Walk down memory lane

It turns out even though I was on vacation for 2 weeks, I didn’t take as much time as I wanted to complete the last items to publish Resurgence. At the end of the 2 weeks, I caught a cold so since the end of December, I spent a week practically sleeping all the time and the past week in a bit of a brain fog.

So in a month, I spent less time writing than I did in one week before the holidays while working full time. Oh well.

So what to do when you have enough energy to sit at a computer but not enough brain cells to complete what needs to be done?

Read past work.

Roleplaying

Before I started working in my Auros world, I was working on a police romance novel. At the same time, I was fooling around with some friends roleplaying. What is that? We created each our own characters and took turns writing a story in an existing world.

For those who are curious, we were writing in the Star Wars expanded universe. That is, we were fans of the books, now become Legend. Yes, I’m a bit of a closet Star Wars fan. That was my foray in the science fiction world. But hey, I had fun.

So for the last couple of days, I reread some of what we wrote between 2009-2014.

Why do I mention this? Because I had fun writing those stories with my friends, friends I still keep in touch with.

I had periods I wrote a lot of posts to our shared stories (before 2006) and I can tell from my infrequent posting in what I read the last few days was due to spending time writing in my Auros world. But that was just a drop in the bucket of the stories we wrote.

Some may be shocked that roleplaying can be of any use to a writer but any activity that gets you writing is a good one, especially if you have fun doing it. Whenever writing feels like a chore, then it’s not worth the effort.

Roleplaying helps to practice character development, it forces you to live with what was already written (you can’t go back and change the story that was written), and gives you practice in adjusting to what others write. When you write a scene using other’s characters, you have to keep faithful to what the owners of those characters created. All good ways to develop skills that help with story telling.

All in all, I had the best experience (and a lot of fun) writing and telling stories with those friends.

Fan Fiction

Another activity I have done in the past is to write fan fiction for no one’s enjoyment but my own.

I’ve written an unfinished story in the Star Wars universe but in 2015, I wrote about 45K words in a period of 11 days based on a character of a modern series I love. I just got inspired after I finished the latest book that was out. That might have been the fastest pace I ever set.

These will never see the light of day, of course, but I bring this up because I had fun writing that fiction. And I have fun rereading the stories.

Have fun

So my point in this first post of 2018 is to have fun writing. Without fun, it’s a lot harder to keep up a good pace to finish a story.

Resolution

It looks like the fog is dissipating. Finally!

My resolutions this year: get Resurgence published, finish writing my current Auros story, then move on to publishing Alliance, book 2 of the Auros series.

For 2018, I wish other writers inspiration. For the readers out there, I hope you'll enjoy Resurgence if you end up reading it.