Irons in the Fire

I am in the thick of putting the Never Going Home manuscript to rights. Almost all of the writing is in, but the wildly different styles of the authors have to be reconciled. This is a big job and I’m really not sure how I’m going to get it done by the date we’ve set for ourselves. I see I’ve got all this work to do, but I also see my inbox full of questions from other writers who are doing adventures for an adventure collection. There are all sort of skill levels represented in this group of 31 writers as well as different levels of experience with role playing games and with the First World War. I’ve found it hard to keep them all on track and explain the game mechanics over and over and still have the energy to sit down and work on my own word counts. It’s just another aspect of how NGH is bigger than we ever expected. My role as creative director is really stretching me when there are so many places my attention is being drawn. Learning. We are still learning how to do this.

Never Going Home is certainly the biggest iron in my fire pit, but I also have a few more in there. Since Wet Ink Games has created a new system for NGH, we feel we can use it to make more small to medium-sized games. We are developing a few at the same time, but the one off to the fastest start I will be called Project Equus. We have someone whom we have worked with before who had a really good handle on the +One system. We’ve basically given this person a free hand to create a game and they are off and running. My involvement should be slight, but it’s still something I have to keep an eye on.

We have also started to move forward on a large project I am going to call Project Nimbus. It will very likely be in development for several years and will take a lot of work – mostly in the world building and in hemming and hawing to get the tone absolutely right. Aiming from the start to make a “prestige” product is not something I have done before, but with the success of NGH and the working methods we are trying, I think we will be ready to make a great finished product by the time we have all the contents written.

Lots to do. Better get to it.

NaNoWriMo Begins Again

First, let me announce the manuscript for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has been completed. We are working to burnish it a bit before we send it on for layout. About 80% of the art has been completed. The comic has been in the bank for a while. Our KickStarter closed one year ago yesterday, so we missed our original target of delivery within one year. That smarts a little, but we rolling forward. I can hardly believe it has been a year already. Writing a whole role playing game from the ground up is hard, let me tell you. Whew! Considering my last major RPG projects all kicked around for multiple years, Wild Skies is proceeding in record time. Always find the latest on our updates page!

What I am really here to talk about is National Novel Writing Month. It’s November and that means it’s time to lay down 50,000 words in 30 days. This is the tenth year I have participated with three victories under my belt. I managed to win last year despite beginning work on Wild Skies and a multi-day trip to see family for Thanksgiving. This year with the editing and layout work to do, I really don’t know if I will have the time for NaNoWriMo. Having said that, one of my victories was achieved in 2013 when there was so much on my plate I needed my novel just to survive. I make no promises. This year I am taking things one day and 1,667 words at a time.

For now, my working title for this year’s novel is The Dream Stele. It is a riff on the actual Dream Stele which sits between the paws of the great sphinx at Giza. The ancient stele tells the story of young Thutmose IV who slept beneath the sphinx on a hunting trip one day. The sphinx was covered in sand. In a dream the sphinx told him he would become pharaoh if he uncovered it. Some version of these events presumably did happen because Thutmose had the story written down on the stele after he did become pharaoh. Assuming the events told on the stele are accurate, I am writing the story of the dream and Thutmose’s subsequent rise to power.

I plan to alternate between three characters. First is young prince Thutmose himself. He’s ambitious and the driver of the events in my story. The scanty scholarship I’ve done on the matter suggests Thutmose may have been epileptic in some form which contributed to his religious convictions. I plan to write him as more manic-depressive. Not in a clinical way, I’ll admit I don’t plan to do much, if any, mental health research. I want to portray him as something of a force of nature. He makes things happen, but no one knows why.

My “real” characters will be the people surrounding Thutmose. Most important will be the engineer tasked with actually moving the sand from around the sphinx. I liked the aquarius hero in Harris’ Pompeii and I have something of a soft spot for Belzoni’s workmanlike engineering so my engineer, as yet unnamed, will likely be a combination of them. I know he wouldn’t think of himself as Sisyphus, but I think he sees himself but in a similar position.

My least realized character so far will be a priestess of Isis. Her story will involve the political and religious side of Thutmose’s rise to power. He wasn’t supposed to be king. Yet he became king. What played out in the halls of power which aided that transition? Whatever story that is will be told from her eyes. I like Jeanne of Arc and I might recast her as my priestess; a character caught up in events “beyond” her because of a clear religious vision. On the other hand, if Thutmose is the religious one and the engineer is the practical one, maybe the priestess plays a role like Valentine Wiggin in Card’s Ender’s Game. She could be the social force which enables what Thutmose is doing to be appreciated. I’ll figure it out as I go along. That’s what writing with abandon is all about.

Right now my word count it 1,721 words.
By now I should have 1,667 words.

Off to a Good Start

First of all, I want to point out the Kickstarter we've been running has ended with great success! We ended with 139% of our goal raised. Thank you to all our backers! This is a great showing for a first-time company. We'll have the comic, custom dice, two bonus adventures and forty different animals because of the stretch goals we reached. I'll be posting about this project here throughout the year as Brandon and I get everything written and tested and ready to go, but you can follow along on the updates page as well.

