#WriteTuesday – Happy Family Day!

Hey everyone, sorry this is a bit late.  It was a long weekend here (happy family day everyone!), so my weekend was full of lots of fun outdoor adventures!  I went snowshoeing on Sunday, then skiing yesterday for 4 hours!  It was a super fun weekend. 🙂

Other than that, I started thinking about the index for the book I’m editing.  I won’t be able to do too much work on that yet, but I started listing some keywords from a few of the chapters.

I also came up with a new character idea last week.  I was watching some videos on YouTube about Star Wars (by Thor Skywalker – I quite enjoy his content) and somehow that set my mind on a tangent thinking about having a kind of Indiana Jones-style character in City of the Dead.  I’m not quite sure what to do with the character yet (it also raised a whole bunch more worldbuilding questions for City of the Dead that I’ll need to work through), so we’ll see where that goes!

How’s your week been?  Did you have a good weekend?  Any plans for the coming week?

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#WriteTuesday – Book + Make Your Way Story Editing

Hey everyone, how’s the week been? Did you have a good Halloween? 🙂

Last week was mainly spent on editing the book.  I finished editing a third chapter and sent it to its author.  Then the first chapter came back to me, so I spent the weekend working on that (just finished those edits yesterday).

Once that was finished, I found myself with some unexpected extra time.  After reading some of The Wealthy Renter (which I picked up over the weekend – very excited to read it!), I turned my attention back to the Make Your Way story.  I’ve been wanting to go over the character’s dialogue for over a month now, but haven’t had the time (or energy to be editing more in the middle of book edits).  Going over the dialogue actually led me to a bit more worldbuilding for City of the Dead – I got stuck wondering what someone would say rather than “thank goodness.” “Thank goodness” didn’t sound right to me, coming from someone living in that particular world.  What immediately came to mind was “thank the gods,” but I hadn’t actually thought about whether or not people living in the City worship gods.  But they do keep altars for the dead, so I settled on “thank the ancestors” as what would probably be said in that case.

I did the initial edits to the story using the Game Book Authoring Tool (GBAT) file, but in the end decided to randomize all the sections and just start working off of a rich text format document instead (which is easier to search through).  I went through all 73 sections looking at dialogue; I’m not sure how well I succeeded in differentiating the characters….but there are some definite subtle differences in how they speak.  One character uses really long words and no contractions (assuming I got rid of them all properly) because she’s a lady who is extremely bookish/studious.  Another character uses more formal words, but they’re tempered with contractions because she is exhausted (and has more real world experience than her studious twin).  The minor soldier characters don’t use big words (again, assuming I successfully caught all of their dialogue).  The only character’s speech that hasn’t been changed is the avatar/player character.  I made that character purposely vague because they are the “you” in typical choose your own adventure-style books.  For that reason, I wasn’t really planning on giving them a specific style of speech, especially since the player has the choice between playing a smarter character or a stronger character (and I was not going to give different versions of dialogue depending on that choice! The story would have ballooned to double the length it is now!!)

Depending on how the rest of the week goes with the book edits, I’m hoping to go over the Make Your Way story a few more times (or at least once more really in depth); after that, I’d really like to submit it!  Wish me luck!!! 🙂

#WriteTuesday – Sick Again :(

Not a whole lot to talk about this #WriteTuesday – I got sick AGAIN last week (I started feeling off earlier in the week, but after work on Thursday night it turned into a full-blown cold, which knocked me out of commission for the weekend).

But I did start thinking through an idea I had for another short story (the one I mentioned in my last post for a new market).  My plan was to use an alien species I came up with many years ago for it, so I thought that wouldn’t be to tough to plan out and start writing.  Unfortunately, the more I thought about that alien, the less sense it physically made to me; so while I wasn’t planning on it, I kind of got stuck in worldbuilding for this story idea too.   While aquatic, these aliens don’t live on Imezza, so I haven’t really thought about them in a long time (or properly thought through their biology).  I’d really like them to make sense to me before I actually write any stories with them.  So I spent some time over the weekend doing some research on how aquatic animals evolved; I *think* I found a way for these aliens to make sense to me.

Of course, once that’s done, I’ll need to figure out how they got themselves to space since they are aquatic!  I also need to get back to the Make Your Way story.  I still need to plan out the ending(s) then write that up. So everything is currently stuck in planning.  Well, wish me luck on all of this – hopefully I’ll be actually writing something soon!

