October was kinda hellish outside of the internet, but I think a lot has resolved and I’m coming out the other side stronger and with more drive. I have a few short story ideas and really want to get things under me all around, but especially in my words. So… let’s go, November!

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - I got the new Chapter 1 done (first draft, pending rewrite) and I’m very happy with it being the actual start of the book. 

Well… not 100%, but I hope this first rewrite will get it closer. It’s definitely better than the original version was! It’s immediately more character dynamics and interaction over other background info. Looking forward to making it even better.

This draft is at 2288 words.

Collaboration Project - No movement yet. I think John and I are holding off, which is fine. I have other ideas.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. Still mulling over the title. As much as I want to say this is “high priority” it’s pretty obvious it’s not as much as I would like. For me or my editor which… is valid and real. We’ll get there. We always do. 

This is something that’s been different for pretty much each story and book I’ve written, but… I guess there are a few things I can discuss on the topic. The genre of the story really does a lot of informing on the types of names I use for characters.

For stuff set in modern, urban areas, I often just use friends’ names, with permission of course. I’ll often modify them if needed, just to add some space between the character and the real person, but not always. 

This has worked for fantasy and sci-fi stories. Most of the fairies in Starsigns are named for friends, with their names just modified somehow. Eviekins is named for my friend Evie. Noblereed is after my friend Nobilis, and Lambria for Briana. You can probably see the echoes of their names in there. Surnames and nicknames informed the elements of the character names not present in the first name of the real person. Eviekins, for example… well, that’s just straight up a nickname I use for Evie. Noblereed and Lambria both include part of the real person’s surname.

In The Deadly Studies, the whole first volume Luc Bertrand: European Assassin, takes place in various places in Europe. In that case, it’s modern-day urban fantasy, and I wanted more normal people names. Knowing the second half was going to be set in the United States, I wanted to make a real distinction in the people around Luc geographically. A lot of the random people you only saw in passing were throwaway names pulled from baby name and regional surname lists. But there were some who were again named for friends. In the case of them becoming characters in the Europe portion of the series, the name was simply localized. It’s been some time since I worked on it, so citing specific examples isn’t too easy, but I do recall a character named Guillaume who was named after a friend whose middle name was William.

For my current in-progress LitRPG novel, since the majority of characters are identified by gamertags or their AI designated names, I’ve asked a lot of my gamer friends for permission to legitimately use their gamertag in the book. A few I’ve had to make small modifications to, but… the few names you’ve already seen in what I’ve released so far are friends. Of the four primary characters— LiveBeans, TheSniper, MushroomSurprise, YetiEnigma— three of them are my friends. LiveBeans is made up because I wanted her to be more of a blank slate than to be colored by a friend insert. But Snipes, Shroom, and Yeti are friends of mine from the gaming world. All three usernames got small spelling changes, but that’s it. I have a list of gamertags for player characters and another for the AI NPCs so their names have a distinct difference from the real players. Most of the names on both lists are friends’ usernames (again, collected with permission). Not all, but most. A few are ones I came up with that I liked the sound of. But it was interesting how many of my actual gamer friends had tags that suit the criteria for AI names over player names.

Some other things I’ve done to get names:

-For out-there fantasy or sci-fi names, get some printed text (newspaper, book, advertisement, whatever) and see what the last syllable of a word and the first syllable of the next word make. Even just from this bullet point, I see the names “Tasyor, Perbo, Randsee, and Keeven. Literally from straight taking syllables from words (fanTASY OR; newspaPER BOok; whateveR AND SEE; maKE EVEN- to illustrate where they came from). Maybe not a great source, but one that works in a pinch.

-I think I’ve talked about it in other posts, but just modifying real names is totally valid. Change a letter or a sound to update a name. Monica becomes Ronica. Jonathan becomes Jarnathan. Maria becomes Saria. And yes, I just used three character names from IPs that are not mine: Robin Hobb’s The Liveship Traders, the film Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. 

Wherever you get names, get them. They can be everywhere. There’s a place for John Smith. I’m sure there’s also a place for K’zyynth’fri’traxessanstiano… 

But… be judicious in apostrophes. Please. 

The short answer here is yes, but… I don’t know so much that it’s a “gotten in the way” as “assisted badly.”

