I’ve been thinking about progress a lot over the last month.  I’m pursuing a lot of things right now that are about trying to be better.  At my job I’m pursuing some certifications, been trying to build a better way for my team to do tedious tasks.  At home, I’ve been refocusing on my physical health and of course looking at my writing.  A thing I have learned in life is that I am afraid of contentment.  It’s not that it’s not a good thing to be in a happy place where you can feel content but rather that I know the draw of “Good enough” and don’t want to succumb to it.  That feeling drove a major career change for me nearly nine years ago, and so as I look at this website and my stories I wonder what is next.

The retrospectives I’ve done after my multipart stories shows I know there are areas where I can improve in my writing.  More recently, I was rereading the second part of “Friends of Old,” and as much as I like the events and narrative of that piece there was something halting and stuttering about the writing and pacing.  The website and the schedule it has helped me keep has certainly improved my writing and also my ability consistently sit down to write.  However, I find that I’m looking towards what I can do to further that improvement.  There’s expanding my reading, finding books and podcasts and videos to help my writing.  All things I think can contribute and many of them making for at least a little bit of fun and helping me to hone my craft (Also, if you have recommendations I’d love to see them in the comments).

I do want to make an important note here.  I’m not pursuing this improvement of my writing in a way that looks to maximize the effort.  I’m still kinda going where things most interest me and that may not be the most ‘efficient’ way to achieve improvement, but most efficient isn’t the purpose here.  This is still a hobby.  The journey of the writing and how I grow my craft is part of the fun and as much as I enjoy seeing a piece that lets me see my growth, I also aim to not be upset when I write a piece that I know I could do better with.  To pursue improvement as an end goal would make writing feel too much like a responsibility, when I want writing to stay as a passion and an outlet.

The other bit of progress I’ve got my eye on is furthering the overarching story I’ve hinted out and set up here.  Just as I have enjoyed the mostly unstructured development of my writing over the last year and a half, I’ve enjoyed the meandering stories I’ve written here.  However, I find now that I want to focus them a bit more.  What that will look like is twofold, one structural and one more abstract.  The structural is that I’m going to strive to find some time to rework the Illithiust page on the website.  The way that page is structured now is mostly based on when I wrote the stories, but not really helpful for telling a story or helping people find a place to start.  I’d like to change that and work on placing all the stories in a chronological order.  I think it’ll help people new to the website, even if it may be a bit strange to have stories at different times in my writing journey (and skill level) interspersed with one another.

I think it will also feed into the more abstract target I have.  I want to move the story forward a bit.  This week’s piece hinted at Quartes ready to follow Keto’s ideas on how they can start to plan for the return of the First Dragon.  I want to more often than not start to follow the Fey and Bard as they finish whatever journey Quartes has them on and them move into the tale of how the groundwork was laid for ending the Cycles (and it’s “more often than not” because a good drop is always worth the distraction).  So yeah, it will take us a while yet to get there but be ready for some new characters, the return of at least one old one, and hopefully some higher quality writing along the way.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean