This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at mjmunoz.com
Welcome to Story Over Everything. This is Story Over Everything, episode 32. And one day I'll get over my difficulty saying that title.
But anyway, you're not here to hear me be funny, because that's not the point of the show.
To talk about my journey as an author and as a creative, I'm currently working on Robug Tales Chapter 9. I don't know how much longer I'll be writing Robug Tales Chapter 9.
It could be a while still, we'll see. But it's a children's picture book, or actually it's a chapter book that is a companion to children's picture books.
And I'm specifically in Chapter 9, I'm bouncing a bunch of characters off of each other. And it's been really interesting and I've been having a lot of fun writing it.
So I'll go ahead and read to you my daily log. I have a goal of writing a minimum of 10 minutes a day.
A very busy schedule, so 10 minutes is all I can do right now, or is all I've been able to get myself to do right now.
How can I do more? I'm not sure, but if I think about it and I put that question to myself in that way, I'm sure I can find more time and get this book written more quickly.
So I'll just go ahead and share with you over the last week what I have been writing in Robug Tales.
So in just a moment I will find the correct date and I will share it with you.
By the way, I'm going to go ahead and just say the day of the week, or the day of the month, and year I guess.
I'll include that and then I'll say, I'll read what I wrote and I'll just kind of quietly let it go by like that.
So there's a marker there of what I wrote when.
August 12, 2023. I didn't write anything.
August 13, 2023.
Yon closed the circuit, the trail of light behind her overlapping with itself.
She called out, coming down, and dashed forward.
The structure collapsed in a few moments.
She reeled in the tendril as she surveyed her work.
Brunt laughed, nice work, cadet.
Babel looked back and forth between the hardworking keeper and the least hardworking Robug cadet of his group.
How did you do that, Yon?
What do you mean, Babel?
I mean, Babel sidled up to Yon and lowered his voice.
I've never seen you take a serious interest in any kind of work like this.
I usually love this kind of work, but as hard as I've been trying, I can't seem to get the hang of it.
I don't get it. What's your secret?
Yon laughed and turned to her friend.
August 14, 2023.
The secret is that I don't want to be here doing this right now.
Come now.
If our lives weren't in danger, are you telling me you would choose to be here doing this right now?
Of course not. Why would you?
I feel the same way.
Well, you're trying hard to do your best because...
Because...
Why do you always push yourself so hard?
Babel exclaimed.
What kind of question is that?
Anything worthwhile is difficult.
So you have to do your best or else you won't do any good.
But Babel, are you saying that everything difficult is worthwhile?
Of course.
Really?
Yes.
Give me an example.
Quick.
Yon challenged.
Babel sputtered.
Clearly this is difficult and worthwhile.
Can you think of anything else?
How about all our training?
Fighting hobgots is difficult and worthwhile.
There.
What's your point?
This is my point.
What about watching the stars?
August 15.
What about enjoying the breeze?
What about enjoying a feast?
Aren't those all worthwhile and worthy things?
Babel admitted.
Well, yes.
And they take almost no work to do.
What is the toil in them?
Well, you have to make the feast before you enjoy the feast, but the other two are really good examples.
So we agree that worthwhile and difficult are two separate matters.
I suppose.
But again, what's the point?
What does that have to do with me failing and you succeeding here?
Babel waved toward the piles of rubble Yon had felled with ease.
What have they told us?
Your focus determines your reality, right?
Well, my focus is to get through this and get to the next good thing.
I want to survive so I can live my life and do what I love.
I'm not trying to keep myself dying.
I want to keep living.
Babel scoffed.
And I don't?
You don't think I have things I don't want to miss out on?
There you go again.
Listen to your words.
What do you want?
What do you wake up for?
What do you mean?
August 16.
I mean exactly that.
What is the point of your life?
Babel thought and said, the point of my life is to protect kids from hobnots.
And that's it?
Well, I don't feel like it so much right now, but I'm supposed to protect you and all the other girlbugs, too.
Okay, I love you, too, brother.
But why?
Do you want us all to die?
No, I do not.
But we've already established that.
I want us all to live.
And I want to live.
Oh, I want to live so much.
For what, Yon?
I asked you first.
Fine, Babel grumbled.
I get up and do all this.
I want to try so hard because I just don't feel right if I don't.
It makes me feel good, happy.
Like I belong where I am.
Like I belong when I am doing my best to learn and grow.
I don't want to quit.
I don't feel like giving up when I meet a challenge.
I want to overcome it and conquer it.
What's so wrong with that, Yon?
August 17.
Yon chuckled.
Nothing at all.
It's good to see you fired up about something.
What?
Why the change of heart?
Because your heart changed first, silly.
You were all duty and doing before.
Now I can see that you're crazy about being exactly who you were meant to be.
What do you mean?
I mean you actually do love things right.
Like you do love things right.
You love stepping up and doing hard things because they are hard.
I don't get it myself, but I think I get you a little better now.
Wow.
Yon nodded sagely.
And what do you love, Yon?
I love to just be here.
I love being here to take in as much life as I can.
That's why I like to do nothing.
Doing nothing leads me to so many great somethings.
I really want to just be a wanderer so I can see everything there is and do some of everything there is to do.
That could take your whole life.
How long do you plan to keep on doing nothing and drifting?
Until my last breath babble.
That's why I don't want to waste one moment of this gift they call the present.
You know what, Yon?
What?
You're a real odd one.
Takes one to know one.
Sure.
So how does that thought process make you so good at doing this stuff?
I still don't get that.
Here's my secret.
I'm sorry.
August 18th.
Here's my secret.
Yon gestured elaborately.
I want so much to be doing nothing that I focus all my energy into doing something.
Getting in the way of my nothing and do it with all my heart for the least possible amount of time so I can get back to that sweet nothing.
That's it?
Babble real.
So you're telling me you are so good at this because you're lazy.
Lazy is such an ugly word.
I prefer to think of myself as goal oriented.
Doesn't that sound nicer?
It does.
But does it sound true?
If you see things my way, yes.
How would you describe yourself?
Uptight, breechy, stuck up, no fun?
That's enough.
Thanks.
Babble tensed for a moment, seemingly holding himself back, then relaxed.
I would say I am persistent, tenacious, maybe passionate about precision?
Babble the precise.
Yon tried out the title and gestured approvingly.
I can hang out with the precise grow bug.
Can you stand to be around someone as goal oriented as me?
Yes I can.
But I think I have a better title for you.
Of course you do.
Well yes.
How do you like Yon the efficient?
Ooh.
Yon waggled her antenna.
I like that a lot.
Well Yon, will you teach me how to do this efficiently?
I'm not sure I feel up to it right now.
Yon dismissed.
And that is the end of my writing, so I believe that's six days worth of writing for this book.
And I gotta say, I feel so badly every time I say or think this.
I love my writing.
I love what I'm doing.
I love what I'm putting down.
The tone of...
Man, it's funny.
It's so funny for me.
So I'm done talking about the reading of the book.
And now I'm just going to give an anecdote or a little story time.
So I really want to make a bigger superhero universe that has basically nothing to do with this kiddie stuff.
And yet I think these girl bug books are cool.
And I think they're interesting.
I think they're neat.
And I think there's a real good market in children's books.
And I almost am thinking about pivoting from doing my superhero stuff
as something for teens or young adults or whatever to making it be kid-friendly.
Because there really is not high-quality, candid media out there, in my opinion.
My wife has read so many books to our kids from the library, and there's so many of them that are so bad.
There's a lot of older books that we like.
And I'm trying to convince my eldest, and I think she's pretty much convinced of it basically,
that she should just read the classics.
I'm talking about Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne and I don't know who else,
but she wants to do Shakespeare as well.
And anyway, she at first read modern books and she kind of got into them,
but then as time went on and she tried to explore more modern books,
she had a hard time reading anything past the 2000s.
That met the family's approval, and she would vet them herself and tell me she rejected them.
So that's good.
And she finally gave in and started reading older stuff.
I convinced her to The Great Lord of the Rings, and she read all of The Chronicles of Narnia,
and the Bredain series, which is fabulous, and some George McDonald, which is amazing,
which I've talked about here in Skimming Leaves episodes of Story Over Everything,
so I won't belabor that.
But I want there to be more stuff in that vein.
And I was thinking about marketing myself and my books, my superhero books,
as like if Stan Lee and J.R.R. Tolkien had a son and he wrote books,
these are the kinds of superhero adventure books he would write.
And well, I think that's...
Well, I hope that's what I aspire to, right?
That's what I aspire to, and that would be my marketing.
If you love anything in the Marvel Universe,
if you love anything from Lord of the Rings, here it is.
But I really like The Hobbit more than I like The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And to me, Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia are closer to The Hobbit than they are to Lord of the Rings,
whereas I feel like the Space trilogy is closer to Lord of the Rings than it is to Narnia or The Hobbit.
And anyway, I hope I'm not speaking esoterically about these books because they're great books,
but they're also...I'm okay speaking esoterically because these are my milieu,
and they're the things that I love in the literary world,
and they're the kinds of things I want to emulate.
And George MacDonald is behind...not behind Lewis and Tolkien, but he is a forebearer of them,
and they were both fans of his writing.
And I'm a fan of some of his writing so far.
The Light Princess was a little weird, which I think I mentioned previously, so I won't talk about it extensively here.
A bit of a weird book, or a bit of a weird fairy tale.
Most of it's good, but there's just some stuff at the end that's odd.
But I do like the imagery in it overall.
Anyway, so that's what I want to write.
But...and Stanley himself didn't want to write comic books,
and he wasn't proud of the fact that he was writing comic books because he wanted to be the next great American novelist.
And I sort of feel that way, but I also sort of don't feel that way,
because I want there to be tons of great books for my kids.
Like, I haven't read the Warriors series. One of my daughters would definitely be interested in that.
And there's like Redwall, so these are, you know, talking animal adventure stories, but they're a little bit more than that.
But anyway, I've been trying to read as much Kid-Lit as I can,
and basically get myself set up for success with that,
because I want to be a Kid-Lit author, to some extent. At least I want to have success in the Kid-Lit or children's books that I am going to write,
because I'm going to dedicate myself and write them as well as I can,
in the meantime while I'm waiting to move on to my, you know, bigger superhero stuff.
But again, I'm almost wondering if I should just pivot and say,
you know what, I'll write these books for kids. I'll write smaller books for kids.
And, you know, I can do more of them, and, you know, maybe I train myself.
I was going to train myself on the Grow Bug series and the Dragon fantasy series I have coming up next.
And maybe I'll just kind of slow down and, you know, read more fantasy and more Kid-Lit and focus on just,
take things one step at a time. I've got to finish Grow Bug Tales first.
Then I've got to move on to the, you know, kids and the Grow Bug books,
and just get all those projects done and then move on to the Dragon book.
And then see about, you know, am I going to make the pivot to writing, like, kids superhero books,
or am I going to move somewhere else?
Because I've tried to look at kids superhero books too, and they seem to edge towards silly nonsense.
And I would rather there be, like, an earnest kids superhero thing out there.
And I think books could be the place to do that, especially, I was planning on doing longer series,
like 12 book series, and they don't have to be incredibly long.
And I'm in the middle of, I'm almost, yeah, I'm about in the middle of reading through Harry Potter right now,
or listening to it rather, and that's an interesting one, because, you know, it's for kids, but it ages up with them.
And I could either do, I could do, you know, multiple series, one where it ages up with kids,
one where it doesn't age up with kids. I have a couple kids superheroes planned already.
And I thought, well, I'm thinking maybe I can just write those for a while.
And, you know, with each book's success, I could, you know, use that to egg me on to write the next one,
even though I'm kind of going to plan them all out ahead of time loosely so I have a direction, a trajectory,
and then I can fine tune it as I need to, you know, per book and for feedback from kids.
So, anyway, I think that would be good. But, yeah, I got off on a tangent because I was talking about how much I like my own writing.
And I think it's good to be pleased. There's definitely errors and there's definitely things I need to clean up and fix.
But I do like the character dynamics. And, like, it was funny, I was telling my daughter the other day,
it's kind of trite to say, like, oh, just, you know, make the cast as diverse as possible.
And I mean that in the right way. And it'll automatically be exciting because having a diverse cast,
having a cast that is from different places in whatever way and thinks differently from each other, has different cultural backgrounds and things like that,
it will create, it should create conflict. However, if your people are good people, your characters are good people,
they should be able to resolve the conflicts morally and it should be exciting and interesting and compelling.
And it should be, you know, not freaky but educational and informative and illustrative to kids or anybody, really, reading your books.
It's illustrative to your audience of how to deal with that kind of conflict. And I think that's a good thing.
So the primary goal is to make the stuff entertaining. The secondary goal is to make it impactful in a positive way.
I don't know, I guess the third goal is to make money. And I think if you make it entertaining and it's impactful, it should make money.
And I don't know if more of the money or the success from the books comes from making sure that it's entertaining versus impactful.
But I definitely think for myself, all three things are important.
And I'm being entertained by the character shenanigans that I have going on between my characters or interactions, not shenanigans.
There are shenanigans, but the shenanigans are just part of the interactions.
But I mean, you know, I read it to you. Of course, it needs to be edited and I pause a little too long in some places.
But overall, that's the intent. That's what I was intending to write. And it's sure to undergo revisions.
But I mean, I like it. I think it's fun. I think it's cool.
I like using these characters or interactions and the fact that they're, you know, if you don't have the context for the rest of the chapter,
basically, the grow bugs are under threat. They're magical bugs that act as like a guardian angels to kids.
And they are in danger because something, one of the types of creatures that comes and attacks kids sometimes is actually coming for them to attack them and kill them,
or to stop them so that, you know, they murder all these grow bug guardians.
Then that means that in their little section of the world, they'll be able to attack children and harm them better and have more success and more, you know,
more flourishing at the expense of the suffering of the children. Right.
And the grow bugs are trying to defend themselves because they're in danger from this threat.
And they've paired off and they're working in teams to do everything that they need to do in order to prepare themselves for the coming attack.
And I decided I'm going to pair off kids with the older, wiser instructors who are leading them in doing different things to prepare for the attack.
And I'm just I'm having a blast. And, you know, I'm not writing as much as I want to as far as the volumes, volume of words per day or whatever.
But what I am writing, I am enjoying. And like this is my passion. This is, you know, like like John is talking about with with Babel there.
Like this is what gets me going. This is, you know, I feel wrong. I feel bad if I don't write.
And so, yeah, as much as I want this to be successful and I want to sell it and market it and, you know, make money off these books,
I'm also writing them just for my own my own happiness, my own sanity, my own joy.
It's pretty awesome. So anyway, I hope that my passion comes through and helps yield me success.
But until it does, until I'm ready to release stuff, I'm just going to have to keep hammering away, chipping away and putting in the work because there is no other way to get the results.
You have to put in the work to get the results. And I don't know. I don't really have a lesson.
I'm just kind of telling the story and sharing some of my thoughts on my own process and reflecting on it. And it's funny because, you know, there's the thing life imitates art.
Well, I guess talking about the passion and all that other stuff, I am kind of, you know, my life is now mimicking or copying or, yeah,
mimicking the art that I'm putting down. So anyway, that's pretty much all I have to say for now.
I thank you for your time and attention. And I ask that you come back for another story of everything. I am playing with the idea of doing an interview every now and then.
And I have an idea for somebody who I'd like to do an interview with and I'm going to buy my time and see if it's if it's the right move or not.
And I like doing this show by myself. I think it's better to do it that way for a lot of reasons. But if you're listening to this and you think there's somebody I should interview or if you like the idea of doing interviews or dislike it strongly,
leave a comment and let me know. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. So that's all I have to say for now. Until next time, folks, take care. This is MJ signing out.
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.
I cover books, tokusatsu, comic books, anime, and more. Look around. You're sure to find something else that you'll enjoy as well. This has been a Story Over Everything production.