This past weekend, I wrote six hours on Saturday and seven hours on Sunday. The whole time I was working on Orly’s Journals Entry 43: “Obscure.” It felt like a difficult entry to reach a point where I felt satisfied. But overall, I think writing the journals is going well. I’m maintaining a pace of completing one entry per week and am still eight weeks ahead of the publishing schedule. I don’t know how they’re reading though. Instinctively, I feel like things have become compressed, with too much happening in too small a space. I mean this for the relationships Orly is developing. I feel like things should be progressing slower so that they have more time to take root into something that feels lasting because it’s now deep. But I’m also wary of slowing things down as I don’t think it will appeal to the journal readers. I feel like I’ve lost my global view of the story, and though that’s uncomfortable, part of me is okay with it because it’s a serial and feels closer to real life where everything can’t be planned, things unexpectedly pop up, and your short-term goals shift quickly. But I really do wish I had a better feel for what the reader experience is like.

Sunday morning, I was writing at Starbucks and my MacBook Air crashed twice, both times causing me to lose text. I’ve had the laptop since 2014 and apparently, it’s going to continue to crash because I haven’t been able to update the OS since 2023. So, I’ve decided to retire it as I can’t continue to lose text while writing. I feel very grateful though for all this laptop has given me. The entire Black Wax Vampire Trilogy and The Last Midnight were written on it over thousands of hours (I’m guessing). But until I replace it, I’ll do all my writing at home on my Mac Mini.

2024 was a good reading year for me. I’m happy about that. It’s a big bummer when it hasn’t been a good reading year. My Goodreads goal was 52 books and it looks like I’ll finish at 57. My favorite reads this year were To Live by Yu Hua and the manga I Want to Eat Your Pancreas written by Sumino Yoru and drawn by Kirihara Idumi. Both touched my heart. Both made me cry. (Oh Fengxia!) Both stayed with me. I’m thinking of getting a page from Pancreas tattooed on me.

Another book that stayed with me was For Whom the Bell Tolls. What masterful writing. What emotion. I hope I learned just a little about writing from Hemingway during that read. Other books I really enjoyed were Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee, and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy which I’m almost through but love in advance of finishing. I also reread a favorite read from 2023: All The Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami.

At the end of the year I always enjoy Spotify sharing my listening habits. My most listened to song in 2024, I believe was the same song in 2023: せかいでいちばん(Sekai de Ichiban) by Inoue Sonoko, the theme song of my favorite show, Ainori Love Wagon. According to Spotify, I’ve already listened to it 636 times this year, and I know I listened to it at least three more times today.

But if anything, 2024 has to be the year of ILLIT for me. I learned of them through Instagram in April and they became my most listened to artist of 2024 and three of my top five played songs were by them. I believe in the past three years, MXMS was my most listened to artist, but this year they didn’t make the top five. I’m guessing because they stopped releasing new work and that was a big bummer, but they’re still my favorite band.

I definitely think what I read in a year affects what and how I write in that same year. I believe music does as well as I’m usually listening to music most of the day, every day. I become obsessed with songs and listen to them on repeat and this definitely impacts my mood which I believe filters into what I end up writing even though during my longer writing sessions I tend to listen to ambient noise.

Anyhow, I just wanted to share that. Sorry if it was of no interest to you. Even if it wasn’t, I hope you had a good reading and listening year yourself.

I’m still at it—writing Orly’s Journals. I had another slump like the one I mentioned in my last blog post, where I was stuck on a single entry for a couple weeks. I’m now only seven entries ahead. But with the time I’ll have off for the holidays, I’m hoping I’ll get caught up, if not get ahead. So far, all the journal entries total just under 41K words. That’s half the length of The Scribbled Victims, and I only began writing in April. Despite my depression being very bad and work being tough in recent months, I continue to sit down to write every single day. Of course, some days are more productive than others. My best days usually involve activating my Freedom internet blocker.

I recently started asking ChatGPT for author advice on how to grow my readership. It’s given me tips I’ve heard before, but it also suggested things I hadn’t heard and never considered. To my surprise, it knew about The Scribbled Victims. It got some plot points wrong and knew less about the subsequent books, but I was still amazed it had a general understanding of the characters and storyline. Because one of the things ChatGPT suggest I do is hold a fan art contest, today I prompted it with: “Can you create a picture of Orly Bialek and Yelena Solodnikova?” What it returned was more than I expected, although I think it still doesn’t understand Orly’s scribbles. Still, it made me feel my books are more recognizable than I thought. Maybe I’m fooling myself though—maybe ChatGPT knows I’m the author and is just being nice to me. If anyone reading this post uses ChatGPT, I’d be very interested to know if it recognized Orly or Yelena or The Scribbled Victims for you.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’m going to Shojin in Culver City for a vegan Thanksgiving omakase dinner. Table for one. That’s my life. On Monday, my shrink and I talked about loneliness, and how, because of wanting to write, I often make choices that result in being alone even though I feel lonely. What to do?

