Hey all! It's been a long time, and while I haven't written anything that I'm able to share, I wanted to talk about my writing progress this year. 2018 has been a very different year for me for multiple reasons, and it's definitely affected how much I write, not to mention how much I've changed my plans for Cirrendale and writing in general. I'm not going to pretend that I'm a hotshot whose writing progress is the thing to read, but I still hope that you find this worth reading.
First thing to mention is that 2018 was my first year at university. Living away from home at a hall of residence with around 600 people took a lot of getting used to, but I'm very happy that I did. I met a lot of friendly people that made moving to a new city much easier, and I'll enjoy looking back on my time there and catching up with them next year. Academically, learning to become more self-reliant in my studying was important, since you spent less hours in classrooms and were expected to do most of the work in your own time. With that said, these things allowed me to balance writing time with study time better. Although I still have a lot to improve on in that department, being able to sit down and work on a personal project after submitting a finished essay felt amazing, especially since half of my papers were geared towards improving my writing. My Creative Writing paper I loved in particular, as the majority of my marks came from submitting various genres of writing pieces. The paper introduced me to forms of writing I previously hadn't considered, such as copywriting for advertisements and digital fiction, which I might explore further later on down the line.
As for what I've been writing, I started shifting from working on the main Cirrendale story I wanted to write to various short stories, either set in Cirrendale or as a stand-alone story. Even my main technique for figuring out characters involved writing a short story starring them. Eventually, I decided that, since I seemed to be more comfortable with writing short stories than longer ones, writing an anthology of stories set in Cirrendale would be a better idea. This allows me to work on worldbuilding the setting of Cirrendale while exploring a bunch of ideas I originally was going to leave on the backburner for later. I still very much want to make a stand-alone story, but right now it's seeming too daunting, so I'm working on a collection of stories instead to help ease into writing something full-length.
One of these stories is the Cirrendale Ripper(Name pending), a thriller featuring a restless spirit searching the city for his killers with the help of a street urchin girl. Admittedly, it doesn't sound like the most original of plots, but I'm having a fun time writing it, playing around with different ideas of what being a ghost means in Cirrendale, and looking at the other side of slasher movie-esque massacres. My biggest issue so far is characterising the spirit and the girl; I have a vague idea of their relationship in mind, but I'm not sure how well I'll be able to pull it off, or if it'll be easy to understand. At any rate, that's the sort of thing I'll need to learn if I want to write that fully-fledged story, so I'll happily tackle it head-on. I'm almost through the second draft now, so there's plenty of time for revision.
So that's what I've been up to! I'm really excited to see what the next year holds for me as I continue my studies and keep working on my writing pieces. Maybe I'll even be able to send them to a magazine and get published, I'd love to get my writing out there more. I'll try my best to post another update soon, maybe with a bit of the Cirrendale Ripper, but for now, I wish you all the best for 2019.
