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Status Report (15 October 2019)

Status Report (15 October 2019)

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After a week of reading other people’s work and providing feedback on the Chapterbuzz site, I’ve swung back to working on The Curse of Steel. The feedback I got was a little thin, although three or four people did offer at least a few suggestions apiece. I’ve already gone through and done revisions in accordance with those, and now I’m back to writing new material. As of today, I’ve reached the projected half-way point in the draft – over 60k words!

Meanwhile, over the weekend I picked up a new map-making application, called Wonderdraft. This is an indie production, designed as far as I can tell by a single coder. It doesn’t have nearly the feature list of my usual toolset (Photoshop), but it’s geared almost entirely toward drawing fantasy maps, and for that purpose, it’s pretty slick. The fact that you can “paint” areas of the map with things like mountain or forest icons, and the tool will automatically change up the current icon and make sure there aren’t any collisions with other symbols? Good Lord, that’s useful. I can’t begin to count how many hours I’ve spent in Photoshop, laboriously clicking through mountain or tree icons and placing them one . . . at . . . a . . . time.

Here’s an example – this is the current partial draft of the main continental map for The Curse of Steel, which I’m using to plan out the back story and plot on the largest scales.

Not nearly finished, obviously – I’ve got a ton of layers to paint onto this yet. But the above took a lot less time than it would have in Photoshop, and the tool is doing a nice job of freeing me from drudgery so I can concentrate on being creative. Those mountain ranges, for example, took only 15-20 minutes to plan and paint onto the map. Looks like a hard recommend from me.

Status Report (6 October 2019)

Status Report (6 October 2019)

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Well, I chained myself to the computer this weekend and breezed right past my 10k word-count goal for the first week of October. As of right now, I’ve put down 11,970 words on the first draft of The Curse of Steel since Tuesday.

Meanwhile, real life has been building up a head of steam, so it’s just as well that I’m ahead of my goal. This week at the office, I have a pile of work to do and deadlines to meet, so my writing pace is likely to slow down dramatically over the next few days.

Still, there are now nineteen chapters posted over on Chapterbuzz, and the story is rapidly approaching its mid-point. Every day I’m more confident that this will eventually be my first published novel-length original work. About time I broke that creative barrier!

Status Report (3 October 2019)

Status Report (3 October 2019)

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I’m in the middle of the 10k Challenge week on the Chapterbuzz site, and at the moment the plot is thickening as nicely as I might have asked for. One more big fight scene, the introduction of a new character, the addition of a new mystery and the resolution of a few old ones, and I’m going to be ready for the big Wham Moment at the halfway point of the novel.

Taking a few days off before the beginning of October really helped me think through a few plot points and get all my tools set out. Since Tuesday I’ve managed to put down 5,900 words without too much trouble.

At the moment, eighteen chapters of the first draft of The Curse of Steel are up at Chapterbuzz. Go, read, “buzz” the chapters if you’re enjoying them, and feel free to leave any feedback that comes to mind. With, as always, my thanks.

Status Report (25 September 2019)

Status Report (25 September 2019)

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Whew. Last few days have been kind of unpleasant – I’ve been fighting some kind of sore-throat-and-intestinal-crud combination that’s kept me home from the office.

On the other hand, in the few hours here and there that I’ve been awake and lucid, I’ve managed to finish polishing up the existing partial draft of The Curse of Steel. That includes a few kilowords of new material that wasn’t in the very first rough draft. Those sixteen chapters are all up on Chapterbuzz now, so if you’re interested in a bit of gritty Iron Age heroic fantasy, go have a read, “buzz” and comment on the chapters.

Plan now is to take a break for a few days. Honestly, I need to get back to the office, assuming this crud is finally gone, and put in some long hours on a couple of projects there. Not to mention that I’m starting my first course toward a graduate degree next week too.

Come the beginning of October, I’ll be participating in a challenge on Chapterbuzz that will involve cranking out 10 kilowords (about four chapters) in the first week, and then polishing and refining and adding to the draft over the rest of the month. Then November comes, and National Novel Writing Month – 50 kilowords in one month. If I can keep up the pace, the novel should be finished in the first draft well before the end of the calendar year. Here’s hoping.

