This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at mjmunoz.com.
This is Story Over Everything, Episode 23. If my calculations are correct, it should be releasing on June 16th, which is a Friday.
Bright and early in the morning so you can get it and listen to it right away and have that motivate you to do some writing that day.
Or any other day that you might listen to it. But anyway, I am here to do the episode. I should be working on Grow Bug, or sorry, rather Grow Bug Tales Chapter 8.
Which Grow Bug Tales Chapter 8 features the story of Glitch the Grow Bug from Zev and the Broken Bonds. Grow Bug Tales, Zev and the Broken Bonds.
And I don't know how much I've discussed my new style of titling, but I very much like that.
Because everything I, because I basically want to write everything in a series format, I need a title, you know, nub or whatever.
A universal title that applies to everything. And then I'm probably going to be going eponymous, yeah eponymous and naming it after a character.
And then giving them a subtitle of some sort that is relevant to them and to the story. It's thematic to their story.
Even if it's a children's picture book, because all my children's picture books have themes in them, or a theme each.
And that's just kind of how I want to write. So that being said, I am currently working on this Zev and the Broken Bonds.
And what I like about that title style specifically for these books is that I can have that, you know, with the and there, it puts some distance between the character and the subtitle.
So that subtitle, Broken Bonds, can refer to Zev feeling distance from his cousins and his sister. But you know, that's natural, right?
And it can also refer to Zev feeling, or rather Glitch, the grow bug, feeling distance from the other grow bugs.
So, or, you know, the other characters, players in the game because they're in this game together.
And I was out on a walk yesterday with my kids and my daughter and I were talking about the, you know, what I should do with Glitch.
And how I want him to have this issue of Broken Bonds be the theme at the root of his story.
And how I was also thinking, and I made notes about this yesterday, that I actually had some time to write. It was great in the afternoon.
And the idea for that was that Glitch would have the issue of not feeling like he belongs.
And I want to be careful. I'm going to be super upfront and honest that my values are not progressive.
My values are holistic and life-affirming. And I believe that the more progressive your values become,
the more out of alignment with holistic and life-affirming they are, which might sound contrary, but it's not.
And we can have that discussion if you'd like to.
I'm open to having the conversation and I wouldn't censor or censure you because I don't believe in that because I think that goes against my ideology.
Whereas I think that progressive forms of ideology actually are anathema or free speech is anathema to them.
And open dialogue and open communication doesn't work with them because as they're progressing towards their goal,
they end up needing or demanding that there be a silencing of others who don't fit with their paradigm and who would challenge it.
Because if you dare oppose this progress, then you are evil and must be destroyed.
Anyway, I apologize for getting on that tangent, but I think you'll see that my writing isn't wholly political.
I never come out and just nakedly make a statement like that with these stories that I'm writing.
And I need to hurry up and get the five grow bug stories or kid in the grow bug whatever stories up on the website on MJMunius.com
so you can see them and you can see that I'm not cramming things down kids' throats. I'm not indoctrinating children.
I'm writing these stories so that they encourage children to face their fears, to have empathy, to have courage,
to let go of their anger and hate, otherwise it will destroy them.
These are universal values that everybody should embrace.
Just because I said some little thing doesn't mean that the rest of it should all be thrown away.
But that's the kind of fear. I mean, I don't let it make me afraid.
I did at one point. I did pull my punches and I was afraid to say certain things.
But I'm no longer going to do that. So, anyway.
Let me get back to my point. That tangent came from the fact that I was trying to say that I wanted the story of Zev and Glitch
with these broken bonds initially to be something along the lines of when this is very much from Digimon.
Digimon Season 2 with Black Org Raymon, I guess Season 3 in some ways, and I don't know if it has anything to do with Season 1 or not.
Digimon Adventure. But that regardless of where you came from or who you started out as,
that does not determine who you are, who you will be, and what your worth is.
And I caught myself as I was saying these things out loud to my daughter that that sounds like progressive stuff.
And that sounds like I'm condoning surgeries and hormone therapies and things like that.
And that's not the message I want to send. Instead, I want to send the message that if you feel insufficient
and less than because of where you are, where you came from, where you started, that it's not those things that matter.
It's what you do with what you have and what you've been given that matters and that makes you who you are.
Because Zev is still a boy. He's still his sister's brother. He's still his cousin's cousin.
Glitch is still a video game character. He can still partner with Zev.
It turns out that he's a grill bug, spoilers for the book.
And his actions, being heroic, being self-sacrificing, using these strange powers that he has that he doesn't quite understand,
even though all creator bots have powers, are what prove in the end, especially him bonding in a profound way with Zev,
kind of like how Swoosh and Ava did, that he is in fact a grill bug. That is Glitch.
So it's not that there are no barriers, there are no boundaries, there are no fixed ideas of...
not constructs, but it's not that there are no fixed realities and therefore you can just be whatever you will yourself to be.
