“Still Life” First Draft Update…

This is a Japanese charm that is supposed to help you write! It has sat next to my through the majority of writing “Still Life” and it’s the quickest I’ve completed a first draft. Coincidence? Probably!

Hello!

It’s been a while, sorry.  I have not been motivated to do an awful lot since this third lockdown began.  I have a history of depression and found the first few weeks incredibly difficult.

My current project, now titled Still Life (originally The Artist) started well.  I wrote just over 67,000 words in November and then a further 36,000 words in December.  My original hope was to finish the first draft by the end of December, but lack of motivation (and indeed returning to work for a couple of weeks) made that difficult (I was furloughed for all of November and was very focussed).

The next deadline I set myself was the end of January.  I was in theory working for the majority of January, but in reality only worked for about a week of it, and was furloughed again towards the end of the month.  I managed to write 7,000 words, but I still had the majority of the crucial end sequence to complete.  I had a decent scene breakdown, but it did some seem quite adequate.

February started and there was a very good chance that it was also going to end without much happening.  I managed to write a couple of thousand words on the 11th, but there was a good chance that was going to be all I would manage.

I don’t know what changed.  I know what my over-all plan is for this year, and I began to realise that if I don’t do something this month – meaning complete this first draft – the rest of it would probably collapse like a pack of cards.

And somehow I got back into the daily routine of writing for that last week of February, figured out what was missing from my final scene breakdown, and I am pleased to say that on Saturday 27th (at about 4pm) I completed the final scene of the final chapter.  It was an emotional moment – both the actual scene and the act of completion.  It’s only my second completed first draft – my 2019 NaNo project was too big to finish and also I ran out of steam last year during the first lockdown.

So here is my plan for the rest of the year:

• Complete the dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on The English Hikikomori (March)
• Read what I have written so far on Empress Of The Tress to recap (March).
• Write 1000 words per day and complete the first draft of Empress Of The Trees (deadline – end of May)
• Edit Still Life (deadline – end of October).
• Decide what my 2021 writing project will be (deadline – end of October)
• Start writing new project in November (targets: 50,000 words by the end of November, 100,000 by the end of December, completed by the end of January).

The deadlines need to be adhered to but there is no reason why I cannot mix things up a bit – for example, if I get into the swing of writing 1000 words of Empress every day there is no reason editing Still Life cannot overlap and be started during that, the stories are completely different and have no characters or situations in common.  Also, it should not take me the whole of March to refresh myself on Empress Of The Trees.

I have no idea what my November project will be – but then Still Life came out of nowhere – thanks to being a bit down I had decided not to take part in NaNoWriMo last year, and the idea came to me at the eleventh hour (and now the first draft is done!)

I do have ideas of things I want to follow up.  I love the characters in The English Hikikomori and at some point I want to find out what happened to them.  Still Life was never planned as the first in a series but there is plenty more scope in that universe – it has a definite ending but I love the characters and would like to meet them again too.  Empress Of The Tress is also full of people I adore, but it has a definitive ending and is the only story so far that cannot be continued.   (Well it technically could but it’s not a story I want to tell.  Certainly not right now, there’s enough post-apocalypse fiction out there and it’s felt like we are living one for the last year anyway!

So I think I’m back.  I intend to post a lot more on here from now on, and I also intend to do more live Twitch stream writing, because that is what enabled me to get my work done last week.  Thanks to those that watched, you genuinely helped to motivate me.

See you next week at the latest,

Happy writing,

Richard

2020 Review

It was shit.

I was tempted to leave it there – not actually sure if it’s funny or not but that’s pretty much how the year has gone for me.  I worked for just over four of the eight months and was furloughed for the rest of it.  My mental and physical health has suffered, but in theory I had loads of time for writing.  The reality is that when I am feeling low, I find that my creative side just vanishes.  As I write this, today, sadly that is the place where I am.

Obviously the pandemic has impacted upon and changed every aspect of all of our lives.  From a writing point of view, my favourite writing environment is a coffee shop.   I am lucky enough in my job to travel a lot, so there are various coffee shops around the world where I have written many paragraphs and chapters.  I made a decision about half way through March (before the lockdown was announced) that this was a foolish way to carry on.  I still remember sitting in my favourite local coffee shop as I made that decision, knowing that it would be a while before I got to go in there again.  Little did I know that it would be that long.  I did break my rule once – in August, a colleague of mine decided to leave the job we both do and also to leave the country.  I met her, and having sat in a coffee shop to say goodbye, I went back there to get some writing done.

