Daily Streaks, Fiction Peaks

Writing method: On phone

Word count: 729

Video podcast

Keith's Audio Commentary

Riding the Writing Wave

It's July 8th, 2024. Today's writing session was much smoother than yesterday. Decided to write on my phone today and just dive right into this chapter.

And it was a pretty action-packed chapter. Lots of movement. Got a small chase going on and we've got a kind of a quicker climax to The Gate and decided to make a major decision about an important character.

Plot Problems and Winging It

And it was funny because I was talking to my wife about the plot problems I was having.

I still haven't decided everything yet with The Gates and what they're supposed to like, is this a good thing or a bad thing type of deal?

And she was, she seemed kind of mortified when I told her like, you know, you've written almost 70,000 words for this, for this novel and you don't know what one of the main parts of the story is.

And for me as a writer, I, this is, this is not too concerning.

Writing Yourself Out of Corners

And because she was like, you, you've written yourself into a corner.

And I was like, well shit, I'll write my way out.

Isn't that the way it goes, right?

If you wrote yourself into a corner, because we get like that sometimes. It feels like, oh, I'm trapped.

I killed this character off, or I said this about that. And I think that's one of the things I've, I've had this skill.

I think that's one of the things that, that, that scares a lot of authors is when they get to this point and they're like, oh shit, what did I do?

Why did I do this? And then you think I got to go undo all this stuff.

It's like, no, no, you don't.

You can just make some new shit up. You made the whole thing up. So why can't you make something else new up?

Childhood Inspiration

And this is what I was going to say.

I got this skill when I was a kid, because my brothers and I, we'd always be playing with our, with our characters, with our, with our action figures.

We called them characters, but we'd always be playing with them.

And it was like, well, he comes out and he beats him up, but then he gets picked up by her and she picks her, him up and now she's back. Oh, but wait, she's not really good. She's bad now. And you can just kind of do this back and forth.

The No-Rails Rollercoaster of Fiction

Now, of course, you don't want to do that just willy nilly in fiction, you know, just tools is foreshadowing and there's how you use the language and things like that.

But the point is, it's your story, so you can really make it do whatever you want it to do. And that's one of the things that's freeing about writing fiction.

I understand for some authors, this is, for some writers, this is a scary thing because there's no rails.

There's nothing to tell you what's right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad. It just kind of, it's your taste all the way. It really is. It's how you present the story.

Visual Storytelling and Comic Book Vibes

that's one of the things that was cool about what my wife said about Sync Whole yesterday, about my novella.

She was like, it's very visual, which is actually that was really, that was intentional to make it very, that goes all the way down to the visuals, the comic book style visuals that go along with it, that's on the the cover. It's very colorful.

And that was all good. She was like, I could see exactly what was going on. It was just, she likes it stuff to be grounded and plot. And she wants to really know what's going on.

The Daily Grind Payoff

I'm approaching 50 days, 50 day streak.

I think this is day 48, tomorrow will be 49 of writing daily, writing and reading daily and doing these updates and just kind of downloads, which has been good because I like doing stuff more like chipping away at it.

I'm not really all at once type of person. And so this is working out for me because I'll have these recordings, I'll have these transcripts to turn into something more after this project is done.

So we'll see what happens with them in the future.