It's you have the capacity to be the best of yourself and your truest self, no matter what gets in your way,
and no matter how difficult it is for you if you keep working at it and applying, because that's what these guys do.
And it led me to the idea that, one, that it was going to turn out that Glitch was some sort of NPC or unfinished enemy design,
or just an unfinished design in general, from the critter bots game who ended up becoming a grill bug through the sheer force of his will.
But again, that feels odd and that feels incongruent with what I'm saying, and it feels like it could be open for misinterpretation,
which I understand the whole death of the author concept, and if people want to misinterpret my words and my stories and what they mean to me
and what they were intended for, what I, the author, intended them to mean to the intended audience,
and people want to take that and do whatever they want with it, I can't stop them. I'll be dead one day.
Please God, after 120 years, but we'll see what happens with that.
And it's not up to me. I have the responsibility to write my stuff in the most robust way so that it proves itself and it makes its own arguments,
and they are as clear as they can be to the audience who is reading them, and they cannot be misinterpreted as much as possible to say what I want to say.
And it's my responsibility and it's my desire as the author to do that.
That being said, I was thinking about having this conflict of, oh, well, he's going to transform himself into being something else entirely
and something else entirely that has nothing to do, that violates the laws of reality, but in reality, I was thinking it would be cooler if
Glitch was a grow bug from the beginning, a grasshopper-type grow bug, and in order to stop the great darkness, the great evil,
the great harm that would come to people from Dr. Decay, the villain in the game from, well, if the villain got out of the game,
he could do whatever, right? So it was like, that makes sense. It's a very common, simple thing.
So in order to stop that from happening, the grow bug who went in there would have to volunteer to go in there,
and I guess because, well, the grow bugs aren't evil, so they wouldn't forcefully put somebody in there,
but the grow bug who went in there would lose their sense of identity and their sense of self,
even though they would retain their capacity, their ability to be who they are,
but they were like stripped of that and put at a severe disadvantage, being put into the Critterbot game in order to stop that from happening.
So that's what I'm thinking is the background of Glitch being the Glitch in the Critterbot game,
and the way that it makes clear, simple, logical, straightforward sense for him to be able to ascend
and break the barriers that are on him of these, you know, false memories or broken memories or whatever,
to eventually become who he is and fulfill the role that he was destined to.
And I was thinking about this as saying that desire indicates destiny.
Where's it, that one is?
Desire indicates destiny, and destiny indicates design? Hold on.
I think it's that desire indicates design, and design indicates destiny.
So if you realize that you love this thing, writing for example,
it means that you were meant to be a writer, therefore it is your destiny to do your writing, to get your work out there.
Hey, that's me.
So the setup in Zev and the Broken Bonds, RoboTails, Zev and the Broken Bonds,
is that Zev and Glitch both want to be acting with agency in the game world, in the world of the game,
to help accomplish the mission of stopping whatever bad stuff were happening in the game.
And ultimately that desire is in them because, well I won't say specifically that they're destined to be together
and to work together like the DigiDestinar, I'll say that they're highly compatible,
and that gift of the game mysteriously comes to Zev through some means that we do not know,
well that we do not understand in the narrative of the story, and I as the author don't know!
So I couldn't tell you who put the game there, why it's there, I kind of have an inkling of an idea
that it's tied to some greater thing going on that also relates to the fact that all these five kids are relatives,
blood relatives with each other, and they're the kids who get paired up with GroBugs
in these five GroBug Tales books, but again I'm not even sure what that is,
it's just a shadow of a thought in my mind and I haven't made anything of it,
I can't find the source to it, it's not tangible yet, I can't get my hands on it, but anyway,
the idea is that they're maybe uniquely talented to do what needs to be done and to stop this force,
which in the end they, being Zev and Glitch, are the ones who are able to do that work,
who are able to accomplish that task, and they're the ones who end up stopping Dr. Decay in the real world.
And then I actually, I don't know why I did this, I kind of set up like sequel bait
that there might be a GroBug Tales Zev book going forward where he goes around and catches
or deals with other characters, other critter bots that have escaped from the game into the real world
at the same time that Dr. Decay did, and I've never read, watched, or played Yo-Kai Watch,
but the concept of it kind of makes me think of Yo-Kai Watch, especially because I had
these gauntlets in the game in the story, and Zev ends up getting a watch that Glitch is able to live in basically,
so anyway, I'm just setting up more stories for myself to write down the line, but anyway,
my point is, yeah, I'm kind of going with this, you are what you want to do, and you're meant to be that,
so you should pursue that boldly, courageously, without stopping doggedly with perseverance.
So maybe Glitch's story is about perseverance then, but also when I bring in this element of this self-sacrifice
that he was willing to do it and put himself at a disadvantage to do it, how does that weigh in with,
how does that weigh in, or how does that factor into that idea? Maybe it's that even if you get lost along the way,
if you're meant to do something and you're true to yourself, you will end up doing that thing,
pursuing that thing, and accomplishing that, which I think is a very lofty, high-minded, warm, cozy thing to put out there,
and I think I believe that's true. Yeah, I believe that's true, it's just it's a difficult thing to believe,
but I believe it's true, and that's a hopeful message that I want kids to have as well.