The timing has worked out great. Just as the Kickstarted ended on 31 October, NaNoWriMo began on 1 November. I am very happy with the progress so far. Having a good idea has been a great help. I've chugged along to a little over the minimum word count each day so far. I'm not over my count for the day yet today, but the day is far from over. I say I had a plan, but that isn't really true. I had no idea what the plot of the story was going to be beyond the vaguest rise and fall of the action. The only think I was clear on was the journal format. That has been going well. I've always loved the books where part of the story was in the “extra” information on the page. Information hidden in the footnotes or encoded in the dates of diary entries has always appealed to me. I am getting to do that here. Somehow it's great fun to skip three days in the dates and come back in with my protagonist making an oblique reference to what else he has been up to. That is where my plot is slowly building up. It's like Shakespeare, a little, where all the action happens off stage and you just have the characters talking about how they feel about the action in soliloquy.

Not that I'm writing Shakespeare, but I am tying to affect an “old-timey” style. My story is supposed to take place in 1648. I don't know if I have an accurate “old-timey” vocabulary for that year. In fact, I would say I don't. My word choice is much more Nineteenth Century, I'm sure. I can't actually think of anything I have read from the Seventeenth Century other than the King James Version of the Bible. The great thing about NaNoWriMo, though, is that getting it “right” doesn't much matter on the first pass. If it sounds old, it'll read as “old.” I can always go back and fix it to the right kind of old if I develop the novel beyond the writing of it this month!

Here's a taste:

I have re-read again the passage from Goloksh. So convenient to have it written out so near at had. Again, I am drawn to de Chapallon's straight-forward amateur's method of simply asking the crystal whence its power derives. The practiced magus often shies away from direct confrontations with power because he has come to know their hazards. I suspect the first small text I transcribed under its influence is the same text he records. With Goloksh I pine for the proof of this theory by the actual page itself! On what misapplied hearth did that great artifact go up in the halls of Savoy? Alas. As I say, I believe I have begun as he did and this text we both produced is the answer to the question he posed. In short it is the proper appellation of the power to which the medium of this black stone opens the way.

Right now my word count is 6700 words.
By now I should have 6668 words.

A Poet's Progress

This past Saturday my wife and I went to a live blues festival held in the older part of the city. It was perfect fall weather and the live music was fun. I'm not much of one for crowds, but I guess other people are because I saw many smiling people.

Since I've been doing so much writing recently, I thought I should write down, in the midst of the show, some poetic phrases to capture the moment. Here's what I wrote:

I didn't know what to expect from the blues festival.
There was blues, for sure, blaring from the main stage.
So loud I could feel it in my chest and through the earth.
But what I kept noticing was people's clothes.
?A commentary on modern America.
The older man with untucked dress shirt taught in the back to accommodate his paunch up front.
The young woman with short jean shorts and a scarf.
The woman in red boots shaking in her ill-fitting jeans in a sort of half dance.
The old black man with naval epaulettes on his white shirt.
Another woman in a pink shirt, black hat, black vest really dancing in the white person way in front of the stage, her red hair bouncing.
The lady with the knit cap and a sweater which reached to her calves.
I look at my own outfit, boat shoes, khakis, a black and grey waffle shirt.
None of these things really tell my anything about these people.
But I notice them. Does anyone notice me, writing this?

Now, this is not a great poem. It's not really even a poem. However, I think it captures something of my real experience in the crowd and I intend to work on it over the coming weeks and make a better poem out of it. I'll be presenting the progress here.

The First Day

Ahh, NaNoWriMo! I love starting a new project. A blank page means anything goes. You can’t do anything “wrong” in the first few days because none of the rules or forms of the story are set. It’s a time of total creative freedom. The more projects I do, the more I realize it is this early part of a project that I enjoy most. I feel really energized and positive about this year’s novel! Let me say now, this is going to be a crazy month. I have two other writing projects that need to be completed this month!
I have had a story bubbling in the back of my head for a few years and this is the month to get it all out. I outlined the story a few months ago so I know all about where I intend to go. It seems like a good idea to have at least some kind of stick to measure against as you go along. This year I am attempting a fantasy adventure story in one of those story worlds where it could just as easily be the distant past as the far future.
For today I will just tease you with a list of my inspirations for this story:
Disney’s Gargoyles
Conan – as written by Robert E. Howard
Heretic II
Starcraft
Hellstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
Verde Valley in Arizona

The benchmark word count for today is: 1667
My total word count so far is: 1793

Year Four Begins

I won’t take long as this blog is eating into my noveling time, but I would like to report that I have actually started my NaNoWriMo for this year. I am off to a slow start. I didn’t write at all on day one. I spent 4 hours at my desk today getting only 1,879 words down. Part of that time I was deciding on names for all my characters and the rest I worked very in-efficiently owing to it being so cold in my office. Although now that I have wised up and put on a sweater things are much better. This year I’m going for the win!

