The State of the Writer: 8/20/17

/ The Shameful Narcissist

<–The State of the Writer: 8/13/17          The State of the Writer: 8/27/17–.

A weekly post updated every Sunday discussing my current writing projects and where I stand with them.  This will include any and all work(s) in progress (WIP) be they creative writing, essays/analyses, or reviews of any type.

Project: Story
Title: The Broken Rose
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Type: Fanfiction (FFVII) Novel
Current Word Count: 266,548
Prior Word Count: 266,752
Word Difference: -204
Status: Editing
Progress: Reviewing Chapter 11

This is the second “letter” chapter (with Chapter 5 being the first), but as I was doing my preliminaries last night, I ran into an integral question.  Is this chapter necessary?  With writing or more specifically editing, that’s something you always want to ask.  Is this chapter/part necessary to the story?  Is it needed to further your and therefore the characters’ goal(s)?

My idea with the letter chapters was to show the past, present, and future through Aeris’s eyes.  The first letter is all about her horrible past and her struggles to reconcile it with the wonderful present.  There are ideas of worthiness and blame she has to wrestle with along with a sort of survivor’s guilt.  She was saved from that horrendous existence, but she can’t stop thinking about those who are still suffering, and that’s tearing her up inside.  She wonders why she was worthy to be rescued when she could physically “take” the worst kinds of abuse, because she’d just come back, but others would actually die.

Of course this is unfathomable and debatable about whom it’s worse for: the person who’ll die from maltreatment and be (hopefully) released from the pain forever, meaning they’ll also lose any hope of a better life (though…I suppose not in the world of FFVII where reincarnation most certainly exists so there’s a caveat on that, though you don’t come back as that same person), or the person who’ll come back time and time again for more abuse.  It’s not a question I really want to consider, but Aeris is forced to all the time.

So this chapter was supposed to focus on her present, but I realized quite quickly that many of the things she was saying (and I was writing) were redundant.  I’m currently now going through it and marking “new information” as it were.  Afterwards, I’ll decide whether to keep this chapter or parse out what I think is necessary (or refuse to discard) and figure out where I can add it.

Quote: “Is everyone so innocent, my general?”
“No one’s more innocent than you.”

Project: Book Review
Title: Talon
Author: Julie Kagawa
Status: Drafting

This is going to be one of my longer reviews, because the book brings up a lot of great ideas and philosophical debates.  Much more than some of the paranormal romance YA I’ve seen  Obviously we have our Hunger Games, Divergent, and more dystopian YAs that present such questions for pondering, but solely romance based YAs without that dystopian setting (especially those with the love triangle) are often vapid and shallow.  Though this one has all of the traits of a typical YA romance (and I was also a bit unsure about how it was going to go initially), there’s a great deal of depth to it that needs to be explored.  So I’m going to take my time writing this.

Project: Book Reviews
Title: Various
Status: Upcoming

I’m just going to put the ones I’ve added instead of the full list.  I’m currently at 14 reviews to do (not including Talon above) with the two added since last week.

  1. Shadows on Snow by Starla Huchton
  2. Red as Blood and White as Bone by Theodora Goss

They’re both fairy tale retellings: Shadows is a genderbent Snow White, and Red as Blood is a darker, more realistic version of Cinderella.  It’s the first book I’ve ever read by Theodora Goss whose titular blog I follow. 

Project: Game Review
Title: SOMA
Developer:  Frictional Games
Let’s Player: ChristopherOdd
Prior Word Count: 1738
Current Word Count: 2397
Word Difference: +659
Status: Drafting

I changed the title of the post to “Soma – An Analysis and Review,” but that may change again later.  I’m still plugging away at the story summary, and I’m a bit shocked there aren’t any comprehensive ones anywhere on the internet I can find.  I’ve been using Wikipedia, the Soma Wiki, and Christopher Odd’s videos to augment my memory.  If I write a decent enough summary, I may update the ones on the two wikis (leaving out my analyses of course).  I’d say I’m about halfway through the summary then I can start on the analysis.

I would’ve worked on this today as well as yesterday, but I had to write up notes on my thoughts about The Last of Us, which took about an hour and is in my queue to review after this and Mass Effect.  I’m a very busy Narcissist.

Project: Game Reviews
Title: Various
Status: Upcoming

If I’m going to do it for books, I might as well do it for games, too.  These are my upcoming game reviews not including SOMA above.

  1. Mass Effect – I’m just going to review the entire series as a whole since it’s really just one story broken into three parts.  Like SOMA currently and the other two after, this is going to be more analysis than just plain review.
  2. The Last of Us
  3. Dear Esther – This is a review I’ve had on my list for a really long time.  I actually have a post drafted for it, but I don’t think I got very far.  I really should review it before anything else, since I watched it more than a year (if not two) ago, but I want to get the other three out of the way.

What are you currently working on?  Is it a creative writing project, essay, review, or something else?  Have you just started something new or are you wrapping up a long term project?

<–The State of the Writer: 8/13/17          The State of the Writer: 8/27/17–.