So that being said, I still don't know how exactly I'm going to start Zev's story, rather Glitch's story,
because he's going to be telling his story to the other Growbugs, so if he is...
well, I don't know what his personality is at the moment, because I have notes written down about that,
and I have not referenced them recently. I found the problem. In my notes, I have Glitch named Glitch,
but since I want all my Growbug names to be onomatopoetic, since I want them to all be onomatopoeia sounds,
or words, onomatopoeia words, I'll say it like that, his name is going to be Zert,
because I figured there might be a zert, zert, zert kind of sound effect when he is glitching in the game,
and I don't know, he might keep glitching out of the game, that could be kind of fun.
So, and Glitch doesn't really... it's not really a sound, right? It's a word, and I guess it can convey a sound,
but I think zert definitely works for that, and my wife likes it, and she is a very...
she has a very good eye for things like that, so I'm going to trust her and go with zert.
So, zert, which is Z-R-R-T, possibly T-T, but for sure one T. Zert is loyal.
That's his number one character trait. That's kind of the lens through which he sees everything.
So, how can I use the concept, the emotional trait, the quality of loyalty, to frame his story of being true to yourself,
and following your desire to determine your design and your destiny?
Perhaps the idea for zert is that he was loyal or true to himself in what he chose to do and how he acted,
and that awakened within him everything that he needed in order to, like I said,
be who he was meant to be and accomplish what he was meant to accomplish.
And I would say there is a measure of loyalty in his story as far as it regards saving zev and being there for him and helping him,
and maybe also there's loyalty to his fellow grow bugs and to the cause of what grow bugs do,
which is protect and save children from these hobnots and other threats, other crazy supernatural threats or whatever that would harm them.
So, maybe I could factor in loyalty in that way too, that he's loyal to the cause, he's loyal to the people, he's loyal to his mission that he was given,
which makes even more sense that he would awaken to that mission within this other world where he had lost his identity because that is just so much who he is.
So, in the car yesterday I was updating my eldest to girls about what's going on with this book and just sharing some ideas and asking them for their input,
and it basically... we had a long conversation, there was a lot of back and forth,
but I'm now going to do some minor rewrites to zev and the broken bonds,
and I don't know if I'd mentioned it earlier in this recording, but I don't know how the game that contained Dr. Decay, the critter bots game,
how it got to his house, so we're changing that all up based on their advice.
Instead, zev's family is going to... the suggestion was that they own an arcade, which I think is an okay idea.
I thought it was a little excessive at first, but then again, there's a...
I basically put sequel bait at the end of zev and the broken bonds,
and I didn't know how or when I was going to pursue it or follow up on it,
but I just thought, you know what, let me seed something here for another Grow Bug chapter book, Grow Bug Tales chapter book, about zev,
and maybe even a comic book or who knows what, but just something with zev and zerk in it,
and it could be really cool and it could be a lot of fun, which I believe I did mention that in this recording earlier,
so I'm not going to bring it up again just to say that there is an idea there,
and with him being part of a family who owns and operates an arcade,
I could see my idea working out even better in that circumstance,
because the escaped critter bots that have whatever dark aspect to them or nefarious character to them,
they can be inside of other games in the arcade, and then he can go into those games, and that's a lot of fun.
I really like that idea. So anyway, whether it's an arcade that they frequent,
or it's like a Chuck E. Cheese type thing where you take your kids to do whatever, Dave and Buster's, whatever,
or it's something that they own, the family that is, of zev's family, or I guess zev and kass family,
then it would make sense for them to be there and have the proximity and the familiarity and all that stuff.
It would also make a little bit more sense for why the parents lose track of the kids for so long,
especially in today's day and age, with helicopter parents and such,
which I guess their parents would not be that, but regardless,
gives me some more understanding and justification for how that got there,
and it also gives me some more better understanding of how Dr. Decay got there,
and I think the idea is going to be that, not that this game, oh, we also created an evil organization of critter bots,
oh, not critter bots, cybugs. So cybugs are this thing that exists, they were created by,
if Robugs are guardian angels, then it's a fallen guardian angel type thing, an enemy, an adversary,
a satan, if you will, and he is involved in opposing the actions of the grow bugs.
So he sets up a bunch of adversarial stuff for them, including him somehow producing little cybernetic creatures
called cybugs, cyberbugs, that do his will to cause harm to humanity in general,
and not just specifically counteract all the activities of the grow bugs themselves,
but the grow bugs are protecting little kids from certain things, and he's operating in a different arena,
but also he has a subdivision that messes with kids as well, just for fun, I guess.