I am not very good at writing at home, so I had to come up with a way of motivating myself to do it.  One of the things that did help was live streaming me writing on Twitch.tv.  Since I started doing that April, I achieved the following, using Twitch:

1. I completed the fourth draft of The English Hikikomori.  There will be a fifth draft, but it is going to be adjustments from feedback and a couple of spelling corrections.  Then it will be done.  I do not intend to livestream that because it will be dull.
2. I did quite a lot of work on the first draft of Empress Of The Trees.  I love this project and believe in it, and my intention was to complete this before November.  However I was unable to do so for two reasons – firstly, the depression caused by the lockdown struck hard, and secondly I struggled to work out exactly how it needed to end.  The first outline of the final quarter was just not strong enough, and by the time I had worked out where it was going I had run out of time.
3. I wrote the first 105,000 words of the first draft of this years project, originally titled The Artist but now renamed Still Life.  I had hoped to complete that as well, and I am almost there, but I have found the second half of December exceptionally difficult.  Not every writing session was streamed, sadly, which had been my original intention.  I spent the second lockdown with family whose internet connection is genuinely too slow to live stream – I did consider recording my writing sessions and uploading them later but the connection was so bad I could not even manage that, and with more than one session per day there would have been too many videos to upload.  Also I did a lot of writing at the breakfast table with other people around so it would not have been fair on them, and to remove them I would have spent hours editing.

I am quite proud of what I achieved but it could have been better.  I set myself three targets and missed all but one – I wanted to sign off The English Hikikomori completely (failed), complete the first draft of Empress Of The Tress (failed) and then start this years project (Still Life) and get as far as I could (which I succeeded, completing the first draft was a nice idea but not essential.)

This would have left me with the following targets for 2021: Edit Empress Of The Tress until is was finished, complete the first draft of Still Life, and start a new project in November.

However I have revised those plans – these are my new targets for 2021:

1. Sign off The English Hikikomori (before the end of January)
2. Complete first draft of Still Life (before the end of January)
3. Edit and sign off Still Life (before November)
4. Complete first draft of Empress Of The Trees (before November)
5. Start a new project in November.

Ideally, I want three projects on the go each year: in January I want to be working on the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project from the previous November, then editing the previous project, and planning the next one.  If I can complete the list above on 2021 then 2022 should look like this:

1. Complete first draft of 2021 NaNoWriMo project.
2. Edit and sign off Empress Of The Trees.
3. Start new project in November 2022.

Boring to read I know, but writing it out helps me to plan.

How else has the year gone?  Well, at the start if the year I was losing weight and was the lightest I had been for years.  The pandemic sent me into a cycle of eating too much and not exercising enough, so I gained all of the weight I had lost.  

Hopefully the vaccine to the virus will help us return to some normality at some point next year (I am not convinced that it will be at the start ofthe year) but I fear that it is more likely that new variants will keep appearing and soon we will get one that will be immune to the vaccine, which will mean that we are back to square one.  We have an inept Government that are failing to take proactive action and as a result there have been tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.  I personally believe that the only way forward is a total lockdown like the first one, and for at least three months.  It’s a horrendous thing to have to do – jobs will be lost (they will be anyway, no Government with any amount of money can prevent that now).

There is a side of me that wants to include the pandemic in a book.  The main reason that Still Life is set in 2018 is because I don’t want to include the pandemic in the story and I also don’t want to set a story in 2020 and ignore it.  Still Life is starting to look like it could be a series, and I think I will address the pandemic in a future story.  I have also talked about a follow-up to The English Hikikomori that will include the pandemic – it is a story about someone who isolates themselves through depression, I quite like the idea of a story with the same characters that are then forced to isolate.  As yet I have no idea what my 2021 project will be.

I hope everyone has a safe New Year, that their loved ones are safe and that things get better for all of us in 2021.

