The End of 2023 is Nigh!

Late night, come home / Work sucks, I know

Hello, it's almost the end of 2023, and I've made as much progress over two years in Moonless than what any other serial author could have pulled off in 6 months (is that a grammatically correct sentence?). Not that you should measure yourself by the standards of others. but do it anyways, self image is a joke.

Good life news, though. After pulling off my 3rd 4.0 semester, getting 100% on finals for some of the most difficult prereqs for my degree, I'm finally entering Nursing school. Yes, I need to brag about it to somebody because do you know how hard it is to take A&P and magically be able to blindly put your hand in a dead body and know yes, this is the ileocecal valve, even though the last person displaced it to where the descending colon should be, due to the sharp angle and the squish it makes.

All that's left is the oral interview. I imagine it'll go down just as well as Andy Dwyer's police interview from Parks and Rec.

Any future progress plans for Moonless? I've got exactly 5,605 words in Moonless that need editing. Once I got some more flesh for 2 or 3 parts, I'm hoping to get all of what I got posted to Reddit before end of January. I may be slow, but I'm not giving up, I swear!

A shot of my messy workspace

to prove I am certainly not lying

Reading Updates: For the holidays, the people in my life accurately guessed I like books. As I'm trying to finish Tolkein's LOTR series yet again, my sister gifted me with On Writing and Worldbuilding: Volume III by Timothy Hicks. Doens't help I got Heart Stopper 1-3, The Vampire Lestat and The Emotional Thesaurus in the mail. A nice break from reading textbooks and angry work emails, I guess.

School Sucks p2

 I want to write a story called The Last Vampires on Earth, about a pair of vampires in a post-apocalyptic climate crises, after all non-infected humans have disappeared, thus condemning the remainder of vampire society to starve out and die. It'll have political undertones. Climate change undertones. Resource exploitation undertones. Undertone undertones. Will it be good? Probably not. But I think I'll name the characters Todd and Sarah, after my Totodile and Cyndequil in Pokemon Go.

Idle dreams for an idle future where I have free times on my hands, though.

After two months of a dead sprint through 3 classes and 40+ hour workweeks, I found time to squeeze out Part 29 of Moonless. After rereading previous sections of Moonless because I, uh, forgot a lot of things over multiple hiatuses (we talk about unreliable narrators, but what about unreliable authors?), I accidentally uncovered a plethora of inconsistencies.

Like character names being dropped then disappearing, or having new names, or names with new spellings... It's hard not to go backwards over details instead of forward. I know what you're thinking--have you thought of making a list of characters?

Yes!

But have you done it?

Sort of! Kind of. Well, I have now.

By my count, Moonless currently has 30 named, reoccurring characters. I've finally gotten around to posting a total Reoccurring Characters list. You can see it on the Serial Table of Contents page.

There are some characters with whited-out names, or parts of their names; this is to help protect some plot twists for those trying to avoid spoilers. And makes me feel like a cool secret keeper. Yes, you can highlight the white-out to reveal names.

sunburnt

 For the record, not only did I remember to bring sunblock floating, I actually wore it this time. And reapplied it! Just not... on my neck and face. It's okay. We're all gonna get cancer and die anyways unless a climate catastrophe or the sun exploding gets us first.

Part 26 of Moonless is up. I know it's been long gaps between updates (which sucks because I have the work planned out up to the final scene), so I'll try to get 27 up either tomorrow or midweek as a bonus. Just gotta warm up my grammar bones and haul up some rough spots. Summer classes end in two weeks; the reprieve might help get my gears running again. At a minimum, it'll be time to actually sleep. 

In my reading adventures, I decided to finally trial Audible. Tried to listen to Journey to the West, and accidentally ended up with the short kiddie version that spoiled the longer work for me :\ Starting to think Audible isn't worth the price since it just gives you one credit a month (which is like, the cost of a book), then access to a bunch of free books I don't want to read.

Good thing for trials, right?

Anyways, read list for this update is short. All I got done is, again, that kiddie short version of Journey to the West. But! Been knocking out Sailor Moon, the OG series. It's fucking great.

Crystal sucks, though. Don't watch it if you've never seen the series, or else you'll miss out on a sassy Mars, sassy Tuxedo Mask, and some Mercury goggle action. Mysterious buildups in the original that take like, 20 episodes to reveal, Crystal just expositions in like five minutes >:(

The three parts of the human ossicles are...

  ... the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!

Just kidding. Anatomy jokes and all that.

Summer's pretty much here, ready or not, and that means more writing time. And reading. And fishing. And, uh, WoW.

I've recently set to conquer all of the Witcher book series by Sapkowski. After finishing the first publication (The Last Wish), I set to watching the Netflix series. Which I enjoyed the first few episodes, despite the sloppy/nonsensicalness of the screen writing. Just gonna say, Geralt's broody, but at least in the books/game, he actually talks. And also likes Dandylion (think the bard goes by his first name in the series). That's supposed to be, y'know, one of his bigger weaknesses--bringing the chaotic loudmouth along. Moody Geralt that hates him doesn't hit as good :(

Don't judge me, I may have Roach as a glider in Fortnite.

