This is MJ, welcome to Story Over Everything episode 30, and I hope I'm not gonna get stung
by a wasp, but if I do, I'll keep it in, because it'll be really funny, in retrospect.
Anyway, this episode I'm gonna be talking about my author's log, which is basically
just a recording, a breakdown day-by-day journal-like, if you must use that example, or that parallel,
to my work, that as I'm writing every day, I'm documenting my writing, I'm keeping in
a document, and which is exactly what documenting means, it's been a rough two weeks, okay?
Please forgive me, indulge me a little here.
But anyway, I've been documenting my writing by putting it into a document, believe it
or not, as opposed to putting it on like a grain of rice, and with that, I have been,
or now I'm going to be reading said document so that I can share with you what I wrote
over the course of, I don't know, the last week or so, and I totally missed an entire
week of writing because I'm not sure why.
It just didn't happen.
So again, like I said, it's been a rough two weeks or so.
So anyway, without further ado, I will talk about other things, but first I'm going to
talk about this.
So from July 30th, this is from chapter nine of my book, Grow Bug Tales, which I am still
developing.
I'm writing it as I can, and that's what you're going to hear.
Keeper Whistle walked in circles around Gnaw, Quiver, and Splash.
He called out names of places where rations could be stored and easily accessed.
He called out types of rations to be set aside and what priority each type should be given.
He had started off with the three Grow Bug cadets standing before him, waiting to receive
orders and direction from him.
But his pacing turned into a looping and then into the weaving dance around the young trio.
Splash kept his eyes locked on Keeper Whistle and moved himself to keep from showing his
back to the older Grow Bug commanding him.
Splash caught Quiver's gaze and failed to stifle a chuckle as he continued his part
of the dance with Whistle.
Gnaw sighed and asked, Keeper Whistle, is this the time for us Grow Bug cadets to be
turning ourselves in circles, or should we be focused on taking note of your instructions?
Furthermore, isn't it true that staying still and focusing on a task ahead of us is a much
better way to absorb everything you're telling us?
July 31st, continues.
What?
Keeper Whistle spun in a tight circle and stared at Gnaw.
Yes, right, I'm dancing it out.
It helps me keep everything clear in my mind.
I would expect nothing less from you, Keeper, but I'm not sure we all have the wisdom and
ability as you.
Gnaw replied, I should hope not, cadet.
Whistle resumed his circuit.
Imagine a group of raw cadets with an instructor on the same level as them.
How disastrous do you think that would be?
Very Splash laughed.
Exactly, Whistle flitted his wings approvingly.
Would bees dance when they talk?
Quiver asked, that's right, Whistle danced on.
From August 1st.
Is that why you dance?
I never thought about it before, maybe.
Seer Glimmer interrupted, speaking through a disk of light that appeared in the midst
of the group.
Keeper Whistle, where are the fungal rations from last season?
Fungus, fungus, fungus, right.
There are two caches, Crimini in the moss stands and Parasols in the south.
August 2nd.
Shall I send a cadet to fetch some?
I'm sure they'd like to do something besides watch me think and I may think more with less
of them here.
You see, it takes a- Thank you, but no, Whistle.
I know you have a lot going on and you need time to form a plan, so I don't want to take
cadets away from you at the moment.
I will go myself.
Since the parasols can be used in the healing compound, I figured I would bring some into
the main camp while chatting with the others and making sure we have clear paths.
Splash slyly turned to Quiver and said, Did you ever think you'd see a seer see you see
the seer?
I don't think you said what you meant to say.
Quiver, August 3rd, said softly, You don't?
No.
Oh no, I've done it again, Splash pouted.
Naa thumped the ground while Whistle danced again.
What are you two doing?
Splash kept twirling to keep the keeper before him.
Quiver stiffened and gestured apology and agreements towards Naa.
Quiver repeated what Whistle was saying, keeping his attention focused on the keeper's growing
list of vital supplies from August 4th.
Whistle stopped and asked, How well do you all know the camp?
Naa spoke first.
I know from corner to corner.
Splash blurted out, I know at the top and bottom, honored keeper.
Look-a-fod, cut the surplus, cadet.
I don't need to be flattered or honored.
My work speaks for itself.
Understood?
