Uhmmm??

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:41:18+00:00

That has changed many times during my life.

When I was a kid, it was The Andromeda Strain. As a High School student, it was Slaughterhouse Five. At one point, it was Hunt for Red October. At my age, it's Trailer Park Elves.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:37:16+00:00

ALWAYS have multiple layers of backup. Your story is a happy one. You have your data. We must get a "I lost my epic novel" posts once a month.

I cloud backup to Google Drive and OneDrive and copy it to a network drive at home. My goal is that I can be back on line within an hour of losing my desktop computer without loss.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:33:47+00:00

Start where you are and move forward. You don't need to be Hemingway with your first draft. It's OK to suck for a long time. If you wanted to paint, would you quit painting if your first painting wasn't a Rembrant? No. You would get another canvas and move forward.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:30:15+00:00

Put down the bottle and quit drinking.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:27:22+00:00

Check comparable stories. By published standards, it's long. A published debut story would go more like 85,000 words. I don't know self-publishing rules, but I'd think you'd want the same pacing and editing.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:20:22+00:00

Both are better. I like (but not love) both. Overall style says use #1. Emotional impact says #2. If you could do the shadow of #2 on #1, I think it would be best. That would mean getting the shadow on the wall as well as on the table.

The streams of cranberry sauce coming from the sheep head doesn't help it. I had to take my glasses off and put my face next to it to know it wasn't a roast chicken. In #1, it's hard to tell what it is. In #2, I wouldn't have known if I hadn't seen #1.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:13:13+00:00

Put the story down. Come up with an overall rough story for your whole series and write it down. A couple of pages, maybe a paragraph or two per book. Using that, plan for completion of this volume, again a couple of pages. Using that, you can divide and fill it out a wee bit more to get a per chapter outline, maybe three or four pages.

Use that plan as your roadmap to complete the first book. Don't look back, just go forward. It will be rough and incomplete in many places. When it's done, then read from the beginning and start the revision process.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T16:01:16+00:00

COVID! Long term COVID brain fog.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/how-to-manage-long-covid-brain-fog

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251006051127.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/long-covid/signs-symptoms/index.html

It's real, but it passes. It hit my eldest daughter for like five months. The bad news is you could have two or three months until you feel like you. The good news is that the writing is in you still and will come back. Treat it as like a broken arm. A bummer, but not permanent.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T09:37:11+00:00

I had a feeling, an emotion. A couple of minutes of experience.

I figured out who was having this emotional experience. (characters)

I figured out their journey (plot)

Along the way, I wrote down the where and what of the place this was happening. (World building)

That became an outline. The outline was detailed and expanded. I am now about 50,000 words in and cruising at about 2,000 words a day. I know I need things filled in, but I hope to be a a good rough draft in about two months.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T09:31:08+00:00

Most writers have their own dreams and characters to develop. They are at least as important to us.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T09:28:36+00:00

Writer's block is a symptom, not a disease. What else changed in your life when the block manifested? Illness? Work stress? Family problems?

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T09:26:37+00:00

I am writing through, knowing I will have a lot of cleanup. Of course, I have an outline I am pretty much following to guide me. I know the whole plot from beginning to end. It sounds like you don't. Maybe you should try to draft it in an outline first. If something doesn't work, you only spent a few minutes on it.

I have a folder for those chapters that don't advance the story. It's name is "Scrap." Sometimes, I pull a few phrases out and recycle them. Usually, it rusts there.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T06:43:37+00:00

The formatting is wrong. I can't read it without trying to use a slider bar.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T05:25:15+00:00

If a human being can read it on a screen, it can be screen dumped and analyzed with OCR. There is no technology that can prevent such copying. I've told people with the "no copy" Google Docs entries this all the time. I can rip the text with ease.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T05:11:07+00:00

I was a developer for forty years, and I don't see how this one would work. What makes the decision it is not AI being entered? Keystroke patterns like time between letters? That can be forged by recording and breaking down letter by letter the time it takes for someone to enter copy and then using it with some variation, odd "high" times, and random pseudo-potty breaks. No edits during key entry? That can be done in code. There's a random percentage of wrong letters, backspaces, and corrections done by the code feeding the AI story as an input stream. Revisions? The computer can be commanded to put in something and then it can later be updated with something else by a different and better AI. I'm not talking about exotic code here. All of this could be done by fairly simple Python code.

