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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.

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.

Status Report (22 August 2019)

Status Report (22 August 2019)

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Meanwhile, I think I’ve done enough work on constructed language, development of names for tribes and places, and filling in details on my overview map. At least for the moment. Now I can get back to the story and write . . . probably about half of the planned length for The Curse of Steel.

Here’s the result: a clipped piece of the overview map, still missing some details around the edges but more than enough to help me keep all the pertinent features in mind.

Ravatheni tribal lands, and their neighbors

The first part of the plot has Kráva and her companions traveling from Taimar Velkari (“hill-fort of the wolves”) across Ravatheni territory, into and through the Silent Forest, and over a mountain pass into the western lands by the sea. With plenty of detours and adventures along the way, of course. As the raven flies, it’s a distance of about 220 miles, maybe eight or nine days’ journey if everything goes well. Everything is not going to go well.

Status Report (10 August 2019)

Status Report (10 August 2019)

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I’ve got a weekend more or less to myself here – no need to go into the office, and my wife and our daughter are out-of-state visiting family, so it’s just me and my son doing the bachelor thing. Good time to get some work done on The Curse of Steel.

The major project right now is a map of the main area of action for this first novel. Decent progress thus far:

Work in progress . . .

Still need to finish marking in terrain features, although the main line of the Blue Mountains is in place. Then it will be time to put down forest icons to mark wilderness areas. I think I’m going to be sparing with that, since almost the entire map is wilderness to some degree! Then a few settlements and place names, and I’ll have enough to push forward with the novel. I imagine the map will get filled in further as I write this (and hopefully future) stories.

Meanwhile, I’ve posted the first chapter of the draft novel – a short story titled “Kráva and the Skátoi” – to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section in the sidebar. Here’s a link to the page as well.

I think tomorrow I’ll continue to work on the map, and I might start looking for art assets I can use to create images of Kráva and her world.

Status Report (7 August 2019)

Status Report (7 August 2019)

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Work proceeds apace on The Curse of Steel – I’m making unusually good progress on it for the moment. I’m very happy with the divine pantheon I’ve developed for my protagonist’s home culture. I’m also continuing to build a more detailed map of the field of action for most of this first novel. Most importantly, I’ve knocked out two more chapters of the first draft, and as soon as I resolve a couple of questions about the future plot I should be able to keep going.

I think the critical step was to embrace the notion of having activist gods and divine-blooded heroes in the setting. You’d think this would be obvious; after all, those concepts were universal among the Indo-European peoples I’ve taken as a model for the world-building here. Yet I’ve tended to avoid the trope in my own work thus far. I’m not sure why. Possibly it’s because of my background in tabletop roleplaying games. I tend to think in terms of well-defined and limited mechanics for character power, and “he’s the son of a god” is a bit too free-form for my taste.

I will admit to taking some inspiration from the Scion roleplaying game that I recently picked up to read. That game is kind of a hot mess when it comes to rules organization and mechanics, but it does provide a nice framework to clearly define the powers of heroes and demigods. I still haven’t decided to use Scion as a tool for actual plotting, but I think I’m coming around to the idea.

Besides, if my protagonist is the child (or grandchild, actually) of a god, that fits in very nicely with the themes I’m working with for this first novel. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to examine some of the consequences of the power fantasy that’s common in genre fiction. Okay, so Kráva acquires a magical weapon that makes her an immensely powerful warrior, and almost in the same breath, she learns that she’s of immediate divine descent. Great! Except “with great power comes great responsibility,” the weapon comes with a rather nasty curse, and the lives of the gods’ children tend to be glorious and very short.

Lots of potential here. I’m almost eager to see what happens next.

Meanwhile, I think I may push a couple of chapters of the draft over to the “Free Articles and Fiction” section of the sidebar. Look for that as soon as I have a little time to spare.

Status Report (21 May 2019)

Status Report (21 May 2019)

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Just a short note this evening. I think my writer’s block of the last couple of months is finally starting to come unstuck, all thanks to the Muses.

Over the weekend I managed to finish a chapter of the Silmarillion fan-fiction novel I’ve been poking at for a long time. Might be able to push that forward a bit more smoothly in the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been fairly successful in using FATE to rework the plot of The Curse of Steel. I’m using the game as a structure to work out setting, characters, and plot, and it seems to be effective. It’s unabashedly a brain-hack, something to keep my creative mind focused on actually producing story rather than slipping back down the rabbit-hole of purposeless speculation and world-building. A little more work on that project and I may be able to re-write the first quarter or so of the draft novel without pause.

Every evening I try to set aside an hour or two before bedtime to make some forward progress. Cross my fingers that it keeps coming together.