Splash minkly answered, Understood.
And you, cadet?
Quiver hesitated.
I know it well enough, keeper.
We shall see, Whistle nodded.
We do what we must, cadets.
Each of us must use his talents and perform his duties as needed.
Our talents may not help us in our duties, but duty demands won't always align with your
talents.
And with this, you must do your duty when the time comes.
This is more of an author's note than actual content from the book.
But splash twitch, suppressing a laugh.
Oh, no, that is what the book is going to say, but it's because I'm winding up for potty
humor, which I did not expect to be doing at all in any of my writing, but here I am.
So yeah, that was everything from July 30th to August 4th.
And I'm going to cap it here.
I guess next week will contain August 5th to August 11th.
Yeah, I think that's seven days worth of writing.
So please, God, I'll have the strength and the discipline and the focus to write every
single day.
And it won't be an issue for me to get these out.
And hopefully I'll have higher word counts because these word counts were bad.
125, 62, 137, 57, 104, 180, 61.
That's oh no, 61 is from the previous period.
Still not not good at all.
So life's been pretty well, I feel very blessed.
I know I'm in a good place.
I know it could always be worse.
However, for some reason, just things have been not lining up that way.
I want them to in some areas.
And that is to be transparent.
While story over everything is the chronicles of an author, artist, and analyzer, that's
me, mostly an author, though, I guess an artist, too, because I do focus on that creative part
of my work here.
I'm drawing stuff for books that I want to make and I'm writing books that I want to
make.
And I analyze stuff to think about and to sharpen my criticism and my critical mind
so that I can turn that criticism towards my own work and make it the best it can be.
I'm trying to dissect things that I analyze and post about here in order to, well, again,
sharpen my creative mind and make sure I'm making the best possible product, the best
possible, most entertaining, most well thought out thing that I can to entertain you, dear
listener.
So that's the goal.
But I have had a very hard time the last two weeks watching anything or reading anything
to analyze.
I did.
I'll get back to that later.
So yes, it's been a little difficult and that's frustrating for me.
A good thing, though, is that I feel like it's very important to get certain things
right with myself, like my health and my fitness, for example.
And I've been very focused on that the last two weeks.
And I think I've been doing a commendable job of doing that.
I've worked out very consistently five days last week, six days this week, Sunday to Friday
this week, I'll be taking a day off to rest my body.
And I think that's good.
And I'm having positive results.
I feel better.
I have less aches and pains.
I have I don't know if I have more mental clarity, but it's definitely taking up a lot
of my time and I have some family issues which are totally non-serious.
And they're more a result of good things than bad things that are also absorbing some of
my time and making it harder for me to find time or make time to do these different things.
But I've been focused on it.
I've been staying up late if I have to, to make sure I'm writing and drawing every day.
And because my focus is I want to get my health right.
I want to discipline myself.
I guess I'm disciplining my body to then discipline my mind and my will, maybe, to do the creative
work that I want to do.
And then the third priority would be to do this analysis stuff that I want to do as well
because that's part of my marketing plan.
But it's also it's fun.
It's recreational.
I enjoy so much to be able to analyze something and talk about it and share it with people.
And if it aids me in marketing and putting myself in front of like minded individuals
who enjoy the things that I enjoy because I'm writing about the types of things that
I enjoy with my own unique stamp on them, then you know, all the better.
More is the better.
I think is the proper way to say that.
Like I said, it's been very, very, very, very, very difficult to do that.
And it's getting exhausting and frustrating.
And if I let things this happened last year in 2022 and around July, everything just fell
off for me.
And I had a really hard time recovering.
And it all honestly took me six months or more to get back on the ball and start being
consistent again.
In fact, there was a long hiatus for story over everything as well as everything else
I did.
And that started at that time.
And I would definitely like to avoid that.
But I want to get back on the ball next week and just who knows, maybe this working out
thing and being more disciplined with my eating and everything like that is going to help
me to have to sharpen myself into the blade that I need to be to do everything I want
to do.
So we shall see.
And I hope that's how it works out.
But that's yeah, that's some of my woes and sorrows outside of writing life.
And there's my writing that you hear that I was able to do in the midst of all that.
And I think it was decent.
Definitely it's a first draft, so it's going to be punched up.
