Making up for lost time.

Okay, I know, I'm a terrible person, I skipped last week. My excuse, I was working on writing instead of blogging.

It's workshop time in my literary fiction class, and I've been working on helping everyone else out so much in class that I left out time for my adoring fans (pst, I mean you. Hey, where are you going?!). So, I apologize, but I finally have work to show you.

So my story I've been working on in class has been through some ups and downs, I have a couple other pieces I've sketched out, but need to go through some drafting processes to flesh them out and get them ready. But as for now, I have one lean mean story ready to rock. I'll post it next week if no further progress is made elsewhere.

Furthermore, on the To Slice The Sky front, I finally finished chapter 5's rewrite. And rewrite it was. I ended up writing in a new scene to replace boring ass exposition, and I realized that the 120 page chapter I had originally divided into 3 parts, has now become 4 parts. I may be shrinking down a lot of chapters in the future as well, and I know I have one complete rewrite of a scene coming up in the not too distant future as well as closer to the end.

I've written dozens of shorts, and I've written a few novellas, but I've never done a rewrite on a project this big. Writing a novel really is a whole different beast, and I feel that breaking it down into smaller parts is the whole way to do it without going crazy. Just thinking of writing out 300 pages worth of crap itself is a huge task. And then you have to chop it up and put it in an order that makes sense to other people and not just the fever dream it was when crapped into this world. I'm just hoping I can keep focused and actually have a 2016 release like I was hoping. We're already halfway through April and I'm still rewriting act one. How ambitious I was in January. At least work is getting done, and I'm not putting it off for a whole year like I did when writing the first draft.

And speaking of all that work, here's the fruits of all my labor for chapter 5 of To Slice The Sky as it stands now. And a bonus dog picture for missing last week.

SSStylish!

So this week was a test of character for me in many ways. I was put in a low esteem position at the ole day job, which I pulled off like a champion. I figure if I'm going to be given grunt work, I'm going to be the best damn grunt you've ever seen.

Well, I completed the Devil May Cry series playthrough. Yay me. Fan fare. I've been streaming my game time for Tom Clancy's The Division and Fallout 4 on my twitch.tv channel: twitch.tv/soyrobo

Now that I'm done with the DMC series, I'm setting my sights back on polishing off Resident Evil, and beginning my Metal Gear Solid playthrough. I'm also going to stream my time playing the TellTale Games collection for XBone, so you get to see what Clementine will remember, and how much of the Wolf I'll let out of Bigby. I hope I have more than two survivors from House Forester next time on Game of Thrones.

I've been plugging away at school, trying to be an A student. This week was a scene expansion in my fiction workshop for the story I'm writing for it. It's still in its infancy, but it's getting pounded into a more pleasing shape, and shaped by populous writing. Hopefully I'm gaining more insight from the square community to write something sellable.

Other than that, I just feel good about life, things are on the up and I'm actively making sure it keeps moving forward with as few setbacks as possible. I'm still shirking novel editing responsibility though.

To-Do Eternity

Almost forgot about this thing.

So, last week was another hard focus on classwork and writing new things for my fiction workshop. I'm building up a story from a first line I wrote for a reddit thread last year. I took a quick diversion from it last week, and wrote something incredibly disjointed and it wasn't as well received. So this week I'm going to be working up the rest of my original story.

I'm a little bummed that it's a workshop for literary fiction, but it's refreshing finally not writing something so mired in genre tropes. Even though I try to write genre fiction like a literary fiction comic book, so you know, ripping off Alan Moore.

In videogame news, I've been screwing around in The Division with my friend instead of being productive in my off time. I reopened up my twitch.tv account and am going to start streaming when I'm playing on the ole' XBone. As for now, I've got about 6 hours of playing Division and 2.5 of me tooling around in Fallout 4. I haven't touched Devil May Cry 2 or Resident Evil Revelations 2 either. But I'm definitely going to be doing a broadcast through the TellTale Games collection and the new Fallout 4 DLC.

I'm all set up with my new computer, so I've at least opened up my word file for chapter 5 to get back to rewrites. Entering into the second quarter of the year, I need to get a move on that business. Life is full of possibilities and adventures, but that means I have less time for writing. I'll be back to posting new material soon.

Until next week folks. I've got some work ahead of me.

And my dog is getting his teeth cleaned today. Here's a picture of his stinky face.

Having an average weekend.

Hey gang, sorry for being so silent (if anyone is reading).

