On Finishing Another Year of Writing
It’s kinda silly that my first piece of writing for 2024 is about finishing my writing for 2023. But I feel like I have things to discuss. The 4000th article was a bit of a downer, mostly because, well, I’ve been down lately. But over the Christmas break, I got a much needed rest, and with it, I found the energy to get back into writing. Most of that writing though hasn’t been Daily SPUF stuff. Some of it definitely has, but thankfully, aabicus managed to write a bunch of articles, which gave me a small break in the new year, so I could write some fiction.
You see, when I started writing, it was all fiction. I’ve been writing for a very long time, but the Daily SPUF only became my main writing in late 2016 and early 2017 when I started taking over the blog and doing things myself. Before then, at least, for the first year of my 500 words a day back in 2016, I did have my 500 words a day, but most of it was for my very early MK3 Phoviverse. The MK3 Phoviverse was my first steps away from Bionicle fandom, and into my own, original universe. It featured far too many, badly fleshed out species, as well as probably too many characters, and the mythology was kinda annoying.
Before then though, I lived in a strange mixture of Bionicle fan fiction and my own clumsy writings. My longest writing adventure before I started my 500 words a day was something called The Bohrok-Kal’s Ramblings. I’d update it about once a week, and it mostly involved the Bohrok-Kal having nothing to do. The Bahrag and the Bohrok swarms had done their job of clearing the island of Mata Nui, and the Bohrok-Kal were kinda just left to pick up the pieces, sharing a three bedroom villa and having arguments, while trying to live a normal life. Of course, being former Bad Guys, they’d constantly run into trouble with the local Matoran. The story got stupidly convoluted and ended up involving a ton of OCs and other random characters. There was an entire story arc where Nuhvok-Kal accidentally fell into a black hole and ended up helping the BLU team defend a base from an incoming RED attack. I did try and revitalize it, but some things are kinda better off left dead.
It was stupid. I was new to writing. But it WAS fun to write.
Jumping back to the present, and 2023 did… little for my fictional writing. I had too many main protagonists and I’d split them up into three different places. While yes, I did bring back the Dessaron (without my namesake Arkay, replacing him with literally the longest running character Phovos), they didn’t really get to do much. I did get to develop a couple of side characters, namely the only vampire in the entirety of the Phoviverse, but Litvir didn’t really feel at home with his new job. Instead, I found myself focusing on The Daily SPUF, since that constantly needed articles, and I had no one to read my now very convoluted fictional stuff. Plus, MK4 had been rumbling along for a little while, and a LOT had happened, which made it hard to bring things back together.
But in December of 2023, I decided to reset the Phoviverse. I did this with a story arc called Doom Drum, in which Epani, one of the remaining Phoviverse deities, conspired to kill Kinisis, the head deity, who had been subtly influencing pretty much everyone. The story arc was actually mostly written during my holiday in the UK, and ended with the end of the MK4 universe, with Kinisis initiating a failsafe mechanism in case she was killed, and Epani and the other gods having to remake the universe in order to save it. My in-universe way of explaining why I’ve reused and reworked a bunch of MK4 characters in MK5.
After that though, I have been hard at work writing the first story arc of MK5, which introduces the four new deities and a team of mortals who have discovered they have cool powers. I’ve enjoyed writing this, even if I feel like it’s a little too tied to MK4. The last thing I wrote for 2023 was the introduction to the Whenvern, the Dragon God of Time, as well as a prompt to action for the newly brought back death god.
Really, the first half of 2023 was only okay for writing. I did slump a lot between August and October. But I did get back on track. And now I’m starting up again for 2024, I’m actually looking forward to finishing this initial story arc. It’s been fun to write, and I haven’t been able to say that for a while.
Anyway, here’s to another year of writing. I’ve already started my writing (after all, I write Daily SPUF articles in advance), but here’s to more of it. And if you want to check out my writing, you can always visit the Phoviverse and read it all for yourself. I’d avoid the MK3 stuff though. It’s a bit… crap.