And anyway, we had this great idea that he's either going to, and the cybugs are involved in harmony in the grow bug as well,
and it's kind of building this whole backstory for stuff that can be expounded upon with this family
who has all these interactions with the grow bugs, or yeah, with the hobnots and the grow bugs.
So that's kind of interesting because I kind of wanted a reason for them to all be so tightly linked,
and a reason for these things to be happening to all of them or with all of them, and it just kind of makes sense.
So the family that has all this grow bug exposure is somewhere between destined to have an encounter
with the Dr. Decade, the villain that's coming out of the Critterbots game,
they're somewhere between destined to have that encounter, and they, you know, like fate and everything lines up for them to,
for the cybugs to send the attack of this evil video game thing through the arcade that they happen to own.
Anyway, so more on that later, but I just think it's fun, a fun idea to think that these cybugs exist in this world,
and that they've made a video game company in order to put forward their nefarious plans.
That's not me saying video games are evil, I don't play video games as much as other people do,
but I'm not wholly opposed to them, but it's just, it's kind of funny that video games will rot your brain,
or will do this or that or have that nefarious effect. I never really accepted or believed in that kind of stuff,
but now in writing this I kind of have that being the case, but it's of course a very narrow instance of that,
so it's not like a wholesale attack on video games in general, but anyway, I think it's a fun idea,
I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think it adds a lot of flavor, and adds a lot of flavor to the world,
and to the cybugs, and to everything that's going on, and it gives me an interesting way to link everything together,
especially if the cybugs are part of this group that seeks the subjugation of mankind for the,
I don't know what you would call that, for the primacy of animal kind being reestablished,
because who was here first, man or animal? Animals, right? So why shouldn't they be the rulers?
Why should the last thing to come to the planet be the latest model that gets the privileges,
and gets to rule, and gets to be in control? And that's kind of where the cybugs and other villainous organizations
that they're associated with have in common, so anyway, it's a decentralized, multi-layered series of attacks on humanity,
which kind of ties into some of the ideas I have for this superhero universe, that the Grobug tales are not,
the Grobugs aren't specifically really 100% supposed to be connected to that,
that it's kind of supposed to exist in its own little world, like I don't think I'll ever have any of the superheroes show up in a Grobug book,
but I basically am writing to the characters in Grobug tales to eventually,
they have the same names as characters who end up in the superhero world, so there's a crossover,
but it's going to be kind of like a soft, unofficial crossover, or a linkage between the two worlds,
but anyway, regardless, it's going to be fun, but that's just an update on more developments I have,
so I got to go back into a minor rewrite in book five, and as I was trying to do that this morning,
because I actually did my writing, my ten minutes of writing this morning,
I found that I have the manuscript document that I have for Grobug tales is very unorganized,
and I have this habit of holding onto data, and unfortunately I've been keeping it all in one document,
so it's cluttered, so I created a backup document this morning, I copied it over,
and after that document was created, I went ahead and started pulling things out of it,
or deleting things from my main primary document, which will be the most up-to-date, the most correct,
but I have the backup archive so that I can go back into it, and access anything that I inadvertently take away,
and possibly can't recover within the new main manuscript document, and I did a lot of research today
into outlining, because I feel like as much as, this is the sixth book I've written in the last couple years,
the eighth book I've written in the last couple years, plus you've got Grobug Tales, which is the bigger one,
which is book nine, the chapter book that I'm working on currently,
and the other eight books were all children's picture books, and those were simpler to grasp,
two of them are completely standalone, and I'd written at least two versions of each one
before I was happy with the final version, and now with Grobug Tales, I wrote Ava first, then I wrote Rex,
and I think I rewrote Rex, and then pretty much everything else since then, then the other three books, Harmony,
I wrote Harmony like three times, and then Cat and Zev each once, but then I went back and I made a big revision to,
or a good revision to Cat to make it make more sense, and now I'm adding these other elements into Zev,
so this is like my, this is actually my third draft of Zev as well, but it's really the second draft,
plus these modifications I'm making, so they're much smaller stories, I basically was able to come up with a,
you know, formula of what is the theme of the story, who's the main character, what threat do they face,
what's the beginning, middle, and end of my story, and then I was able to separate that out and say,
okay, for my beginning, I'm going to use a couple pages, you know, two pages, two to four pages,
and for my middle, I'll use about ten pages, and then for my end, I'll use two to four pages, again,
and that's, I think, to give me sixteen pages, or sixteen spreads of the Children's Picture Book,
to have the thirty-two picture, to have the thirty-two page format for those books, which is what I want to try to stick to,
and I like that, that's good and that's simple, but as I went into writing the Grow Bug Tales chapter book,
I realized that that wasn't quite enough, I was lacking in some ways, and it caused me a lot of trouble,
and I kind of went ahead and just on the go, on the fly, wrote other characters into it,
the Grow Bug Keepers, the Guardians, the Watchers, the Seers, I kind of had these ideas,
but I didn't develop them or think about them, I just started writing and then started jotting down notes afterwards,
so I don't know, like I'm honestly intimidated to do the next chapter book, or really, well, yeah,
well, I want to do my Fantasy Dragon series, which will be chapter book plus picture books to accompany it,
or they stand alone from each other, but they, it's like with Grow Bug Tales, I don't know how to say it,
they complement each other, the books complement each other, but they stand alone as well,
so, and that's the same for all of the individual picture books as well, you can read them all independently,
or you can read them together, you can read them in order or out of order, it doesn't really matter,
the way that it's focused on the titular or eponymous child from each of those books,
it's an enriching experience to have read them all and to have greater context,
but you don't need it to enjoy each book, which is good, and I don't even have like big recaps in it,
I just have like mentions or nods or allusions to past events and different things that have happened,
so, anyway, I prefer that style of writing, I think that's a better way to do series,
but you know, I'm an untested, unproven author, I haven't published these things,
put them out in the world and been able to measure their success by sales or reviews or anything like that,
so, that's what I'm pursuing, but anyway, I do have this dragon, and maybe because I'm nervous about moving on to the superhero books,
which are going to be, you know, 40 to 60,000 words, and I want to do a big series,
I want to do like, I want to say I want to do 12 books per character,
and I already planned out at least for one character, but for really more like three or four,
I planned out 12 books, I gave them, I figured out titling structures, I figured out this is my character,
this is the emotional arc I want them to go on, for the series overall, this is the emotional arc I want them to go on from book to book,
and these are the developments or advancements I want them to have in the story, as they go from the first to the next,
and there's going to be, again, the idea is for those to be standalone, but be enriched by reading the entire series,
and it'll get better as it goes along, and I think that's the way to do it,
but now that I've had this trouble trying to write these chapter books,
and I've had to go back and look into my notes and find that things are not organized like they should be,
or they're not organized in a way that makes it easy for me to keep writing,
and to have a good handle on what I'm doing, it's honestly given me pause, it's made me a little nervous,
and I want to get this Girl Bug Tales project over with as soon as possible, as far as the writing is concerned,
then I'll have to do the illustrations and the publishing, or the formatting, the publishing, all the other stuff,
but then I want to take my time, learn some lessons, and figure out how to structure a,
how to really go from idea to book, because I've looked up videos, I've read blogs, I've referenced different things,
I talk about doing that, and I thought, oh great, I'll just follow this example and I'll know what to do,
and maybe I haven't paid careful enough attention to those things, or maybe I, no, I think that's the case,
I'm not going to besmirch the people who put out stuff like that, because honestly, I haven't given the time to those that they need.
Joanne Appen, who runs the Creative Pen, who is somebody whose work I really value,
as far as learning to become an author and things like that, I haven't read any of her actual fiction,
but her show is very entertaining, and it's good, and it's informative, and interesting,
she has this author blueprint, which you can find on her website, you give her an email and she gives you the thing,
she emails it to you, and I've had that sitting in my inbox for, I don't know, six months or something like that,
and it's long, I skimmed it, but I never read it, and I found a tool, which I shared something online,
but I think I'll copy and paste and I'll just link that to this post too,
I found a tool that I think is a great creativity hack, or productivity hack for writers, which is, it's called EV,
it's EVoice Reader, I think it's what it's called, EVoice Reader, and it's a cute little name for it,
a branded name for it, it's EVIE, and it takes any PDF and it reads it to you,
and I realized that with Google Drive, you can copy and paste anything from anywhere that has text,
and you can save it into a Google document, and then you can download it onto your phone or your desktop,
whatever you have, and you can turn that into a PDF that is readable by this software, by this app, by this program,
and I did not realize this at first, but the entire author blueprint that Joanna Penn put out,
it's like a three hour read, something like a three hour read according to the PDF, or to the app,
so I skipped a chunk of it, I listened to the beginning chunk of it, or the beginning part of it,
then I skipped to the end, not to the end, I skipped over a portion because I didn't think it mattered,
it was about marketing, because she says later on in the book,
you shouldn't be worried about marketing or publishing right now if you haven't written your book,
so I skipped ahead to stuff that was going to be more relevant to me, figuring out the process,
not the craft, just the process, how do I make the outline,
how do I structure my writing so that I can go to my outline and reference that,
and continue to work off of that to build my book chapter by chapter, scene by scene,
and it was really interesting, I've got about 10 minutes left in the audiobook,
I don't know if that's factoring for, because I'm listening to it at more than one to one speed,
I'm listening to it at 1.5, so I don't know if that's 10 minutes or if that's actually 15 minutes that I have left to listen to,
but I'm going to finish listening to that today, and it really struck me that I have not been going about this the right way,
and she was talking about in that book, or in the guide,
that you need to set aside a time every day, or whatever interval you choose,
