Speaking of games, I\’ve been running several iterations of The One Ring roleplaying game, my new favorite, which requires a surprising amount of writing!

In terms of proper writing projects, I\’ve been penning out the odd poem here and there, mostly just to get the proverbial juices flowing. Homes is a constant state of revision as the rejection letters trickle in. Self-publishing is becoming a more viable option by the day. I\’ve also begun sketching out a sequel to Homes focusing on the trolls. My approach to this one has been a little different than Homes. Homes was largely written from the gut with a basic structure in mind; I then went back and punched up some of the lesser prose and injected chapters/characters as needed. It\’s still not done, but it\’s probably 90% there with some minor tweaks and edits still to go. This sequel, which started gestating some months ago, has me writing out full chapters of various parts of the story. The characters live there and I\’m discovering them as I go. The overall theme is the same: communal identity discovery. But the focus and plot, even a bit of the world, is quite different. Gram will be there, albeit quite older. 

The work is slow. I don\’t know what\’s to come and how I can sustain this habit. The emotional ups and downs are getting bigger and harder to write through, but I find it is still good medicine. I just have to make myself take it.

I leave you now with a bit from a draft I started two months ago:

I haven\’t been blogging much because (1) I haven\’t been writing much at all and when I am writing it\’s going towards books and whatnot and (2) there just hasn\’t been that much to write about.
I don\’t want this blog to be one long vent session about how hard it is to find the time/motivation/ganas to write novels (or anything at all for that matter) whilst working full time to support a family and maintain hobbies and relationships and general grown up whininess, but that\’s just kind of where my life is right now. I feel like Niggle, who just wants to finish his Tree but is constantly set off track by his garden and his house and his neighbors. More than that, I think I want to be more like Niggle because he so desperately wanted to complete his work, whereas I am kind of poking at it from time to time.
It\’s not a bad thing by any means; it is what it is. But I nonetheless feel a great impatience: will this ball ever get rolling? Is it the right ball to be pushing against? All I ever hear from the Person in my brain is, \’Just wait. It\’ll be great\’, but that gets a little trying when one is literally dreaming about getting published.