Laughter Through Tears

Five or six years ago I created a Twine game, a kind of friendship-driven counter-romance that didn't fit neatly into any of my ideas of how a story could be. After completing the game, I grew dissatisfied and contracted a freelance editor to help me polish it up. The editing notes sat in my inbox, silently judging me, but I never got around to reading or incorporating them.

Several times, over the years, I said to myself, "When XYZ happens, I'll finally polish up Wreath of Roses and post it again", but that never came through.

I'm closer now than I was. I intend to put WOR back out there, this month or next. Provided I don't reread it and decide that I hate it to the bones, that is. But this year is the Year of Doing, and even more so, the Year of Finishing. I'm determined to make it happen.

Oh, I haven't worked much with Twine in a while. It's going to be a challenge, to get back into it.

In two weeks NaNo will be over and I will either have a complete first draft or else I'll have to re-evaluate how long the plot of this story wants to be. Assuming it's the former, I need some way to maintain momentum so that the draft doesn't get relegated to the back of the WIP folder. I want to make something out of this piece of shit, if at all possible.

December has 31 days in it.

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Progress today: I determined that the soul story is capital-b Broken and needs to be set aside indefinitely. I selected two magazines to submit my existing finished stories to. I found an anthology with a deadline that has a prompt that might interest me, to write a new story for.

Not from tonight, but also important: I have a pretty solid lead on an ending for one of my other unfinished stories.

I've been testing out a new writing workshop. Yes, this means I've started writing in Hebrew again. Somewhere along the line I started reading primarily in English and, consequently, writing almost exclusively in English. But I read the autobiography of an author once, an Israeli immigrant, who wrote about losing his mother tongue. Ever since then this has been a persistent existential dread of mine. And so I am writing in Hebrew, again, and I am doing it in a workshop, because I sure as shit can't do it alone.

Last week I finished a first draft to submit to an anthology, and submitted it. Next week I'll reread it and see if I don't hate it. I will likely not find out that it was rejected whether it was accepted for a couple of months, or more. After finishing the draft, I was relieved to the point of ecstasy that I was free from the gnawing anxiety of not finishing to deadline. This led directly to me falling down the rabbit-hole of Sunless Sea which I hadn't played in, I believe, over a year.

And so I may do a proper review of Sunless Sea, now that the game is big and rich and nearly (or wholly?) complete. This is as opposed to the short snap-review that I posted, earlier in the beta process (before the Steel update was introduced). Meanwhile, I'm struggling to keep zee-madness at bay, at least enough to get a consistent night's sleep.

Still drowning myself in trope_bingo to avoid thinking about my anxieties. I made a handy HTML to follow my progress:

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