... and now what?

With the ending of NaNoWriMo 2022, we embark on that period where I have not a single clue of what to do next.

It is not that I do not have any ideas or even material to work with, I have, a lot, and that is The problem: there is just too much I want to do, meaning I will spend hours staring at the ceiling and doing nothing. This has been the case for quite a while now, but I cannot keep going like this.

One thing I posted when I trully gave up on this year’s NaNo, was that I was trying to tell I story for which I’m just not good enough to tell, and the biggest revelation was I wouldn’t ever be good enough, if I did not write. I can’t complain my craft is subpar if I do not hone my skills. And though I’m saying it was a revelation, it really wasn’t, it is something I know for quite some time, I just did not want to accept it.

Of concretes works, i.e.: stuff I have a pretty good idea how the world operates, I have:

  1. This year’s NaNo: a kind of sci-fi-ish story some twenty minutes in the future. I cannot simply continue it, as there is a major event which should have happened earlier in the story, and though most of the three Point-of-View characters are mostly disconnected, this even will have repercussion in two characters. One thing I can do from this point forward, is to go through what I wrote and take notes of what is happening but also preparing for the changes needed, in order to re-write the whole thing at a later date.

  2. Another project is a previous NaNo, the only one I have actually finished the draft, maybe four years ago? Can’t remember. And by draft I mean the outline. Beucase this is what us pantsers are, really hardcore planers. Currently, the draft, has three parts with three chapters each, meaning it will have at least twenty-seven chapter if I ever get to rewrite it. On this project I already have a number of notes and changes that need to be made and events that stay as they are. Ah, fun-fact: this is one of the few stories I’m set on a title, with a subtitle; the subtitle being Prologue. Yes, the whole 50k+ words outline started as a prologue for another story. (I’m telling you pantsers are just very detailed planners.)

  3. The third project I could tackle, that has something concrete on it, well, it is not that finished. I have a title (another of the exceptions), and a good deal of the world is set, but I stopped writing at some point for reasons I fail to remember and never returned to it. If I were to work on this, I would just continue the outline- I mean, continue with the 1st draft.

Aside from the aforementioned, there are the following stories:

  1. Space Fantasy: I’m thinking on golden age of piracy. Definietly not scifi, I won’t even bother to make tech seem believeable, let alont explain it. Basicaly humanity is in some sort of exodus, but it is not humanity from our planet Earth. It is not twenty minutes in the future. It is something else entirely.

  2. Steam Punk: I’m thinking a bit of grit and treasure hunt. And just as above, the setting is its own, it is not Victorian or Edwardian era (I think it is the later). It does not happen in an alternative past, nor in alternative future of the past, nor even in an alternative earth.

  3. Seven Samurai meets Dungeon & Dragons meets The Witcher: You can imagine the story, it has been told already, I just can never settle between actual D&D races or my own.

There are a few other world concepts, but I will not even try to detail them as, different from everything above, these other ideas of mine are still very fluid.

And let us not forget that I also enjoy cartography and programming. Heck, I already started looking into developing a web app to serve as the main landing page for my domain (it is just some crap placeholder at the moment).

Regardless of what is comming next, my initial plans is to work on one chapter per month and post it online. I’ll probably use a separate blog for that. I know one chapter per month is really nothing, but I also know I won’t keep the schedule of one chapter per week. I do have a deadline to make this decision, and chances are, when it comes to it, I will do something else entirely.

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