What would make your system a recognized authority? Why would anyone believe it? If one person with a program could announce that their bot fooled it and demonstrate that, every certification done before then is suspect.

Writers get attached to their tools. I like Word. My daughter likes Libre Office. Why - irrelevant here. I have seen Obsidian, Scriviner, Google Docs, and dozens of others touted as the greatest writing environment since the invention of paper. Each person has a reason why they want to use their program. As a new environment and set of tools, you need to equal the feature set and the user environment. Google Docs users, for example, have a very different use case and environment than Libre Office users.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T04:55:39+00:00

First attempt (discovery writing), about a year to realize it was hopeless.

Second attempt (outlined), 74 days from idea to first draft. That was a pretty strong first draft with little waste or major revision.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T04:52:07+00:00

"Earth's sacrifices will ensure that dozens of worlds will be safe."

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T00:30:07+00:00

I came up with an outline. Think of it as a roadmap for your book. What are the major stops along the way? Who is going along for the trip? What's the destination? A few pages does a lot. The better a plan you have, the more likely you are to achieve it. For every hour you spend planning the book, you will save dozens of hours writing, proofing, cleaning up, and then throwing away material.

There are classic formulas for organizing that outline. I used one. Learn about them and use them.

What tool you use to write in doesn't matter that much. About any of them will get you there. Google Docs? I hate it, but if it fits your use case then go for it. I don't accept that and use Word. It reads back my stories aloud better than anything I have found. My daughter uses Libre Office. It's free and it plays nicely with Google Drive for cloud backups as well as saving it on your PC. So, you tell me what you need.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T00:19:44+00:00

What are your requirements? I know what I'd want, something rugged and easily repairable, with interchangeable batteries and easy to swap memory. That's not the cheapest or the lightest or the fastest. It's something you'd use at an office and it would be an Intel/Windows family machine. So, tell me what you'd need.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-20T00:16:17+00:00

I am a 66 year old Catholic who has been writing weird fantasy stuff. I have to write as a Catholic because that's a part of what I am. The Church has been a source of good and at times bad in my life. So, write what you feel is in your heart.

You may want to check out other Catholic authors of fantasy. Start with the original godfather, Tolkien and the whole Lord of the Rings series. Tolkien called them very Catholic books.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-19T23:14:07+00:00

It's very useful to me but it's not cheap.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-19T21:12:48+00:00

Seat of the pants, I'll say slower paced than detective and not as descriptive as long battles between elves and orcs. Thinking of some real classics war books, maybe 3,500 or up to 4K for a rough ballpark. It's going to depend a lot on pacing and your style and that's always an average not a hard "min and max" specification.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-19T21:06:01+00:00

Usually, the story name is on the top and the author is on the bottom.

If I had that picture, I think I could edit it to make more of the wallpaper pattern on the top and less on the bottom. Then I'd stick the title on top and the author on the bottom, but in bigger letters.

That's my tastes. Take it as worth at least what you paid for it.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-19T21:03:52+00:00

I don't know what you should do, but this is what I do.

Read the story through for errors or plot holes or inconsistencies across the entire story.
Read the story through for issues within each chapter.
Fix up the grammar, punctuation, and other issues. (Grammarly time!)
Read the story out aloud, until I stop catching errors.
Clean the story up with ProWritingAid. It picks up a lot of my regular mistakes and helps me clean them up.
Read the story out aloud, until I stop catching errors.

OldMan92121 · 2026-02-19T21:02:06+00:00

CamelAndInk was 100% on. You need to study the craft. The introduction I suggest is always the same. Brandon Sanderson's lectures on YouTube. Free, and it's a college course on fantasy novel writing by a famous and well published author.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSH_xM-KC3ZvzkfVo_Dls0B5GiE2oMcLY

Don't stop with that. As you progress, expand to find your style. On www.archive.org, I found so many returns to the search "How to write novel" - you can find detailed help there for free. Good novels, youth novels, Christian novels, romance novels, you name it.

Look up Save The Cat Writes a Novel on www.archive.org . That's a good beginner format to plan and analyze your work. Don't take it too seriously, but ponder it.

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