May was another month of mostly not-writing. Homeschooling took up most of my time, and when I wasn’t doing that, I was playing Animal Crossing or Elder Scrolls Online. I did manage to do some non-writing work that doesn’t amount to a word count, but it was progress on various elements of the new fantasy project I’ve been mulling over. I did a bit of world-building research, character and plot brainstorming, made progress on my fantasy conlang (constructed language), and finally purchased Scrivener to use for organizing this project.

I’m getting excited about the prospect of working on this project. I made a lot of creative decisions this month, working on the main character (scholarly archeologist!) and elements of the plot that have been a bit vague until now. Still not enough worked out that I feel comfortable writing it down yet, but we’ll get there. I did sketch out a couple of mythology things to work through some ideas, so there were some words!

Word Counts in May:

Blog/Newsletter: 549
STARCALLER: 621
Other: 333

Total Words Written in March: 1,503
Total Words Written in 2020: 61,582

Plans for June:

School is finally out, so I’m hoping for a bit more time to focus on my own work while kiddo mostly plays video games and watches TV. Part of me feels guilty about the increase in kiddo’s screen-time, but we all have to figure out a way to survive somehow. Homeschooling was exhausting, demanding work that sucked all the life and energy out of me. Over the last week, I feel like I’m slowly gaining something back, though there are still days where I don’t manage to do much of anything except build Legos with kiddo and help her get through the dungeons in Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. I can’t really complain about that, though.

I’m hoping to make a little more progress this month on STARCALLER. I’m reading The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder for my fantasy conlang, though I feel like I’ve made pretty decent progress on my own. Language is going to have a minor part to play in the story, but in an effort to make this feel like a completely different world, I wanted to build the names and language from the ground up so that it doesn’t feel derived from any real world cultures or languages. My main character doesn’t even have a name yet, because I haven’t figured out the language. I’ve been using placeholders like MAIN CHARACTER and NORTH REGION in my notes to replace later. The conlang is probably going to be the only thing I make any tangible progress on this month, but I imagine other little worldbuilding details will formulate as well. My brain is constantly spinning with ideas lately.