This week has been quite the week. It flew by quickly and it’s really not until now, writing this post, where I’ll find out whether or not it was a productive week. I only know for sure that it was a stressful week and I was just waiting until today came where I didn’t have work or uni or other work to do. A few things have come up with uni that will impact what happens going forward with my studies. I’ll find out more about it this tomorrow at a project meeting. It’s directly related to Covid19 and how it will affect the rest of my degree. The government has so far decided not to disband the universities and so as far as I know, the semester will continue, just not my Situated Creative Project, which I’ve already discussed before, but I thought I might reflect on it anyway.

I’ve been working on three separate projects this week: The Doll, The Demon’s Secretary and Interview with a Serial Saviour.

The Doll

I still haven’t finished it yet because it seems to have evolved just like TAS did, though it won’t be so large, I just don’t think I’ll be able to wrap it up in the next two-and-a-half thousand words. I think I’ll get close to it though. I have an ending in mind that I really like and might help make it cut off reasonably close to the initial deadline.

I haven’t done this before, but I want to talk a little about the direction of the story and so about the plot of it. The Doll is set in a world where men are everything and women are born but altered and designed to be nothing but servants and decorations for men: Dolls. It follows the story of Lucian Delatoria who is a young man of the Delatoria family, a famous family of generals, and happens to despise Dolls; not the women, but the concept itself. Nicknamed the ‘Male Doll’ for his beauty and composure, he is working silently to gain power and finally tear apart the society that engineers their women and places restrictions and protocols on their individualism and ability to think and act for themselves. It’s an advanced digital age with prehistoric patriarchy embedded in life everywhere.

All is going more or less smoothly for Lucian until he is gifted a Doll, as is tradition once a young man comes of age, and he meets Elisianna Von Celeste. Changing her name to ‘Pearl’, Lucian now has to juggle his desire for power and control with a young woman whose personality, when freed of her coded bonds, is something he has not experienced before in such close proximity. He finds that he can’t keep her quite at a distance, as she gravitates towards him no matter how coldly he treats her. He doesn’t want to involve her in the power-play he is about to find himself in but is finding that he is running out of excuses to ignore her.

I don’t want to talk about the ending just yet, that would spoil it. I’ll probably write about that once I’ve finally finished the writing for it. I’m excited about the ending, I just need to get through everything in between.

I started writing this because I wrote the character design for Pearl and fell in love with it. I also wrote one of the main plotlines along with it but I can’t tell you about that right now.

The Demon’s Secretary

This a project that I started a few years ago that is based on a central character named Myka Beedle. Myka is growing up in an abusive household when she runs away to the city thinking she had acquired a job that will help her start a new life away from her parents. With what she’s saved from her jobs and internet cafes, she tries to establish a life for herself in the outskirts of the city, working at a company called Sayleaf Ravenscarf where she will be a janitor. When a ‘glitch’ in the system causes her to be thought to be the candidate of a secretary position, the man who she is meant to work for takes a liking to her because she isn’t anything like the other people who Bianca Sayleaf has tried to force on him. The problem is, other than the fact that Myka finds out late that Gabriel is Gabriel Ravenscarf co-owner of the company, is that the company is in the business of people who try their best to keep the city ‘clean’; they’re hitman for the government. Becoming the secretary of Gabriel, Myka now has to decide whether she wants to channel her trauma into assisting a killer for the greater good, or turn on the hand that clothed, fed and housed her and risk being gunned down for it. They say that Gabriel is a demon, a man who has no time for others and will bathe in blood whenever he gets the chance. Myka discovers that Gabriel is more normal than the stories paint him, but he does indeed have a lethal streak.

This came out because of my love for classic Josei themed manga/anime/drama. It is neither Korean nor Japanese and there was never the intention to follow all the cliches but the ‘poor-girl rich-guy one’, and the content is a lot more macabre than the others that it might seem to be similar to. It involves a lot of my personal growth and gruesome realities here and there. It’s not a Cinderella story, I can assure you that.

Interview with a Serial Saviour

This is the project I am working on for my KWB306 writing project unit. It currently needs quite a lot of work, but if you would like to know about it, see my elevator pitch post about it: My Writing Project for KWB306: My Elevator Pitch.

The TLDR of it is: a journalist interviews the Deus Ex Machina of a Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master.

As it’s a piece for uni, it has a limit that I have to adhere to: 6,000 words. I’ve already breached it but it needs a complete makeover so I’m hoping to get it back down to limit fairly quickly. This piece is evolved from a small dialogue piece that I wrote last year (I think).

Currently, my targets for the week are at:

• 10,136/ 10,000 for “Personal Writing”
• 4,614/ 5,000 for “Professional Writing”

Now, I don’t normally put my work out there, much less my plans for my work, because I worry about the theft of my work. Ironically, I don’t think my writing is anything special, but I do worry about what will happen to me if I ever find myself faced with a stolen version of my own work. I only imagine the worst of emotions and scenarios. There are two works that I will never post about because losing them would be akin to losing a child. Now, I know there will be a lot who disagree with that comparison, but I have literally been breathing life into these two works for around ten years, and if I were to lose them I would rather die than live with it. Which sounds extreme, but it’s a scenario that, no matter how slim that possibility, would completely crush my entirety. I just rely on the idea that what is published on here is still mine.

Now, on a lighter note, I’ve found that it truly is myself getting in the way of my writing. I’ve found that drinking wine definitely releases those inhibitions and I spit out words as I actually think the, rather than half an hour later with half as much substance. Though I don’t condone alcoholism or excessive drinking, it was nice to take a drink and loosen up as it meant that I wrote without worrying about it. Sometimes, though, I do leave myself mean messages, but these past couple of times I made sure I only hit the moment I felt relaxed without getting shit-faced. Drink responsibly, folks.

Though I don’t particularly like the stereotype of being a smoker and a drinker as a writer (due to a lot of personal reasons), I can see why some of the great writers did/do it. I don’t think it’s a good idea to rely on addiction, especially when writing is already an addiction, but sometimes it feels nice to write without that version of myself in the back of my head biting on my sentences before I can get them out. I think one of the biggest reasons it helped me this time is also because of the stress. It gave me a chance to kind of shrug off the problems for now… which I then have to pull back on once I wake up. But it lets me write without judgment. It’s kind of funny to think that, sometimes, the biggest person and critique that stands in our way is ourselves. But I guess that’s also textbook when it comes to things like these.

That reminds me, it’s been a while since I’ve had any coffee. But I have been drinking a lot of tea, so that may be why. I love drinking warm tea during the chilly times, under a jumper as I write and stare out of the window. Can’t quite get enough of it.

I’m finding that these writing reflections have been good for me in the way I thought they would. Setting smaller goals per week and working towards them and then reflecting on what I have achieved and what I haven’t has been really good in terms of making sure my drive for writing doesn’t crumble like it did during the past two years of uni. As strange as it is to write, I’m actually kind of proud of myself. I have a lot of work to do to get to where I want to be, but I’m doing a lot better than I was at the beginning of 2019, in a lot of aspects.

It’s getting late now so I should wrap this reflection up. It hasn’t been a great week but I think it has been a good week. I can’t say for sure whether or not I look to the upcoming week, but you’ll find out in my next reflection post!

Give yourself a slow clap.

That’s my Writing Reflection for the week starting the 9th March 2020.