#WriteTuesday – Working on City of the Dead

Last week I actually did sit down and think through a couple of the City of the Dead worldbuilding kinks I’ve been putting off for two weeks!  I’ve been needing to properly think through some of the fantastic ideas my brother gave me about the setting when I told him what I was working on.  At the time I was trying to puzzle through whether the undead need to sleep.  My brother and I discussed what the different undead within City of the Dead are like and as I mentioned before, he made some suggestions about the undead that were fantastic but had huge repercussions for the entire setting if I decided to use them.  Having mulled them over for a few weeks, I finally examined what those suggestions would mean in practical terms last Tuesday night; in the end I decided to use them (I kind of thought I would because they really were fantastic ideas!)

Of course, all of this led to more questions I needed to answer about different kinds of undead.  I continued working on worldbuilding City of the Dead for a few days until I felt I had sufficiently found answers to my outstanding questions.  Then I finally turned back to thinking about the actual story for the Make Your Way anthology.  My first order of business was figuring out how all of the new worldbuilding changes impacted the characters.  Once I’ve got all of that figured out, I will be able to get back to actually writing!

Last #WriteMonday (It’ll Be #WriteTuesday Going Forward!)

Just to warn everyone, this is going to be the last #WriteMonday.  I was thinking about it, and since I generally work on things on Monday (and so never really have a consistent time when I post on Mondays), I’m going to move the weekly update to Tuesdays instead.  That way I can do all my writing without trying to remember to post on here simultaneously! 🙂

Fitting in with this change, I also decided to move the monthly Tuesday Book Talk to Thursdays.  So starting this month, that will now be happening on the last Thursday of the month instead of the last Tuesday.

This last week has been full of brainstorming and worldbuilding and plotting, all for the Make Your Way Story I’m working on.  As I mentioned before, the story is going to be set in City of the Dead.  After finally finishing bingeing through the Pitch Meetings on Youtube (they’re by Ryan George for Screen Rant), I started thinking a lot more about this story.  I don’t know why, but I was having a really hard time working on it, so I forced myself to go over things and see what the matter was.

My thoughts led me off in some unexpected directions: the original story I envisioned had a man looking for his betrothed, but I wasn’t really clear on how he realized she was missing.  Thinking through that, I thought it made the most sense that they separated because of an argument and he realized she was missing when he went back to apologize to her.  But the more I thought about their argument, the less sense the story made as I had originally envisioned it.

What made more sense within the story was to have the lady looking for her betrothed instead. That meant I had to change some aspects of the characters I had originally envisioned, too.  At its most basic, she was originally going to be a revenant, but now he would be instead (revenants are the soul that remains when a zombie is made – I talk a little bit about it in this post from 2015, and wrote a short story dealing with revenants and zombies for Apocalypse Madness).  Making that change led to some unexpected worldbuilding problems within City of the Dead that I had to work through (specifically whether the world’s magic is capable of affecting a revenant).  That question took an unexpectedly long time to answer (about two days!)  But that was okay, because now that I have answered it, I feel a lot more confident about this new version of the story.  And now that most of the worldbuilding is out of the way, I’ve been able to start re-plotting the story.  That has (of course) kicked up a few more worldbuilding things I need to think about, which will hopefully take a bit less time than the last one did.  But no matter how long it takes, once I’ve figured all of this out I think both the story and the setting will be much stronger!

Once I’m finished with working through the plot and the few worldbuilding kinks, I’ll get back to actually writing the story.  Unfortunately the changes I’ve made mean that most of what I had already written will be scrapped.  But that’s okay, these things happen (remember when I was working on that story for the Dark Crystal Author Quest? I wrote 5+ drafts of that story, many of which involved huge structural edits like this!) The main thing is that no matter how many drafts this takes, I end up writing the strongest story I can! 🙂

#WriteMonday – Mostly Worldbuilding

So this weekend I managed to actually work a bit on the story I started for the Make Your Way anthology.  I had a really hard time sitting down with it for some reason, but last night I finally started thinking through the characters a little bit.  I guess the problem was that I knew I needed to do some worldbuilding in order to properly think through my characters.  But once I started I ended up on a roll!

One oversight that I made with City of the Dead was that I failed to come up with naming conventions for the world.  I’ve got rough naming conventions for pretty much all the other worlds I’ve come up with because I want to make sure characters from different settings don’t have too similar-sounding names.  So last night I sat down and thought through that; from there I moved on to thinking about the individual characters a little more.  Thinking through everything also made me realize that lands and titles in City of the Dead move through matrilinear lines.  This is a little thing, but it is pretty obvious because City of the Dead is ruled primarily by the Queen (she has a King, but he is in charge of security and military matters while she is the one who does the actual ruling).

