No More Games: My Writing in 2017, and What’s Next

So. It’s coming up on 11 months since I last posted, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to look back on my writing endeavors in 2017, and a little of what I’m planning for the future. The past year has been rough on a lot of people, myself included, but I won’t go into that. Suffice to say that the political climate hasn’t helped my creative focus.

2017 started out pretty solid for writing. I spent January revising a long short story/short novelette. I participated in my online writing group’s February intensive, and in April I got a good 14,000 words or so deep into a novella before a sinus infection knocked me down for the count. (I later realized the story is probably two novelettes anyway.)

I’d hoped to pour my efforts into finishing that story, along with expanding and revising a couple other stories in the same series, so they fit into a coherent whole but could still be read independent of each other. Instead I spent the summer plagued with writer’s block while wrestling with a different story. My own impatience and failure to respect my writing process only dragged things out, leading to frustration and frequent retreats into computer games. It made for a disappointingly unproductive summer.

Then I went to Japan for three weeks. And it was amazing. It rained the whole time, and even so, it was quite possibly the best trip I’ve ever been on.

Between preparing for the trip, the trip itself, and various distractions in its aftermath, I went for a month or two without really writing, reading fiction, or playing computer games. I decided to resume the first two, but not the third, and see how long I could keep up my “no computer games” streak. I started writing a novel, and dug into my reading backlog (also novels). And it turned out, life without computer games was pretty nice. Even if I wasn’t writing more than I had been, reading more novels felt like a much better use of my time than mucking about with digital distractions.

So I gave up computer games.

20 years ago, this would have been unthinkable. As a lad, I considered myself a pretty serious computer gamer. But starting late in high school, computer games and I stopped clicking the way we used to, and we’ve been growing apart ever since. My computer gaming has been sporadic for years. In 2016 I built a computer (because we needed a new one) with the idea I’d play games on it, but mostly my wife uses it to surf the internet and watch Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. (I consider this a worthy use of the hardware, as both my wife and Miss Fisher are awesome ladies.)

I won’t go as far as to say I’ve permanently cut computer games out of my life. But any forays will be in brief intervals, and even fewer and farther between than they already were. I’ll also be limiting myself to games I can play through once and be done with. Nothing open-world or open-ended that might suck me in and interfere with writing time, like they did over the summer. I’ll stick to games that are more like my favorite kind of novel: self-contained, with potential for sequels or rereads (replays), but not requiring either.

Oh, yeah, and I got into an Odyssey Online course, taught by Beneath Ceaseless Skies editor Scott H. Andrews. So, that’s awesome. BCS is one of my favorite fantasy short fiction market — I listen to every podcast episode — and I’m honored and excited to have the opportunity to learn from Scott.

In the coming year, I plan to: finish a novel (maybe even start shopping it around to agents), finally finish that novella/novelette series I mentioned above, participate in a flash fiction challenge and thus write more flash pieces, participate in the Odyssey Online class (in January and February), participate in the third year of my online writing group’s February intensive, make my first appearance at Capricon (also in February(!)) where I am scheduled to be on and even moderate several panels(!), attend Windycon as per usual, and hopefully get around to revising some other odds and ends I wrote this past year; not necessarily in that order. (Really hoping February doesn’t kill me.)

I didn’t sell a single story this year, but that’s at least partially due to my poor writing output. I hope, and even expect, that 2018 will be different.

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