Hello. We are a week-and-a-half into the new year, and I want to do a check in as to how I’m doing with my goals. I haven’t looked into Asian queer/genderqueer groups, so we’ll set that aside for now.
Writing: I have been doing ok with writing one hour a day except my sleeping schedule is fucked. I mean, it’s been fucked for most my life*, but it’s seriously fucked now. Plus, I fuck around too much. I need to buckle down and just get to it.
Still. I’ve managed to do the hour of writing every day but one, which isn’t bad. I’ll be honest. I thought I would struggle more with it than I have, so I’ll take it. I’m going to make up that half hour today and get back on track.
Am I happy with what I’ve been writing? Not really. It’s not great. It’s not terrible, mind. My writing is decent. It comes out decent. It then goes great or terrible, depending. Since I’m still in the explanation phase of my novemoir, it’s just fine. It’s difficult, though, because I have to go back and reread what I previously wrote to keep caught up on the main thread. My memory is shit now, and, yes, that’s something I can blame on my medical crisis.
One interesting thing is that while I had the main mystery planned before I started writing (that’s always how I do), a second murder, completely separate from the first mystery, is emerging. It’s not something I wanted to happen, but who am I to stop it?
Here’s the thing. With this novemoir, I’m in new territory. Normally, when I write, I have an outline of what I want to do. I go from beat to beat and rarely diverge from the road (less taken). Sure, the details may be emergent, but they don’t usually surprise me–much.
Plus, it’s usually follows in a chronological fashion. “Point A happens first. That leads to Point B, which trips off Point C.” In this case, Point A is tangential to Point B, but they don’t directly influence each other. Sure, I can make it so they intertwine, but I don’t want to do that for a few reasons. One, it’s too much of a coincidence. Two, it would get too messy. I’m fine with a fair bit of mess, but this would cross the line. Or rather, I don’t want to create that kind of mess.
The smart thing would be to not introduce Point B at all. It has nothing to do with Point A, and it would make things more complicated. The really smart thing to do would be to save it for the sequel. I like doing trilogies because I think it’s a shame to create a character I really like and then abandon them after one book.
On the other hand, I think series get stale after six or seven books. I understand why an author would want to continuue with a detective they wrote (comfortable, beloved, and steady money). I’m also a hypocrite because I adore Hercule Poirot and have read the whole series several times over. The least is probably four times and the most would be dozens. My favorite is Curtain (the last case), but a close second (and it used to be my favorite) is The Big Four. The latter has not aged well, especially in terms of racial characterization of the Chinese (full body shudders bad), but the ingenuity of it still shines through.
I read that Agatha Christie was heartily sick of Poirot by the time she killed him off (also, she wrote the last book well before her death and sealed it away with orders that it was to be published when she died), and it’s very clear with the introduction of the Ariadne Oliver character (who is a stand-in for Agatha Christie herself).
I found trilogies to be the perfect number of books for a character. I have written three or four of them, I think, in my past. Before my medical crisis, I was working on two of them simultaneously. Both of them were what I would loosley term urban fantasy, and I was on the third book of each. I reread them, and they’re still really good. I would like to go back to them, but I don’t know when or how I’d do that.
Bagua: I have started the Bagua Knife Form, and it’s pretty easy going in the beginning. That’s because there are two preparation steps before going into walking the circle (on the right side), and then three strikes with the knives. The strikes are similar to movements from other forms I know, so I’m not having any problems so far.
I suspect that is going to change, though.I am under no illusion that the form is going to be easy. The only one I had no difficulty with was the Sword Form, and that was a very special case. Correction, I didn’t have trouble with the postures my teacher taught me. She had to have a substitute teacher once, and the sub ‘taught’ me like five movements in a row, but really badly. She rushed through them, did not do them correctly, and when I protested, she said my teacher could clean it up.
It was clear that she did not know what she was doing, and I have no idea why she felt the need to do that. Other than that, though, the Sword Form was a breeze for me to learn.
I have about four or five movements I still need to teach myself of the Swimming Dragon Form, left side. There are two or three postures I need to iron out, but it’s been fairly smooth going for the most part.
I feel comfortable saying that I will teach myself the Bagua Knife Form this year. I am tempted to be rash and add another form to my ‘teach myself this form’ list, but I’m going to hold off for now. I’ll revisit it when I finish teaching myself the Bagua Knife Form. (Stopping myself from giving a prediction of how long I think tthat will take.)
*The only time it was unfucked was after my medical crisis, and that’s because I was drugged to the gills. I slept for a solid eight hours from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. for the next few months, and then, everything started slowly creeping back to the norm. That meant less sleep, more broken up, and gonig to bed later and later. Now, I’m going to bed at six or seven and it’s bad. I’m trying to work on it, but it’s so hard. Oh, in the morning, not at night.