By now I should have 3,334 words.
My current count is 1,879 words.

A Challenge for August

One of my writing buddies has clued me in to the Write Fifteen Minutes a Day challenge. The gauntlet has been thrown down by Laurie Halse Anderson and I am going to pick it up. Every day in the month of August, write 15 minutes. That’s the only rule. As others have pointed out, it’s more than a little like a warm-up for National Novel Writing Month in November. I accept the challenge! I have just finished a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. book (a review is coming…) and I can’t help but be inspired by his artfully compassionate cynicism. The last time I read a Vonnegut I was inspired to emulate him in my failed 2009 NaNoWriMo. This time around I had also begun a story inspired by Vonnegut. I already had a page or so about a mundane anti-hero and his strange connection to a pseudo-science movement when I learned about WFMAD. It’s a natural fit. The stream of consciousness style I am going for with this probably can’t be (shouldn’t be?) maintained for too long anyway.

Stirrings

So, as you could have guessed, I did not win NaNoWriMo 2009. I wound down and despite encouragement (and then justified chastisement) by my writing buddies I never got started again. This last year is the worst I have done yet. Well, there’s always next year… Speaking of which I have already started planning. I have too many ideas. I think I want to write a magical realist piece. Something set in an identifiable time and place but that doesn’t hold itself strictly to reality. Maybe it could be called symbolist historical fiction?
Current ideas:
A semi-biography of three Chinese pirates. It seems that in the early years of the Nineteenth Century the Pirate King of the South China Sea had both a wife and a male lover. After his death (accident or murder?) this bereaved duo teamed up and ruled the waves together. This is based on real events! Go read about Ching Yih and you’ll know as much as I do.
I also like (again loosely based on reality) the idea of an Icelandic family that takes a traditional New Year’s Eve trek to the foot of a local glacier. Except the glacier is receding farther each year. The changes in the landscape reflect the breakdown of multi-generational traditions in the modernized world. (Oh wait, did I tip my hand too early?) There’s Ma and Pa, the “good” son, the “bad” son and the daughter with her American lawyer husband. I know “the journey is a metaphor for life” type stuff has been done; but not in Iceland! There’s the opportunity to mix commentary on environmentalism, the debate about aluminum smelters and American thrill-seeking with references to Viking mythology! I’ve tentatively called this one “Twilight of the Gods.”
Lastly, the American Southwest desert. I’m a big fan. I’m thinking of a tale set in three or four times. A Hohokam, an early Anglo settler and someone in Phoenix circa 1970. There is something that resonates about that place for all of them an even back and forth between them. It’d be kind of an exploration of “the more things change the more things stay the same.” The desert is the symbol of that. Saguaros are so slow growing and just outside of the blacktop of today’s Phoenix the scrub looks the same now as it always has. There’s something powerful in that kind of ever-present landscape. Something…
In other news, I have something really close to fruition that isn’t at all related to writing novels all on one month. Official announcements to follow before too long.
Anyway, that’s all the news that fit to type. TTNF.

The Road Before Me

Greetings. I will be a participant in this year’s National Novel Writing Month and in a fit of over-ambitious creativity I’ve decided that in addition to actually writing my novel, I am going to write this log about writing my novel. This way, people other than my fellow participants can follow along with my progress.

For those of you that don’t know, the basics of NaNoWriMo are as follows: Starting on 1 November participants begin writing a novel. Typical things that writers focus on like plot progression, character development and intriguing settings are not in focus here. They are, in fact, mostly irrelevant. The only measure of success for NaNoWriMo is completion of a 50,000 word manuscript by midnight on 30 November. If you upload and have officially counted your 50,000 word novel by the end of the month, you win! If not, you don’t. There are no prizes, no publication opportunities and no expectations. There is only writing. The focus of the organizers is on getting people in our hyper-busy, über-connected modern civilization to take some time out for simple creativity.

I did NaNoWriMo last year, but I only managed 12,000 or so words. I was attempting a historical fiction set on Sri Lanka between the years 1948 and 1983 that dealt with two families on opposite sides of the political strife that has plagued that island. Basically, I was attempting a James Michner style, multi-generational epic. Since I started without knowing much more then that Sri Lanka is an island plagued by political strife, I was constantly finding myself bogged down in finding the answers to pressing questions like “what kind of animals are on the island?,” “did the British consulate have a large front porch?,” and “are there plantations on the east coast?” Suffice it to say I learned a lot more about Sri Lanka, but didn’t quite finish the novel.

This year I am trying something that (I hope) won’t get me so bogged down. I am going to write I science fiction novel. Not only that, but a science fiction novel based on a film franchise! This is no tabula rasa. I have a wealth of pre-established main characters, archetypal supporting characters, and plenty of loose threads left behind by the canon to draw upon. Plus sci-fi, generally, is highly malleable. Just about anything I want to happen can happen, no matter whether or not there have been any prior hints about it in the canon. I think this year I will totally win!

The greatest adventure is what lies ahead…