I'm Brian Ross, and I'm writing my first novel. It's tentatively titled Ball Kickers (99% sure that's getting changed).

The story: Two soccer team owners in post-collapse Northern Virginia will do anything to win—one's an egomaniac, the other's rumored to be a vampire. Meanwhile, three fans attempt to break the curse on their team, a manager fired for his "turgid" style seeks revenge against his old boss, and a mysterious mercenary gets more caught up in all this than he ever intended.

In the meantime, you can read my Writers’ Playground story “A Prayer In The Caldarium,” or “No Love For The Zebras,” which has some characters from the novel. The feedback I got was that while “overall, the writing is good,” nobody could quite figure out what was going on. I guess that’s what happens when everything’s already in your head and you forget to explain some of it. Nonetheless, I still think it had its moments.

Current word count: 28,369/~90,000 (updated Saturdays)

Latest update (10/24): Back to updating on Saturdays, fresh off the disappointment of not placing in Writers’ Playground this time. Not that I expected to twice in a row, but I saw a couple people managed it. Anwyay, 3,887 words this week. That was lower than I expected but still a great week by my standards.

10/18: Not a Saturday, oops. Even after going to a couple events, there was still plenty of time and I just forgot out of frustration with the metro system, although I still got where I was going on time in the end. Even if it’s just me and future me reading these, I’ll make sure not to forget next Saturday. Wrote 2,182 words this week, which is far better than most weeks but I think I can improve this time around. Into Act II, at last, and answered a potential plot hole—”Why would they wait ten years to do this?” Come to think of it, I’ve waited a lot longer than that to write this, but protagonists have to do things.

10/10: Hard to believe, but I got 2,791 words in this week—well, all in the last three days. For the longest time, I had a scene that just didn’t feel right even though I knew the sequence of events I had planned for it would work. Turns out all I needed was to work on it at a certain time of day and insert more conflict. “Team A wants to beat Team B” isn’t enough. This means act I should be done today or tomorrow. For act II, I have so much planned that I’m not sure I can do it in ~45,000 words, which would be a nicer problem to have. Maybe I can even finish the first draft this year, though it’s doubtful.

10/3: I might have figured out just now why I've been stalled for so long. It's so easy to forget how you need to think of scenes: someone wants something, something blocks them, and at the end things are different. In the introduction scene, this led to a new idea right away: instead of just showing him doing things, someone wants to quit their job, but doesn't for reasons that'll become clear later.

As for the game scene, I thought “both teams want to beat the other” was enough. Also someone gets sold, someone dies, someone else disappears. Hopefully I can fit that all in there, although it felt that somehow there was too little material there, not too much. But for now, have to focus on the character introduction.

9/26: No more words this week, but I realized that instead of trying to make a certain scene longer—which seemed doable with literally a dozen different things that needed to happen in it--I realized I just need to give a dedicated introduction to a character that appeared briefly in scene one, but will be much more important than the other two characters in it. Can't believe I didn't think of this before.

Anyway, as long as I don't dread getting out of bed next week, which sometimes happens, I can finally get act one in the books.

9/19: Something like 400 words this week. Not great, but at least the ball’s rolling again. Maybe I just need to reduce the number of words I expect in this part and move something else into act I to make up for it. I thought about introducing another character here, but since he will be under 18 and thus probably not playing in this professional sports league, it wouldn’t make sense to do it yet, because ten years pass between act I and act II. I’ll think of something.

9/12: Some actual things to deal with beyond the usual laziness this week, of which there was plenty, unfortunately. Picked up a novel that I hope will help me get through the scene I'm hung up on though.

9/5: Only about 110 words this week. I never thought that coming back from vacation would make my sleep problem even worse, given the tiny bed and lack of environmental control that I had, but that’s what’s happened. But the real problem is that I’m trying to write a soccer game scene and I’m not sure I’ve ever read one, only seen them in TV/movies. I have another 15 things listed that I want to happen, but for some reason the words won’t come. Maybe I just need to list all the ways I could execute any given sentence (e.g. character A, B, or C talks, simply describe what happened, crowd reaction, etc). and go from there.

8/29: Well, I can finally reveal that I was in Italy August 3-26, and act I should be done next week. Maybe I'm the only one reading this, but you never know: maybe AI-powered scrapers are looking for vacation plans or something.

Anyway, since it's superficially a lot like my story, I watched season one of Ted Lasso on the plane back and found it to be almost unbearably corny. I've been thinking about writing this book for nearly 20 years now, so it would've been a great disappointment if Ted Lasso had beaten me to it and done it better, but that's not the case at all.

My story will have a much greater emphasis on curses, the fans, and a darker tone, among other things. Also, it won't include The Message™. Just off the top of my head, Ted Lasso had a foreign schoolgirl humiliating British schoolboys on the way to class, Ted Lasso referring to God as “she,” and then there's Keeley. There's that remark about her relationship not defining her—sorry, but to that point, it does, just as much as Lasso or Kent are defined by their jobs—and then the writers tell us four times how independent she is during the faux press conference. No she isn't; nobody really is. Aside from her relationships, her income is doing marketing for a football club whose owner sabotaged it just to get back at her ex-husband, who didn't seem particularly bothered. The relegation and inevitable player exodus will dramatically affect the club's revenue, and there's not too much Keeley can do about it.

8/22: Only got 342 words this week, but major life changes are coming next week, and I'll finally be able to finish act one (at about 22,500 words). For act two I already have at least five plot lines in mind, but I think they should be easy to follow, even if the characters take me to unexpected places.

8/15: Only a few hundred words this week, but at least I’m getting back in the habit. There won’t be much time for it the next couple of days, but after that I should just commit to ten words a day, with the hope that it’ll turn into a lot more than that every time. Major changes in my schedule are coming too.

8/8: For temporarily undisclosed reasons, all I could do this week is make my way through a book about character arcs, so it’s not just the usual laziness. Should be able to finally add some more words next week though.