Status Report (21 September 2019)

Status Report (21 September 2019)

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I’ve done some polishing of the partial draft of The Curse of Steel. At this point, the first eight chapters have all been posted to Chapterbuzz for reading and feedback. Here’s a link to the book’s page there.

Right now, my plan is to finish micro-revisions to the first sixteen chapters – that is, everything I’ve produced thus far – and post those to Chapterbuzz before the end of this month. That should clear the decks for the novel-building challenge they’re going to hold over the month of October.

The biggest reservation I have right now is that the section I’m writing is subject to major revisions in the plot. The first arc of the novel is basically an action-adventure story, but this second arc is mostly about political intrigue and a couple of mysteries. I know how it’s going to end, but how it gets there isn’t entirely fixed in my mind. Entirely possible I’ll rethink how the plot goes and need to go back for major revisions. But we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

An Experiment: Chapterbuzz

An Experiment: Chapterbuzz

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Anyone who’s trying to write and self-publish creative work will soon come to the realization that the market for potential readers’ attention is insanely competitive. It’s tough to find readers when there are millions of other people all doing their best to drown you out. I can attest to this: the few short pieces I’ve already self-published via Amazon have maybe sold enough copies to buy me one meal. A cheap meal at that.

Now, there are plenty of “services” out there that promise to help you past that obstacle. The vast majority of those are effectively digital vanity presses. They charge the would-be author fees for every step of the process, and there’s no guarantee that anything they do will actually help. As a result, a lot of hopeful authors end up spending a pile of money out of their own pockets for no result. Manutius Press is the only party that wins.

Still. Self-publication means that you’re going to have to take some risks and make some investments, of time and energy if nothing else. So I’m going to try an experiment, one which I can shut down if it becomes obvious that it’s not going to be to my net benefit. The experiment is going to involve the Chapterbuzz site, operated by Timothy Pike.

I’ll be posting first-draft chapters of The Curse of Steel to Chapterbuzz, which means you’ll be able to read them there as I work on the novel. Probably the best way to find the work there is to go to my author profile page: John Alleyn on Chapterbuzz, and look for the link for The Curse of Steel. You can also click on the Chapterbuzz icon in the sidebar to get to the same place.

Feel free to read the work in progress there. Won’t cost you (or me) a thing. If you’d like to help me along as I work on the story, there are a couple of things you could do. As you read each chapter, you’ll probably see a “Buzz” button; if you’re enjoying the story, click on that to give it a little push. That may give you the opportunity to get email notifications for new chapters as I post those. You can also comment on chapters as you read them; that will help too.

We’ll see how this turns out. As you may be able to tell, I’m skeptical about sites like this, but so far it looks less predatory and more actually helpful than most. If it can get me some useful feedback, and maybe even a leg up when it comes time to publish, then it should be a useful investment.

Status Report (16 September 2019)

Status Report (16 September 2019)

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Not much concrete to report for the moment. I’ve been making superb progress on the first draft of The Curse of Steel, hitting the 33% mark this past weekend. While I’m working on that, though, other projects that might be interesting to blog about are on the back burner.

This week is going to be a bear. I’m teaching one course, wrapping up work on writing a second one so we can hold a pilot offering for it, and otherwise likely to be buried at the office. I hope to get at least a few hundred words down per night, but we’ll see how things go.

It is looking as if I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month this year, for a change. I suspect I’ll still have at least 50,000 words to go on the first draft at the end of October. It will be interesting to see if I can keep up that kind of pace for a month, but if I can, I should have the complete first draft finished well before the end of this calendar year.

Introducing Kráva the Swift

Introducing Kráva the Swift

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Here’s my first attempt to generate imagery for The Curse of Steel:

This young woman is my protagonist, Kráva the Swift, close to the beginning of her story.

I’m pleased with how her face, body, hairstyle, and coloring all came out; I was able to make her look almost exactly like the image I had in my head. Clothing and gear, not so much. It’s very difficult to find precisely the look I want for those, among the digital assets that are available for DAZ Studio. Her gear is supposed to suggest a pseudo-Celtic culture, but at the moment she looks kind of generic. This isn’t a bad first approximation, though. Later I’ll try to get her hauberk to look more authentic, improve the sword a bit, add a cloak, a scabbard, and the bow and arrows she also carries, and so on.

Here’s a link to the DeviantArt page where this image was also posted. You should be able to get higher resolution there, and some technical notes that I left out here.

Status Report (2 September 2019)

Status Report (2 September 2019)

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Another very productive weekend for The Curse of Steel. I had to go into the office on Saturday and didn’t get much writing done, but I more than made up for it yesterday and today: two whole chapters down in rough draft, about another 5,700 words in all.

I’ve now finished what might be considered Act I of the story, in which Kráva learns that she’s a hero of divine descent, first shows some of the power of her heritage, and (most importantly) starts to get used to her new role. At this point, she’s kind of enjoying it, it’s starting to go to her head a little. Now for Act II, in which things are going to go rather spectacularly wrong for her.

In other news, I’ve been browsing around for assets I can use to assemble digital art of Kráva and her world. This is a lot harder than you might think, given the size of the market for fantasy-related art. The problem is that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of assets available for female figures . . . and 99% of them seem to be oriented toward producing soft-porn or pinup art, rather than practical and realistic female warriors. Such is the way of the world, but it’s rather frustrating given what I want to accomplish.

Still, I have a digital model that I’m fine-tuning to match the way Kráva looks in my head, and I think I can kit-bash decent armor and gear for her too. I might have a test render to show off later this week.

Of course, the next couple of weeks are going to be slightly frantic at the office – I’m going to be teaching offerings of two courses, and I’m facing a deadline to pilot a third course that I’ve been writing. Hopefully, this won’t bring progress on The Curse of Steel to a crashing halt, but I’m going to just take it one day at a time.

Status Report (29 August 2019)

Status Report (29 August 2019)

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Since last Friday evening, I’ve been able to put down something like 5,600 words on The Curse of Steel.

This is a pretty good rate of work for me. My personal best was probably the time I produced the last seven chapters of a Mass Effect fan-fiction novel in a single three-day weekend – over 24,000 words in those three days. Usually, I’m lucky to get more than a thousand words down in a day, and that’s assuming it’s a weekend day when I don’t have to worry about the office.

But then, this is why I do a lot of world-building.

As a writer, I seem to be able to produce very short pieces off the top of my head, doing all the scene-setting and character development in the back of my mind and just pouring the vignette down on the page. Most of the vignettes I wrote as flavor text for various GURPS books were done this way.

As soon as I get into the longer forms, though – pretty much anything above the level of the short story – I always get bogged down in setting detail and have a hard time proceeding. Unless I spend the time and effort to build those details in advance: constructed language and culture to help me get into characters’ heads, maps to help me see how places and people are related to each other, astrophysics for SF stories, and so on.

One reason fan-fiction always seems easier for me is that most of the work of setting up the story has already been done. Any original details I want to add, I can just graft them onto the existing structure and keep moving. I can concentrate on just writing story, and the words just flow. As witness that amazing, enormously satisfying weekend of something like 8,000 words per day.

I spent months wrestling with backdrop for The Curse of Steel, never writing more than the one chapter that started the story (which, by no coincidence, worked pretty well as a short story on its own). I tried several times to move forward, but every attempt failed until I had the setting worked out to my satisfaction.

Now the investment pays off. There’s a good chance – knock on wood and hope I don’t jinx it – that I’ll be able to put down about half the novel, a total of 80,000 words or so, without a pause. If the current rate of progress keeps up, that sounds like it should be doable by the end of the calendar year.

Feels good. I will admit to kicking myself sometimes, for being the writer of stories who never seems to actually write a story. If I’m starting to find ways to hack my creative mind and get actual stories written, that can’t hurt.