Well, I didn't expect to be sitting here, writing this, when the year 2020 began. There are times in one’s life that feel a bit like defining moments, and in a lot of ways, this past year has been that to me. Sure, there were the lows. Early on, March, April, and May felt tense and draining. I was constantly bombarded by defeatist, negative news. Refreshing websites every ten minutes just to see the latest frenzied half-truth repeated ad nauseam. It was stressful, draining, and well, just made it hard to get out of bed some days.

Nothing better exemplified this than a more than one-minute-long video I took of myself, alone in my apartment, spinning around and zooming in and out nonsensically on things like a bottle of Purell, a glass of water, a cut up t-shirt improvised into a mask, my wireless mouse, and any other things I kept on my desk. All this, while singing my heart out along to the Wahaha song. I do regret a bit that this video no longer exists. Nothing could summarize quite as well this strange, strange mental space we had all found ourselves in.  

By May I knew this couldn’t continue for me. I removed Twitter from my phone. I unsubscribed from any subreddit even tangentially related to news. I turned off the tv during the day. Within a week, I felt like myself again. My anxiety disappeared. Stress related heartburn and stomach problems also vanished. I was sleeping well; my back wasn’t hurting. I felt like I could live again.

With all this suddenly free time, I turned my attention to my writing (Well, and some video games I’d been meaning to catch up on, but then my 3DS broke…). I had been noodling on one particular fantasy story, that would eventually become Toric, casually since college. I’d find myself going to Starbucks to write for three or four hours on a lazy Sunday occasionally, or getting some motivation to put in a few hours after work here or there. It was just for me. Something fun to do without much of a plan at all.

It was at some point around 2015 or 2016 that I started to take this whole thing a bit more seriously. I sat down and outlined for several weeks. I solidified characters, cities, countries, races, worlds, and came up with a plan. I threw out the 100+ pages I’d written and started from scratch.

It was character backstories first. I spent a year writing intricate and detailed vignettes of each of my main characters in scenes that fell years earlier in my timeline than my planned chapter 1. I thought that if I didn’t understand where my characters came from, how could I hope to write them in the present? Well, it worked. Kind of. I was excited now for the story, and while my pace of work improved, all kinds of barriers sprung up as well. I was traveling every week for work at this point, and most nights all I wanted to do was throw something on to watch or just crawl into bed at whichever hotel I found myself at.

I chipped away at the thing though. Eventually making it about halfway through the story before 2020 derailed everything.

Well, after regaining my sense of normalcy in May, or as close to it as I could find given the current situation, I decided I wanted to do something to take back my agency from the world. So I wrote. It wasn’t nonstop (until the final week or so that is), but I set aside a good amount of time in my evenings and weekends to actually, finally, dedicate to this project.

It’s surprising how much you can accomplish even in a relatively small amount of time. Even though I was limited to just time in the evening after work, I was flying through the story compared to my earlier efforts. By October, only four months and change later, I found I had matched my output from the previous four years combined. By November, the story was finished, revised, and sent out to beta readers for feedback.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Up to that point I had received zero feedback from anyone on my work. I told myself to prepare for the worst. I roleplayed conversations while I lay awake at night, imagining how I could best accept negative feedback. I started brainstorming ideas for other books in other worlds once it became clear this one was a bust. Oh sure, I also dreamed about doing huge book signings with legions of fans lined up (who doesn’t?), but this was about as fulfilling for me as dreaming about winning the lottery. Fun, but ultimately just a pointless diversion and far from a realistic outcome. 

But, as initial feedback came in, it was actually, shockingly… pretty positive. I couldn’t believe it. I went into my first beta reader review sessions armed with several plans I could roll out when I was told that the book inevitably needed to be rethought. I could cut 1/3 to 1/2 of what I had written and turn the book into just part one of a larger book. I felt like I was teasing a lot of things, but not answering enough questions, and worried endlessly that the work as it was would feel unsatisfying on its own. I was also prepared to pitch another idea about writing a concurrent narrative from an alternative character’s point of view that could run simultaneously alongside what I had already written. I also had a long list of scenes that I thought I could cut or rework to slim down the story and keep it more gripping. I was prepared to take an axe to the thing.

Well, my early readers were horrified at the thought. One even said “That would be a tragedy” when I proposed cutting a large swath of material. There were minor nits, but overall, they liked it. Overall, they said it was good. Overall, they wanted more.

Well, for the first time in my life, I found I was not just doing this for myself. It’s a scary thought, but also one that excites me like no other. By January 2021, I was researching agents, query letters, and all manner of publishing related topics. All of that culminated in the existence of this blog post you are reading now, on this new website that has become the first technical side project I’ve ever actually fully completed.

If you are reading this then I assume it is probably long past the day when I actually first posted this blog. I can't even pretend to know what life will hold for me in your now. Maybe this website is sitting abandoned in some forgotten corner of the internet while I just can’t bring myself to pull the plug out of nostalgia. Maybe I did actually manage to make it happen with Toric. Maybe it was years later with another book. All I know is that through all the chaos and pain that was this past year of 2020, I was able to do something pretty dang cool for myself. So, here’s to that! 

Thanks for reading to the end. This probably wasn't the most interesting blog for you, but it felt right to me for a beginning. I don’t have too many firm plans for my blog at the moment, but I do expect to update regularly on Wednesdays to start out. I think I’ll be focusing half on the craft of writing and half on more personal topics. I want to discuss my thoughts on topics like characters, settings, plot, and so on. I also am a regular listener to the Writing Excuses Podcast, which is a great resource for fiction writers of all kinds, so maybe I’ll post some of my thoughts when an episode really captures my interest.

Things aren’t going to be too serious here all the time though. If I watch or play a particularly good game, anime, tv show, movie, or something, then I probably am going to want to discuss it, at least from a writing and character perspective. I’ll try to keep my sports rants to a minimum, but no promises there.

And who knows, maybe when this so-called Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour comes to an end, I might actually have interesting and new things happening in my day-to-day life to write about. Don't let your memes be dreams!

Well, there comes my website, right on cue, telling me an exception was encountered as I went to save this blog post. I guess the whole website thing is still somewhat a work in progress. Please excuse me while I debug this thing when I really should be just heading to bed. See ya!