But I'm having fun with these characters.
I didn't know.
I knew that now was going to be like a complainer, but I didn't know he was going to be like
a sour puss teachers pet, like doesn't want other people have fun.
And therefore he complains about that and like tries to ruin it for them.
I did not know that was going to happen at all.
And all right.
So I've got the great interrupter here.
This is actually.
Yeah, anyway, I don't want to blame anybody for my actions.
Oh, you want to go see them?
Let's go.
OK, so again, Gorilla Podcasting.
That's what you can expect.
You can expect my kids to interrupt.
You can expect me to be using a phone.
Now the bar is going to be super hot.
Don't touch that.
And yeah, so anyway, getting back on task.
I'm not going to complain about the vicissitudes of life anymore, but I just want to use that
word real quick.
I will tell you that I did last week, actually, I believe it was last week when I did nothing
and I had the Princess and Curdie mining leaves story of everything lined up or rather it
was basically in the can.
Yeah, I put like 10 or 15 minutes of work into it and then I released it.
I was like, hey, stop it.
OK, I'm doing the best I can.
Anyway, so I did also do some work on Typhoon and developing the system.
And I shared it with my daughter, my eldest.
She didn't give me any feedback yet.
She's a burgeoning self taught author.
So she you know, I described this as her.
She said it sounded cool, but you know, she doesn't have it yet in hand or I know that
she's utilizing it yet, but I definitely gave her the information for it.
And I looked over my notes for it and I developed it out a little bit more.
And I'm not going to say it's like 80 percent done, but maybe it's like 50 percent done
broad strokes anyway.
I've got down a lot of good information and Typhoon is supposed to be a system that fuses
the it's kind of based on the eight point story arc, but it takes it to the extreme
and it's a system for developing all aspects of your story for core aspects of your story.
The players, which is the cast or the.
Yeah, the players.
The players, the place, the props.
And I can't remember what the fourth P is, but basically for the, you know, the superhero
or pulp type stuff I want to write in particular, maybe even fantasy, like there should be magical
items in those.
Those are the props.
The players are all the characters, the good and the bad.
The place describes like when it's set, you know, the time it's a setting basically, but
it's, you know, there's four piece.
So that's kind of fun and cool.
So I did that.
I worked on that a lot and I feel really good about it.
So I'm not going to belabor it anymore, but just to tell you, I'm moving forward with
Typhoon and I'm so tempted to stop writing grow bug tales.
I know, I know.
I'm so tempted to finish to stop writing grow bug tales and just focus on Typhoon, but I'm
not going to let myself do that.
I need to finish Typhoon.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no.
I need to finish growing tales first, get that book published and work on marketing
time stuff, then I can develop Typhoon and then I can move on to my other stories.
Cause I do want to write so many other stories.
And the great thing about the Typhoon system is that it allows you to write stories at
any scale, which is something I'm really interested in.
And it makes sure that you do all the planning ahead of time.
Unlike do well, like I did with grow bug tales where it was all done after the fact.
And I think it'll give me like the courage and the confidence to make a series from go.
And I can, I'll know that I'm making a series and I will put in all the work to think about
the different implications of how to do it.
I know I see you want to bring them to me.
I'll think about all the different aspects I need to, you know, what is the world like?
And it's going to keep me from wasting time, but I think I'm wasting your time by going
into this again.
So just there's a little teaser about Typhoon.
If you're interested, ask me about it later.
If you're holding off your interest and you don't want to ask me, that's fine.
It'll come out sooner or later.
And I think you can benefit from it.
So there's that about Typhoon.
And the last thing I want to talk about is it's not that I didn't read anything at all
this week.
I actually listened to Daniel, Daniel or Dale, Dale Carnegie's, how to win friends and influence
people this week.
That was really interesting.
I very much enjoyed that.
It was super interesting because then I listened to a financial planner of sorts talking about,
well, you know, how to earn money and how to think about money and how to do things.
And it was really fascinating.
This gentleman said that the things that will make you successful at business will make
you successful with your family.
They're the same kinds of things that you need.
However, there are some people who neglect their families, despite the fact that they
do not neglect their businesses.
And that's tragic, right?
