Writing journal

Simran is a second-generation immigrant who has enlisted in the army and has made to the rank of an elite soldier, a small group of highly-trained, physically optimised soldiers directly employed to protect the Capitol.

Elite soldiers are engineered for peak physical performance though enhancements and drugs, but it has a terrible toll on their bodies. They are also mind-controlled by the oracle (wip), a priest-like figure who sometimes appears publicly during some sacred celebrations, but otherwise lives a recluse life.

Elite soldiers are not aware of neither of these things. They are told they get to retire at 40 but none of them actually reaches that age.

Simran was trained by her mentor, Ali, who is now on his death bed. At 43, he is the oldest elite soldier and, by all accounts, he should be dead by now.

As he gets older and his body weakens, Ali starts to remember events he had previously forgotten, things he had done and wouldn't have if he had a choice. He shares these things with Simran, but before she can investigate, he dies.

Simran is a war machine with a strong moral compass: she joined the army in the hope to find a purpose and a way to make the world a safer, better place. However, she's noticed how a lot of people in the city seem to be scared of her for no reason, even people she hasn't met before.

Simran is 32, which is considered the peak of an elite soldier career. One day, she is deployed to settle an attack on the Capitol. The attack is easily controlled but she hurts her legs: her knee pops off and her muscles are torn.

She's carried to her room by a couple of other soldiers. Pearl, the charming caretaker assigned to her division, is tasked to put her bones back into place before her fast-healing tissue closes around the misplaced rotula. The two have already butt heads earlier when Pearl had offered Simran an “extra” service but was met by the soldier cold integrity.

Rikki was born into a semi-closed, highly religious mining community lodged against the side of a mountain. At age 19, Rikki left her family and moved to the big city, wishing to run away from her religious obligations and, most of all, her overbearing, emotionally immature mother.

Somehow, she's found a way to become an unofficial link between her old mining community and the urban population, bringing in various goods and materials. This includes drugs, banned books, metals, rocks to make temporary and permanent ink, all of which are either illegal or highly regulated.

Rikki is mainly motivated by the need to be independent and live some adventures. She doesn't have a strong moral compass and is more of an opportunistic character. She sells to anybody who is willing to buy, and that includes the resistance group active in the capital.

When she's not travelling up and down the harsh way between her town and the city, Rikki is often seen at the local pub where she drinks more than she should and hangs out with a couple of friends. Rikki is now about to turn 30 and has lived her life without a plan, to her parents' disappointment.

One day, however, her brother Michael ventures to the big city to ask her for a favour: bring back the child of a couple from their community who was kidnapped as an infant. The child would have just turned 21 and, for some reason, his parents felt his presence, reigniting the hope that he was alive.

He adds that she would have felt it too if she hadn't tuned out of the plane with some substance, since they were sure he was in the capital. She waves him off and scoffs that if they really want to find him they can come and search for him, but Michael argues their people are not familiar with the city and he himself is highly uncomfortable being in such a dangerous, unfamiliar place. He leaves a bag of gold for her and tries to appeal to her good heart.

She half-heartedly promises says she'll give it a go.

Anxiety right out of the gate

In a not-so-unexpected turn of events, I was a little too optimistic while on holiday. I came back to work on the 4th of January and immediately had to put my writing plans aside. We are in the home stretch of a six-month project and are doing the last user interviews, discussing deliverables, and preparing our final presentation. Monday was back to back calls to catch up and plan our next couple of week.

Despite being more than reasonable for me to take a break from writing, which is a side hobby, I felt my usual anxiety build up and found myself often thinking about how I wasn't writing. Equally predictable has been my inability to focus on writing anytime I had some spare time since I didn't have enough time to wind down from work.

Having a creative job is awesome, I love what I do and I will be the last person to complain about work. In fact, I even like the company I work for. But that means that any creative hobby actually taps into the same type of energy I need for writing.

Recently, I've started paying more attention to this sort of things, and I've divided my activities into four types: active, passive, physical and social.

Active activities, such as writing, drawing, or playing the guitar, require me to create something.

Passive activities include reading, watching videos or movies, and even scrolling through social media – anything that involves consuming media of any kind. These end up taking a lot of my off time because so much of my work is in the active court.

Physical activities are of course stuff like walking and going to the gym, maybe the occasional yoga class, and social activities focus on building relationships with other humans (90% of whom has been my partner during this pandemic).

These are basically my character stats and they need to be kept in check. The good news is that one type of energy seem to top up while I'm using a different one, so going to the gym will free up some brain space for some reading, or spending enough time writing “in the zone” will eventually make me want to see people again.

This is probably pretty basic for most people I was never taught how to regulate my energy or my emotions as a kid, and I'm “reparenting” myself as I go. It's much harder to learn as an adult.

All this to say that I've hit a wall right out of the gate with my project, but I'm trying not to be too hard on myself because work has been pretty intense and I need to chill.

##starting small

Since I'm still not sure about the entire plot, but I want to start writing, I'm giving myself the opportunity to explore my potential character with some short stories. I will start posting them on my [other (as of today empty) blog] (https://wordsmith.social/queer-stories-lab/). If I post there, I won't post here unless I feel strongly about it – sometimes I need to debrief. Also, when I'm in the writing zone I don't really want to get out and journalling is a very easy way to keep going.

I was also following a creative writing course on Coursera and I will try and pick it back up and post the writing exercises there.