and write consistently in that amount of time,
and I think I've mentioned that I want to do this 10 minute writing and this 10 minute drawing thing,
and I want to do it, but I haven't done it, so if I haven't done it, how much do I really want to do it,
I think my actions betray my intention or my focus, will, or determination,
and I want to have that focus and will and determination,
so like last night, it was really late, but I went ahead and made myself draw,
this morning I got up and I made myself write,
and I was thinking about making myself draw right now,
because I really want to read a manga, to do a review thing,
for one of my podcast review side project things to try to help market myself through podcasting to people,
which is good, but I need to be doing the work, I need to be writing books,
I need to be making art, I need to be making myself better,
and in the last couple days when I have done art,
I've been making up book covers for the Grow Bug Tales books,
which is I think a legitimate use of my time,
I'm function stacking, I'm sort of practicing composition I guess,
because I'm not doing really nice drawings,
just rough sketches, thumbnails, basically for my artist who I've contacted,
and that's good, I think I did, what did I do, I did, yeah,
I've done four of the six covers, so today when I draw again,
I'll be working on cover number five,
hopefully I can get five done and then I can figure out what to do for the chapter book as well,
and then I'll be able to share that with the artists and move forward,
move myself forward one little bit as far as writing is concerned,
but I did write this morning, and I'm supposed to be dictating right now,
but I'm not, I'm not doing that at all, I'm talking more about kind of like making notes,
and I'm sharing the process because that's kind of the point of story over everything,
I wanted it to be something where I could just talk about every story I like,
because that's what's important, but as time went on, I wanted to focus it on my development as an author,
my journey in becoming a published, successful, extremely successful author,
who's prolific and has works that are celebrated by people and enjoyed,
and that make him and his family lots of money, that make me and my family lots of money,
like that's the goal, and that's what I'm trying to do here,
and I thought it would be beneficial to kind of speak very openly about not only my process,
but about my lack of discipline in the process,
and not to speak on lofty, in concrete things,
which I can't think of a better word for in concrete things,
and then talk about the fact that I'm not writing every day like I should be,
I'm not drawing every day like I want to be, because that's part of my creative process as well,
and part of, you know, I want to develop that drawing skill,
because honestly I'd love to be my own illustrator,
but right now I don't think that would be good,
so, you know, it was interesting in the, in the, gosh, in the author blueprint that she wrote,
kind of saying you need to devote that time,
and she was saying for her she gets up early, extra early in the morning,
and would work, and she'd set a word count,
and like most, you know, like Stephen King's got a, I think, 2000 word count,
or 3000 word count, or something like that,
and, you know, I thought that's a great idea, I should not just try to write ten minutes a day,
and try to draw ten minutes a day, and say, oh, I'm going to do this,
I should just schedule myself the time, and then every day, maybe it will be in the morning,
my mornings are sometimes crazy, but that's not an excuse, that's just information,
regardless, I need to find that time, and just devote ten minutes to the writing,
and ten minutes to the, to the art, and keep putting myself there every day,
and developing my craft every day, and figuring out how to do that,
and not being distracted by book covers, and new book ideas,
because if I'm not finishing books, which, again, I have finished eight books,
I've got More Than Milk, which is a breastfeeding book I wrote for my wife,
it's really cool, it's non-fiction, my daughter's doing illustrations for it,
I've got the five Grow Bug Tales kid books, and that's, you know, Rex, Zev, Ava, Harmony, and Cat,
and then I'm, and then I have Superheroes Get Hungry 2,
which is a cute, fun book with superheroes, all superheroes that I created,
and these people are being recycled, and reused, and put back into my Holy Heroes universe,
which is this idea I have that, like, basically, if you combined the Marvel Comics universe
with something fantastical, kind of like, I don't know, like Tolkien, but brought it to modern day,
like, because if you, if you read, like, the Cimmerillian, there's a creation account, basically,
where, you know, his version of God creates the universe, and then, like, basically, the thing that,
is it Morgoth the Malevolent? I want to say Morgoth the Malevolent is what Sauron served in the previous age,
and, like, the second age, and then at the end of the second age, there's all this destruction,
people fled to Middle-earth, or whatever, in the third age, those kingdoms got established, blah, blah, blah.
Basically, there's just, like, a creation account tied into, you know, Tolkien's lore,
and, like, there's a Satan-type figure who, you know, the servant of that Dark Master is Sauron,
and causes all this trouble, and, like, that's super cool, and I like that idea, and I like this idea of, like,
what if superheroes existed? What if it was kind of like the Book of Judges,
where there were these people who were chosen by God to have this power for, you know, just purposes,
and I thought, well, yeah, that'd be really cool, I'll do the Book of Judges, and then as time went on,
I thought, well, I can take these superheroes and make this unified superhero universe,
where I have all these different characters going through all these different things,
the power source is God, then there's enemies who their power is.
The devil doesn't really make sense, but if you, like, really examine the highest levels of, like,
spiritualistic or mystical thinking, like, if everything, like, it's not, like, it's not so simple.
