Update on Tales & Lives of the Vietnam War

The nonfiction story I've been working on for the past few years has been Tales & Lives of the Vietnam War.  By "working on" I mean gathering stories as I tell people I'm working on it when in fact I keep putting it off.  I finally decided on Veteran's Day last year that I couldn't put this off anymore.  So I started actually pecking away at it.

To be honest, it's very difficult to get through.  The subject matter is obviously depressing, but it's also been depressing for me ever since Two Gun didn't do very well.  If that was a subject that didn't catch people's attention, I don't see why this one should.  From everything I've seen, people want to bury this part of history and never hear about it again.

But hearing these stories, I can't help but realize how important it is for people to hear them.  So I push on.

So far I've finished Lance Block's story and Wally Turner's.  This was the story of an infantryman and a priest.  I've started on the next ones and am expecting to speed up a bit.  I want to have it done by Memorial Day

Writing Projects I'm Working on This Year

I've got a lot of writing projects backed up that I need to get to, and I'll be going through them as quickly as I can this year.

First are the two RPG Storytime projects I'm working on for my Youtube channel.  The main RPG Storytime series will be Star Wars, but I want to have something from Start Trek during the new season of that series, and something from D&D to go along with the last season of Game of Thrones.

Next, I NEED to finally finish the book about stories from the Vietnam War.  This is an important book that describes some of the incredible experiences of people during that trying time.  I keep putting it off partly because of the subject, but mostly because doing nonfiction is a lot of work, and the last effort that took me eight years or so had little to no payoff.  So there's a voice in the back of my head that keeps asking "what's the point of all this effort?  Why not at least do something fun?"  But every time I work on it, I realize how important it really is.

I then have a Star Wars fan fiction series I'm doing for two reasons.  One, it's the series that inspired me, and I feel like it's gone off the rails starting way back with Return of the Jedi, and two it's to get people to know my work and hopefully go check out Relic Worlds.

I then have several books I want to pitch to mainstream publishers; and the way to do that is to write a first chapter which gets their attention, then hopefully they'll green light you to write the entire book.  I want to do this with a story from Hurricane Katrina, one about the making of Lord of the Rings, and one about stories from people who escaped Iran.

I then need to finish the latest Relic Worlds novella, which is going to replace a Relic Worlds group of short stories this year.

I then want to start a podcast for RPG Storytime where I tell the stories from role playing games in podcast form.  This is partly because RPG Storytime on Youtube hasn't been doing very well, and I'm hoping people listening to podcasts on their way to work will increase those numbers.

I then want to write some pilot episodes for screenplays in hopes to get those to agents and managers.

Then I'll get to the RPG Storytime series for Star Wars on Youtube.  This will be an epic undertaking in terms of story, but I'm sort of hoping it won't be an epic amount of narration.

And then at last I'll be writing the story about my childhood and growing up with Ryan.  That's going to be a huge, personal story for me, one that I'll be going to Nebraska to write.  It's one I don't expect to do well, but it's very important to me.

It's Difficult to Move on to the Next Project When You've Failed

I've failed a lot of times.  So many times it's hard to imagine succeeding anymore.  I would even say that being this used to failure gets in the way of success because I'm expecting to fail.

But hope is always on the horizon when you have that project coming up that's supposed to be the big success.  What happens, though, when that project comes and goes and it still wasn't a success?

That's when true depression and lack of confidence kicks in.

I recently heard Dan Harmon wax poetic about what an artist does when they've gotten everything they want.  I couldn't help but ask, what happens when an artist has done everything they expect to work, and they still can't succeed?  That is the true existential crisis of an artist.

I've been going through that crisis lately.  It affects everything I do.  Any time I sit down to write, there's a voice in my head that says, "Why are you bothering?  You tried this before and it didn't work?  What's the point?"

I don't have an answer to that.  I hope I do soon, because my vacation of self-pity needs to be over and I have to get back to work.  But even on a night like tonight when I have a ton of time and my girlfriend's gone so there are no distractions, I'm having difficulty turning that part of my brain off and getting to work.