The last two weeks have been some despairing lows and hopeful highs. My lows mostly consisted of feeling directionless, existential angst, and the feeling of loss over an old friend whom I hadn't seen in years, and finding out that she had just died of cancer. It really hit me hard, since you never really think of someone you know as disappearing from the world forever until it happens. You can joke about it, but when it happens, it's such a blow to reality that it's hard to adjust to. I will say it lit a fire under my ass to be even more productive since awful things can happen whenever, and you don't want to be left standing unprepared when it comes.

So I finally transferred into University. Instead of waiting for CSUN to get around to accepting me so I can sit in a class for maybe 4 more years, I signed on for online classes at ASU. So far, using an online interface is so much nicer than having to be the only one paying attention in a sea full of blank faced droolers fresh from high school staring at their phones. So I decided on finishing my original goal of getting my degree in English, focusing on creative writing. I've already been too long without a degree, and getting by for a decent day job these days isn't as easy as it used to be.

And of course with the enrolling of online classes, the charger of my laptop broke, so I used it as an excuse to upgrade at last. I'd been using a Chromebook for 4 years anyway. I needed something that I could do some real work on.

So, now I'm splitting time doing more reading and school work, opposed to doing more work on To Slice To Sky. Instead, I worked on editing a couple short stories for publication. Working on cleaning up the shorts I've previously released in Urban Legends and By Starlight for the omnibus collections once TSTS is released. The shorts I've been working on are meant to be published traditionally, but will also see light in the first short collection of The Lilim Chronicles wave 2.

I'm not really focused on creating anything new at the moment. More legitimizing my already completed work and getting it in front of eyes. I finally feel like I'm in a place to make that magic happen, and am finally feeling hopeful for the future in a substantial way.

In videogame news, I've completed Devil May Cry 4, only have number 2 left to complete the series. DMC4 was a fun game to play, and would love to have seen Nero and the Devil Bringer/Exceed moves in another installment of the series. Going from Nero to Dante mid game really kinda feels like taking all the fun you've been having and holding it ransom to play through the game backwards before you get the privilege to play again. DMC4 mostly suffered from lopsided level design, and the enemies lack decent balancing. But the gameplay is so fun and fluid that it makes up for it.

So, yeah, depression, school, editing and videogames. Sounds like an average week for me. Have a dog picture.

Fuck titles, I'm not sharing this.

Almost forgot it was this part of the week again.

This week was an effective week in some regards, not so much in others. I finished beta-reading my friend's first work he finished. I've never really had the privilege of reading anything literary from one of my friends. It's interesting being able to read something and know what their influences are without having to dig for it. I found it to be a satisfying experience, and I'm glad he's putting some work into something creative again.

Haven't progressed any in my Resident Evil playthrough, but I've already cleared all but 2 Devil May Cry games. Last week I played DmC: Devil May Cry. This week I powered through Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening and Devil May Cry. I've Started up Devil May Cry 4, and only have no.2 to go after that. It helps that the games are meant to be completed as quickly as possible. But I'll be hot damned if DMC3 and the original didn't have me work for that ending.

The blog is late since I just started working on chapter 5 of To Slice The Sky's rewrites. I've been rewriting chapter 1 again, and I feel it's considerably stronger this time around. I'm not going to post it, because I've already done a chapter 1, but I'm looking at having to change up some stuff in chapters 2 and 3 because of the changes. It's a lot faster, less boring infodump crap, and also gives my stalwart aging punk rocker that I keep throwing into everything, Johnny Marko, another introduction. He pops up in the later chapters as well, so I figured it'd be better to introduce him early instead of waiting for it and relying on outside material.

I don't have anything else positive to say right now though. I've been on a downswing into depression which has only been progressing with all the awful news that keeps popping into my personal life. And as of right now, I really don't feel like saying anymore. I really don't feel like going all dramatic in my writer blog about the inner turmoil I'm currently experiencing, because if I start now, it's never going to stop.

All I can say is everyone you meet in your life will effect you in some way, and when you realize it, you'll wish you did the same to them.

A trip to the Black Cross doc.

Well hello there. Welcome to this week. I'll be your host for the however long it takes you to stop reading. Please don't stop reading, I have so many fun things to show you.

So in writing news, great advancements on To Slice The Sky's rewrites and proofreads. Granted I realized I had to completely scrap a chapter and change how it goes since I wrote it mostly in an insomnia haze and it shows. I've begun completely changing the opening chapter as well. I've grown desensitized to the initial shock of the opening, so I've decided to go for something more substantial. That and the original opening is kinda dense and boring. I hope that I've grown out of dense and boring.

