Cocoon Year: When Accountability Gets in the Way of… Accountability?

As I continue my cocooning, I find that the act of blogging about it may in fact be getting in the way of actually working on the script. The cocoon artworks are only here to continue the theme, because I promised myself I’d see the whole thing through. As the heat waves rise and fall, it may just be the normal summer doldrums getting to me. I start longing for new projects, or at least to do anything but write.

Lately I’ve been a lot more social than normal, actually visiting friends in real life. Catching up on my past and all that. Everyone just kind of meandered from the Bay Area over to the Pacific Northwest for various reasons. We have been eating incredible donuts and terrible, no-good avocado toast. It really wasn’t worth forgoing a mortgage on a house.

As far as SAWgust goes, what’s eating most of my time there is supporting other people. I’m not getting an equal amount of support back on my project, so I will have to balance my time and attention spent there. Luckily people seem to like my prompts, which roll out automatically each day. I think that is going to have to be enough for me. I will have to continue to find my own lonely way through my project, per usual. It was unrealistic to expect otherwise.

Writing is still going well, easily even — suspiciously easy. As of writing here, I have about a third of the script drafted and ready for revision by the end of the month. It could be even longer if it had correct formatting. I am over halfway through the scenes that I had in mind. one scene in particular I glossed over and should be a lot longer than I originally plotted out. As I’m writing I’m trying to look for points of escalation, to extend the story and tease the reader in an entertaining way. This is instead of adding entirely new subplots or characters. I think this is a much better strategy for writing, to investigate little twists and turns and developments, rather than pull in new things. The story in general is also so small now, it needs twisty little details like that.

Warlock’d also has a new working subtitle now: NO VACANCY. The whole story takes place in a very full in. I also enjoy the wordplay hinting at the idea of the dead person still sticking around as a character in the story. They’re not gone. The body is not vacant. In general the idea of a spirit world being nothing and something at the same time also seems to fit ‘vacancy’ as a concept.

To Hell, with Love’ is still an incredible subtitle, in my opinion, but it might work better for a sequel. Perhaps this sequel involves a corrupt knight! Who knows! I love a good fall from grace. I also have the titles ‘The Crusades Marginalia’ and ‘Red Letter Days’ on lockdown, with very small ideas attached. It’s all mostly ripped up elements from previous drafts to go with each title.

And still, there is nary an actual warlock to be found in the story. Even though people work with demons, they’re often clerics instead. Or, you know, bucking the entire trend of being a gaming class at all, within a story.

It does feel like maybe I’m hitting on a formula that would work for multiple books. All I was ever interested in writing was cheeseball adventures. In general writing does feel a lot less weighty and hopefully the story is more fun as a result.

I’ve also allowed myself to explore a few new concepts via pitch format, and while I don’t have them ready to pitch here was what I was thinking about:

1. Psy High — A high school where being psychic is just something you do — so there’s sports with telekineses involved and stuff like that.
2. Cap’n Aye Aye and the Nope Rope — On a pirate ship full of animals, the captain must deal with hearing the word ‘no’ from their snake employee. Bonus creepy primate fingers. You know which ones I’m talking about!
3. Mx. Moxie’s Marvelous Museum of Mistakes — A nonfiction examination of notoriously bad reconstructions of animals, from this ancient Roman mosaic of a horsey wolf to the  Madgdeburg Unicorn to Victorian dinosaurs — and with a takeaway that science evolves, so we should be kind to ourselves as we learn and grow each day. Something like that. (Mx. Moxie is literally the last living Neanderthal.)

And some more Amphiox might be nice someday. Tentatively the next story would be called ‘Idolon’ and introduce a larger aspect of the world. Right now that short story draft is in an awkward place where I’d have loved to explain why Amphiox eggs are important, but it feels so cluttered in conjunction with the Idolon concept.

Just wish I could start shearing ideas off the list instead of having it grow, though.

As for the way the caterpillar’s soft, old body scrunches up at the top, just to be thrown away in favor of a shiny new carapace — Yeah, buddy, that’s exactly how it feels.

As a result of volunteering, I was very late writing my blog post here. I hope to include further Cocoon Year posts as part of my SAWgust progress. Already, I’m making a lovely amount of progress on my screenplay version of this story.

August is the worst month, but at least I have SAWgust!