Dane Mallahan

Week 17 –

Hello and welcome to my small and humble section of the internet.

This week was a very productive week for me, word count clocking in at 12,508 words!  This is the most I have written in a single week, that I can remember, though when I was really working on my first book I probably hit this – or close to it – several times.  I like that I am keeping track now so that I can look back and see if I can pull anything from the numbers as I move forward.  Data always helps to inform decisions.

This week, though productive, had some awesome moments for me – talking mushrooms are very fun to write and play around with – I felt as if some decisions I had made weren’t necessarily right.  And the worst part is I could not tell you which ones they may be.

The way I look at writing is that I will have an outline or an idea of where things are going, but often there will be certain branches and offshoots that I will go down and twist and turn to get to my next step.  Sometimes that entails changing the next step and sometimes it doesn’t.  What I end up getting, though, is this sort of “choose your own adventure” mindset.  I tend to lean on logic and say “What would this character do?”  But sometimes there is a direction that I end up thinking would be awesome and I head down that path instead.  Usually, I try and justify my decision before moving on, and look at the contents of the story and see if the decision works out logically, even if the initial decision or change of path was not exactly logical or sticking with the “plan”.  Other times I will have to change something in the past or future to make it work.  But usually, it will work out one way or the other.  

My point behind all this is that I felt like the initial decisions I was making weren’t the best.  I found myself second-guessing myself on the order and structure of chapters and paragraphs, and overall finding myself sort of lost in the shuffle of my own creation.  I talked a little in my most recent update video about how I felt maybe I was moving too quickly or getting too far ahead of myself, and that I should slow down and take some time to reassess and reoutline, or just to reread and make sure things were settling in ok.  I will probably take some time to do that this week, with the upcoming holiday, and focus a little less on pumping out the weekly words.

That being said, something came to me after – or in – a dream (as it usually does) and I sort of have a background or direction, or at least a thought process, for one of the main characters in my fantasy series, The Gates of Antillion.  So, struggle sometimes has a point where things just click and are ready to move on.

Next week I am going to start exploring artwork for some of my stories so I can push little by little forward to publishing.

I hope everyone has an amazing holiday and I will be back next week with another update!

Cheers,

Dane