Richard xxx

Final Reading opportunity for “The English Hikikomori”

The English Hikikomori is a story about someone building up to suicide after a series of losses in his life.  Freddie is 24, lives with his family and is struggling to get a job, keep friends, and is finding himself withdrawing from society.  When his family is killed in a car crash, his life falls apart.

Thanks to a reasonable number of people now reading the fourth draft I am going to withdraw the opportunity at the end of this week.  The top link to the right (or at the bottom on the mobile section of this page) gives you links you can click on to request a PDF or a physcial copy.  The physical copies are limited by location, but if you ask for one and it’s not possible I will offer you a PDF instead.

I will remove the links at some point on Sunday, so if you do wish to secure a copy please consider Saturday evening your deadline.

I have had several bits of feedback now, the majority has been positive but there is a marked male/female divide, which does not really surprise me, whilst I had no audience in mind when I wrote it all of the people I talked about it with that subsequently expressed an interest were female.  I will send copies out to anybody but I have a lot of female readers and would be interested in a few more males taking a look.

Once I think most of the feedback is back I will put a summary on here, and probably talk through it on my twitch.tv channel as well.

Thanks to everyone who has sent me feedback so far, and thanks in advance

Take care,

Richard xxx

General Update

Well, it’s almost August and an end to all of the strangeness does not seem to be in sight.

I know that certain things have opened up again, but for me I think they have done too much too soon.  It is perhaps too early to tell, but there seems to be a small increase in Covid-19 diagnoses at the moment, which is possibly due to the things that have been opened up.  We are in the strange situation that America found itself in a number of weeks ago, where the death rate was dropping but the number of cases is increasing, and we all know what happened next.  I have a horrible feeling that the same will happen here.

I am going out a little more in an attempt to support the businesses that have reopened.  My favourite coffee shop, Kuni’s Coffee And Comics in Daventry is open both for takeaway and to sit in.  I don’t feel confident enough to sit in yet but I have had a couple of takeaway drinks from them.  I used to love sitting in there and writing, hopefully I will be able to do so again at some point.  In the same way there is a farm shop in Catthorpe, Manor Farm, that also does lovely breakfasts.  They are also doing takeaway and have a field opposite full of tables, so I have been there and eaten a nice breakfast in the field.

I think we are heading for a bigger spike again and additional lockdown measures.  I hope I am wrong, and if in a couple of months people have adapted to the new version of social distancing and there has not been a massive upswing in cases then I will start sitting in coffee shops again. But I am not confident.

The other thing that has happened recently is I send off several copies of The English Hikikomori to various people.  The feedback is starting to come in, and with one exception it has been very positive.  That is not to say that there are not suggestions for changes, most of which I am looking at.  I have at least two printed copies with notes in the margins coming back to me, which I am looking forward to seeing.

There will be enough changed however to create a fifth draft, so yesterday I opened a new file to make the changes in.  I have made the following changes already – I have changed the car from a people carrier into a smaller car as I think it more likely that people could be hurt or killed in that one.  I also removed the reference to the fact that Freddie could not see where the car stopped and his parents started, as some feedback pointed out all cars now have crumple zones.  I also reduced the amount of time before Freddie gets help.

I have also looked at branding within the book.  Freddie was formerly a Tesco employee but because I have characters that work for that company in the story I have decided to not name the supermarket.  Anybody who is a Tesco employee will still realise who it is, the disciplinary process, and some of the jargon used is still consistent with them, but I do not name them.  There are also a handful of references to a fast-food company which conversely I decided to leave in, just removed a comment about nutritional value!  I am mulling over naming the airlines in the book as well, there are some comments about one of the Australian ones that, whilst reflecting my own personal experience of flying with them, could be seen to be defamatory.  So the names will probably come out.

The fifth draft will be tweaks rather than major changes, and because of this, I will not be streaming the changes as I make them.  I may do a final read-through again though!

Meanwhile, I have put loads of weight on in lockdown.  I lost a stone and half last year and have put it all back on, so I am ramping up my exercise from now on, and going back to my Ketogenic diet in order to fit into my uniform when I get back to work!

As a final reminder, I wrote a song called Hikikomori (Freddie’s Song) which is an internal dialogue leading to the point at the end of the book.  The more I listen to it the prouder of it I am although it is rather bleak.  It is just over five minutes long and I am working on an edit which will get it down to three and a half.

I also did a playlist for The English Hikikomori, you can access it here!

Stay safe,

Richard xxx 

Song (based on The English Hikikomori)

One of the things I have done in the past as a creative outlet is to write songs. This has dried up a bit in the last couple of years as I have concentrated on writing, but I do occasionally come back to it. I often play with sounds and rhythms and create a basic idea for a tune or melody or baseline, then come back to it later when I think about a theme for the lyrics.

That is true of this latest creation. I actually used the fifty seconds of music as a theme for the Twitch broadcasts related to The English Hikikomori. There is a koto sampled in the music (a Japanese string instrument) which was why I chose to use it. And it got me thinking about possible lyrics for a song.

Two nights ago it all came together in my head. The song is about Freddie, from the book, battling with his negative urges to end his own life, where he is talking the subconscious voice that is urging to him to do something foolish, initially challenging it and eventually coming round to its way of thinking.

It’s really downbeat but I am rather pleased with it. It’s up on Soundcloud now.

Here are the lyrics to Hikikomori (Freddie’s Song):

Tell me what to do. Tell me where you think I ought to be.
Try and keep me sane.  Don’t undermine it with insanity.
Are you telling me a lie? Are you telling me the things I want to hear?
Do you suppress the facts? Do want you to imprison me with fear?

Don’t put a gun to my head, don’t hold a knife to my heart.
You make me wanna stay home ‘cos it’s a good place to start
When all I’m feeling is dread on a scale off of the chart
You cannot pick up the phone ‘cos I cannot play that part.

Why do you want me to be hikikomori?
I’ll try but what else can I be but hikikomori. Hikikomori.

Tell me what to say. Tell me how you think I ought to feel.
You cannot keep me safe. We’ll discuss our terms and then we’ll make a deal.
You make me overthink. You hate me when I try to interact.
Could it be jealousy? One day I’ll win the fight and that’s a fact.

And yet my feelings inside say that you’re right all along,
That I am better alone, and yes it should be lifelong.
You cannot pick up the phone ‘cos I cannot play that part
And if one day you did I would not know where to start

Why do you want me to be hikikomori? Hikikomori.
I’ll try but what else can I be but hikikomori. Hikikomori.
Why do you want me to be hikikomori? Hikikomori.
I’ll try but what else can I be but hikikomori. Hikikomori.
And then one day I understood your agenda. You want me to die alone…
On my own.

Tell me how to die. Tell me when the moment has arrived.
It’s not a cry for help, it’s not a choice that feels at all contrived.

Why do you want me to be hikikomori? Hikikomori.
I’ll try but what else can I be but hikikomori. Hikikomori.
Why do you want me to be hikikomori? Hikikomori.
I’ll try but what else can I be but hikikomori. Hikikomori.

And when I draw my last breath you’re laughing right in my face.
You steadily got ahead and now you’ve won this last race.
And as I see my last sight and as I feel my last pain
It’s with some minor regret I know we won’t meet again.

 

Reading opportunity: “The English Hikikomori”

Synopsis:

Freddie Naismith is unhappy.

He completed a degree, struggled to find work and now can’t maintain a job stacking shelves at a supermarket. He will never be able to afford to buy his own home. The love of his life left him for a man who treats her horrendously. His parents don’t understand him and think he’s just lazy. He cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel.

His sister Rose is six years his junior. She is about to take a year out and travel with two of her friends before going to University. She is going to eclipse Freddie in every way, but he doesn’t resent her. She is the only person that truly understands his fragile state of mind.

When Freddie’s family are killed in a car crash on the way back from Rose’s farewell meal, he has to try to learn to live without them and rebuild his life. But he cannot, and starts to push people away. Totally alone in a mental prison of his own making, Freddie starts to descend into misery and madness, heading towards a final, inevitable, futile act of desperation…

Author Richard A. Boxshall

I would very much like you to join the reading team. I have a limited number of paperbacks available (and only in countries that have their own Amazon operation) plus unlimted PDFs of the book.

If you are interested, please click on the link on the right hand side at the top (or underneath this article if you are viewing it on a mobile device) to request either a PDF or a paperback (if the paperback option is not there it means I have none left).

All feedback gratefully received.

I will feature the feedback on my Twitch.tv stream.