general as the plot then seems contrived even if it had been great until then. 

Readers like to submerge themselves in the world of a novel and if the main character suddenly starts acting a fool when they know better because the author needs it, the author has lost the reader's trust in them. Keeping the character in character is a big deal and a necessity when it comes to writing a series. Consistency is key. That's why knowing the characters is more important than knowing the plot. If you know your characters well enough, the plot will develop on its own. 

Yes, I had the basic idea for the plot in mind before I started working on the characters, but it was a nebulous idea that had nothing solid. Nothing solid until the characters began to form and introduce themselves. Once that happened, the plot became more concrete and the characters became more and more people in their own right. As the characters developed, so did the plot. Without the characters, the plot would have remained rather nebulous. Plot is secondary to characters, not the other way around. 

New Series

 Awhile back, I mentioned that I'd had an idea that wouldn't leave me alone and I'd focused on the characters, plots, arcs, and titles for the novels in the series. I described it as Criminal Minds meets Suicide Squad with supernatural elements thrown in. I'd said that I hadn't yet started writing as I was planning things out.

Well, I finished the planning and started the writing. I'm working on the first book in the series. I've also got a five book spin-off series planned showing how the killers joined the team as well as how the team leader actually ended up in the position he's in. What I don't have at this point is a title of the series in general. But I have titles for the novels, so that's something, especially considering I usually suck at titles.

Yes, some of my titles are incredibly punny. It fits with the tone of the series and with my personality so yeah, they work. Other titles have multiple meanings and for one of them, I actually had to use Google for the title and found that the changing of a single letter changes the entire meaning of the word. I'm not spoiling anything here, but Google "parlay" vs "parley" to find out the difference.

I'm not going to share too much here about the series or anything, but I have started writing the first book. For an idea what the first book is about, you could read the Missing 411 series by David Paulides, or listen to some of the stories from the books on YouTube. That's not exactly what my book is about, but those will give a great feel for the killer and what the victims go through. 

Anyway, I'm working on the first book of the series and still working on The Agency anthology (it's 193 pages, and a whopping 92,981 words so far). There are other ideas that occasionally want my attention, but these are the ones that I am going to focus on. 

These are the ones I am going to finish.