It ends up I needed a break from writing here to focus on a few things elsewhere. There was the chasing of insurance documents so that I could leave an insurance company that went a few stages below disappointment, there was not feeling at my best.

The good news I didn’t have one of the popular headline viruses. It wasn’t Covid, Monkeypox, or whatever new strain of illness is popular now. It was a mundane sore throat and headache combination that made it difficult to concentrate on things that I wanted to concentrate on.

During that time, with the challenges I’ve been having with The Book, I decided to revisit some things and found myself revisiting Timothy Hickson’s “On Writing And Worldbuilding Volume I“. I have the paperback version, so it was reading, unlike the audio versions through that link.

It gave me some ideas on other ways to do a few things, which I’m exploring now. It’s useful to revisit books like that, I’ve found, particularly when you’re not getting your head around something. What we tend to do sometimes is to try harder rather than try different, and while I’m a bit proud of my try different, I sometimes fall into the try harder trap.

It’s not just writing. It’s pretty much everything in our lives. If we just slam into that glass ceiling a little harder, if we try to shout through it… if we just work that much harder, we’ll see more reward… It’s a trap. It’s like a loop in programming except we don’t know when to quit sometimes.

Quit and try something new to meet the same objective.

The Inner Writing Critic.

It ends up in this particular instance I believe I was trying to force a prologue and first chapter on the rest of the book when the rest of the book really has a lot to say about the prologue and first chapter. I’d tried writing around the issue, but all I did was end up going off course. So I have to figure this part out still, and a lot of that has to do with whether or not I want this book to be the first of a series or a standalone book.

So I have some decisions to make, because there are things I’m trying to make sure people get out of the book.

It was fun, then it was work, and now it’s time for some fun again, imagining the world.