Writing Report October 27, 2023

This writing report is being written almost two months ahead of its posting date.

I try to stay a couple of months ahead on my regular Tuesday (fictoids) and Friday (general) posts.

At one point with my fictoids I was almost a year and a half ahead of schedule.

I want to keep a regular stream of posts up even when there are periods I know I won’t be able to post as regularly as I like.

In this case, I’m writing in advance of my wife and I taking our 50th anniversary celebration trip to Germany.  By the time this post goes online we should be back for a couple of weeks, but while we’re traveling I don’t want to leave my blog empty.

Being lazy, I’ve learned that if I write anything longer than 1,000 words for a Friday post, I’m better off splitting it in half and posting it over two weeks.

That stretches out my schedule and gives me more time to come up with new posts -- and of course, should anything topical arise, I can always bump scheduled posts further down the line.

Fictoids, however, by their very nature run less than 1,000 so I need to stockpile quite a number of them to give myself an adequate cushion.

Which is kind of hard to do when I’m working on a new book.

At this moment, I’m about 67,000+ words in on my second book of the year (I start one on January 1 and the second on July 1, taking about two and a half to three months to complete a first draft).

I anticipate this first draft capping out at the 75-78,000 mark and at my current rate of progress I should just get it done under the wire by the time we leave for Germany.

But I am about to run out of fictoids so I need to write at least a half a dozen before I go.

Fortunately, I have a system.  Before the social media site formally known as Twitter went down the tubes, I followed an account called Magic Realism Bot.

Three or four times a day it would spit out a randomly generated sentence of two.

I copied the best of these and kept them on a list as story prompts, and recently they’ve been what I’ve relied on for factoid ideas.

Case in point:
”You read in a 16th century book that you are a tsar in a 10th century Anatolian city.”

So I look at that and wonder what it means.

“A 16th century book” implies scholarship of some kind.  Few 16th century books are readily available on the mass market, and the double use of “you” in the sentence implies the tome is addressing one specific person across the centuries.

But it’s not an exclusively forward looking sentence.  Written in the past, it addresses a person in its future / our present but it also tells that person of their past life as a tsar in Anatolia (i.e., Asia Minor, viz Turkey, etc.).

If so the book can’t be easily accessible by anyone.  This instantly brought to mind the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious 15th century codex which puzzles scholars to this very day.

So my fictional book needs to be even more difficult to crack, so difficult that it causes various scholars over the centuries to go mad in the attempt.

But they lived before AI became available, and with AI the seemingly insurmountable challenge of decoding the work becomes much, much easier.

So what happens when it’s decoded?  The fictoid is already available online:  ”The Scorpough Document”.

And if you’re wondering
why I ended it that way…

© Buzz Dixon