But it was super interesting because as I was listening to how to win friends, influence
people, it made me think about families.
And even the author says something about being good to your family and sort of using the
system of how to win friends and influence people to, you know, be good and be there,
be a part of your family.
But he also stressed that, you know, just because people have financial success doesn't
mean that they're healthy and doesn't mean that they're doing well, that that's not true
success.
And it was really interesting because it's an older book.
So it's got like an older ethos to it.
But I was actually like fairly proud that this like secular.
Yeah, I mean, there was mentions of God or the Bible or whatever a few times.
But like, as far as I know, they're secular.
And it's just like a generic, like American, you know, European kind of like God is a concept
rather than God is an actual, you know, moral, personal entity that you, you know, commune
with and, you know, love and all that stuff.
So it was really interesting.
And if yeah, so I mean, I believe in God.
So I felt that I found that charming and refreshing and kind of wonderful.
And it made me think about some books about being good.
Like there's a book called On Yourself.
And I don't know what that book's about.
But I think you could call How to Win Friends and Influence People on yourself and it would
have the same or greater effect.
But because it was made at a classier time in a more, you know, outwardly moral time
where people cared about representing themselves in a certain way, it didn't have that title.
It has a much nicer, much more family friendly title.
And it's something that I want my eldest to read and all my kids to read at some point
soon.
Like she should read it now this year.
And then maybe in a couple of years, I'll have the next kid up read and then we can
go down the line because I think it's just a really good, really interesting book.
So that was cool.
And I need to add that to my notes that I talked about how to win friends and influence
people anyway.
So the last thing I want to mention is I did listen to The Light Princess, which is a fairy
tale by George McDonald of The Princess and Curdie and The Princess and the Goblin or
strike that reverse, The Princess and the Goblin and then The Princess and Curdie.
And that was really interesting.
I liked it for the most part.
There was something towards the end that kind of bothered me, especially because it played
it differently than it did in like The Princess and Curdie.
But then again, given the state of The Light Princess, you know, whose name I don't even
remember.
That's funny.
It didn't really matter.
There's a prince and a princess in it and there's a king and a queen and an evil princess
who's the good princess's aunt.
And that's all you really need to know, which I guess lines up with the fact that it's in
the fairy tale genre, because to some extent, you just need to know the archetypes or generally
what the characters are, not their names and their blood type and all that kind of stuff.
So anyway, I found that to be an interesting story.
I liked it a lot.
I think I do.
Well, I was going to cover it on a story over everything this week in a skimming leaves
episode, but I decided not to do it because I was going to do it in a rather rushed manner
and I didn't want to do that.
And I also wanted to make sure I know, son.
I also wanted to make sure that I was attending to this stuff here and recording my readings
and doing the office log because it's been too long since I've dealt with those and I
don't want to continue collecting them.
So anyway, thank you for indulging me.
If you made it all the way to the end of the episode, I really appreciate it.
And I think it was rather nice of you to stick around and listen to some of my ramblings
because I'm definitely a little distracted, a little off focus, a little gorilla, if you
will, at the time.
Come on, mister.
We got to go.
Come on.
We got to go.
Real quick.
Uh oh.
Okay.
So.
You're okay.
You're going to be all right.
Come on.
Oops.
There we go.
Okay.
Anyway, folks, are you okay, little buddy?
Yeah.
Okay.
So little buddy's good.
I'm good.
And I'm going to once again, thank you for spending your time with me and hearing me
out as I work on this stuff.
The intention is to get better every day, every week incrementally.
And if you're sticking with me through this leg of the journey, that's really neat.
And I hope you'll see a lot of growth in me and I hope we'll see a lot of growth in me
too.
And yeah, I'm going to stop waxing on and on because I can do that quite well.
And I will let you go.
This is MJ signing out.
Don't forget to check out all the things that I do over at MJMUNOZ.COM
There's going to be a little blurb here at the end and links in the show notes everywhere
where you're seeing this, hearing this, watching it, listening to it, whatever you're doing.
I hope you enjoyed that.
Go to MJMUNOZ.COM to leave any questions, comments, or other feedback you might have.
There you can find all of my analysis, art and fiction.
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Look around.
You're sure to find something else that you'll enjoy as well.
This has been a story over everything production.