On Patreon last week, I asked readers which characters they’d like to see more of in Orly’s Journals. To my surprise, the most votes went to Ji’Indushul. Because of this, my next “Scribble Secret” post on Friday will be about that character.

So that’s basically all that’s going on with me. With so much nothing going on, it must be no surprise that this is only my fifth blog post for 2024. LOL.

Orly’s Journals, my serialized online novel through Patreon is going quite well. I have eleven subscribers already and am hoping for more. I want more subscribers to increase discussion among the readers regarding Orly’s new ongoing story. I’ve been posting a journal entry each Thursday. This Thursday will be the be the sixteenth post. To keep up with the demands of serialization, I’m nine entries ahead in writing and am currently working on Entry 25.   

In addition to the journal entries, I’ve been posting image-based previews, solicitations from readers for character names and plot points, and my favorite—what I’m calling Scribbled Secrets where I post trivial information about Orly’s universe, inside and outside her trilogy, that the reader is likely unaware of. It’s fun to tell mine and Orly’s secrets.

As an independent author, I do have a small budget for marketing and promotion. But because that budget is small, I must be very selective when choosing what to throw my money at. Should I spend it on Amazon book ads? Instagram sponsored posts? Book review services? I’ve tried various approaches with limited success. But I feel like I should be more active in my attempt to increase awareness about Orly’s online journal and her book series. If anyone has any suggestions, my ears are open.

Other than that, I recently went through a minor writing slump where I was just spinning my wheels on the same entries. I think, at one point, I was only five entries ahead of what had already posted. I’m sure some, if not most, was due to depression. But I feel like I’ve gotten back up and am enjoying the substance and pace of what I’m writing again. If you’re one of the eleven people subscribed, I hope you’re enjoying reading the current work as much as I am enjoying writing it.

So, way back when I last posted in March, I talked about writing two stories at once, because one was good for providing the regularity I need for maintaining my mood and the other because it excited me. Well guess what happened? I put both of them down. I know that sounds bad but let me continue because it’s actually good.

When I woke on April 5, I was thinking about Patreon and had the idea of writing there in serial form, a new novel made of journal entries penned by my character Orly Bialek, picking up where The Black Wax Vampire Trilogy ended. This concept excited me more than anything I’ve felt in years. I kicked around the idea for a few days and then decided to go for it, and it was then that I put down the other two books.

So, for the past two months, this is what I’ve been working on every single day. I’ve been writing as Orly again and building the Patreon page which launched a few days ago. I plan to release a journal entry there every Thursday evening.

Today is Thursday. Her first journal entry drops tonight.

I have no regrets putting the other two books on hold as writing Orly again makes me feel happy. I do have fears though. I’ve never written in serial form, and her POV is slightly different because of the nature of journaling. But more than that, I feel like some series continue long past what is beneficial to the thrust of the story and the universe created. Though I love what I’m doing now and look forward to releasing the installments, I hope I recognize when to stop.

So, if you enjoyed her trilogy or are new to Orly and want to read a new vampire story, I hope you’ll check out Orly’s Journals.

I’m still working on turning Exhume into a novel. I’ve been at it for seventy days straight. I’m making incremental progress, averaging 130 new words a day. The more I work on it though, the less sure I feel I want to show it to anyone. To be honest, the more I work on it, the less excited I feel about it. This might be because I’m struggling to develop the characters beyond the screenplay version. It might also be because I’m writing in third person, present tense, which I’ve never done before. I chose this as it felt closest to the way a screenplay is written.

Recently, I had this thought of writing Forever Candy from a different point-of-view. The last time I tried writing it, I was writing from Candy’s POV, in first person. But now I’m thinking of writing it from Burrows’ POV. I’ve tried that before, but only in third person. For some reason it never occurred to me to write him from first person. I wrote a little, just to try it out, and I got really excited about it.