Anyways, it's nice to catch a refreshing bit of fantasy worldbuilding after 3 months of writing essays on the nutritional value of breastmilk, relearning what a logarithm is for the 10th time, and memorizing 95% of all the bones in the human body. Human biological sciences, amirite?

On a boring writing note, Part 23 of Moonless is out. Not like it's been forever since the last update or anything.

School Hiatus

 Hi guys! It's been awhile--

Pretty obvious from the lack of story updates the past few weeks, but I've taken time off from writing/being online to focus on school. I'll be back to working on updates once summer hits, around May. Got a few chapters of Moonless brewing, along with a new short story.

Wish me luck. Also the Space Needle is very tall.

Moonless Update: Royal Road and Happy Holidays!!

 Merry Chrysler, my dudes :)

Royal Road Updates:

I wanted to expand on the places you can find Moonless. Now, you can find it on RoyalRoad, a website for posting fiction content. There's going to be some lag between r/RedditSerials and Royal Road as I gradually sort things out--I'm currently compiling multiple sections into beefier chapters so updates look less piecemeal on Royal Road's platform.

Writing Progress:

I've been struggling with whether or not to release certain sections of Moonless because of my worries that they aren't decent enough quality to be worth reading. Hence, uh, delays on three sections from deleting multiple drafts.

"Look," I tell myself, "Your goal with Moonless is to finish a book whether or not it's good." Most romances are dribbling romance, and that's why we like them, okay?

Maybe a year and a half from now, Moonless will finally finished. Or the next decade. Some authors didn't start publishing until their 40s, right?

READ LIST: DECEMBER 2022

 “People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil...
Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.” -Ann Rice, Interview with the Vampire

Here's a quick summary of the more notable things I've read this last quarter of 2022 (crazy, right? My mind still thinks it's 2020). Starting with my favorite:

Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice): I cannot, cannot, cannot freakin' stress how masterfully written Interview with the Vampire is. It's everything anyone could want from a vampire book. Dark, moody, violent, it was published in 1976, just at the start (if not a little before) of the contemporary goth movement in the 1980s.

Louis is definitely my favorite vampire of all time. Course, I still have the rest of the Vampire Chronicles to devour :)

The Last Pendragon (Robert Rice): I'm going to be honest--I picked up this book because it was directly adjacent to a book I was searching for by Anne Rice. Reading legends of Camelot has been in the background of my to-do list. As should be noted, Robert Rice's work was published in 1991, so it's a more modern interpretation of the aftermath of King Arthur's death.

I haven't finished it yet, but the prologue had me so captivated I nearly missed out on Christmas dinner freefalling chapter after chapter. It's a beautiful, descriptive, historical fiction work. Rice understands his source material exceedingly--his love of the legend shines through. If you've ever seen my Read List on Goodreads, the history and works of Britain between the 600 and 1400s AD has been a sleeper genre I'm secretly in love with. The Last Pendragon hits me with just the right mood, like a shot of Licor 43.

Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (J.R.R. Tolkein): Before Tolkein wrote his famous Middle Earth fantasies, he was a professor and fellow of Anglo-Saxon studies at Pembroke College. It hasn't been since early college that I've read translations of Beowulf, so I don't have much to compare Tolkein's translations to. The Translation and Commentary is one of those books where the translation of the work itself is nearly less than a quarter of the book, with the introduction and notes dominating the page count.

Still, I enjoyed both the actual translation and the notes on Tolkein's word choices/style in his translation. Maybe it's just me that finds boring academic stuff thrilling. 

Reading Tolkein's translation, alongside the Norse Poetic Edda, is like looking into the backstages of Tolkein's fantasy productions. The name of Middle Earth has origins in Edda's "Midgarth," which happens to translate to, y'know, Middle Earth.

Massive side tangent--there's so many people out there who'll egg you on to read the Simarillion for an expanded view of Tolkein's writing. Yet, honestly, I think Tolkein's translations and commentaries on various historical works should be considered, too.

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (Marc Morris): Okay, okay, it's probably boring to confess that one of my favorite authors strictly does historian works (sans hobbits). But Marc Morris reminds me of an English professor I had in college who had to go through the painstaking task of teaching us Puritan History without half of us dozing off--by taking what looked like the blandest historical account and uncovering the sheer craziness going on behind the scenes.

Marc Morris' book on the Norman Conquest/William the Conqueror continues to be my favorite book by him, but this one comes in at a tight second. Morris includes his sources, dives into fun family conflicts unique to royalty (bloody wars included), and the political machinations involved in church building.

Find my Goodread's profile here.