Salisbury.Fake Weekly Update, writing

Writing Journal #15

Another short update this week.

I’ve released Daisy into the wild. It’s listed on my publications page if you wanna see the final cover and stuff. I’m very much a minimalist when it comes to cover design, and this one is definitely minimal. There’s no summary on the back, and the front is just a flower and the words “a novel” centered on it. The title and my name are on the spine, so it’s not like… a complete mystery. But yeah. Daisy is done.

My November Writing Thing is currently at …. some number of words. I’m 293 away from my goal for this week. I’m contemplating letting myself miss goal since I was working on getting Daisy finished up. I can make it up easily, too. I’m a little less than halfway through to my final word count goal, and I don’t know where I’m trying to go with it entirely. But that’s the beauty of storytelling. It gets figured out along the way.

I’ve decided after I finish writing this piece (currently titled Simon Says), I’m going to gently encourage myself to take a break from writing. I don’t know how well that will go because I must always be giving the world words, but as I’ve finished up my Daisy work, I’ve come to realize I devote a lot of physical energy to a book and I don’t really ever tell myself to slow down.

I have a folder of short story ideas that I’m looking forward to getting into for next year, and then of course there’s the third book of the Maker series, Lazarus Rising. That’s going to be a fun time. I mean that. I kind of went through the first draft a bit, about halfway through for some random edits, and I genuinely enjoy being in that story. It’s a home I created for myself, I think. If I could live in Lazarus, my goodness. It’s one of those situations I wish I could link up my brain to a visualizer and show you what it looks like in each of the cities so you could see it the way I do.

But therein lies the other joy of storytelling. I get to show you with my words.

I had something else to talk about, but I’m currently working on typing something up for a friend, and my wrists are a little sore–OH! Instead of writing the rest of the year, I’m going to be reading. I have two books I want to finish before the end of the year, and then whatever else I happen to come across on my shelves will be a delight. I don’t remember what my current total read is for the moment, but I’ll do a “books of the year” post either at the end of December or the beginning of January.

So, this isn’t a short update, but I got a little sentimental, I suppose. I was thinking about how I made a promise to myself to utilize this website more and I think I’ve done so. It’s been nice to put my thoughts somewhere I know someone might see them. I appreciate the readers I have, and I appreciate the consistency in which y’all see the innards of me noggin.

And with that, I sign off for now. It’s not the end of the posts for this year, but it might be the end of the posts for November. We’ll find out! I hope you’re well. I hope your words taste good, and I hope you remember it’s never too late to tell a story.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Weekly Update, writing

Writing Journal #14

Good morning! Wait, no. It’s afternoon. Good afternoon!

I’m almost done with my proof copy edits, and that’s been a delight. I think from now on I’ll order a proof so I can make final changes seeing it in book form. Once I get those edits done, I’ll fix them in the final document and upload and everything will be ready for publishing. Woo!

I’m a bit over 4600 words into my 15k project for this month. I’m looking forward to seeing where it all goes.

Short and sweet this week, as I wrap up my last day of time off for the year. I don’t necessarily want to go back to work, but as I am not independently wealthy, the mortgage must be paid.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Uncategorized, Weekly Update

Writing Journal #13?

Lucky numbaaaaahhhhhhh 13. Or something. I have returned from my time in the trees, and I did no editing. I did read a few books while out and about (Quicksilver by Callie Hart, Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, and The Lost Woman by Sara Blaedel), and I hiked for a bit. The state park I went to is one I’ve not visited before, so it was nice to do some wandering in unfamiliar territory. At one point, I thought maybe I’d wandered off trail, and I got nervous I’d be lost. But, clearly, I am not. Have a picture:

Writing wise, I plan on editing the proof copy of the project I am almost finished with. I still have some changes I need to make to the final text, and seeing them in printed form will definitely help with that. I ordered a proof version to make sure everything was where it should be, and it ain’t, sooooooooo back to the GIMP drawing board.

I have sneezed almost ten times in the last six minutes. My face is betraying me.

Anyway, since NaNoWriMo is disbanded, I’m participating in a November Writing Thing on the forum I’m part of, and I have a title, and I have almost 1500 words so far, but I hate them, so I’m going to (pause for sneeze) redo them and try again. The title will stay, though. I do like that one a lot. I’m only shooting for 15k words instead of the 50k because I am trying to finish a project, and I don’t want to be too spread across the lands. (Like butter over too much bread, eh, Bilbo? [I had to, sorry]).

That’s all the soup in this tureen, chickens. I hope you’re well, and I hope your words are coming along pretty.

Until next time, friends. Have another photo.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Weekly Update

Writing Journal #7?

Heyooooo what is up my friends?

Actually, give me a second. Gonna go look at the last journal and see what all I said.

Ah yes. Well, the car is broken broken, and I now have a new vehicle to cart me on my adventures (to the office because all I do is work). I wrote a short story for a contest on a writing forum. I’m currently …. with some votes.

