<–The State of the Writer: 8/27/17          The State of the Writer: 9/10/17–>

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.

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Project: Story
Title: The Broken Rose
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Type: Fanfiction (FFVII) Novel
Current Word Count: 263,453
Prior Word Count: 263,770
Word Difference: -317
Status: Editing
Progress: First edit of Chapter 11

One good thing about editing a letter chapter is I don’t have to think too hard about what I’m going to use for a weekly picture, and I have some decent candidates for the chapter image.  Editing is going slow on this one, but I’m hoping it picks up the next couple weeks since I’m officially on vacation.  I’d like to finish the first edit by the end of the week, incorporate any additional notes, and hopefully get the final edits out of the way.

Quote: I could shut my eyes and read the pain that flows beneath his skin.  The memory there is deeper than shadows and more hidden than a tear in the sea, but I can see it sometimes in his face when he sheds the mask for me. 

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Project: Book Reviews
Title: Various
Status: Upcoming

I added three more books to my editing backlog while posting the review for Saga: Volume 7 yesterday.  One of the recently added was just DNF’d today.

1. The Archived by Victoria Schwab
2. Dweller by Jeff Strand
3. Popular Tales from Norse Mythology by George Webbe Dasent (DNF)

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Project: Game Review
Title: SOMA
Developer:  Frictional Games
Let’s Player: ChristopherOdd
Prior Word Count: 3118
Current Word Count: 3118
Word Difference: 0
Status: Drafting

I haven’t had a chance to work on this this weekend.  I decided to push it off until Monday where I don’t have anywhere to go or really anything else to do.  I’m hoping to wrap up the story summary by tomorrow then spend the rest of the week working on the analytics.  If I could finish this up before the end of vacation, I’d be extremely happy.

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Project: Various Essays, Reviews, Audio/Video, and Organization

It’s that time of the year again, my mandatory two week vacation from work where I try to catch up on as many things as possible in a frenzy that most would not typically characterize as time off.  Since I’m a writer, I don’t really ever go on vacay, I just switch up the type of work as I fight my ever growing fatigue.  It’s a worthy battle though, I think, one definitely deserving of song ♫

Here is the list of things I hope to get accomplished in the next two weeks:

Final Fantasy Friday: Character Assessments

• Squall Leonhart – per LightningEllen.  Never fear, I have everyone’s suggestions in my notes, but I knew out of all of them I could easily do an assessment of Squall.  He’s probably the protagonist who is closest to my own mental state, and I actually started a post for him last Friday, but it was getting late so I just saved the draft.
• Kain Highwind – Since I did Cecil, Kain seems to be the logical next choice if I’m going in order.  Please continue to give me any suggestions even non-Final Fantasy ones are fine!  I have a list of characters I want to analyze from many fandoms across various media anyway.

Blogger Stuff

• Blogger Tags and Awards – My backlog on this is pretty extensive, and I really want to try to clear it out.  There are 11 still on my list from various in the year.
• Created Award – Yes, I’m going to hop on the WP chain latter train.  I’ve had an idea for my own reward for about half a year now, but no time to execute it.

Essays

• Half a Tragedy is Worse Than Whole/The Unfinished Seventh – This is the FFVII/Greek Tragedy comparative essay I started on months ago that I had to put to the side due to time constraints.  September 7 aka Final Fantasy VII Day (the anniversary of the game’s release in North America) is coming up, and I always try to do something VII related on the date.  I want to have this essay finished, edited, and prepared by then.  I love the irony of posting something that’s probably going to be entitled “The Unfinished Seventh” on the anniversary lol.
• FFVII/ASOIAF comparative essays – I have two on my list, if I may be so bold.  One is about missing mothers, dickhead dads, and lost children and the other involves apotheosis, dispossession, and eugenics.  I think for the latter I noted that I had to research WWII so we’ll see how far I get with this.

Reviews

• Book Reviews – I’m desperately going to try to knock a bunch of these out.  I told myself one a day, but even two or three a week would be helpful.
• Game Reviews
  • SOMA – As stated above, I really want to finish this up before the end of vacation.  I’ll have plenty of daylight to work on it lol.

Audio/Video – I’ve been wanting to add video and audio to my blog for over a year now, and vacation is the best time for me to finally test that out.  I kept putting it on my to-do list for Friday, but I’m so exhausted by week’s end that it just wasn’t working out.  I have to do a lot of organization with it (which is also on my list), which I’ll talk about in that section.  Essentially, I both want to add audio or video to existing reviews and also do full reviews in audio and/or video.  I haven’t ironed out all of the details yet, but I do so love brainstorming and organizing.  I have pretty nice recording equipment for both audio and video (plus I’m quite adorable with a good speaking voice if I do say so myself :p), and it’s time I put them to use.  I also have quite a collection of recordings on my iPhone that I need to edit, so you can see there are a lot of moving parts.

• Reviews
  • The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare (New/Unposted)
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Audio/Video Addition)
• Essays
  • The Seventh is the Darkest
• Poetry
  • The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (previously recorded on iPhone)
  • Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (previously recorded on iPhone)
• Northern Lights
  • Review/Edit recording of Chapter 1
  • Make recording for Chapter 2
• General edit of saved iPhone videos

Organization

• Bookmarks – These are just a mess.  They need to be sorted so I can find what I need when I need it.
• Audio/Video
  • Separate pre-recorded audio from what needs to be recorded
  • Separate audio and video i.e. figure out what content will just have audio added and what content will have video added.
  • Separate video into ones that will feature yours truly (TSN) and ones that will feature the content of what’s being reviewed e.g. if I’m making a video review for Final Fantasy IV have clips from the game.
• Blog Updates & Enhancements
  • Front page banner
  • Potential upgrade to paying site
• Research Patreon – I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too.  I have to figure out what I’d offer though before I kicked anything off.  More brainstorming and organization!
• Research freelance editing – This is something I just started to think about seriously after a friend paid me $25 to edit his job application.  It was less than an hour’s work!  I have to do a lot more research and figuring out before I go forward, but I’m keeping it in my back pocket, and it never hurts to just gather information.

There you have my plans for the next two weeks.  While they all don’t necessary have something to do with writing, they will be taking up my time, and I’m hoping to have something to show for it on the blog.

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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: 8/27/17          The State of the Writer: 9/10/17–>

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