In 2007, when I first moved into an apartment with my best friend. About a month later, we got a pair of stray kittens from their coworker. The kittens were sisters, a grey tabby-tux and a standard tux. I ended up with the standard. She had a little mark under her nose that looked like a mustache. I named her Moiraine Damodred Grappin, after Moiraine from The Wheel of Time, and her nickname was Rainey. Her sister was named Jenny by my best friend. 
Rainey lived until 2023. RIP. I miss her a lot.

But the thing with Rainey was that over the almost exactly 16 years I had her, she saw me through everything: moves, relationships, jobs, everything. And that little cat saw a lot of what I’ve referred to before as the “Golden Age” of my writing productivity. She also saw the burnout after.

Rainey was my girl. Granted, I had another cat, Cersei, for almost the same amount of time, but… Rainey was my shadow. She was absolutely the type of cat who behaves more like a spouse or owner. She wasn’t the stereotypical type of cat that you think “that cat has staff, not owners.” No, Rainey was a hardass, but… she was a caretaker. That girl saw me through surgery recoveries, illnesses, depression, and heartbreak. She was smart as hell and… I really can’t say enough about how amazing she was.

Anyway, the specific behaviors I most think of with her “assisting” with my writing comes from… probably the 2009-2012 or so era of my writing. At the time, I was in an apartment on my own (in the same complex as my best friends, who had started a family) and my main computer at the time was a laptop. I didn’t write at my computer desk often. More often than not, I was on my couch, with a background noise movie or music on. That was my spot for gaming, writing, pretty much everything.

As much as Rainey loved being a lapcat, she understood the limited lap access that came along with computer being there, and she was happy loafing next to me. Cersei did, too, but Rainey was more regular of a couch companion.

Back in the days before I got Scrivener, I used WordPerfect over Microsoft Word, but I also tended to do a lot in Wordpad, mostly because .rtf files were easy to format and move between computers, since I was very much not in the world of shared folders and files or anything back then. File transfers were email attachments. 

And I printed my novel outlines so I could reference them most easily. Working on a small, single laptop screen… yeah, I wasn’t much of a pro at keeping multiple windows open or switching between them yet (that wouldn’t come until later in 2012 when I started working at a call center. But I digress). So I’d have my outline printout beside me, usually sitting on the couch, so I could glance at it quickly without having to deal with clunky touchpad mouse controls.

Well, the place I set my outline just happened to also be Rainey’s spot.

There were plenty of times she was a paper stand for me. All things considered, she was decent at it. A purring, fuzzy, cuddly paper stand that put up with her lot in life.

She was there through everything from Empeddigo to The Deadly Studies. 

I was just barely starting to peek out of burnout in September 2023 when she passed. I like to think she would be proud of me for still writing and still chainmailing. Because she saw the onset of that too and… very much put up with metal rings everywhere.

You were the absolute best, Rain-cat. 

Of all the writing advice I’ve gotten and even given, it’s easy to get bogged down in fine details about grammar mechanics, language, plotting, or anything. So many think there’s some sort of master ruleset that if you can just follow it, you’ll be a hugely successful author and the world will adore you and the words will come easy and…

Simply put, that’s not fair to believe. And it’s not fair to perpetuate. 

I’m not going to go into advice like that. 

There are two pieces of advice I’d consider the most valuable ones I’ve ever heard, and they’re pretty closely linked in theme, so I want to discourse on the two of them. What’s great is that they’re very simple sentences, super easy to remember, but they don’t pull their punches. They might seem brusque or blunt, but… the more I’ve thought about them over the years, the more they’ve made sense.

The first is “You can’t edit a blank page.” The second is “You have permission to suck.”
12 words total. The best writing advice I’ve ever heard. So let’s discuss a little.

You can’t edit a blank page.
This really is one of the most important things to keep in mind. You can think about writing all day long, every moment, but… unless there are words on a page, all you’re doing is thinking. Prepping, planning, postulating. 

But at the end of the day, you need to have words on a page in order to have a written story. 
So it’s literally advice to just write. Put words down.

There’s all kinda of studies on the effectiveness of practice, quality vs quantity, how to maximize what you can do in a given amount of time. There are exercises (I’ve done plenty of them on Patreon), practices, techniques you can do to focus. You can do word sprints, focused tasks, whatever, but they all boil to the same thing: writing words.

Write words. That’s really all it is.

You have permission to suck.
This one is the one that really seems almost rude. I didn’t react well to it when I first heard it, probably around 12 or 13 years ago.

Thing is, it’s largely the same advice as “You can’t edit a blank page.” 

