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Writers Journal 50: 16-22 May, 2022

The title took a while… and isn’t as special as it sounds. I changed to “Journal” because my Thesis Diary was no longer about my thesis. The diary lasted more than a year, so really this is closer to blog 103 than it is 50, but you get it.

This week was filled with extra hours and more work, but I’m still very glad about my writing output. Let’s get to it.

WORDS

I hammered out two more chapters this week (though I feel that the second chapter needs a little more to it, it didn’t have a good end). I’ve been really happy with my output these last few weeks. I just seem to make a lot of gains.

Total for the week is 9607 words. The manuscript is sitting at 22,700 words.

I also spent a few hours working on my cheat sheet (characters, backgrounds, mapping cities, etc.) So, even with an extra day at the day job I managed to get a bunch of extra work done for future chapters and scenes.

I also spent time updating the Draklon section of the webpage with new information about this book, and the future books. (I have a feeling that the way things are working out that I might have to go longer than five books, but we’ll see).

There are future plans past this series. I am inspired by several authors and one of them is Dennis L. McKiernan and his Mithgar Series.

Mithgar

Started as a Tolkien… I’ll say homage, but it quickly grew into its own story which I kind of love a lot more. What’s really cool is that McKiernan wrote it out of order. He wrote his trilogy, then went back and wrote a book from an earlier age and then jumped forward a bunch of years and then back again.

It was a lot of fun reading the series, which I read completely out of any order. I didn’t know about the publication order or the chronological when I started. And I was buying my books in bulk from used book stores. So, I read them as I got them.

In either case, I bring this up because I plan to use this pattern myself.

The goal is to finish the invasion. Then write about different time periods.

Future Stories

I plan on writing about the Holy Empire before it was destroyed. Maybe a story from the age of heroes, then a story from the dark ages, then a story from the Schisms that broke the elves. Then back to a post invasion story that leads forward.

Besides jumping around in time, I want to tell stories from the various nations around the world. What about the Dragon Empire in the Far East? What about life in the Ashlands from the nomads? What about a G’Harne tribesman and his journey through the Darklands and down into the jungles and further south to the unknown lands? The Birth of the Martyr Empire and the first Emperor. On and on and on.

Toku and Hobbies

Well, I haven’t had anytime for hobbies and worse I didn’t even get to play D&D for the last two weeks. That really sucked.

But I did get through a bunch of Liveman, which is an ok sentai. I’m not a fan of the costumes and animal motifs are kind of blah for me in Sentai, but the robo does look pretty cool and the villains (as much as they rip off heavily from Bioman) are ok.

What I’ve really been devoting my time to are the actual plays. I’m now 22 episodes into Black Dice Society, and 26 episodes into Vox Machina. Though I have been neglecting my podcasts. I need to catch up on a lot of things.

I haven’t played my videogames in over a week. So sad. Ha ha.

Gaming Talk

I’ve been having a lot of thoughts on characters and gaming of late. Probably as an off-shoot of writing the novel and remembering how many of these characters were originally acted at the table. Or it could also be all of the gaming content I’ve been watching.

In either case I have all these ideas for games and characters and I’m trying very hard to ignore them… but maybe I should instead pull out a new notebook and start writing down some of these ideas. Even if they never get gamed, they could be used as characters in the novel, or npcs, or somewhere else.

The only problem is that jotting down all of these notes is another form of procrastination. It takes away time from writing. But then I can twist it around and say that it flexes the same “muscles” that I use for writing. Letting my imagination shoot off a thousand ideas and catching them on paper will just influence more ideas and more ideas.

I used to be the most creative when I actively ran games and was called on to improv the most. That is where my strengths lie.

Outro

Well… I could run on and on, but I need to get in a write session and survive over 90 degree heat without an AC. Bets to all and I’ll talk more next week.