Have you ever “outgrown” a story? I felt lost with the novel I’ve deemed the “summer project” and I was worried I’d lost my way with it. Not necessarily that it was a bad story, but maybe I no longer felt like it needed to be told.

I rearranged a chapter and rewrote some other scenes and now I’m writing like a fiend. I still think I have some lingering “am I no longer able to write this story?” but for the most part, it feels like I’m moving forward at a steady pace. My right wrist and middle finger say “maybe lighten up on how you hold the pen, fool.”

I think that’s all I have for now. I hope you are doing well. I hope your stories are coming to you word by word and page by page.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Weekly Update, writing

Writing Journal #6

Singing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” while unwrapping a peanut butter cup is peak Saturday morning behavior, I think. I don’t know if this is journal number six. I could look, but that requires more dedication to a numbering system than I particularly care for currently. I don’t know “Baby” past the chorus, so it’s been just a repeat of “baby, baby, baby, ohhhhh” progressively more offkey.

I haven’t been stuck. Well, no, I have been. Stuck in chapter twenty of the Lazarus Rising first draft. I’ve come across things I’ll “fix in post,” I tell myself. Scribbling late into the night because insomnia has come to visit again. Who needs sleep when words give so much more to me? I probably do need sleep, because the headaches that have come from this lack of it are just debilitating sometimes.

But yeah, finally got through chapter twenty, and I actually made it through chapter twenty-one. Finished that last night, and then when I woke up this morning, I had some clarity to restart the gibberish I wrote to open chapter twenty-two before I passed out.

Currently, peanut butter cups are eaten, and water should be next to consume, but that requires getting up again and I just sat down to keep typing up chapter fourteen. I don’t want to get half a book behind on typing again, so I’m going to spend today doing some of that. After I have brunch/lunch with some friends.

Depression has been keeping me company as of late. I see it. I wave at it when I get home. I tell it how my day has been, knowing full well it’s been right there at my ankles the whole time. It knows my weaknesses. It knows my sadness. Not a bad roommate, really. More like a mother giving you the silent treatment and you aren’t sure what you’ve done wrong, so you’ll keep trying your best not to mess anything else up.

I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’re able to see the sun, and I hope the warmth sticks with you longer than you expect it to.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Weekly Update, writing

Writing Journal #5

I don’t necessarily have writer’s block, I have lack of interest in writing at the moment. I’m still trying to write, though, and so some of the stuff that comes out is useable and other bits are more scrappable.

I am not discouraged by this, though! Sometimes taking breaks is necessary. Give a brain a bit of a rest. I’m doing some reading, though. Currently I’m reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran. I may review one or both of those! May also just read them, haha.

I considered doing a game review of a game I recently watched a playthrough of, but I sometimes feel like a poser when I try to talk about video games. I’m not skilled in the slightest at playing them, so I usually watch games (without commentary). Big, big space horror fan.

Back to writing: I’ve done a few things with the language I made up for the Maker series, like named a metal and started … doodling? I guess would be the word for it, but seeing how sentence structure would work. Different cities would have different structure sometimes, I think, as a way to differentiate their cultures/accents/etc.

I think that’s about all I have in terms of an update for now. Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake food, Life, Weekly Update

Challenge Yourself

Well, well, well. I kind of disappeared, didn’t I? I got the book finished to a point. It’s being read by betas right now, and I’m doing my second to last round of edits, the final round being when I go through for typos and minor grammatical things. But then it’ll be ready for the “fun” things. I’m going to self-publish, which will be a post for another time, but rest assured the moment it becomes available, I will let y’all know.

Today I wanted to talk about how my January went. Yes, I know it’s March, and yes, I know I could have posted this last month, but I neglected everything last month. Not just this blog. My personal journal suffered, my friendships suffered, I didn’t spend much time with my family. I got the whole book typed up, printed it off, and that was incredible. I got to see my book printed for the first time. Actually took a selfie with it, which should tell you how excited I was about it, because I never take pictures of myself.

Proof

But that’s all February. I’m here to talk about January. I’m an ambitious person, and I decided to start this year out with a bang. Challenging myself to not one, not two, but three different “challenges” just to prove I could. Veganuary, a pantry cleanout, and a no-spend directive.

Veganuary

This one feels like a no brainer for me, because I’m already mostly vegan, I just get a little emotionally attached to cheese on a difficult day. For the month of January, though, I try to avoid even that and see how I can be creative in the kitchen. It’s something I’ve participated in for the last three or four years, and I never really talk about it to people because as I’m sure I’ve said here before, I don’t judge people on what they eat. It’s not my place. Hunger is a prevalent problem everywhere, especially in places with famine or drought, and I’m not about to go after someone for spending .35 on a box of generic macaroni and cheese versus 3.99 a pound for cauliflower. The cost of living is rising, too, so I think it’s okay to give ourselves a little grace nowadays when it comes to eating what we want. And I drifted away from January again. But that’s okay, because I can segue into the next challenge. It added a new dimension of difficulty to my food choices.

