#WriteFriday – August 21st

I’m not going to lie – I didn’t really do any writing this Friday.  I had every intention of writing.  I went to my brother’s house with notebook and laptop in hand.  He was going to read, I was going to write.  At least, that was the plan until I got there and we ended up talking politics for most of the night.

Earlier in the week, I did some work on my RPG, Tears of the King.  Back in 2013, I planned out a large forest map that would connect the starting village and the witch’s house map.  I started building the forest map, but stopped working on the game before it was finished.  Now, it actually almost IS done.  Looking at it now, I’d say I’ve got to finish up about 1/3 of it.  The stuff I’ve added this last week includes a small lake, a fisherman’s cottage, and a graveyard for the village (for some reason, I always tend to build the graveyards outside of my villages…).  I’ve also added in some spots for eventual secret areas (most likely chests and dungeons).

After that, I sort of got distracted by reading.  One of my goals for the year is to read 50 books off what I call The List, which is a list of fiction books I currently own a physical copy of.  My brother pointed out a month ago that I am rather behind schedule.  So I’ve been trying to read a lot more.  This week alone, I’ve read three books (one was a graphic novel, one an excellent YA, and one an older fantasy I’ve had for over ten years).  I admit, I feel like I’m cheating a bit because I’m trying to read all the short things I’ve got on The List in an effort to catch up.  But I’m still 15 books behind schedule, so that currently means I need to read about 2 books a week to make that goal.

Well, this became more of an update than a #WriteFriday post!  Let’s take this back to writing – by talking a bit about Apocalypse Madness.  It’s once again nearing the end of the month, so I decided to work on something for that today.  The quote I posted for this month (“His dreams of flying and breathing fire like his idol will never be realized.”) comes from Hearthstone’s Oasis Snapjaw (you have to go into your card collection and click on the cards to find the quotes).  Literally, the quote is talking about a reptile who comes to realize he isn’t a dragon.  I thought there was some hilarity in that.  But I also thought the quote suggested much more in the way of talking about idols who let us down.  So that’s exactly what I wrote for this month, using some of the characters from my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel.  I thought this quote would let me do a character sketch of one of my characters, using an event I knew had happened in the recent past before the NaNoWriMo novel began.  I ended up switching the names for two of the characters (Ryan and Danny) back in June, so I had a bit of a hard time keeping the characters straight (making this another good exercise for me).  Like my City of the Dead Short Story, there’s a good chance some of the details in this story may be inaccurate (and I may have to change the names back because I still think of Danny as Danny).

I really suck at coming up with titles.  Hence the terrible title for this story (“She Shot Me!“)  This time I didn’t end up even trying to write a microfiction, hence the almost 600 words.  I think it was worth it though, as it gave me a chance to think through this rather defining moment in the lives of my characters.

I had another idea for this quote which I may write if I have time during the week (or possibly next Friday since it’s still August then).  Otherwise I’ll probably go back to Tears of the King.  And reading.

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