I came up with my character motivations as well.  I think I’ve figured out how they think (and why things unfold the way they do).  Last night I was thinking they were an aristocratic family, but after sleeping on it I’m thinking they are not.  While I liked the idea of them being aristocrats (especially because it explains where the family’s father is), I’d then have to figure out either why they don’t have servants or why the servants saw and heard nothing.  Plus having servants in the picture may pose a problem for keeping the character count down (which I want to do because this is going to be a short story).  If they aren’t an aristocratic family, and so don’t have servants, all of these problems become nonexistent.

Most of the work I did was yesterday, but I did find names for the characters today.  I’m planning on doing some more work on things tomorrow afternoon, too.  After that I’ll probably have to turn my attention back to Sustainably North and getting a blog post ready for next week.  Thinking of Sustainably North, today I talked about drinking straws, if you’re interested in reading it. 🙂

I hope everyone has a good and productive week.  🙂

Last Weekend Writing

So last weekend was a long weekend here in Canada.  I set myself a couple of low-grade writing goals: get a post written for Sustainably North (that’s kind of a given), and write a first draft of a short story.  The Sustainably North post ended up a short rant about garbage and what to do about cat litter (I don’t have an answer to that last one – if you have any ideas, please let me know on the post!)

So that left the draft of the short story.  I knew what I wanted to do – I found a market on Duotrope that wants short stories about monsters (and not the usual ones either). With a bit of thought, I decided to write about a monster from Imezza (specifically a kraken, because why not?)  I originally started developing Imezza specifically to write short stories in it, so this seemed like an easy choice.  Unfortunately, as much as Imezza is developed, there are still gaping holes in the setting.  Which makes it very hard to stay focussed on writing in the setting right now because I keep getting sidetracked by research needs.

The main problem I was having last weekend was that I decided to focus on a character whose species hasn’t been very well developed by me to date (whoops!) And then the kraken itself started giving me grief.  Do kraken look like octopus?  Squid?  What do their eyes look like?  That last question sent me onto the internet for probably 45 minutes or so.  I now know how octopus eyes see colour.  But I never did track down what colours exactly octopus eyes come in (I ended up having to image search octopus eyes to see what colours they come in).

Despite all the research quagmires, in the end I did succeed in crafting a first draft of a story.  It’s going to need a whole lot of work, but at least it’s a start.  And in the process, I hit my writing goal for last weekend, so that’s a win in and of itself. 🙂

Hello 2018!

Happy New Year everyone!  It’s that time of year again – time to look at the goals I set for myself last year and set new goals for this year.  Last year, my goals were:

1. Read 40 novels.  Success!  I read forty novels, a bunch of graphic novels, and a bunch of comics!  2017 was a great year for reading!
2. Write four polished short stories.  Yeeeah….partial success I guess?  I did write one.  But that was it.  I did start on a second one, but I discovered that Imezza isn’t in as good shape as I thought; I got a bit bogged down in worldbuilding, and the story ended up really blah as a result.
3. Work on Tears of the King. This was nice and vague.  I worked on it a bit this year (it’s no where near being finished).  So partial success?  I don’t know if I built another third, but I did make some progress.

I apparently also set a fourth goal, which I managed to forget about (it was to spend an hour a week on writing).  😦

2017 saw me start two new RPG Maker Games (oops): Memories and a second one I haven’t actually talked about on here yet (oops, I’ll have to remedy that).  It also saw me working on a freelance project which I’m still unable to talk about, which was very exciting.  It also saw me slowly and unexpectedly move away from my second job.  So for 2018, I’m going to work on freelancing a little more than I have.

So with that in mind, here are the goals I’m going to set for 2018:

1. Read 25 novels.  Well, novel-length books.  I know that the 40 novels from last year was my only really successful goal, but I need to back that off.  I found that 40 novels was a lot of pressure while I’m trying to accomplish other things.  I also found myself shying away from any books longer than around 300 pages, so making this goal less should help me tackle some of the longer books I’ve had for years and have ignored.
2. Write two polished short stories.  I wrote one, so this year I will aim for two.
3. Finish a bloody RPG! Like I said, I currently have THREE RPG Maker games on the go.  So this year, I want to get SOMETHING finished!  lol I also have to not start another RPG Maker game until I get something finished!

A couple of final notes for the upcoming year:

• next weekend I’m going to be participating in my first ever game jam!  I’m really excited for it!  I’ll have to blog more about it. 🙂
• I am not going to make a goal for “so much time writing” this year.  Instead, I’ve currently got one guaranteed afternoon off from work, so I’m going to try to use that time for working on things, be they writing or researching (although it’s also a time I use for other things like vet appointments, because I know it’s a time I don’t work).  Depending on how the year goes, this can change, so I’ll have to be flexible with it.