Part of the problem with a lot of art—and life in general—is the tendency to only see the finished product, not the steps to get there. We see the final performance of the dance number, not the hours of rehearsals. We hear the concert, not the years learning to play an instrument, the repetition of the parts over and over again. We view the sculpture or painting without seeing the lump of clay or marble block or blank canvas. We read the final draft and don’t see how much it’s changed from the first. 

We are constantly comparing the best of things to our own worst efforts. People see NYT Bestsellers and think they could never write something like that. I’ve been so guilty of this myself: thinking I needed to have each word perfect from the outset.

But that attitude doesn’t do anyone any service. It’s paralyzing attempting to start, disheartening if things don’t seem perfect from the start, and it facilitates over-criticizing yourself. If you’re expecting a finished product from the start and you don’t get it… how much easier is it to give up altogether? 

No, what this advice teaches is that ANY words are better than no words. They can be as bad as you want, but you’re allowed to write badly. Write smut if you want. Write self-indulgent self-insert fanfiction. Write as badly as you want to, just write it. Make it real, and if you want to after that, you can work on making it better.

You know, tying it back to editing. You can always make something better with revision and work.

It just has to exist first. In whatever form it does, just make it exist.

That’s really it. As much as it sucks, it’s simple. This is how we practice. We make words. We make sucky words. And then we make more. We make them better. And eventually… the sucky words are less sucky in general. Our bottom line improves and… we keep writing. We still suck.
But we accept it. 

And then we edit it.

I eked out more writing time in September than I expected, but still less than I’d hoped. Seeing improvement thought!

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Finished Chapter 3 at 1866 words, and I’ve gotten Chapter 4 done, at 1364 words. That’s 1932 for the month on this, which I am pretty pleased about.

You’ll notice I didn’t put in anything about a rewrite of Chapter 3. That’s because I had gotten to a point that a lot of what I’ve already written for chapters 1-3 felt like backstory/buildup to the real action of the book, and I do NOT want a prologue and 3 chapters of buildup. I DID write Chapter 4 as a whole new Chapter 1, and I’m progressing that way, so… we’ll see how things move forward.

What I have in chapters 1-4 is good info, and I’m sure bits and pieces will inform what I write going forward and some pieces might end up in flashbacks or things like that. Absolutely not wasted effort!

Collaboration Project - No movement yet.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. Still mulling over the title.

Ooh, this is a fun question. I don’t have quite the insane character population as some other authors and… to be totally honest, I’m not really a huge fan of a lot of my characters. Don’t get me wrong, I love them, but… not so much that I really want to spend a lot of time with many of them.

But… the moment I read this question, I knew exactly who my answer was.

From Starsigns, it’s Tivory.

SPOILERS UPCOMING FOR STARSIGNS

Tivory is a tiny fairy, the first one we see that lets us know they’re real in the first place. But because his egg was shaped, molded, and carved before he was hatched, he’s got physical issues, like a partial leg and missing fingers.

The problem is, through Starsigns, we pretty much see his entire life, so… not easy to do a spinoff. I suppose I could choose one of the other fairies who does survive, easily. I mean, what I’d really want to explore would be fairy culture, how they live on their own when their eggs and trees are safe.

I know this is a short post but… that’s the answer. 

I honestly doubt I’ll ever actually revisit the world I built in Starsigns. If I did, though, that’s where I’d most likely explore.

I was a ridiculously avid reader as a child. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons we could delve into, but simply put, video games and books were my refuges. It shows in who I am now: a storyteller. All about the stories.

So, what was I reading as a kid?

I was all over the place, honestly. Regular trips to the library happened a lot, so I tended to be exposed to a lot all the time. I was in the right age groups and generation to be swept up by R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs. I’m not much of a horror fiend— at least, I’m a little more now than as a kid, at least with books— so I avoided the slightly-more-horror Fear Street books in favor of the goofier Goosebumps. And I only made it so far in the whole Animorphs series. Never finished, but I did get a good ways in.

But to be totally honest, the books I most remember reading as a kid were the Children’s Great Illustrated Classics. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned them before here, but they were a LOT of my childhood. Back in the olden days, before Wal-Mart even carried groceries, we could get these small paperback versions of the classics for fifty cents apiece. The books were squat and fat, but they were my lifeblood. Every other page was an illustration, and the text was obviously abridged, but I took in a ton of classics at a young age because of these editions. Dickens, Stevenson, Wells, and more were the author names I knew before I even hit double digits in age. 
Because of these books, The Count of Monte Cristo remains probably one of my favorite stories of all time. I adore Dickens, though I do find him a little overconveniently trite sometimes. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne are still some of my favorites and… I honestly need to revisit them more as an adult. Thanks for the reminder.