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20 thoughts on “The State of the Writer: 8/20/17”

  1. Pingback: The State of the Writer: 8/13/17 | The Shameful Narcissist Speaks

    • I wish I could’ve worked on my SOMA review today, too, but I HAD to get my thoughts out on TLOU so that I can watch/listen to others interpretation. Not to say I might not change my mind or add some more ideas to my own philosophy, but I need to have a base 🙂 I’d send you my babblings, but I wouldn’t wish them on ANYONE.

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  3. Awesome! I finally had a chance to sit down and read Chapter 10, so now I can anxiously await Chapter 11!

    I re-started Soma, so I’ll have to watch faster in order to be ready for your review! In regards to my own writing, I’ve been remiss at editing my thesis for publication (sigh) so that is officially commencing this week (double sigh). In other news, I finally am also sitting down to get out the story that’s been banging around in my head. It’s another “I’m writing this for me” project, but like my fanfiction I hope it will see the light of day at some point! Oh, and I’m continuing my DA fanfiction because Renya and Leliana are screaming at me to be let out of my head.

    Needless to say, all these things I want to do are requiring me to actually have a schedule, which is surprisingly nice as I still sit around working part-part-time…

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    • Yay! I did see your review on AO3. I’ve been so behind with replying to those, but I’ll get to it. I agree with what you said just to be quick about it 🙂

      Oh, don’t rush…I doubt I’ll be posting it before September lol. I can only work on it on weekends right now, but I’m on vacation the first two weeks of next month so I’ll be able to work on it more then.

      Ah, I understand projects like that all too well. I’ve been thinking about my first original novel a lot these past few days, because after finishing TLOU and ruminating on it, I realized that my story was VERY similar to it thematically. It needs a lot of work/editing. I doubt I’ll get to it before NaNoWriMo. I think I had it on my yearly to-do list, but then I also figured I’d edit all of The Broken Rose this year, too lol, ah well.

      If your characters are yelling at you, you HAVE to write them. If I don’t work on my FFVII fanfiction, conversations between Sephiroth and Aeris run through my head, so I know I have to get back to it. They don’t say writers are a little touched for no reason :p

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      • See, the issue is that neither of us have won the lottery. Then there would be time for all these projects! (haha)

        Yeah I’m going to try my hand at NaNoWriMo again this year, too. I was a dork and started posting my fanfiction last year, but flaked out halfway through the month, which was stupid because my fiction is WAY more than 50,000 words, but oh well. Maybe this year It’ll happen….

        And yes. I think it’s required for writers to be just a touch crazy. I mean, we hang out with imaginary characters for hours on end… other people seek medication for that, don’t they?

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        • Yasss! If you do NaNo and you decide to sign up on the website, let me know and I”ll friend you 😀 I think it’s easier when you have something to keep you in check so I try to sign on every day to update what I’ve done. I think I did a daily post every day in November 2015, but I don’t think I’m going to go that route. I need to do some prep in October since there’s still some things I want to iron out before I start writing. It’s always hardest to start, I find.

          There’s a joke about how they do one of two things with people who answer the voices in their heads. Either they’re put into a padded room or they’re given a pen 😉

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          • I’m actually already on there. I’m (very originally) Athena Veda 😀

            Yeah… I have the weirdest way of writing stories. I need to know how the story will begin, how it will end, two points in the middle, and then I just sort of connect those four dots, so it makes for an interesting ride.

            I’m glad I was given a pen, and not put in a pen, then!! 😀

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            • I think I’m AshRose. I’ll find you, since I don’t remember whether I went with that or my current moniker.

              That’s not that dissimilar to how I write a story! I usually know how it begins, how it ends, and major plot points. There’s usually at least one or two huge ones that I want to get to and that are the driving point behind the writing. Then it’s just the matter of writing it and seeing where things go. Things never quite work out the way I expect. My first novel, I completely changed the ending though I’d had it planned out for probably a decade. I had no clue how I was going to end Northern Lights, the first novel length fanfiction I wrote; I just knew what I wanted it to accomplish, and with The Broken Rose (the current one), I planned for it to be only 10k words. Whoops! The NaNo one I’m not sure how it’s going to end either, but it has a similar mien to The Broken Rose and is actually the reason I wrote that, as a practice of sorts. Eep, I can babble about writing forever if you let me :p

              Okay turns out I’m TheShamefulNarcissist there, too, but I could never figure out how the hell to add anyone o.O

              Bahaha, that’s perfect!

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  4. I’m surprised to hear that there isn’t much information on Soma online. Maybe the story is open to interpretation so everyone is scared of posting their plot summary out of fear that someone will say they are wrong.

    On Thursday my vacation starts, wohoo! I don’t have any writing projects per se, but I intend to use the free time to watch some movies. Expect to see more motion picture reviews on my blog in the near future.

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    • Oh there’s info! There’s just not a decent summary that details the major plot points. I’ve found tons of interpretation stuff, feelings, reactions, metas, and essays, but I was hoping Wikipedia of the SOMA wiki would have just the major plot points about what happened without any interpretation either way. There’s websites with timelines, but they usually go back before the events of the game, which is ironically enough in the future o.O

      Hooray! Vacation is awesome. What movies are you planning to watch?

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  5. Pingback: The State of the Writer: 8/27/17 | The Shameful Narcissist Speaks

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