Joely Black

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 49—Stare into the abyss long enough and it'll send you more paperwork.

I wake up and it’s dark but it’s also not. Two rooms overlap with distinctly different hues; one is my bedroom in the flat, with its exposed brickwork and plain off-white walls. The light cuts through the gaps between the blinds. It’s never entirely dark because the

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 48—The eviction hearing and other waiting rooms.

OK, where were we? Over the last two weeks, I've been starting to pick over the bones of the last fourteen years—oh god, has it really been that long?—in an effort to explain how I got here. How I ended up doing two PhDs, how my world fell

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 47—I got the eviction notice on my birthday.

I got the eviction notice on my thirty-first birthday. I remember sitting at my table, a ridiculously big and stupid table I'd had since Lancaster days, and hearing the car engine down below. I remember that my windows overlooked the postboxes to the building, and I remember how, on that

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 46—How do I tell the story of how I got here?

I have a story to tell you. It's a story I've been meaning to tell for a long time. No, wait. That's not how it goes. This is a story I never wanted to tell and I never planned to tell. It was a story I fully intended to keep

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 45—A mug fell on my head.

This is not going according to plan. Not that I had a plan, but still. I say under duress because if I hadn't said I'd write every week for a year, I wouldn't write at all this week. It's Sunday evening, and I'm still burnt out. Maybe even more burnt

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52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 44—Burnout

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 43—The coming few weeks will be a little bit different.

I am digging myself up out of the burnout grave this week with a bit of an odd post. Not penguins again, but more like an introduction to the odd posts that are going to pop up in the next couple of weeks. I might have set myself an utterly

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 42—The answer to life, the universe, and everything is maybe this.

I've always thought the number 42 was special because I'm a Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan. I wanted my forty-second birthday to be more special than my fortieth for that reason. If I'd made any plans to set up the forty-second week of this journey special, then they've fallen

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 41—Lessons from Writing a Series of Prompt Challenges

Well, you may have noticed a bit of a change this week. It's Spooky Season, it's the last month before Nanowrimo, and it's my first week of teaching. I feel like I've been running very fast and still not keeping up with a high-powered treadmill. Oh my god. What I

Amnar

WA Spooktober 2023.3: "Helpless"

Today's World Anvil Spooktober prompt word: "Helpless" Today required quite a bit of work. I spent all morning on campus teaching, which slowed me up. I had no idea what to do with the word "Helpless". It's a great word—it conveys the core of horror, after all. So, because

Amnar

WA Spooktober 2023.2: "Spectre"

Today I have another post for you from the World Anvil Spooktober Prompts. I'm going through them as they show up, and I'm going to apologise straight up and say this is very scrappy indeed. Today was my biggest teaching day of the week so far, and I came home

WA Spooktober 2023

WA Spooktober 2023.1: "Crow"

It's Spooktober. I had a whole set of plans for this month because Ancient Magic probably has a lot of crossovers with this month. However, all my intentions to write smart academic-style blogs have fallen by the wayside as I am struggling with medical issues as one of my organs

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 39—From another world

Hello. I'm reporting in from the stern of a narrowboat somewhere in the East Midlands of the UK. This is my first long, proper holiday since 2019, when I flew out to Rome with T and friends. After that, there was a pandemic, and although we went away for my

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 38: Shadow work for developing characters and plot

For the last week, I've been digging into the idea of shadow characters and shadow work. If you haven't encountered this aspect of storytelling before, the basic concept is that characters (or even groups of characters) around the main character, represent dark features of the protagonist's psychology. This can work

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 37—I did this course so you don't have to.

Allow me to hold my hand up and say I haven't written any actual fiction over the last week. That total word count has been sitting at just over 80k words for what feels like a long time. We're at a knife-edge moment, and I'm sure Maali and Arandes are

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 36—Burnt out like burnt toast

Oh boy no. Last weekend was a blistering run of success, at least in terms of writing out a somewhat decent first draft of an account of Amnar, thanks to a Deck of Worlds prompt. But, as is typical of my life, the minute I get up to speed, I

Amnar

Prompt of the Week: The Wasting Abyss and the Origin of Amnar

I was supposed to post a prompt response, but I decided to do something a little bit different today. I've been playing with the Deck of Worlds. I almost didn't post at all this weekend, because I think the anaemia has come back and I've been feeling unwell for the

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 35—Trying to Recover from Trauma (A Story About A Writing Process)

Every Friday morning, sometime between the first and second coffee of the day, I have therapy for an hour. It's a tricky time to have a session like that. On the one hand, it's Friday, which means I can set up my editing week so I don't work; but on

Magic and Materiality Featured

Materiality and Magic: A magical system can totally be based on words, actually

It's been a hot minute since I've done a Wednesday post but I'm back and trying to stitch together a lot of very disparate ideas I've been having around the idea of sound as a physical material. Two reasons for this, one of which I'll try to cover in this

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Amnar

Prompt of the Week: How do they (Amnari) view having multiple romantic partners?

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 34—When the thing you need to write suddenly won't work for you

This week has been a crisis, climax, recovery type of week in my writing world. In order to understand this, you need to know that I write on a site called 4TheWords. It's an RPG game that's also about writing. I discovered it by accident back in March and it

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Amnar

Subscriber Bonus: What kind of calendar do they use (in Amnar)?

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 33—Let's Talk About Writer's Block and Mental Health

My god, it's week 33. How did we get here? It's been thirty-three whole weeks, and in that time I've written two halves of two different books and not done the original editing I was planning to do at all. This isn't one of those "Show up and hustle for

Amnar

Prompt Bonus: What is the most common cause of death in your world?

🎆Usually, these are subscriber-only, but I decided to make this one available to everyone, because it summarises the way Amnar works as a society. This might be the easiest one to answer from this week's prompt selection. For full disclosure, I had four questions from this week's prompt card, drawn

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 32—Tracking Words Between Nanowrimo Months

I've tried to start this week's post three times. Maybe five. I'm no good at this whole blogging thing. I have no idea how to do it in 2023, when things have moved on from the days of Open Diary and just writing whatever happens to be going on in