Happy New Year, everyone! Been a while since the last one of these, so here we are again. Read on for updates on Red Watch 3, the blog, and more!
Did you finish the draft of Red Watch 3?
No. Not yet. I hit a bit of a wall that seemed bigger than it was. Coming into the new year, I picked up a new habit (more on that later) that helped me work through it. I’m making steady progress again, working on the penultimate or final chapters of each storyline in the book to be followed up by the epilogues. It’s the biggest ones left, but I’m optimistic about completing the draft by winter’s end.
Still unsettled on a title. I have a short list of some ideas for one, but I haven’t been enamored with any of them yet. As a peek behind the curtain, the front-runners right now are A Violent Peace and A Merciless Union.
One more thing for Red Watch: in the upcoming months I’ll share something big here on the blog. It’s something I’ve been considering for a long time and once the draft for book 3 is done, it’s my next project. You’ll know more about it in a few months.
Latest on the Blog?
So, middle of last year, I started missing dates for my goal of two posts per month. I still mostly got one out each month, but inconsistently. One month I’d drop one a few days in, the next one it was on the last week. A handful of factors played into that.
The first: when I hit my wall on RW3, I ended up hardly writing anything. I was expecting I’d get disrupted by some of my hobbies in the back half of the last year (Baldur’s Gate 3), but I didn’t expect it to the degree to which it happened. And I’m not blaming BG3 – when it came out, it was all I was interested in spending my time on. That isn’t a fault in the game (probably a credit to it, really). It just coincided with a time when I also had few enticing ideas for blog posts.
I had drafted a couple posts, even, but I wasn’t satisfied with them afterward. I had one cooking about Starfield – mostly outlining my disappointment and a growing frustration with customers who wanted to say that the jank was fine because Bethesda used to make good games. I had another about Warcraft, but I ended up disagreeing with my own thesis less than a week after drafting it. (It was written on the week 10.1 dropped, when we had the next zone available, but not the raid or mythic+ season. At the time, I was unenthused with the prospect of spending another patch pugging dungeons for all my progression, but my friends and I joined a guild and started having a lot more fun again. Playing an MMO with a community works, who would’ve guessed?)
There’s a weird problem with the blog. I like to write on a topic when I feel like I have something to say about it, but oftentimes, it seems what I would say has been said already – in a reddit post, in a video essay, in an article. If I don’t feel like I’m adding to the conversation, I wonder what the point of the post even is. Sometimes it’s worthwhile – with the political posts, those are battles we keep having to fight.
When it comes to Starfield? What’s one more nerd’s article about his disappointment good for? Do I really need to write a post about how weird it is that the fourth Indiana Jones movie got so much criticism when the movies all seem to be full of shlocky bullshit? Is that something I want to go to bat for?
The final factor: I spent much of the year running a Pathfinder game. As I discussed in my blog post on the system, it’s really solidly built. (Awesome for some, didn’t work out for me.) One of D&D’s flaws is the holes in its system that I had to fill in over the years with homebrew solutions. The latter (while worse as far as a professionally designed product goes) (especially one released by one of the biggest companies in the world) provided more opportunities to find problems to solve, solutions to work out. Thoughts that might be worth sharing with others.
Anyway. I’d like to get back to two posts per month. I just need to figure out what I want to write about – what kind of things you might want to read about. Hell, maybe you’ll see a post very much like those above-mentioned abandoned drafts.
What else is going on?
Earlier, I mentioned I picked up a new habit. At the suggestion of my younger brother and following the example of my older brother, I started journaling during the last week of December. (I believe all successful New Year’s Resolutions begin before the new year does.)
I’ve journaled before – usually to vent or when I couldn’t sleep. Now, I’m doing it habitually. No matter how inane or uninteresting my day is, I write about it. (And I work from home, so my days can be really uninteresting.) I journal about my thoughts, my plans for the day, where I am with my writing. It’s helped; a lot. I’m fully bought in. I’ve got two more journals waiting in the wings.
Otherwise, I’ve slammed through some books since Christmas. I read Murderbot #3-7 (Martha Wells) and the Sunlit Man (Brandon Sanderson) in these last three weeks. I’ve locked up one full, uninterrupted hour to read every day when I finish my shift at work.
I’ve been looking at the Blades in the Dark TTRPG, and I’m planning to start running it with my table in a few weeks. Really excited about the system. It’s hard to like Hasbro / WOTC right now, so I kind of just don’t. Makes it even more enticing to give it a run.
Think that’s about it! I’m taking the risk to say I’m pretty optimistic for this year. I think it’ll be a good one. As always, thank you for reading. Good luck this year, y’all.
Ben Stovall Blog 