Hi all!
School is out and Summer is in. Each Summer I push myself to find some routine to stick to so I stay busy when I'm not teaching. It's easy to fall into a rut of sleeping in and playing video games too much. Though, I did back Mina the Hollower on Kickstarter so I will be playing a lot of that. Rock and I just CANNOT get away from retro video games!
My goal this Summer is simple: get better at writing by practicing every day. I looked around online and studied the advice of experts to create my daily regimen.
I get up at 6 am and make coffee and a bagel. I sit at the table, keep the room around 68 degrees, and put on music. Music with lots of lyrics distract me too much so I stick to songs with little to none. Depending on what I’m writing I will choose something to evoke that feeling and keep me in the head space. Spotify has loads of user created playlists to search up and lots of great undiscovered bands to lend your ears to.
Without getting into the niche subgenres of metal, I always go to something around atmospheric black metal and doom metal. Today I listened to Faetooth, Witchrot and Lowen. Obviously that music isn’t for everyone so I encourage everyone to explore niche subgenres to find what moves you and gets you in the zone.
Stephen King gives a lot of great advice on writing. The first and most important thing he wants all aspiring writers to know is that you need to read if you want to write. Read a lot and write a lot.
For me personally, this required some self discovery. I needed to figure out what I like to read. Once I finished Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings, I was spent on high fantasy. After college I realized I don’t hate reading, I just don’t want to read fiction. Of course there are PLENTY of exceptions to that rule (like comics), but the reason I prefer nonfiction is simple; truth is stranger than fiction. Maybe I’ll write about my personal gripe with fiction in a later blog post.
Stephen King also says he sticks to 3-4 hours of writing a day, creating at least 6 pages. If you do that every day for a year, that comes out to 2,136 pages. A daily quota? I can do that.
I found online communities like r/WritingPrompts on Reddit where people post prompts to get you writing. They seem to lean into Dungeon and Dragons territory, but they can help spur some thoughtful science fiction.
I also have a backlog of dreams in my dream journal. Like maybe you've seen in past blogs, my dreams are very high concept and strangely coherent in story. Just like Salvador Dali and Nikola Tesla, I’ve been pulling ideas from dreams to turn into short comic scripts.
As for reading, I think it would be best to pay it forward to other readers. From now on I’ll include some recommended (or at least recent) reading at the end of these blog posts with the GUARANTEE I read them. They are not just AI generated lists of books that fit a theme. I think readers will quickly see how obscure and curated my reading list is. AI cannot generate something as genuinely disorienting as my library.
Recent and Recommended Reading:
Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer (1994)
A piece of investigative journalism into a feral and criminally neglected child born in 1957, her rescue and education, and tragic conclusion.
The Unicorn Tapestries by Margaret B Freeman (1976)
A book on the history of the unicorn myth and the mystery of the European Unicorn Tapestries that reside in The Cloisters in New York City.
Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer (1486)
This is the legal document that was used to prosecute witches in medieval Europe and Salem, Massachusetts. It's got three chapters, but the curious reader should only see the last one that explains the “rights” of the accused and grossly illegal court proceedings. It's a centuries old legal document translated from German and written for God fearing Puritans. Its as tedious as it sounds.
Cultish by Amanda Montell (2021)
Although meandering and repetitive at times, there is still something to gain here. It covers how language is used to control and manipulate people like in cults, internet echo chamber message boards and with new age MLM health influencers.