November 2022 Update

Reminder that this is cross-posted from Patreon!

Welcome to my world, where every month is National Novel Writing Month! You know, that’s a joke that a lot of pro writers have made over the years, and well… it’s old, I should haven’t said it, I apologize.

This month’s lesson: How to critique yourself and others. In the throes of all the revising I’ve been doing the last couple of months, I keep talking about critiques and feedback, and I realized — that’s kind of vague. Like so many things, critiquing is a process and a skill that requires learning and practice. So I’ll talk a little about that.

I finalized that novel I’ve been revising. It’s a thing. Good thoughts appreciated as it goes to the next step on its journey: submission. Oof. Now we wait.

I’ve moved on to the next rough draft, which is something of a surprise novel. This story’s been cooking in the back of my mind for something like a decade, and it spewed out in a big chunk over the end of the summer. It looks nothing like I thought it was going to look like, and it may be that shifting to a different main character, a different point of view, and a different verb tense, and basically a different everything, is what the story needed all along. It’s written, and now I’m revising. (Note to self, revising two novels in a row kind of sucks, that’s too much revising, I should probably take a break and work on something else except I want to get to this while it’s still fresh, argh, too many things.) Of course what I really want to do is send it to my beta reader with the bouncy enthusiasm of a small child showing off her first macaroni art. This is what I’d normally do. But I’m waiting. There are some holes in the story that need filling in, some plot lines that I know I can develop more. I’m going to try to let this draft breathe and see what happens.

What I’ve been watching: I really enjoyed The Rings of Power. I know not everyone did, and I understand why, but I love just how beautiful it looks, I love the detail and background, building on what we know of the world, and story wise, I love the way it manipulated our expectations without us even realizing it. Great stuff.

I also watched the most recent season of Cobra Kai. Every new season I drag my feet, thinking the show can’t keep getting better, it’s going to drop the ball one of these days… well, not yet. This season was just as great. This show is so tightly written… it’s corny, cheesy, over the top, and every piece of that is well thought out and intentional. It’s simultaneously mocking, deconstructing, and celebrating the 80’s teen action movie aesthetic. I love that. This season reminded me of that time the GI Joe comics were all ninjas all the time, but with high schoolers. Like, Baby Ninjas or something.

Let’s see, what else… my niece was Sabine Wren, from Star Wars Rebels, for Halloween. That kid is so ambitious! What that means is I learned to make foam cosplay armor. So many YouTube tutorials, y’all. With that skill now in my toolbox, other costumes become accessible. For MileHi Con, I made the headband for the Sylvie variant, from the Loki TV show.

Speaking of skills that need practice, I haven’t been doing any baking because of all the traveling, so my “If I want to try the food on the Great British Baking Show I Guess I’ll Have to Make it Myself” project is effectively on hold.

I will not be attempting to make those objects that they were calling s’mores. That was…so odd.

And now we enter the mad rush to the holiday season. Hold on tight…

Advertisement