I talked to my shrink about this quandary of mine—which story to pursue now. Even though I’m struggling with the Exhume story, she and I both belief that the regularity in which I’ve been writing it has really improved my mood and helped pull me out of my last depression. We’re wary of me walking away from that. On the other hand, I’m so excited to write this other story right now, that I feel like I should seize the opportunity of inspiration.

My shrink suggested I work on both, simultaneously. I can keep making my little daily progress on Exhume, while also embracing the excitement I feel with writing a different book. When she said it, it baffled me because I’ve never written two books at once. When I wrote The Last Midnight, feeling inspired, I had to put Scribbles of the Empress down completely, even though I was already 40,000 words into it, and I only picked it back up after I had finished.

So, I guess I’m going to give it a go, writing two books at once. Wish me luck.

I’ve been going to the gym regularly and counting calories on MyFitnessPal because my doctor told me I really need to lose weight. In twelve weeks, I’ve lost 18 lbs. While on the treadmill last week, I listened to Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. A friend from Silent Book Club told me she had read it. She mentioned what a despicable character the POV characters is, but I really enjoyed the character and found myself relating to her. This wasn’t because I want to or ever would plagiarize another author (but if I did, it would be Kwon Yeo-sun and her book Lemon, LOL), but because, as a mediocre writer, I know all too well what it feels like to be jealous of writers who have more talent than I’ll ever have. While listening to Yellowface, I was really impressed with and jealous of the author with how smart and sharp her writing is. She’s super gifted.

I don’t know if it was that book or other books I’ve read recently (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Road, All the Lovers in the Night), but I’ve glimpsed the dawning of me giving up as a writer, feeling like I’m just not talented enough to write something worthy of the readership I daydream of having. Mediocrity is a dreadful thing to feel.

I know it’s not over just yet though. I’m going to try to keep going, fueled by my hopes that Forever Candy will be a good book. Again, wish me luck.

In my last post I mentioned a screenplay I was thinking of novelizing. Well, guess what? That’s what I’ve been doing every day since January 7. I wrote the screenplay in 2006 while I was in the Professional Program in Screenwriting at UCLA. The screenplay was titled Exhume. I toyed around with renaming it and did rename it when I began the novel version, but I have since returned to the title Exhume. It’s about a string quartet who heads out to a remote location in Amish country to work on new music. There they do something they shouldn’t, and all hell breaks loose. The screenplay received an honorable mention in the annual competition at the end of the UCLA program. I thought it worked well as a screenplay, but we’ll have to see about the novel version. It might be too early to call it a novel. At the rate I’m going, it’s feeling more like novella length. I’m already appreciating getting to explore my main character more deeply writing it as fiction than I could as a screenplay. I hope I’ll finish it this year and plan to send it out to agents in the hopes of traditionally publishing it.

Lately, I’ve been on a reading streak where I’ve been reading very good books. Right now, I’m reading War and Peace and To Live by Yu Hua. A couple weeks ago I finished reading For Whom the Bell Tolls and was in awe for many reasons. I’ve also been reading the manga series Tokyo Tarareba Girls by Akiko Higashimura (my crush) which has been a lot of fun but whose viewpoints I’m often surprised by.

Two days ago, marked one year of being off social media. I don’t feel lacking because of it other than wondering if I’ve missed any messages from readers, but those are rare.

Well, that’s basically all I can think of mentioning. I hope you’re well and reading something really good.

Another blog lapse. I haven’t posted here since August. This is only my fifth post of 2023 and it’s the last day of the year. Maybe it seems remiss of me not to have posted since August, but I haven’t had anything noteworthy to mention. Since that last post, I’ve just been spinning my wheels, going in circles, and getting nowhere. I tried working on I Was Mistaken, like I mentioned, but it became painful to write. My shrink said a little discomfort is okay, but what I was doing was retraumatizing myself. I then went back to writing about Tara Raikatuji but couldn’t find her voice and so I completed another lap around my circle of stories by returning to Forever Candy. I struggled with the same point of view problems I’ve always had with that story, and my last attempt read back so lifelessly that it made me think of a desiccated grasshopper, if that’s a thing. This week, I pulled out a screenplay I wrote in 2008 about a cellist. It’s kind of a haunted house story. I’m kicking around having a go at novelizing it and it feels fresh because it’s not yet part of my traditional merry-go-round of stories that I tinker with then give up on. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere though.

So that’s what I’ve been doing since August, even though I’ve written every day for the past 48 days. I’ve been forcing myself to write for a minimum of ten minutes a day to try to get something going. Though I haven’t made any progress on any of my projects, forcing myself to write like this has at least awakened whatever it is that allows me to daydream. I’m hoping this will soon lead me to finding solutions with my current stories or thinking of something entirely new.