So that’s it.  Hopefully 2018 will be a good and creative year, giving me the flexibility to work on different things (and actually get some stuff finished!)

So what about you? Have you set any goals for the upcoming year? 🙂

Write Sunday – February 5th

Life is busy.  That’s an extreme understatement.  Over the last sevenish months I haven’t been making any time for writing, which was extremely unfortunate.  So as my added fourth goal for 2017, I vowed to spend one hour a week on writing.  I didn’t do so well through January (I wrote a little bit here and there near the end of the month, plus built that chatbot, which took quite a bit of writing initially).  But it’s the beginning of a new month, which means time for a new start.

I started out by writing down an idea I had for a 10 minute play.  There’s a theater event called 10×10 here in Thunder Bay which I went to a writing workshop for back in 2015.  I didn’t submit anything that year (I was dealing with sorting out my NaNoWriMo blob around that time) and hadn’t really thought much about it since then.  But then I had a random idea from work that I wanted to get onto paper.  It’s way too late to work on anything for this year (the deadline was back in January), but maybe I’ll get this into shape in time to submit it for next year.  We’ll see!  It will definitely need a lot of work (and an ending!)

After that, I also finally tweaked my Imezza and Faeriia docs to reflect the work I did on Imezzan magic back in December.  Faeriia was an easy edit – the magic on that world will not use the basic elements at all now so I just had to take any reference to that idea out.  Imezzan magic is going to be the one dealing with the elements now because it’s way more appropriate there.

I have to say, I’m very happy to have taken the time to do this writing, even though it’s really not a whole lot.

I think my next project is to work on a short story.  There’s a local writing contest coming up that I would like to enter.  And that would go hand in hand with my goal to write some polished short stories this year!

#WriteFriday – June 17th and 24th

I apologize.  I had every intention of posting last Friday about the writing I did last week.  But I ended up going out to the movies after work (and stood around chatting with a few of my friends for about 2 hours afterwards) and ended up completely forgetting.  So here’s the info now!

On my actual birthday last week, I didn’t end up doing as much writing as I’d planned.  I ended up spending way too much time trying to track down a comic I was 99% sure was by John Kovalic.  I was looking for the wrong thing though and had trouble finding it (until I asked him on Twitter and got a response almost immediately – it turned out I was looking for a bus when I should have been looking for a train!)  But once that was done, I did some worldbuilding!  I decided to work on the world I have creatively been referring to as either “the Centaur World” or “Werewolves, etc” (I think it’s the latter on my Google Drive).  I haven’t really talked about it on here, but it’s the world that my failed Script Frenzy attempt takes place in.  I chose to work on the bird people who live in the world, too (yes, the world is going to be made up of a lot of half-human beings).  They have always been an integral part of this setting, but I needed to figure out how a few more things about them worked.  Long story short, the answer is “shut up, they’re psionics, that’s why!”  Thinking through their psionic aspect ended up making me really excited about them!

I did that bit of work hanging outside with my cat, writing in a notebook.  So later in the week, I ended up meeting up with my brother at a coffee shop for a bit.  I started transferring the notebook notes into my Google Drive document.  I finally got around to finishing that off on Sunday.

Sunday also brought me to an interesting dilemma.  A number of years ago, I had created an awesome minotaur character for a roleplaying game run by a friend of mine.  I loved that character so much that I ended up writing a short story about her, trying to bring her into her own world (lol, I tend to like doing that sort of thing – creating characters for someone else’s setting and eventually changing them to a point where they no longer fit into that setting and so jump into one of my own making).  When I was working on the NaNoWriMo blob, I did a bit of worldbuilding for this setting, making the note that these minotaurs (they call themselves the Rundarin), would fit on Werewolves etc.  But try as I might, I actually can’t get them to fit into this setting.  So after thinking about it long and hard, I made the decision to make the Rundarin into the centaurs, rather than having them be minotaurs.  I’m a bit sad about the change, but it feels so much better for the setting!  I think that as a consolation to the poor lost minotaurs, some of the centaurs will have horns, too (because really, why not?)

Once that was straightened away, I started trying to decide on the other creatures that live on this world, or at least on the part of the world I’ve currently got stories for in my head.  One of the major ideas behind this world is that it is made up of creatures who descended from humans and other animals, so there will be lots of half-animal people.  I haven’t quite got it all sorted yet, but hopefully I will soon!