After being sick for a bit less than two weeks, and then feeling better at the beginning of the month, I did some reworking of my living space in the hope that I could get some writing done. This has been successful so far and I wrote about half a novel, which I had notes on but had been stuck on for awhile otherwise. There's a certain saminess to the voice of it, perhaps due to the rushed writing sessions, but I intend to power through and finish the last four or so chapters, and then perhaps revise later.
The sort of voice I keep returning to is calmly tough and confrontational, like a film noir detective. That tends to suit the material (I read Raymond Chandler in preparation for this), and reflects my mood when writing it, but this story has a large, unusual ensemble of characters which requires a little more variety. This novel is a tie-in to the personal project, comics, toys and games I've been doing, and the first eleven chapters were already released elsewhere. I am now on chapter 22. The novel is the darkest iteration of the story, and is largely an introspective character piece about carrying on after trauma, tragedy and a lost decade or two. Other iterations of the story are more like an animated cereal commercial from the 1980s. This all makes sense as pieces of a puzzle.
I haven't been able to write very much the last few years, and have also pretty much stopped watching television and movies, and a big issue is that I'm sitting in an office chair in front of the computer most of the day, and the chair isn't comfortable. Besides general health issues, exhaustion and burnout, I don't have a chair I particularly like that can handle the state my back and body are in these days.
Setting up somewhere I could lie back in, and working on smaller devices, while also standing up and pacing around a lot, did the trick for now. Especially for variety's sake. Variety is important for the position I'm in also. Lesson learned.