Update: Moonless Without You

 “Do you know what a lone wolf is?”
“Somebody who… is alone?” I vaguely answered.
“Somebody who’s searching,” he responded. “What are you searching for, Collin?”
-Moonless Without You, Part 9

My sympathy goes out to everyone who's started school—highschool and college. I'm a returning post-baccalaureate in Pre-Nursing, and the program I've gone with has me starting with the freshman basics. Going from 400 level child psychology class back to a 101 Psyx, well. Lucifer probably had an easier time falling from grace.

After a two-week hiatus for the next part of Moonless, the series will pick up again this Friday (September 2nd). My main motivator driving me forward is knowing people have been reading my work, and genuinely enjoying. No big surprise if you're a writer, too.

If you have a Reddit account, I appreciate upvotes and comments on my r/RedditSerials posts, since that's one of the firmest ways of communicating to an author you like their work. It takes only a second, if not less!

🌕 | 🌗 | 🌑

Onto another topic: Some personal notes on what I've recently learned about writing.

I want to share with you some of the writing tactics I've picked up in the past few weeks since enlightenment has been long a journey. I've been writing for over ten years starting in middle school (with, uh... fanfiction), so I don't consider myself naive. But expanding from short stories to long-form has been a novel (pun) challenge.

To bridge that gap, I've been going to writing panels during various conventions, ranging from a comicon-style local convention (Miscon in Missoula), to the largest furry convention in the world (Midwest Furfest in Chicago). My biggest surprise, however, is that some of the most valuable information I've picked up from panels aren't just writing related, but discussions on the psychology of stress and therapists' personal experience in their careers. Characters are illusions of people, and if you want readers to fall for your tricks, you have to have some truth in your characters' thought processes and problems. As it happens, highschoolers have a lot of problems.

There are two plot structures of interest I've been experimenting with to organize key events in my story: the W Plot Structure, and Dramatica's Plot Structure. Both have helped me come up with future events to fill in gaps in the middle of the story where things can get a little boring—a very common issue in the writing community, referred to as a "sagging" or "mushy" middle.

You can find a summary of both plot structures here. Course, there's also your typical Dromedary camel 🐪 hump structure (and I call it that because I think it's funny to contrast with imagining the W plot structure as Bactrian camel 🐫 humps), which Moonless follows the most. Things are just getting started for Collin, anyways, so it won't be too long until things fall off a cliff and start to hit the shitter.

I've attached a map of my recent efforts, so you can get an idea of my learning process—the W plot structure applies more to Collin's relationships (you can see the shape best in Simon's), while the main plot is still a freakin' mess of events.

My ambitious dream is that once I finish the serial, I can do an overhaul targeting the story's order of events, subtracting weak scenes, and buffing up scenes that can delve more effectively into each character's portrayal. I plan on trying to use Dramatica's Plot Structure to cut down on lulls:

initial action --> decisions --> action 2 --> decisions --> action 3 --> decisions --> crisis action --> decisions --> final action

There's a whole notebook full of my plotting junk—insert iceberg quote here—mapping out the serial nearly to the end, to try and keep things on track; no writer's block excuses going forward.

Somehow, my mapping of "chronological events of good/bad experiences for Collin" is a lot more optimistic than the story's W Act plot structure.

For comparison, here's a humpy 🐪 map of the plot structure in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (SPOILERS)

(Credit to NaNoWriMo's blog)

Currently more in line with Moonless' plot shape, so I feel less bad that my story doesn't have as much as a W/M shape.

As for program advice I've received from writers, there's plenty of options to find something comfortable--conventional and unconventional. I've spoken to writers from the late 1990s to early 2000s who religious confessed to sticking to the Windows XP versions of Word since it's what they learned first. Two writers of high fantasy that worked with publishers such as Tor told me their luck lied with (to my surprise) Microsoft Excel. Plenty of friends online rely on a maze of Google Doc folders because they trust it to keep their files safe. Some swear by USB drives. Some posterboards covered in sticky notes that look like a murder investigation from a distance. And, on a single occasion (in my grandmother's case) a library of floppy discs. Yes, floppy discs she used to save parts of her drafts on a genealogy book.

My personal choice is Scrivener--it works offline, easily backs up to cloud services like OneDrive (free with Windows), is friendly towards organized chaos, and costs far less than services such as Campfire. You can export your work easily to PDFs, Word/Open Office files, etc. And if you're smarter than I am, you can pull off exports that'll make your novel e-Reader friendly. Scrivener is generally $49, $41.65 for students/teachers, but is almost always heavily discounted for those that complete a NaNoWriMo event. I believe mine was 40% off.

An example of Moonless' Scrivener file.

That's it for my unwarranted writing advice. Thank you so much with accompanying me on my writing journey, and hope to hear from even more of you guys soon :)

"[...] consistency is one of the keys to longevity. When you are consistent people know what they are going 
to get, and that's the foundation for having a long career. -Jamal Crawford.

"Key to longevity... drinking embalming fluid every year." -Angus Young.
Cofounder, lead guitarist, and songwriter for rock band AC/DC.