Summer was set to burn itself out the day before my girlfriend arrived from Germany, but it stuck around an extra day to give her a sweaty “hello” — the next day, sheltering from the rain at a covered picnic bench, she became my fiancée 😊

On the writing side of things, it’s not going as well. Or it is, depending on how you look at it. 

As a Christmas gift for her, I wrote a short story every day of advent in December, twenty-eight shorts in total. Some were merely flash fiction, the shortest being six words long (“Hi, dying of cancer. I’m dad.”), the longest being just shy of three thousand words. I would often finish it and press Send only seconds before my daily deadline of just before she wakes up for work. This had a few unintended side effects. 
First, it gave me some distance from Kill The King as a manuscript, which put me even further away from the person I was when I plotted it and broke it down into beats and scenes.
Second, it made me realise exactly how concise I wasn’t being in my longer-form writing.
Third, it raised my standards for my own storytelling. Finishing a story, whether anyone else reads it or not, does that. Even (and especially) if it kind of sucks.

Ira Glass put it best when he talked about the Gap:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Ira Glass

( You can also watch it here )

Taking a break from the manuscript to execute that Christmas present of twenty-eight different stories levelled me up a little, as a writer. The only problem now is that I’m wiser than the 2021 Matt who wrote the outline for Kill The King. As 2023 Matt, I still like to outline a story and break down into chronological scenes and beats, but I’m less formulaic and am struggling to see why I need to hit every beat that I set for this story at the end of 2021.
Because I’m so far into it (105,000 words and just breaking into act three) it would be monumentally stupid of me to abandon it and start a new project, so I’ll stick with it. I hope to have it finished by the end of March, if it doesn’t kill me first.

Will be back with news about some short stories later.

Love you all.