A Mid-Year Review: Workshops, Novels, and Video Games

It's no secret that I've had terrible burnout lately. Just look at the difference in time between my last blog post and this one. But I'm back in action now! To get things kicked off on this blog again, I'm going to share what some of my projects are about - without giving too much away, because I'm also implementing a new approach to my work.

 

Secrets, Secrets Everywhere

I'm going to be keeping things to myself a bit more moving forward. Not that I was sharing much of anything before, to be fair, but this is related to my offline presence. I have great friends who are willing to listen to me ramble on and on about my stories and what I've got planned for them, as well as my other projects, and while that's terribly lovely and supportive of them, I've made up my mind to stop doing that.

The reason is pretty simple: When I've talked about something, the chances of me doing that thing go down by 99%. It's a terrible character trait, but there you go. I don't think I'm the only one who suffers from this. I'm hoping this will keep all of that excitement bottled up inside me, and since it can't be expended by gushing about my projects to lovely people who are willing to listen, it's got to come out in another way... through actually working on those projects. 

Revolutionary, I know. 

So, with that in mind, what have I been working on?

Workshops

I've actually got a couple of workshop projects that I'm currently working on designing and developing. One is a 10-session horror-writing workshop that's designed as an intensive crash-course into writing horror. Hoping to release that in early 2024.

The other is a half-workshop half-writing challenge that I'd originally hoped to release this summer, but we'll see if that will still be possible.

Novels

I've got one novel that I'm focusing on at the moment, and it's a murder mystery novel with psychological suspense elements. It recently underwent a huge revision, and I'm doing a primary edit before moving on to tackling the majority of the edits that are required - what that means is, I'm going through and getting rid of or changing any scenes or paragraphs that no longer align with the direction that the story is going (a direction I redefined in the aforementioned huge revision) before I start actually fixing it up.

I have one other murder mystery novel lined up for revision after this one is done. I guess I'm in a mystery sort of mood this year, huh?

Video Games

Yes, I've been working on video game design and development! This is the first video game I'm working on with a team, and I've been doing a lot of concept development, narrative design, and game design. (I worked on the script a bit today, and I was laughing out loud as I wrote it - so I guess that's going pretty well!)

Other Projects

My podcast is coming back in a couple of days with an episode explaining my current editing process in detail. I have lots of other episodes that I recorded previously but never released, along with new episode ideas that I'm excited to get to.

I'm considering a few other things, like getting podcast guests, figuring out how to move forward with Scrittorio, maybe dabbling in some audio production again (perhaps even recording an audiobook for Apartment?) - so it seems like the motivation has hit me full force again! 

Stay with me, and you'll see a lot of fun stuff coming up in this space. 😁