Writer’s Diary: January 2024 Update

And we’re back!

Apologies for my brief disappearance. I had more content planned for the end of December last year. However, my life got a little complicated and more than a little exhausting. So I decided to take an impromptu one-week break for the holidays lest the sand castle that is my mental health got swept away in the tide of the season.

But now I’m back, refreshed and ready to go! Let’s hit the new year running!

It’s time to start another movie marathon! This time, I aim to minimize my potential suffering. I want a nice, smooth, consistently enjoyable ride. Short, too. Something that won’t take up another two months of my life.

So, naturally, we’re doing the Rocky movies. Yes, that includes the Creed trilogy.

*Note: I’ve been promising a review of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary for a while now. However, with the release of the 60th and Christmas specials, it ended up getting lost in the weeds. So I’ll be pushing that back until the debut of the next season of the show. Be assured I’ll bring my A game to that one to make up for the wait.

I don’t have any especially thrilling plans for the book review slot. Currently, I’m halfway through ‘The Name of the Wind’ by Patrick Rothfuss, and I should hopefully be finished reading soon. After that, I’ll tackle ‘The Republic of Thieves’ by Scott Lynch, wrapping up the Gentleman Bastards series. While I’m making my way through those, expect more Papa Poirot.

The Thursday slot is gonna see some radical changes. I want to expand it beyond just a character analysis slot to something of a variety hour. Said analyses aren’t gonna go away, but they will be fewer and more far between. To fill the gaps, I’ll be talking about… pretty much anything I want to talk about. Specific scenes from stories, anime battles, explorations of story themes, so on and so forth.

To start with, I’m gonna do one last Jujutsu Kaisen article and analyze everyone’s favorite punching bag: Itadori Yuji. After that, we’ll see what happens. I know I’ll do an anime fight analysis/discussion, but I haven’t picked which one yet. As for the rest, we’ll see when we get there.

Onto the Friday slot. There are two games I’ve got ready to review. The first is ‘Knights of the Old Republic’, one of my favorite childhood games. The other is one of the greatest games of all time: ‘Fallout New Vegas’. But before then, I still need to deliver on my promised ‘Most Anticipated Games of 2024’ list. I also want to talk about Frost Giant Studios and their upcoming game, Stormgate, so expect that soon as well.

Now that I’m all caught up on Jujutsu Kaisen, it’s time to talk about some other shows. First of all, I’ll be doing an article on Frieren and why that show has been so incredible. After that, I’ll be taking a look at what we’ve got to look forward to in this year’s Winter season. Then we’ll get back to Berserk for a bit and hopefully wrap up the Conviction saga.

As for my novel, I’m finally getting back to work on that. Break time is over, it’s time to finish the rough draft once and for all. Then it’s straight into editing, which will be a monumental task in it of itself. Now that I’ve had time to mill on it, I realize just how much fat needs trimming off of this project. Still, they’re called rough drafts for a reason. It crawled so the next draft could walk, and the one after that will run.

That being said, I’m not devoting 100% of my energy towards it. I’ll also be juggling that side project I worked on during the break. I’m really liking how its shaping out, and I’m about 2/3rds of the way through, so I figured I should at least finish it while I’m at it. I aim to divide my attention roughly at 60/40 towards the main novel.

Is that efficient? Probably not. But I write to have fun, and by god, I will have it!

Thus begins 2024. I’m not gonna come out and say it’s going to be better than last year; the other entries in the 2020 trilogy ensured I’ll never make that mistake again. But if the year won’t be better, than I will be. For now, that’ll have to be enough.

Thanks very much for reading! Hope y’all have a great new year!