A status update for you all:
We’re late to the party by a few years, but we finally started playing Baldur’s Gate III (thanks to our local library). It’s been a lot of fun and I’m officially declaring this a pro-Karlach household.
Speaking of Baldur’s Gate III, I was thinking about “couch co-op” games and, until my wife and I played Diablo III together, the last game I can remember playing cooperatively with someone in the same room as me was Contra III on the SNES. (Something about third installments in a franchise, I guess.) Otherwise, the only non-online multiplayer games I can think of in that timespan were Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007. Ah, good ol’ four-way split-screen on a 25” CRT. Nothing quite like it. (Actually, Smash Bros. figures in there somewhere, too, but I only have passing experience with multiplayer in that game.)
Given that status update, it might come as little surprise that I’d rather not say how long it’s been since I made any progress on my novel. But even without excellent story-driven video games taking up my time, these fallow writing periods do come and go. I am thinking about story and character elements on a regular basis, though, so it’s not completely being ignored.
Speaking of character elements, I started a short course at my local community college on writing a character-driven novel. I want to be able to improve my craft generally, but specifically to be able to make more fleshed-out characters (primary, secondary, tertiary, and beyond). I feel that I’m often guilty of creating characters who exist because the plot needs them to, and the result is that they’re very shallow or their motivations are flimsy.
I can already see areas where my novel’s main character needs to be refined in order to make him more 3-dimensional. Some of this is stuff I’ve inherently known for a while, but this class is giving me some tools on how to approach that in a purposeful way. I’m eager to start trying it out (once we finish BG3 or we have to return it to the library).
Lastly, I think I want to take a stab at doing Novel November. I’m bringing the expectation that I will not at all meet the 50,000-word goal, but what I would like to achieve is developing the habit of writing more consistently. Tracking my writing output has already been a big help for me in that regard (both as a general accountability device and also a nifty summary of how much I’ve written, when I do my most writing, and on what projects).
I’m still not even entirely settled on which story idea I want to use for Novel November. I’m deciding between a story focused on a group of retired adventurers reluctantly reuniting for one last job or a story that touches more directly on my broader world-building and cosmology. Whichever one I choose, I’ll just need to remind myself to stick to it for a month and not worry about the other idea. It can wait until December if it’s that important to get started on it.
Thanks for listening (well, reading, I guess). Take care of yourselves and each other. Until we next meet,
-Marc
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