To sort of rapidfire at this point:

I discovered Middle Earth at age 10-11. First with The Hobbit and immediately taking me to The Lord of the Rings.

I did get into Harry Potter when I was in high school. I’m wanting to say my sophomore year, but it might’ve been my junior year. By then, 5 books were already out.

I suppose we can cap the “growing up” part of my life with say, my gap year between high school and college. So I’ll finish up by capping my childhood off with discovering Ender’s Game and Orson Scott Card in general.

Yeah, I have some serious personal problems with those last two authors now, but the fact remains that their books did affect me as I grew up. They got me through some hard times.

Fuck you, Joanne Rowling.

But I digress.

The fact I was reading so many of those classics means I actually missed out on actually reading a lot of children’s actual classics. I’ve never read Harriet the Spy, Charlotte’s Web, or anything by Roald Dahl. I only in the last 10 years actually read Little Women. 

There’s a balance to be had. Like, I’m familiar with the stories of the ones I’ve missed thanks to movie adaptations and such, but… I missed out on being a kid. A lot of us do that.

It’s not to say that I didn’t read things normal for kids. I had school assignments and all, so I read what my classmates were reading. Even in my leisure reading, I read age-appropriate stuff, targeted books. I was just never as tied to reading levels as some might be. If it was a book and I was interested, I was going to read it no matter what.

In fact, I have! For over a year now I’ve been using Libby. I switched mostly to that after leaving Audible as part of my “As little Amazon as possible” boycott.

While I do mostly borrow audiobooks, I’ve borrowed a few ebooks, as well. It’s generally a lot easier for me to consume via audiobook because I just cannot dedicate time to physically reading as much as I would like. It takes actual pausing in everything else to sit and read, as opposed to being able to be listen to audio while cleaning, cooking, etc.

Most notably, I’ve recently finished listening to the main 8 Bridgerton books and the Happily Ever After anthology. As of the time I’m writing this post, I’m just about to finish my first Kurt Vonnegut book, Cat’s Cradle. I listened to one of his short story anthologies, and I’m really trying to decide what I think of him as an author. I totally respect him; he’s fantastic. It’s just a matter of if his writing style really vibes with the kind of reader I am. A few of the short stories I was totally enamored with, but more often, I was kind of unimpressed. Same with the book I’m finishing up this week. We’ll see. I still want to give him one more really good shot, so yeah. (fun fact: the review for this book dropped here a few days ago. Go see what I ended up thinking!)

Honestly, using Libby/the library has opened me back up to a lot more books than I let myself get into while I was using Audible. My money isn’t tied up in these books, so I can take more chances, and if I don’t like something, I just return it early with no guilt.

I doubt I would’ve bothered with the Bridgerton books if I’d been on the hook to pay for them, honestly.

So yes. I highly recommend using your library or a library app to get books into you. I’ve also heard of Hoopla, so I need to look into that one, as well.

Just read, guys!

August was both better and worse than I expected. I got a lot done for free posts and such, but my big projects were largely stagnant-ish.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Carving out writing time for this was not easy this month. Chapter 3 is at 1298 now. 876 words is all I’ve managed this month. I’ve been struggling with this one, and it’s probably going to end up being some stuff that gets cut in future edits because of that, but it’s at least good stuff that helps inform my future writing. I’m learning about the characters and world right now, how to really make things work, and that’s the struggle.

Collaboration Project - No movement yet.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. It’s been rough. Still mulling over the title.

Vonnegut is an author I’d heard the name of for years but never really got exposed to. It wasn’t until I got back into using the library (via Libby) for audiobooks that I started branching far out into the book-o-sphere, and I saw my opportunity to check him out.
​
My first exposure was Welcome to the Monkey House which was a nice broad intro of short stories, but I wanted to at least read one full novel. Naturally, I put what was available on hold and… I started waiting for my turn. Only three books were available to borrow: Welcome to the Monkey House, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Cat’s Cradle.