Wish me luck!

After dumping my initial ideas onto a couple of whiteboards, it's now time to map out the story, I guess. I've always struggled with plot-twist and making my characters keep secrets and lie. I think that's because when you write an unplanned draft and you're the omniscient narrator, you are sort of discovering the events as you go. But that also means that any surprise is also a surprise to you.

I'm not sure this makes sense but bear with me. You've picked a situation to start writing from, you're writing the story when suddenly you think: “Oh! What if [character name] has secretly been a spy for the other side all along? That will be cool.” Sure, it would be cool. But now there's probably a number of things that character has done or said that doesn't make sense and you have to retroactively fix all these little details – and sometimes it's more than just details.

Maybe that's the purpose of a first draft, but this time I want to lay out all the events first, then pick a starting point for my narration, which will allow me to decide what's backstory and what's not.

So my third board on Miro is, as you probably guessed, a timeline.

As I started doing it, however, I realised it would be much better to name my character, even if just with temporary names, so I can refer to them more easily. Some of these may stay, some may change, nothing is set in stone.

The timeline is quickly turning out to be a big task. After all, once it's done, it will encompass the entire story. So I'm cutting myself some slack and I'm doing it bit by bit. Here's the first stab just so you can see how it looks like.

Planning a novel

Let me start by saying I have no idea what I'm doing. Sure I've heard about the three-act structure of any good piece of narrative, about knowing your characters' motivations, strengths and weaknesses, about starting with action to get the reader hooked. I've read some stuff.

But how much detail do I need to put into my character sheet without getting bored or overwhelmed? What's the right amount of information I need to give to painting a clear picture of them without giving to much away too early? How do I build a world, and in which era do I place it? Is it an alternate universe or is it somewhere in our past or future?

If anyone has any advice, please let me know!

What you probably don't know about me, is that by trade I'm a UX designer, which is relevant for 2 reasons:

• I have a pragmatic approach to problem-solving
• I have a quite extensive experience with online whiteboarding tools such as Miro

I've used Miro to create and moderate workshops, ideation sessions and other design-related activities that require a whiteboard. I think it's a great tool with a lot of useful templates and a functional, intuitive interface. You can use it in-browser or download the app, and your stuff is stored in their cloud.

Of course, as many non-federated cloud services, you're always at risk of losing access it or having your account hacked, but for something as non-sensitive as novel planing, I think it's ok.

Using Miro to map out themes and relationships

With fanfiction, I usually start writing from a hunch. I find a universe and characters I like – for example, the Birds of Prey from 2020 homonymous movie – and I imagine them in a situation. I don't always know how the situation is going to pan out, but I know there will be a happy ending (I don't write sad endings, there's too much of that) and I will use the narration to probably go through some of my own conflict or trauma.

Fanfiction is a wonderful way to tell a story having a starter kit to get you going. The best characters have clear major traits and compelling backstories, but leave enough freedom or the writer to add their own interpretation.

For a novel, however, I need to start from scratch and one thing I want to avoid is not knowing what I want to say with the story. I want to have a point of view, what some people would call a morale. I want my characters to be nuanced and never motivated by pure evil. I want to find conflict in the fact that the characters do their best with the information they have, yet a lot of information is withheld from them (in fact, this could be the overarching theme of the novel).

In order to do that, I created my first board, titled “Barebone” (the title is not very important)

The Barebone board contains 3 elements: themes, characters, and setting.

Then I tried to map out the relationships between these elements

I'm also posting a thread about it on my Mastodon, come say hi!

A new year

Yesterday was the end of 2020, which will probably be remembered as The Terrible Year unless 2021 turns out to be worse.

I have been toying with the idea of writing a novel for a while, and stories have been coming to and going away from me without me being able to fix them onto something.

2020 was tough on the World, but it was far from the worst year I've had. In fact, it was objectively a good year. I got a new job I love, I settled nicely into a new country, I moved in with my lovely partner, I got a wonderful cat. Most of all, I worked on creating a routine.

I spent the past 10 years feeling like a flipper ball, moving too fast and hitting my head against all sorts of walls. I can't tell if high-functioning anxiety snuck up on me or if it's been there since I was a teenager, but it's kept me going at this insane, spiralling pace for very long. I used to throw myself in all types of weird, funny or dangerous situations, thinking if it doesn't go well, at least it would make for a good story.

I no longer think that way.

It's what got me to drink too much and dangerously close to a coke addiction. Entertaining people should not be my highest priority, even though it's a resolution I'm still working on. I am, after all, a people pleaser.

It took leaving London, a year off work and regular therapy to get where I am now – to be able to apply for a permanent position (instead of freelancing) without feeling the dread of commitment in my guts. Turns out fear of boredom is, most likely, an addiction to anxiety.

But that's another story. This story is about me writing a novel.

A new resolution

In the past year, I have learnt to appreciate having a routine. Getting used to the pace and environment of a new job has taken up most of my energy, but after eight months I feel like I've settled in and I'm ready to add to that routine.

Writing a novel feels overwhelming, but I have written in short, intense spurs throughout the past year. In fact, I've written over 130k of fanfiction, which has even gotten some positive comments here and there.

The challenges of writing an original story are, obviously, many and different from fanfiction, and I'm not sure where to start. In this journal, I will try and document my progress and perhaps post fragments that will then be used or at least useful for my novel.