It's not, you know, Cobra and G.I. Joe or whatever. It's, like, you know, if God is everything,
if God is one, then that means that he's one and one and only, and everything is him.
Even the evil that we see and perceive in this world and experience in this world is, in some way, shape, or form,
from God or given energy or life vitality through him in order to put us through what we go through,
because, like I've said recently, all of this is happening for you, not all of this is happening to you.
So it's this very interesting mystical concept that, like, the construct of creation is here and nothing,
because if God is God and if God is sovereign, then that means that even, like, you know,
a Satan or devil-type figure cannot be an actual contradiction to God.
That figure can never win. They never can achieve victory.
And what would it look like in a world like our own where I believe all those things are true, but there were superheroes?
Well, then the talented people, the people who are good at things, the people who are powerful,
yeah, they may be privileged disproportionately and have all these advantages that other people don't have,
and it, you know, it's not fair, but, you know, fairness isn't the measuring rod to compare to everything.
It's the truth. It's the truth that we live in an unfair world.
We live in a world where, for now at least, things are, you know, revealed and dark, or, you know, not revealed entirely.
They're dark and there's opportunities for pain and misery and things like that.
But if you really think about it, everybody who does something wrong, everybody who does evil,
who purposely hurts other people, even if they were victimized, they have a choice to ascend and rise beyond
and go above their limitations, go above and beyond what was put upon them and take all that negativity
and turn it around for good, which is why, like, Kamen Rider is one of my favorite characters,
one of my favorite heroes, because he literally was taken and his body was entirely transformed
into being a weapon for a evil neo-Nazi worldwide global domination organization.
And because his mind was yet left intact, his mind and his heart or his soul were left intact,
he was able to break away from them and become a warrior who used the power of evil against evil for the good.
And I love that. And so I thought about having these people be kind of like the judges from the book of judges,
these superheroes in this other world I'm creating.
And I thought about it long and hard and I thought, well, maybe it's not going to be like that.
Maybe it's going to be more like, look, people are given the capacities that they're given by God.
Everything comes from him and we have the choice to do with it what we will.
And I think that's a more powerful concept that you are ultimately responsible for what you choose to do with what you have.
And I think that's a more heroic perspective. And I want to use that.
So I don't think it's necessarily that God's going to bless and give power to each of my superheroes.
It was an idea I was toying with. I think it's going to be, this is the reality we live in.
You have superpowers. What are you going to do with that?
And that's going to apply to good people and bad people or people who choose to be good or choose to be bad.
And I think it's a lot more interesting. I don't know why I got off on that tangent.
Oh, I guess I'm just intimidated going back to it.
I'm intimidated to go forward with this process when I'm still untested and untried.
And I'm really trying to figure out how to use this EV reader to find all the...
There's lots of blog articles. There's lots of videos.
But I think the blog articles are going to be better for me to listen to actually so that I can go through the process and really see, well, OK, I know there's a beginning, a middle and end to every story.
You have to have a triggering event. It's a trigger, an inciting incident.
You have to have the inciting incident or the trigger.
Then you have to have the hero leaving their normal world.
Then you have to have the stakes set up for them that if they don't do this, then this will happen.
Therefore, they go on a journey and embark on a quest to do whatever.
And it leads them into all this sort of conflict.
And they almost lose everything. But then they come out and have a resolution after facing the antagonist or the force of the antagonist.
Boom. But, you know, how do you expand upon that? How do you get chapters out of that?
How do you make sure that you're not getting lost, not getting confused and stumbling over yourself as you're trying to figure out, well, OK, I know I want to have my protagonist and my antagonist.
That's two people, but they need to live in a world.
So who are all the other people with them and what are they going to do?
And previously in an SOE, I talked about I want to give a motivation, conflict and goal to everybody in my stories.
From the baker to the guy at the weapon shop to the, you know, crook number three who gets his knee snapped.
I want them all to have that motivation, goal and conflict so that I know who they are and have a deeper insight into them.
And I sort of did that with my Grow Bug book, this chapter book.
I gave a key emotional aspect to each character, and that's kind of their lens on the world.
And I just spoke about this earlier in this episode about how for Zert, his is loyalty.
And I looked at and I examined and I expounded upon how can loyalty manifest in different ways and how can it mean this, this and that?
And how can it define his actions as a character?
And I want to be able to do that. But what do I do?
Do I write down my story idea, write down a theme and then list all the characters?
Do I list all the characters as good, bad, neutral?
That stuff I don't know the mechanics of just yet.
And, you know, I get it. It's set, you know, you need, you need like an idea.
You need a, what do you need? You need players.
You need a cast. You need a setting. You need a plot.
Beyond that, you don't really need anything. Well, you need to be in the middle and end of the story.
And then beyond that, I guess you need the story as well.
So what's that? It's characters, setting, story, plot, theme.
