Hi . . . Um, Hello Again, I Guess

In Hollywood, reboots of older movies are pretty popular. So maybe I should call this a reboot instead of a reintroduction?

TL;dr: I’m posting again. What’s up with you?

Anyway, hi. You may not remember me, because I haven’t been around in quite a while. Lots of stuff happened after the last time I posted, and there was a lot to sort through, both personally and professionally (day job). And because I’ve been struggling with writing/being “a writer” over the past half-decade or more, anything publicly connected to that fell way, way back in the list of priorities.

It used to be that in times of upheaval and massive stress/anxiety, writing was the first thing I’d turn to. Some of my most prolific streaks of word-count production happened when I had so much going on in my life that it now seems impossible that I was actually able to do all of it and write thousands of words every day. But, frankly, I probably wouldn’t have made it through otherwise.

My plan for writing this year started out with the idea of working on my own form of fan fiction. I’ve never been a traditional-fanfic reader/writer (is there anything such as “traditional” fanfic? LOL), but many (most) of my stories were inspired either by storylines or characters I emotionally attached to in books/TV/movies and started forming my own stories around. Plus, I figured if I consider what I’m doing “fanfic,” I’ll be able to approach it as something fun and entertaining to do rather than the “work” my writing turned into back when I was writing for publication.

And so far it’s worked!

While I haven’t really been publicly talking/posting about the characters/story ideas that I’ve been working on over the past couple of months, I’ve been delving into it deeply enough that I’ve actually already purchased a few research books about the setting/era I’m thinking about for it (Gold Rush California!).

I don’t want to share too much about it, because I want to keep this as a personal project as much as possible in order to keep the correct mindset about it, I will say that I’m taking character/worldbuilding/story inspiration from TV shows and movies such as Criminal Minds, the Marvel movies, Supernatural, Grimm, Charmed (the original version), FBI: Most Wanted, and Legends of Tomorrow.

Here’s a teaser of what I’ve been working on.

So far, I’ve just been doing character development and worldbuilding, with tiny bits of historical research thrown in here and there, but I do plan to start actually writing soon. I started writing out backstory for a couple of characters the other day, and it turned into the start of a story synopsis. So I stopped writing that. Now that I have an idea for where to begin a story for some of my cast of characters, I don’t want to get too “in the weeds” with the details (as my boss likes to say in our daily team video meetings) lest I lose sight of the purpose of this creativity exercise.

I’ll be checking in at least once a week with progress posts, writing revelations, tantalizing teaser tidbits, and totally non-writing-related crochet progress updates, since that’s my other creative outlet right now and much easier to share progress of:

What have you been up to recently?