Shame and Guilt

Journal 118:  6- 12 May 2024

I think that my last post shamed me enough to wake up a little and get my shit together.

I won’t say I’m firing on all cylinders, but I did spend several days of the week revising the novel. Work got done and more is planned.

Revision

I forgot how overly wordy I can be. Just some of the stupidest sentences that can very easily be cut into two shorter sentences, or just have words lopped off entire.

But I also forgot that it takes me hours to revise each chapter. I’m laughing at myself. After months and months of ignoring the book, I suddenly revised a single chapter and felt great. I said to myself, “Tomorrow I’ll sit down on my day off and knock three or four chapters. Get a real start on this work.”

And then the very first chapter was about 10,000 words long and took me three hours to go through and find typos, remove and rewrite sentences, and generally fix continuity errors. Three hours.

So, anyway, I’m now happy if I get one chapter done each day between my other work.

Outcome

I got four chapters finished over three sessions last week and am about a third or so into the book. About 200 pages of 600.

I’m only on chapter 11 though. I know the early chapters are very long and then the last third of the book’s are shorter. That seems to be a pattern for my novels. The last chapters move faster and faster toward the conclusion. With each chapter swapping to a different pov.

My thesis novel, The Ashlands, was crazy at the end. Most of the chapters were overlapping, with parts of the scene retold from a different view. The chapters were super short and super-fast. Almost like whiplash at the end.

Literary whiplash?

Sounds interesting, but maybe not fun?

Other Work, Rest of the Week

Because I was working on the novel again it immediately had me thinking of fantasy and RPGs. So, I took out my notebooks and started working on more campaign notes, mechanics, and other ideas for running games in my world again.

All of this world building goes back into my novels as well. Not that I write litRPG, but the basis of things is in gaming. I like that there are easter eggs that will trigger a gamer when they read. They will recognize that a character might be a certain class, might have a feat or ability. Stuff like that.

Criticism

But my magic system is not the Vancian D&D one. Though I get called out that it uses terminology that very much resembles the weave in Faerun. Though the origins and how the weave/aether are manipulated are very different.

And I’ve gotten criticism from my players (and surely from readers) about the “Hammer of Oblivion” (Hammerfall/ Gods’ Wrath/etc.) is very much the Cataclysm from Kyrnn. And I admit to being guilty about that, I did come up with the first version of my game world when I was a teenager.

But considering that first world was 50-50 my material and maps stolen from old adventures and modules. And that each time I recreated the world I changed things up. Adding more and more of my own flavors, cultures, and rearranging the map. Again, and again.

But I had to keep some of the greatest features. The shattered 1000 Nations was essential. The Ashlands, the “exit-wound” of hammerfall was vital. Having an Egypt setting, despite the fact that then forced my world to hold to some real-world equivalency… meaning that Southron became very “Africa” and Northron became very European, and the water between had to be the Mediterranean.

Eurocentric Break

I really wanted to move my world away from a Eurocentric view. I wanted more fantasy and less medieval historical. And I ended up making a world that roughly corresponds to our own… at least in climate and such.

I believe understanding where the equator is and how climate changes as you move further from it is important. So, my world has real climate and terrain, but still fantasy enough that I didn’t figure out things to a scientific level.

Since I couldn’t avoid references to the real world, not if I want to keep my Aegyptus, I embraced some of them. I then doubled down on a lot of the fantasy elements, and added in more non-euro places. I explored how the 1000 Nations were heavily middle-eastern, I mish-mashed various cultures to create new gestalts, and moved them to “different places” on the map.

I’m sure I’ll still receive criticism for my world. Whatever. I think I’ve made some interesting choices and I have areas that I’ve personally never seen in games. People want to judge, have fun. I think I’ve put a lot of thought into things. And I spend my freetime learning about other histories and cultures. It would be easy for me to have Rome in my world (and I do, but that empire fell thousands of years ago) but instead I spend my time learning about Akkad, Sumer, and Assyrian empires. Early feudal Japan and Three Kingdoms China. How the Mongolians lived.

Off Topic

Anyway, I feel like I’ve strayed from the topic.

I spent time working on the old book and as soon as I get near the end, I will set up to start the new novel.

The rest of today, I plan to try and get TWO chapters revised. We’ll see how long these bloody chapters are.

Thanks for reading this far and thank you for staying with me as I kept skipping weeks and getting nothing done.