Beginning, middle, end that they all go through or that all takes place in.
But beyond that, how do you take the next step?
How do you figure out in how do you, I guess, cast all your characters and determine who they are and what they're about?
And how do you do that?
And then start writing the rest of your book or your story.
And then when new ideas come up and new characters emerge, how do you plug them in?
What's the structure of the, I don't know, series Bible or, you know, mega outline that has all the stuff in it?
Or do I need to have an outline and then separate things? I don't quite know yet.
I'm trying to figure that out.
So again, before I move on from Grow Bug Tales, I'm going to finish refining my manuscript document for now.
And I don't know if it should be called something else.
Should it be called, you know, outline or Bible or series guide or what?
I'm not sure yet.
But, you know, I have these five, really six Grow Bug characters in these different books.
And then they all appear in Grow Bug Tales, whatever the first book is called.
And, you know, I need to keep them consistent.
And I do feel like they are consistent now, but I just didn't have a good place to reference all that information for them.
So I guess, I don't know, I'm going to have to redo.
And maybe it was foolish of me.
Maybe I need to make sure I have separate from each other a document that's, you know, series Bible and then outline.
And then the individual manuscript separate from that three documents.
It seems excessive, but maybe it'll be a lot easier to truncate things and keep them in order if I have them like that.
And I can cross reference between all of them.
I can have my outline going.
I can look to my series Bible and I can look to my manuscript.
And as I'm filling in the manuscript, you know, rough draft or third draft, whatever, I can look back at the series Bible to see if details match.
And I can look at the outline to make sure I'm putting in the proper stuff.
So, yeah, anyway, I'm going to think about this more.
I might have more to say or it might be time to wrap this up.
I'm not quite sure yet.
To sum up, I think that what I need to do for now, at least to develop the discipline and the craft is to make sure I'm writing that minimum 10 minutes a day.
Make sure that I'm journaling on that, which I've already started working on my journal, which is just going to be using the weekly roundup post that I did last week.
Saturday night I published that it had.
Well, anyway, you'll see.
But I added more to it.
I added basically a chart for tracking my drawing, 10 minute drawings and my 10 minute writing.
And I'm also going to log my word count there.
And the idea is if I go back to that every single day and fill in the information then, because I've half forgotten what happened earlier in this week.
So I'm just filling it in as I can now.
And it's imperfect.
Next week will be better.
Hopefully, I'll actually touch that every single day and fill in that information and I'll have good information to put in there.
I'll have my word count.
And then I can start creating a metric for myself to measure what I'm doing.
And aside from that, I will investigate further into different things, figure out the whole outline process, and maybe I'll even create my own outline because I went through a bunch of documentation and have seen different things.
And I still have a little bit of a hard time wrapping my mind around.
Well, I've got beginning, middle, end. I need to have the inciting incident, the status quo, inciting incident, and then all the struggles or conflict, and then the climax and denouement and resolution.
Which is denouement is different from resolution. I can't remember anymore.
But I need to have all that stuff so I can reference it and figure out who my characters are and what they're going to be.
So I'm going to do that restructuring that I talked about with my documents and clean things up.
And hopefully with that effort and with the daily writing.
And I'm going to have aside from doing the 10 minutes of creative writing, I'm going to have my restructuring stuff that I'm going to attend to.
I should do that daily as well until I'm all good to go and have everything set up the way it needs to be to facilitate me doing the writing in a more consistent, better way and have a better flow so I'm not losing myself and stumbling through.
So anyway, that's the plan. That's the idea. That's what I'm thinking.
And I think with that, that'll help me create a path to success for myself with writing and it'll free me from having to reinvent the wheel all the time and psych them through all this crud in order to get to the good stuff and get to just writing what I want to write the way I want to write it so that I can get it finished and then marketed published and all that stuff and out to the wide world.
So I'm going to go ahead and conclude with that. I encourage you to check out everything I have over at the website. Check out the weekly roundup post to see all the different stuff I've done. Maybe I'll leave a link to last week's and this week's story over everything post and check out Ava and the grow bug for now.
I will hopefully very soon, which is something else I should actually make a schedule for myself in my notes of what I want to do in the long is what I'm doing. That's what we've done this week and this is what I want to see happen over the next couple weeks. Also, I'm going to read George McDonald's The Princess, The Goblin Princess, The Princess and The Goblin and that'll be for story over everything.
I'll do skimming leaves for June 30th, 2023 so you can look forward to that. Check out that book and get it at the library and get it free on Audible or not. You can get it free lots of different places. You can get it free on LibreVox and it's a delightful book. Very charming. You should check it out and I'll be doing that over the next week or so and getting ready to have that casual book chat.
So much for you. Keep doing it. I thought about not doing it this month but I said no, I should do it. It's a short book and it's like five hours long and it'll be nice for me to just enjoy that book and get to turn it around. So until next time folks, take care. This is MJ signing out.
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.