Activity

What I read – Emmanuel by Angela R. Watts, some of The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien, WAR by Sebastian Junger, Homeland: Legend of Drizzt: Dark Elf Trilogy, Book 1 by R.A. Salvatore, some of Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

What I wrote – Concept and some paragraphs of a short story I intend to submit to SE, some copywork of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, some copywork of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, some bits of by novella Gilded Dark.

What I learned – For those of us who enjoy writing spec fic with characters who have crazy powers, here’s an interesting way to think of power and character design from Hirohiko Araki, author of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (AKA the perfector and potentially the originator of the “everyone has one unique power” concept):

“When I’m writing JoJo, I’ll often think of a character’s Stand—a personification of supernatural abilities common in the JoJo setting—before anything else, which means the first items I fill out on the history sheet will be that character’s special moves and abilities. Let’s say I think of a character who can stop time. I’ll start there, and see where that leads me. Do they need to be muscular to stop time? What about their appearance—is there a kind of hairstyle that might have something to do with time? How would their relationship with time be reflected in the decor of their room? … As I fill in the gaps in a character’s history sheet, appearance, hairstyle, and clothing become inseparable from personality…” (Araki, Manga in Theory and Practice, pg 64) [emphasis original]

Other stuff – I took a course called “Bestseller Blueprint” by Derek Murphy from CreativeIndie, a respected person from a respected site. The course was pretty trash. It was little more than “write to market” and “hero’s journey 101” and “make sure to worldbuild 4head.” Not all the lessons were even completed but instead had brief notes for later expansion, and the sound quality on everything except the free preview videos was garbage. I’m really disappointed and don’t think a bunch of stuff you can find for free on blogs and YouTube deserves to be gated behind a $197 course, or even the $47 for which I got it on sale :-{

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