stress – Robert Tomoguchi

It’s been a difficult month. At my day job our fiscal year ended on June 30, so this is my busy and stressful time of year. Despite this, I’ve been writing consistently. Today, I finished writing Entry 70 of…

If you were expecting me to end that sentence with Orly’s Journals that would make sense, but I have an announcement to make…

I’ve retitled Orly’s Journals to My Darling Tragedy. I’ve never loved the title Orly’s Journals and feel like My Darling Tragedy is more personal to Orly, it being her nickname. I don’t know why I didn’t think of My Darling Tragedy when I first began the online serial—after all, I have it tattooed on my shin.

What prompted me to think of retitling leads me to another announcement…

I’ve begun posting the online serial to the free platforms Royal Road and Substack. So, My Darling Tragedy can now be read for free. I posted the first eight entries already and a new entry will post every Thursday. Patreon will remain 50+ entries ahead of the free versions and only Patreon will include bonus content like Scribbled Secrets and allow readers to contribute to the story by participating in reader polls. But I’m hoping the free versions will attract more readers to Orly.

On Substack, I’m also launching a monthly author newsletter next month, so I hope you’ll consider subscribing.

Signing out.

My writing sprint was successful. It was helped by taking three Fridays off in a row in order to give myself three, three-day weekends. I always write more per day during a three-day weekend than I do in a regular weekend. Today is the end of my third three-day weekend. Twenty-four days after conceiving of the idea for my ghost story, I finished writing it. I titled it The Last Midnight. It’s fifty-six chapters and just under 17,000 words, making it a short novella.

I didn’t write every one of those twenty-four days. There were a couple days where depression got the best of me, and more days when I was too stressed and exhausted from my day job.

This is a different book for me. For starters, the chapters alternate between the points-of-view of two characters, one character written in first person, the other in third. This structure is something I’m considering doing if I ever get around to writing Filming Tara Raikatuji as a novel. This will be the first time I publish something in third person which I’ve thus far been too afraid to do as I feel like there is more responsibility required when writing in the third person.

Though this is another story about love, I really struggled to write it. A couple of days ago it occurred to me why. In The Scribbled Victims, Yelena’s love for Marcel is lost love, and the love between Yelena and Orly is the love between mother and child. In Scribbling the Eternal, the love between Orly and Mirela is dysfunctional, and the love between Orly and Berthold is unrequited. In The Last Midnight the love may be a tad impulsive or even obsessive, but it’s the closest thing I’ve written to healthy romantic love. I don’t know if I succeeded at expressing it. Only Amirah has seen it and on Friday when I sent her the ending chapters, she sent me back a video crying after finishing them. That felt like a success, but I just don’t know if the love is believable. I hope so. I really want people to love this love story.

After I post this, I’m going to email my beta readers to ask if any of them would like to give feedback. I’ve written this so quickly that this will be the first time my beta readers will see something all at once, rather than a few chapters at a time. I’m terrified of their responses, one beta reader especially. Wish me luck.