Unprepared

At some point today, I’ll be in a car driving up to Indianapolis on my way to Gen Con for the second year in a row. And even though I’ve known the dates involved or had my badge arrive and signed up for the various gaming sessions and paid for a hotel and all of it…

This kind of snuck up on me.

I guess as much as anything can sneak up on a person. But like anything you might have circled the calendar for or things you’ve been looking forward to, sometimes life throws you for a bit of a loop and decides that the best time to do a whole bunch of things is at the same time. That’s where I’m at right now, waiting until the night before to actually pack my stuff up and hoping I don’t forget anything. Deciding to write the blog two days before as opposed to the night before – nah, that wouldn’t be my style.

In my day job, where I’m a mild-mannered civil engineer, we’ve talked about organization and making sure to spin multiple plates in the air. And I do a decent job of it, but sometimes… just sometimes you need time in order to free up other time. Like in order to get your life in some kind of order, you must first throw everything into chaos because you must have the room to just stretch out.

It’s a bit like that with the writing I’ve been doing. I took a writing course a month ago and have been really, really trying to follow the steps in creating an outline for the next project. And it’s been a fun time trying to be in total brainstorm mode for this long. Compiling notes here and there. Basically trying to make sense of a bunch of chaos in my head. I’m trying to sift through the bad stuff to get into the good – sometimes with success and sometimes not. It has been a struggle to hold off on just diving into the story immediately. That’s what my creative (unrestrained side) wants to do. Jump in and figure it out as you go along. I’m fighting that urge.

I need to be organized for this to work the way I want to.

Which is a long way of saying that the last few weeks have been hectic and I’ve still managed to write about 5000 words of an outline for a book. I gave myself the month of July to really get into it, and tomorrow is August and somehow…

It snuck up on me.

Luckily, I have a long drive with some friends who are going to have to be my 1st outline beta listeners.

As schools start back, and life begins to speed up from the summer days, no matter what you are doing – every little step gets you a tiny bit closer to your goal.

 

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John McGuire has co-written, along with his wife, two Kindle Worlds novellas set in the world of Veronica Mars: Theft & Therapy and There’s Something About Mac.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. The Trade paperback collecting the first 4 issues is finally back from the printers! If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Want to read the first issue for free? Click here! Already read it and eager for more?

Click here to join John’s mailing list.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow EmpireBeyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

About John McGuire

Writer of comics and novels. In 2006 his first short story "The God That Failed" was published by Terminus Media in their debut comic Evolution Book 1. Since that time he has had stories published in Terminus Media's Evolution Book 2 and Evolution Special, Kenzer and Company's The Knights of the Dinner Table, and Four J Publishing's The Burner #3. Currently he is eagerly awaiting the digital publishing of his first creator-owned comic The Gilded Age #1 to be published online as well as his first novel The Dark That Follows later this year.
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