Rapunzel Update

Part of the reason I’m posting this is because, unfortunately, I did not get anything written 7 April. But I also thought it would be good update everyone on where my story is at currently.

To be honest, I was seriously considering scrapping the entire thing, even just a couple days ago. I haven’t made much progress on it the past couple months, either, and I recognized a pretty glaring issue I somehow missed the first time around. The way the magic system works, at least when it comes to fairy gifts, involves stealing from someone’s future to give to their present. That involves setting hard, baseline, quantifiable “norms” for such intangible things as beauty, cleverness, etc. And the harder I want the magic system to be, the more well-defined those limits and norms have to be, especially when we get into the idea of witches stealing those from other people to make up for their own deficits. And no matter how I spin that, no matter where I set those bars, it comes with a great number of unfortunate implications that I don’t intend.

That said, my brother—ironically the same one who brought this to my attention—talked me down from the ledge, so to speak, and I still want to try a few things. If I put more of the emphasis on Aurora’s mindset, and (either as part of her arc, or clearly established from the beginning) make it clear it’s okay even if she does lose those things, that could at least mitigate some of the more problematic issues. Will that work with the story? How does that affect the themes I was already emphasizing? I don’t know yet. It’s possible I’ll still wind up scrapping it. I hope not, but who knows? It has been a great learning experience already, anyway; I just want to make sure I have no regrets with it.

13 January 2023

This was a point where everything seemed to be a struggle. I felt like I had no time, no energy. So I went ahead and used an assignment from my Institute class (kind of like a Bible Study type of thing) to count for my daily writing this day.

Not that I was particularly good about things after this, either. I didn’t write at all from the 14th through the 16th, and then only made it about 3 days before I had another break. And even then, the 18th, was mostly just venting, and I don’t plan on posting that one. I should be back on my updated schedule by next Thursday or so, based on the things I’ve found.

At the flooring mill where I currently work, it can look kind of dreary. Concrete floors, metal beams, corrugated tin roof, fluorescent lights, typical warehouse stuff. It's not too bad, especially once you get used to it, but it's not exactly soothing to the soul, either.

In the summers, some of that can be mitigated when they open the massive doors in every part of the building, hoping to invite a cross breeze in addition to all the fans whirling. That lets in some natural sunlight, and glimpses of the Missouri greenery around us. In winter, though... it's too cold for that.

Despite that, this past week, I had a chance to work outside for a bit. There were some things to clean up, and it had actually warmed up a bit. I'd forgotten how much natural sunlight improves my mood compared to the artificial, "false" light from the fluorescent bulbs. It seemed to warm my soul and ease my burdens that day, just from the way I could relax my eyes.

I think that's the way the Savior is. Even when we're working hard, and things are going relatively well, if we don't include the Savior in our lives, we don't have that natural light in our life, and we never get the peace and comfort that comes from his presence.

Updates and Future Plans

So, updates first. As you might have guessed, I've been dealing with an episode of depression or something similar most of this month. I'm finally back— something clicked for me this morning, and now I've got loads of energy— but that's why I haven't been posting.

On top of that, Sunday, while trying to set up zoom, my laptop fell and busted. I'll be able to make things work; the screen died, but the computer itself still works. But I can't afford a monitor until Friday, so it's going to be interesting the rest of this week. My brother said I can borrow his computer, so hopefully I'll be able to keep up on my updates here.

Now, for future plans: I want to take time to revise my Rapunzel story, so I'm going to shift this to every other day, except Sundays, which I will still be staying on here for. That will make it less of a to-do checklist and more for myself.

1 December 2022

Stuff I wrote while reflecting on Nanowrimo.

I felt like I should take some time, now that Nanowrimo is done for the year, to look back and reflect on what I’ve learned and what I’ve accomplished.

First off, wow. This was the best Nanowrimo I’ve had since my first one, and possibly even that one, despite a slightly lower word count. I’m still parsing through why I feel that way; part of it definitely has to do with how committed I was.

I learned a lot about myself and my writing process, too. First, I need to give myself the freedom to wander around my story. If I try to force myself to write things in order, for whatever reason, it stops being fun, starts stressing me out, and my motivation gets shot. This is a bit frustrating, since I feel like having everything nice and organized would be so much simpler, but if that’s the way it needs to work for me, so be it.

Closely related to that, for the first time, I figured out how to work around outdated bits of story without being compelled to immediately rewrite them. I’ve struggled with that in the past. There’s one story I started that has 10-15 different versions of the first chapter, even though I’ve yet to finish it. (That story’s been shelved for now, but I do intend to finish it at some point.)

That wouldn’t have worked with Rapunzel. Because it was part of Nanowrimo, it felt like I couldn’t, even, and that wound up really good for me. It let me find the whole story, not just the next piece of it.

The most surprising thing I learned, though, was how much it affects my day, in a positive way, when I get up early to squeeze in and extra 20-30 minutes of writing. That wasn’t easy for me; I have to start work at 6 AM, so I needed to start getting up at 4:30 if I wanted to do that. But generally speaking, rather than feeling extra tired, I was strangely energetic and a lot happier while I was at work.

There’s also a lot of work I need to do, both to improve my writing in general and for Rapunzel specifically. In particular, a lot of my sentences were far too same-y. “So-and-so verbed X.” Part of that was because I was rushing through and put no effort into trying to make it sound better… but there’s also the fact that no other alternatives immediately sprang to ming. That’s something I’d like to work on in my daily writing over the course of the next few weeks; I’ll try to think up exercises I can do for that.

Key to that, I need to read more. I think that’ll help a lot, especially if I’m proactively paying attention to sentence structure as I read… Not that I’m good at that. It’s far too easy for me to get sucked into the story and forget everything else.

More specifically to Rapunzel, there are a lot of concerns. Isaac, for example. I want him to feel like a cool, proactive younger brother with a bit of a stubborn streak. (That part seems to run in the family.) I worry that instead, I made him too annoying or stuck up, maybe inflexible, with the added insult of general being “right”. I’ll need to think on that. There may be nothing I do about it until I get the story more polished, and get feedback from other readers to see if there actually is an issue at that point.

Another is Rapunzel’s loss of her fairy “gifts”. Supposedly, she’s been given extra beauty and cleverness, pulled from her own future. Which means once the bonus is gone, after Hannah’s sacrifice, there should be a noticeable difference. And there isn’t. I never address it, it has no consequence on the plot… It bugs me. I have a few ideas, but nothing solid yet.

The battles are also going to need a lot of work - possibly revision after revision, just to try different things out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually fairly happy with what I came up with, and even a bit proud of it. But there are a lot more factors that I need to take into account that I forgot (like rain), and Gothel in particular should have a lot more options for things she can do in battle. I don’t want her to feel like some bog-standard D&D dragon, or worse, a brainless giant lizard. I want her to fight like it’s actually Gothel in a dragon’s body.

There’s more I could nitpick; I could probably spend hours ripping my story apart piece by piece. But those were the big things that weigh on me even now. My plan is to set the story down for the next couple weeks, maybe all of December, and pick it back up come January. I think I’d like to get the next draft done by the end of April, though I am starting online courses in February, and I don’t know how that will affect things.

I don’t know if I’ll post any of my revision work on my blog or not. I think this should be separate from my daily writings. But if that’s the only time I have to work on it, I may sneak bits in here and there.