The first novel that came available was not the one I’d heard of, and I could’ve kept putting it off, but I decided I didn’t want Slaughterhouse-Five to bear so much pressure of representing Vonnegut’s novels well, so when Cat’s Cradle became available, I went ahead and listened.
I went into this novel not even having read the synopsis or any book blurbs. I legitimately went in blind to anything except the title, the author’s name, and an impression of his writing style from having listened to Welcome to the Monkey House. So when I say I listened to this book without a clue what I was in for, I mean that.

I’ve found, via the short stories and Cat’s Cradle, that Vonnegut weaves plot together in a loose knot. It wanders in an out of itself, dancing around the crux or epicenter of poignancy, not quite revealing what its goal is or where it’s headed, until Vonnegut is ready to pull it tight so it suddenly becomes an intricate knot. Like dominoes falling into a pattern or something, it just suddenly clicks. The sudden moment of “O. M. G.” I have when I suddenly understand what’s going on, what all these moving parts were heading for… that’s pretty heady.

It’s exactly what happened with Cat’s Cradle. What blows my mind is how rapidly Vonnegut really puts big pieces on the board, so to speak. We learn right away the world is basically over, that this book is about what happened, and we even learn the name of the scientist responsible. We start getting interviews about him, spawning from how the scientist— Felix Hoenikker— was one of the creators of the atomic bomb. The author is wanting information regarding the bombing of Hiroshima… and in the long run, learns about a theoretical side project Hoenikker had entertained: a substance called ice-nine, intended to restructure the way water solidifies. Intended for military use— to keep Marines out of the mud— such a substance would hold the potential to convert all water on Earth into ice-nine.

Through a winding process of personal discovery and insanely odd religion, the author ends up converting and becomes mired in a small, fanatical nation heavily influenced by one of Hoenikker’s children, Frank. We learn that all three of Hoenikker’s children actually have a fragment of ice-nine, and Frank’s chip of it has put him in a position of influence. It’s only once the ice-nine is used as a form of euthanasia for the nation’s leader that the world… well, actually ends for real. Bigger than Hiroshima, bigger than any other disaster. The ice-nine-frozen body is accidentally dumped into the Caribbean, and… ice-nine freezes the world.

The thing is, Vonnegut telegraphed the ice-nine takeover multiple times. It was pretty much slapped on the wall once it was first mentioned that such a thing was going to be the end of the planet. It’s pointed at loudly fairly frequently, as an ominous note that ice-nine is around, in Frank’s pocket, or in his brother Newt’s luggage, and so on. It’s there. It’s THERE.

Personally, most of the time I was listening to the book, I was sort of absorbing it on surface level only. I wasn’t sure I wanted to “let Vonnegut in” so to speak. I’m not sure what I was afraid of, but I was honestly holding the book at arm’s length. Maybe it’s his reputation, my natural hesitation at things recommended to me. Not that Vonnegut was ever personally recommended to me. I think that’s the difference. If something’s recommended by someone who knows me, I’m more likely to trust that. But the general populace… it can be hit or miss with me. When you hear big names get dropped a lot, or fad or popular media, it can be hard to pick which ones might actually resonate with yourself. Like… people love the Austin Powers movies. They were all the rage when I was in high school. I’ve never seen a one and refuse to. I only watched Squid Game because I happened on a clip and enjoyed it, so I decided to see what else the fuss was about. But I adamantly declined to watch even a moment of Tiger King. I read Dungeon Crawler Carl and watched Arcane because a friend recommended it to me.

But Vonnegut… he was one I never had a direct recommendation for. I just knew his name and that he was considered a classic, notable author worth reading. But… that never told me why.

I doubt he’s going to be a favorite author of mine anytime soon, but after two books, I definitely think I can look forward to when Slaughterhouse-Five finally becomes available for me. The more I’ve thought about Cat’s Cradle, the more I realize I enjoyed it overall. So much of me enjoys the concept of spoilers when done right. I’m more interested in HOW something happens than what actually happens. Like… I grew up knowing Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father, long before I ever watched a Star Wars film. And I saw the prequels first, so my first exposure was watching Anakin become Vader.

Once I recognized that that’s been what I’ve gotten from Vonnegut, I was able to really see Cat’s Cradle for what it was. Sad thing is, that didn’t happen until I began writing this very review. I’ve already put a hold on it again. I’m looking forward to listening again. And it’s the mindset I’ll be going into on Slaughterhouse-Five. Because I’m not reading any synopses or book blurbs or anything about it, either.