Pantry

I have several items in my pantry (shelf stable) I’ve had in there for more years than I’d like to say. Rice, lentils, quinoa, that kind of thing. Since I was working on Veganuary I had to find interesting ways to utilize the stuff I already had. I didn’t do well the first week because most of the items in my pantry are things you have to cook to add to other things, or flavor well, and while I was doing my best to keep my head above itself, I had a bunch of residual holiday depression lingering in the back of my mind. I ate the convenience foods first, and then when I ran out of those, I ate the easiest to cook things like pasta and nutritional yeast. I did lose about five pounds in the month of January because I wasn’t eating much of anything.

No-Spend

I didn’t have an easy way to segue into this, so pardon the abruptness, but for this challenge, it was more to see how I could go without fast food. I have such a dependence on easy solutions, and I struggle to allow myself the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing something requiring effort. That goes so deeply into more than just a no-spend requirement. It delves into the appreciation of self I seem to constantly find myself striving toward. I was about to go on a horrible tangent on the word choice of “strive” but I’ve already diverted from the main topic of this paragraph already. So, for the month of January, I didn’t want to buy anything. No groceries, no fast food, no toilet paper (it’s just me in my house, so don’t worry, I was fine with what I already had), nothing.

Discussion

So what did I learn? I already touched on my dependence on cheese, and my dependence on easy, but to take it further, I learned how quick I am to fall into old habits. I did end up spending a bit more money at Target after the challenges ended, but I was absolutely out of everything. As one would be. And so with a restock of supplements and vitamins, household cleaners, and other various things, it became apparent that my relationship with money has been chaotic at times. I’m not going to go too far into that because that’s a different level of personal I don’t know I want to share on the internet, but it was interesting to me to see what became “oh, I’ll stop at Target on the way home so I can grab this snack, this thing, this something else, and blah, blah, blah.”

What is the point? The point is, I want to go back to the questioning of “do I really want this or is this an impulse?” It’s something that fits just about all facets of each challenge. How quickly do I turn to comfort foods because my emotions are so high and food functions as a punishment instead of a comfort? Why don’t I consider the efficiency of shopping for things all at once over random stops several times a week? How do I utilize what I have already to keep myself fed and content?

Several things to consider. And I leave you with that, for now. I have plans for blog posts more frequently now that the book stuff is kind of slowing down. I hope you are having a good day or week whenever you read this.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Weekly Update, writing

It’s All In How You Say It

Hey, how ya doin’? I hope you’re doing well. This blog is a sort of update on my writing projects. Not only am I reworking the first book of my trilogy, I’ve made some progress on my worldbuilding journal. I finished the setting discussion for Lazarus, including the history of Moarteans. It was a lot of insight into a world I neglected during my first few go arounds on this story. Discovering an entire culture has been so satisfying. The rise and fall of leaders, the growth and stagnation of policy, the wealth of “art” history. I say “art” because the Moartean way is more scientific, and more visceral. They aren’t a romantic bunch of people (in terms of love or historical era), so they tend to dwell on the pain and suffering aspect of life a lot more than the people of Fulcrum (our world).

As I was developing this background, I was thinking about how there’s this phrase that they use as a kind of blessing, “nantu sonsprek moartea-hi,” (the strength of the dead goes with you), and it struck me that this was a small insight into their language. They came up with a new language as a way to be above humanity and it slowly spread to the mega cities. Some humans of Lazarus can speak Moartean, but mostly it’s just used between the Moarteans.

Which brings me to my coolest thing I’ve done so far creatively. I am creating the Moartean language. Actually creating their language with real words and grammatical rules and there will be poetry, scientific literature, regular literature (all of that will be alluded to, because I’m not that cool yet). I’d kicked the idea around in my head for a while because I liked that they had a different way of speaking. It elevated them above the humans and then it became their way of surviving. Which is hella vague, I know, but the book explains more.

The words have a sound that’s got a combination of several of the Romance Languages, Russian, and Japanese/South Asian. The reason for this? It sounds good. The word for star is gakima (the plural being gakimai) pronounced “guh-KEE-muh” or “guh-KEE-muh-ee” and the word for everything is winexi, which is pronounced “wee-NEY-zhee.” There doesn’t appear to be a pattern to the words or anything so far, but I feel that’s accurate for the Moarteans in their earlier arrogance. They wouldn’t want the humans to learn their words.

So that’s where I’m at currently. Still working on the actual story, yes, but my side projects are keeping it all fresh in my head. I know my approach to writing isn’t necessarily what will work for others, but I enjoy sharing the process and the side bits to hopefully help others in their work.

Until next time, friends.