I first dreamed the idea for TSTS back in 2009. I finished the first outline in 2011 and the first draft in 2014. So two years past my style has changed a lot and I really wanted to pull away from long Tolkien/Stephensonesque didactic passages. Showing your homework in fiction is just public masturbation, which is a crime everywhere you go. You're supposed to talk about what you learned from your homework. Sometimes it's nice to drop a little hard science in the background, like public masturbation, but no need for it to overpower the scene. I'm not into computer science (and my understanding of most scientific disciplines is general college level anyway), so writing in depth would make me look like an idiot. I don't need that kind of business in my life, so I stick to things I have experience with.

I'm closing in on the last four chapters for proof reading. So far I have about 3 major changes, and I've split up a lot more chapters into smaller chunks. On the rewrite front, most of my effort has been put into continuity and restructuring. Combining both of those aspects created today's offering of 2nd draft writing. This week is Chapter 4, Decker and Trip reunited. I think so far it's the strongest chapter, and I definitely put a lot of work into chopping it up and splicing it together into this new monster.

Before we get to that, started playing Resident Evil Revelations 2 in co-op with my friend. Pretty damn fun so far. Since I'm playing it co-op, I decided to jump ahead into Devil May Cry turf. So I've played through DmC: Devil May Cry and I'm in the back half of Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening. Devil May Cry is a game series that openly hates its fans and wants them to experience as much soul pain as possible. And the abused lovers we are keep coming back for more. Damn you Dante, you SSStylish demon bastard.

Okay, that's enough about games. Here's your weekly dog picture:

"I dream of your blood's warmth."

Here's chapter 4 of To Slice The Sky in its current form.

A mixed bag of nuts and chews.

It took me three weeks, but I've hammered and banged another chapter into readable shape.

Man that was a lot of hard and easy cuts and pastes. Chapter 3 was a complete dump chapter, and still is. But you get to be the judge on whether or not it suffers for it. I trimmed about 1500 words out of it. Had to add a bit more too, but the parts that are added are necessary while everything trimmed wasn't. And this week, my efforts on this current rewrite is what you get to witness. The best part is, all of this hard work is just a foundation for something completely different later. I've already got plans on how to completely change chapter 1 so who knows how that will effect everything that comes after. But this is all future stuff.

As for the here and now, before I copy and paste some genre fiction for you, I beat Resident Evil 5 and am gearing up for Resident Evil Revelations 2. The end of my survival horror fest is coming fast. I also have The Evil Within that I'm going to play after. I've been putting it on hold to do this playthrough and it took longer than expected.

I also smashed through the current gen Grand Theft Auto V. First person mode was nice sometimes. It's useful playing online and killing people with it, that's for sure. Finally playing that puts the nail in the coffin of my huge game series playthrough I started last year. I strung together a chronological order of all the games in Rockstar Games canon (except for Manhunt, because I never played the games in the first place and didn't see a reason to start now). From Red Dead Revolver to GTAV I completed the Red Dead, GTA, Max Payne and Midnight Club series. Also in there was LA Noire, Bully, The Warriors, and all the available DLC packs for the last and current gen titles. So it was a long, fun, open world sandbox experience. And even in some of their worst games, Rockstar games will have something redeeming to them. Not many companies can say that about themselves.

I also gleaned a lot about the sliding scale of cynicism and optimism, and each franchise seems to do better the more it teeters on it. Max Payne is off the deep end of cynicism, while Bully is very fun loving and optimistic. GTA and Red Dead games straddle that line, with GTA being more moderate to cynical while Red Dead is moderate to optimistic. One could argue that it breaks down from the tropes/genres that each series is drawing from (Hard boiled detective, mobster/gangster crime, Spaghetti Westerns, prep school/college comedies) to dictate its place on the scale. But GTA definitely takes itself extremely serious about not taking itself seriously. I do have to hand it to the writing teams of each series that they at least don't pull punches. Each series is potentially offensive to anyone who doesn't want to believe the real world exists. I had numerous times while playing Bully where I'd think, "Wow, that kid's life is ruined forever". And while playing GTAV as Trevor Phillips, "This is what Rockstar thinks of its client base." There's definitely a lot of validity to the company's praise, and I await their next title.

After I finish Resident Evil, I'm looking to break things up with their other franchises Devil May Cry and Dead Rising. I've been a DMC fan since its birth back in 2001, and while I own all 3 Dead Risings, I haven't played a single one. Tsundoku for videogames and all. But my next big playthrough is going to be the entire Metal Gear series in chronological order. And since an official Hideo Kojima timeline exists, I consider that a challenge. I don't know if you've been keeping track, but I tend to enjoy putting stipulations on how I consume media. I guess I want to be told a story from start to finish after hearing it all jumbled up.

Speaking of stories, I'm done talking about videogames. Here's a chapter about a lonely drug addict and a picture of my dog eating a volleyball: