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 the story over everything. This is episode 43 and this time it's Grow Bug Tales chapter 11 part 4.
So this is my fourth week basically, documentation of my fourth week working on Grow Bug Tales chapter 11.
This contains the author's log from November 4th to November 10th, however I did not record on November 4th or November 10th.
So really it's the author's log from November 5th to November 9th.
So that was five days worth of writing that I did during that one week and that brought me pretty close to ending things.
And that's basically it. So it's been a couple weeks out that I'm actually recording this since I...
Anyway, something crazy happened but anyway, here it is. All the stuff is ready for you.
The audio is ready so listen to the snippets of the chapters and I'll talk about it afterwards.
I failed to make time to write on November 4th, 2023.
November 5th, 2023, my 10 minute writing session. This is continuing in Grow Bug Tales chapter 11. This is part 21.
What was that? Chirp spun in place to see the Mockwing bellowing at her and Quiver.
But I heard it. Not enough! Quiver shouted and nudged her aside as the foe struck a blow between them.
Let's get her! Chirp called to Quiver.
The Mockwing swept its head towards Chirp, beak snapping.
How? Quiver asked.
It advanced, snapping at Quiver, then turning to Chirp.
It wants you! You think? She dodged another peck.
I have an idea. Great. What?
That was 79 words and it took me 11 minutes to write.
My 10 minute writing session for the 6th of November, 2023. This is Grow Bug Tales chapter 11, session 22.
Be the bait. Bait? Why? For a trap. What trap? I'm working on that.
Waaah! Chirp narrowly escaped another peck. Just like that. I'm not trying to lead it. I'm trying to not die.
Good, Chirp. Just follow me.
Quiver dashed through branches and bows. Chirp followed after him and the Mockwing followed her.
They looked like a bizarre...
That took me 10 minutes and 50...
That took me 10 minutes to write and it was 59 words.
My 10 minute writing session for the 7th of November, 2023.
This is Grow Bug Tales chapter 11, part 23. And it goes like this.
...flying worm or something. I know what I'm going to call that thing now. It's an editor's note.
I'll just let it lie for now.
They circled the shrub for a while until Quiver shouted to Chirp, I've got an idea!
He dove into the foliage and emerged through the other side.
Chirp and the Mockwing followed. The Mockwing had some twigs and leaves sticking through it, but it rolled, shaking off the debris.
They ran two more circuits through the bush. Then Quiver stopped suddenly.
Chirp almost crashed into him, but swerved past. A jet of dust shot from Quiver, covering the Mockwing.
Okay Chirp, get ready to...
That took me 11 minutes to write that and that was 88 words.
My 10 minute writing session for November 8, 2023. I'm continuing in Grow Bug Tales chapter 11. This is part 24.
Blast!
Chirp pivoted and put the enemy in her sights.
Now!
Chirp chirped with a piercing sound that worked in concert to stop the foe.
The Mocking... Sorry, the Mockwing froze, caught in the bushy foliage.
Chirp and Quiver dashed to meet the Mockwing and...
That took me 10 minutes to write and it was 43 words.
My 10 minute writing session for November 11, 2023 is Grow Bug Tales chapter 11, part 26 it looks like.
Is that right? Hold on. No, no, no. November 9th... That's part 25. Okay.
Dot, dot, dot. I tacked it with light arms and radiance.
Now that the Mockwing had been stopped, the two cadets now had the time to apply their attacks for long enough to hurt it.
As the moments ticked on, they burned away at the creature. Puffs of mist shed from the bird as they continued to attack.
The bird had been stunned by Chirp's sonic attack and Quiver's paralyzing spray, but it was too strong.
Neither of the cadets' attacks by itself would have hurt the hobnots, but together they were able to deal serious damage.
The Mockwing shrieked with rage and thrashed. It was not ready to be vanquished. It broke free and dove for the pair.
That took me 11 minutes to write and that was 115 words.
I came across... everything is divine providence, so it wasn't an accident.
But I came across something just the other day, I believe yesterday, and this person was talking about documenting things.
And they hear all this advice from creators or creatives. Document everything. Document everything.
And she was saying, well yeah, documentation is good, but I have a glut of information and it's all just like digital garbage.
It's like I have a digital junkyard here. And what do we need to do to make this work? We need to process our information.
So yeah, in effect it's interesting. I am documenting and chronicling my creative process, but the purpose of it is primarily I'm documenting to keep myself moving and making the stuff.
Making the actual art, the books. And both the written art and the drawing art, the illustrated art, I guess you could say.
I'm such a self-taught everything that I just make up terms for what I do. It's kind of strange, but anyway.
So yeah, I'm a self-taught illustrator, self-taught writer, and I am documenting my writing every day when I do it, which is the plan to do it every day.
And I'm documenting my drawing every day to do it, which again, the plan is to do it every day. And when I do do it, I do document it.
And I'm using it all, and I'm figuring out a way I can use it all even better.
So I had gotten into a place where I thought, well, I don't really need to draw anything for these Grow Bug books anymore.
I was for a little while, and then I got away from it, and I took a long time off of doing anything creative, which was not good for me.
Not good for my soul. But when I finally got back to it, I thought, okay, well, I'm going to work on the Grow Bug book.
I'm going to keep writing that, and then I'm going to work on my superhero books by drawing stuff for them, and that'll be great.
And they'll give me a creative outlet, and I'll be working on two different things, and it'll be a nice little break for me to go from one to the other.
That way I'm not just all Grow Bug all the time and all superheroes all the time, especially because the way my superhero books are working out,
well, the way Grow Bug kills and my other stuff is worked out, it's taken me a long, long, long, long, long time to get them done.
I'm hoping and praying that with my new methodology of making sure I dedicate the 10 or more minutes a day to the writing and the drawing,
that I'll actually be able to have more discipline and more focus and really create a workflow for myself so that I'm getting the job done more quickly.
However, I also need to change the way I approach my work, and I'm thinking I need to draw and write.
I need to draw what I'm writing about or write what I'm drawing about.
That makes sense. I need to write what I'm drawing about or draw what I'm writing about.
Well, I have no idea what I just said. Anyway, in between the time I was working on this book,
I went from drawing some Grow Bug tales, stuff, covers and little character sketches and things like that,
to exclusively drawing stuff for my superhero world, which is good.
But I realized recently that the act of drawing for my superhero books gave me all these ideas for these superheroes
and really invigorated me and made me want to write them.
And actually, I almost stopped working on Grow Bug Tales, doing the draft to doing all the revisions for draft to and cleaning it up,
or I guess cleaning up the first manuscript and turning it into the second manuscript.
I almost stopped that to write a short story about a superhero, partly for money,
because I found a cool group of people and the opportunity to get involved with anthologies, contribute to anthologies,
which I will discuss at some later point.
And partly because I was just so taken with the idea. I was sketching out this superhero guy and it seemed, well, it just it felt fun.
It felt new. And I've said this before, but I've never I haven't thought about it in the context of actually writing recently,
that when I draw, I come up with story ideas, drawing actually.
And I don't do it purposely. I can just start drawing. Oh, I want to draw a lady with a skull sword.
OK, I started drawing a lady with a skull sword. Why does this lady have a skull sword? Where is she from?
Whose skull is this? Do we know is somebody dear to her? Is it an ancient skull sword?
Whatever. As I'm making the drawings and manifesting this image from my head,
something happens and there are story ideas that emanate as well, along with the actual drawing.
This I believe this even works with characters who I've drawn before.
If I draw them again, I start thinking about them in a different way.
And it just kind of opens up this channel. So I actually after I finished the book entirely,
I sketched out the grow bugs again. I tried to make them look a certain way.
I tried to make them look like Digimon because that's one of my influences. And I love I love Digimon so much.
At least the first four seasons. Yeah, four, including Frontier Frontier School. Anyway, so
I was trying to draw on that and I just something fell off.
I couldn't make the bugs cute enough. And I thought, well, maybe I don't want them to look like Digimon.
Digimon, maybe I want them to be like Digimon, but look like real insects.
And I toyed around with that idea for a while. But as I was developing the book, I thought,
how do these guys do anything? I just have this vague. They shine a light power.
Does the light come off their wings? Does it come off their bodies? Does it come off their antennae?
I really don't know. The mechanical issues stayed foggy for me because I didn't give myself the opportunity.
When I'm only writing 10 minutes a day, I don't want to document, oh, what should I do?
And I did do that along the way. Some of my documentation of my writing, some of my 10 minute writing sessions were
me writing down notes and outlining, asking a bunch of questions. Oh, should I do this? Should I do that?
What about this idea? And that's OK. But it's not. That's OK.
But I think it's more efficient for me to in the future think about my story and think about my characters
and how they work by drawing them and saying, OK, well, what's going to look like physically?
How big is this thing? You know, what are the details of its texture? What are the details of its body?
And I ended up doing these sketches that I really enjoy. I did a bunch of them.
I mean, I just drew bug after bug after bug or pro bug after pro bug after pro bug.
And it really helped open my mind up to how these things work.
And I had eventually come up with this idea of, oh, they have these light arms, which you heard mentioned in the book.
You know, the reading of this. They have these light arms that they can do things with. They can manipulate.
They're literally like tentacles or tendrils of light that come out of their bodies somehow.
And it's just a part of their nature. And they can use them to manipulate things.
They have gross motor skills when they're younger. They get better as they go on. They become fine motor skills.
They get additional arms. They start off with two and then eventually they get I think six is what they have in the developed stage.
And they don't I don't think they get any more than that.
They make it so the artisans have as many as many arms, as many tentacles, as many stellar beams as what they're called now, I think, or astral beams as they need to have.
And yeah, I think I think that's something I should do. Anyway, so.
It's really interesting. It was it was kind of humbling to go back and look at my to one look at my revisions over the last week or two.
Over the last week, I've been looking at my revisions.
But then last night I made time to turn all of these documentation recordings, which are, you know, 10 to 15 minutes long, 10 to 12 minutes long, and shrink them down and then actually read what I had written and then make commentary on it, which you don't hear in this.
You'll find that somewhere else exclusively on the individual video video by video basis.
It's like shorts. Anyway, they're short shorter videos, a couple of minutes long, though, on YouTube or TikTok, whatever.
And you can find them linked where you can just find them. So anyway.
But yeah, so I. Really stumbled and really faulted because I didn't understand the physiology and how the bodies worked and certain details about the characters.
And I feel like had I started drawing them with an idea of I need a guardian angel bug who can do all these different things.
How can I do that? What will that look like? And I just started doing the drawing process that in that process, I would have had a much more rapid development.
I would have been able to figure things out much more quickly and it would have been a lot more concrete and it wouldn't have led to me.
I like the fact that I was able to fudge it and do this thing where I leave things in square brackets so I can come back to it later and fix it.
But I dislike how shaky the ground was on my word count was really low throughout this week.
These five days of writing, it was like I like 58. I had 70 something I had, you know, one that was like 120 maybe like 109 really low word counts.
My target would be to like if I could write at how fast I want, I would want to do 250 words a minute so I could do 5000 words an hour or something like I think it works out something like that.
I would love that to be my pace in order to write that quickly. I can't be developing things on the fly.
I need to do more planning and more outlining. And I thought I'd done a good enough job when I started grow like tails going from a blurb to expanding a blurb into an outline and then expanding that outline a little bit is not enough.
That's what I did. That was my method for this. It could work for I mean this is a short story. It's less than it's a of around 18000 words.
So it definitely it's doable but it's taken me a long time both because I think the method of me writing only 10 minutes a day and having the lack of outline.
So it makes more sense while I'm itchy while I want to get to writing already. I think it makes more sense to just put myself through the paces, draw every character, draw all the monsters, draw all the different aspects of the world.
Before I start writing and it's OK to start with the idea. OK. What's the idea. There are guardian angel bugs that protect children from monsters in the night. OK.
What are those guardian angel bugs look like. What are those monsters look like. If I were to assign myself the task of sketching those things out first it would help me work through all the practical implications and help me develop everything.
And it would help me to say OK well I know all these things about these characters. I have a you know a Bible I have a guide to them a field guide if you will to the world of the grow bugs.
And I have these things that I can work off of. And now that I have all these ideas stored up now I can be creative and just flow and write and work and not worry about making up as I go along.
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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