Never Meta Blog I Didn’t Like
Writing a blog post about what you’ve previously posted on your blog about writing is a fairly meta activity, and it’s one that we engage in every year. Behold: 2023 as seen through Rune Skelley’s blog.
2023 got off to a running start. We were already thick in the writing of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Story #1. In January we were finishing up a batch of stubs (and ironing out a problem or two so that no one would forget it was a ghost story), and it dawned on us that the end was nigh. The end of the novel, that is. The year was just getting started.
Trucking along in February we passed 100,000 words in As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Story #1. And since things were going pretty smoothly with the writing, which doesn’t always give us much to blog about, we talked about our recent travels.
In March we continued our exhaustive travelog. It was a big trip, so there was a lot to talk about. Checking in with the writing, the end still felt really close, and Kent admitted that Jen is often right about stuff.
April brought a new addition to our writer’s toolbox — the Shoehorn. It joins the Monkey Wrench and the Goose Wrench, and is used when you have to go back to a previously written section and wedge some new information in (while making it look like it had always been there). And we had a lesson in not planning too far ahead.
In May we finished the first draft! Mostly! There were some holes we knew we wanted to fill, and some small changes we knew we wanted to make, and… Putting all that quibbling aside, we reached the end of the manuscript, and it felt damn good.
Filling in those holes happened in June, along with a read through. With the story fresh in our minds, we plotted our next steps. Jen worked on the prose outline for Book 2. It had been about half-done when she picked it up, and she saw it through to the end.
While Kent dayjobbed through July, Jen wrote the prose outlines for Books 3 and 4. And we complained a whole lot about how disorganized our notes were. After spending an entire year brainstorming the entire spectral quadlrilogy, we should have taken a week or two to organize all of our notes. We did not, and we paid the price for it in July. But now everything is all straightened out and organized and we’ll have no excuses going forward.*
*we will definitely have excuses
We wanted to have a break between writing Books 1 and 2, so we spent August doing other tasks around the writing cave. It wasn’t necessarily exciting to blog about, though, so instead we shared photos of the intergalactic vacation we’d taken in the spring. We also started rereading the Divided Man series, just for funsies.
Anything important happen in September? Oh not much. We just talked about Kent’s retirement! And our new baby whiteboard! and how we used him to set up the Book 2 rainbow, and a little bit of travel again
Okay, so maybe it was a lot of travel. It was a big year for us, with some Covid-delayed trips finally happening, and celebrating Kent’s retirement. In October we shared pictures from Iceland and Greenland, and we talked about how a long vacation makes a perhaps too-convenient excuse not to write. We got back on track by immersing ourselves in the Book 2 rainbow with the help of both whiteboards.
After so much travel and upheaval, we had trouble finding our new work session rhythm. So in November we shared our Halloween decorations. What? We’re writing a ghost story, so it’s research! And on the topic of writing, we were finally ready to dive in. Almost. Jen started writing stubs for the new book while Kent optimized the blog.
Which brings us to December aka Now. Kent updated the story world map, we finished all the other preliminary stuff, we finally figured out a new schedule that seems to work, and we actually started writing Book 2!
And now the end of 2023 truly is nigh. A good writing partner is someone you enjoy spending a lot of time with. Years, even.
Countries visited: Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Batuu, Norway, Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland. Some of that was actually in 2022, but we didn’t talk about it until 2023.