Right, Not Perfect

Quality before quantity is a philosophy I want to encapsulate. I want to balance the two out. So, that means delay for quality purposes.

In 2025-the rest of my life, I want to meet every deadline, even if they’re malleable for me. But if it needs stylistic flair, and not pulpy (that’s okay if that’s your thing) execution, it’s better to take the extra time to get it not perfect, but right.

The paneling and prose need to be right. Panels take hours of work, prose in this series must be poetic to fit with the in-world themes, and my standard of prose is higher for personal ability testing. Writing doesn’t have the glorious colors of an anime like a Shinkai film, but the words can be colorful and elegant, and the story needs to be a colorful dance of theme, motivation, and structure, with a kick of whimsy.

Writing a post like this takes me fifteen to twenty minutes, and between a fifth and tenth of the daily word count I set for myself for prose cultivation.

But writing novels takes weeks of writing the first draft, sculpting the prose, fixing the timeline and story arcs, and copy edits before publication. It might take months to hone that prose to something that floats along.

A direct novel like D65 needs less elegance and more direct work. A series set in a fantastic array of musical spheres where blossoms fall from the dancing auroras and music is a driving theme needs poetic work. If that means more time, I’m okay with that.

I won’t take fifteen years to write it, but I want that amount of care put into it, as if it had been written over fifteen years.

I have confidence in my work and find the idea of beta readers to be a type of writing by committee. Not that it’s bad to use them, but I prefer to work on my art in my way.

The Last Key of Maestraumus will be the first book in the Orchestrylus Odyssey series to do a manga-panel structure in pieces and I need to make sure it’s up to standards. I’m far more confident the story will be better if I redo the paneling to tell stories per frame, with sparse full-page spreads.

I want to do the paneling myself, and I refuse to use AI to make my panels. AI is an amazing tool for other things, and maybe we shouldn’t fear it, but that doesn’t mean it has the soul of a person behind it. I’m sure it would hone something far greater than I can, but alas, I have my artistic sensibilities to worry about.

It’s been an interesting fall and winter so far, with a full-time work schedule, making the time to write (because there is no excuse not to be if I want this to work), and an array of events and personal matters that isn’t anyone’s business but my own that made me carve out the time.

I’ve scheduled out some work in progress out to 2026, to keep me on schedule this time.

My sweet-spot novel length is now 65,000 words to 120,000 words. I’m writing a light novel series, but that doesn’t mean following their conventions for everything. The Noted Colors of Silver Wings needs to be superbly longer than a light novel to express the lore and new sphere of Verdisti.

Now that I have more time, a structured scheduling plan, and stricter discipline, I think I’ll become the writer I aspire to be within five to ten years.

This is a long game, and there’s no such thing as overnight success. If J. K. Rowling rewrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’s novel introduction fifteen times to get it right, then that’s the drive it takes to get it right.

If it took Bryan Davis 200 rejections before making it, then I’ll follow that determination and walk the path it takes to get there, with every bump, setback, and trial included.

I want to do this right.

Maybe I wasn’t ready before, but I will not stop until I am. No matter how long it takes to get there.