I’m going to remember 2023 as the year I had writer’s block. I’ll also remember it as the year I read All the Lovers in the Night and Kokoro. It’s also the year I deleted Twitter, and deactivated my author Instagram and TikTok. I decided only to keep my personal accounts (@deadponies). My author accounts felt like a collection of promotional posts for my books rather than showing anything about me as a person. Hopefully, the posts about me are more interesting than my advertisements.

I really hope I get through this writer’s block soon. I can’t have another year like this. I was thinking about pretending I got an agent and a book deal so I can give myself a deadline to finish something—anything.

Goodbye 2023.

Hello 2024.

In my last post, way back in May, I said I chose to write and began writing Forever Candy as a novel. Today, in August, I’m letting you know I stopped. It fizzled out weeks ago. The voice I was writing in just fell flat. It didn’t feel authentic. I considered starting over in a different voice, but right now, I think I must walk away from it. Maybe someday I’ll try again.  

I finished my first UCLA Extension Creative Writing class, but I dropped the second class.

In the weeks since I stopped writing, I’ve become depressed. I feel adrift and without purpose. But I’ve been putting in a lot of effort in my sessions with my psychologist. I recently began considering writing about my childhood best friend. In the preceding post, titled Pushpins, our story is laid out in the fourth row of note cards and is something I intended to weave into another story I refer to as Candela.

Writing about my childhood best friend is something I think I can only write privately, without the intention of anyone ever seeing it. I think it’s essential in order to tell our story honestly. 

So, for the readers I do have, you may not get anything new from me for a long while.

I deleted my Twitter accounts. I think Facebook will be on the chopping block next. Social media has proven to be more detrimental than beneficial for me, and after being off it for over 180 days now, the feelings of FOMO rarely surface.

I feel like disappearing. 

I told my psychologist that by my next session I would open a new Scrivener document and save it for the new writing project. That next session is tomorrow. I’ve been struggling with what to save it as for a working title. I could stick with calling it Candela, but I feel like I should start fresh. I’m leaning toward saving it as I Was Mistaken.  

I know my last two blog posts suggested I was leaning toward writing a novel version of Filming Tara Raikatuji, but I no longer think it’s going to be my next project. I took six days off from my day job, with the intention of resting before my busy fiscal closing period. On Thursday I mapped out the three stories I’ve been kicking around in my head using note cards to identify the major beats of each story. I typically lay out six beats per story. The stories were Filming Tara Raikatuji, Forever Candy, and something I for now just refer to as Candela. The Candela story has two rows of cards because there are two parallel stories in it. I pinned them to my bulletin board but ran out of pushpins. I don’t know how that happened. I’ve had many more cards on this board before. Anyhow, I felt good after pinning the cards up because it told me I did have things I’d be able to write from beginning to end. In general, I won’t start writing until I know my beginning and ending.

I spent the rest of the day and Friday evaluating which of the three stories I should pursue, and I landed on Forever Candy. It’s the least brave story to write because it’s the least personal, but I chose it for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been worrying about what writing I can share if I continue in this creative writing program at UCLA Extension, because it’s online, and so the instructor and students are all faceless and I don’t find myself getting to know them. I realized that it’s difficult for me to share drafts of things that are very personal with people I don’t know. The second reason is that it’s my goal to traditionally publish my next book, and I think Forever Candy is the easiest to explain and the most marketable.

Saturday, I wrote a prologue for Forever Candy. It was only five hundred words, but it was a beginning, and I’m still happy with how it came out. Yesterday, I pushed myself to shift settings and begin the first chapter. After a couple hours, I only settled on the first three sentences—32 words. But it’s a start. I’m a little intimidated to embark on this book because I’m writing in third person, which I don’t typically do. I also have a major character who’s male, something else I’m not accustomed to if I’m not that male, and especially after spending the last eight years writing Orly Bialek.

But hey, the point is, I began something I feel like I might be able to write all the way to its ending. As always happens at the beginning of any writing project, I think I’ll be able to write this story quickly, in this case, a year. If history is any indication, it’ll likely be at least two years. At least I’m writing again. Yay me.

On a totally unrelated note, can I mention just how much I love the new show on Netflix, Love Village? It’s a more mature version of Ainori Love Wagon, which I absolutely loved and made me cry more than any other show I’ve watched. Love Village is making me gush buckets too. If I have any influence over my readers, I highly recommend.