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Untitled Sonnet

Untitled Sonnet

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Most of the past week, I’ve been spending on fan-fiction. I set myself a bit of a challenge for the next chapter I’ve been working on. I have a scene in mind in which my protagonist (a mage-Warden originally from the Dragon Age: Origins video game) is required to improvise some verse in honor of his beloved wife. So I decided to actually produce some verse.

As a poet, I make a pretty good carpenter, so it took me a surprisingly long time to come up with a sonnet I could live with. Here it is. I find it isn’t actually all that closely tied to the Dragon Age setting, aside from a single reference in the second quatrain. This piece should also appear in the next chapter of The Voice of Silence, as soon as I can get about a thousand more words down.

She walks along the margins of the night,
A creature wrought of secrets and desire,
With hair as dark as raven’s wings in flight,
Her golden eyes alight with reason’s fire.
In truth, she loves bright gold and precious stones,
The better for her beauty to adorn,
Yet Chantry’s power and might of kingly thrones
She never stoops to hold them but in scorn.
Still I know well the passions bright that burn
Within that guarded breast and wounded heart;
I count it all my fortune thus to earn
A husband’s welcome place in her regard.
Tho’ walk I now in winter’s bitter scope,
I trust, in her, to find the summer’s hope.

Status Report (23 April 2018)

Status Report (23 April 2018)

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Okay, having finished a rewrite of the first chunk of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, I’m going to spend a few days working on other items on the to-do list.

In particular, I have one fan-fiction project under way (The Voice of Silence, a Dragon Age piece) that hasn’t been updated in over a month. Once I’ve put down two or three chapters on that, I’ll probably come back to Architect of Worlds and start on the next section of the design sequence.

I also want to get some work done on the “Human Destiny” setting. I have two stories of novelette and novella length in that setting, more or less finished and ready for a final coat of polish and self-publication. I want to flesh out the background for those a bit, and then get them out the door finally. That may generate some new world-building material to be posted here and at the Archive.

Finally, I have an original fantasy setting coalescing in the back of my mind, associated with what’s likely to turn into at least one complete novel. That’s third or fourth on the priority list, though.

Feels good to be writing on a regular basis once more.

Reviving the Palace

Reviving the Palace

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In the fall of 2016, I was getting a bit discouraged over the lack of takeoff in my writing career. I had written a number of books for the tabletop gaming industry, I had published about a million words of successful fan-fiction, and I was getting a series of decent non-boilerplate rejection notes from mainstream publishers. I just didn’t seem to be able to get over that last potential-energy barrier to start seeing my work in print.

Then Tuesday, the eighth of November happened.

Suffice it to say that I was strongly motivated to withdraw from public engagement at that point. I shut down my blog, deleted my social-media accounts, and resolved to just concentrate on my family and my day job for a while. I even stopped writing entirely for several months.

Since then, some of the things I feared have come to pass, while others have not (at least not yet). Yet life seems to be going on, and I eventually found myself writing again.

Already, I had set up a new website for static content (Sharrukin’s Archive) although I never generated enough material to populate that. Unfortunately, by the time I thought about emerging from my cave again, the domain name I originally used for my online activity had been captured by a domain squatter. It was being used to advertise cars, I think. So, rather than negotiate with the squatter and possibly end up paying hundreds of dollars to get my domain back, I let the situation lie.

Then, early this year, on an impulse I checked the domain’s registration status. Apparently it had been permitted to lapse again, and would be available for recapture sometime early this year. So I watched, and when the domain was deleted from the Internet registries I grabbed it.

Sharrukin’s Palace is back in business.

My approach to writing has changed a bit over the past couple of years. I’m no longer trying to get short fiction published. Instead, I’m working on some large-scale world-building and developing a couple of full-length novels. When I have material ready, that will go to Amazon for self-publication.

Meanwhile, I plan to try to post some work here at least once a week: reviews of media I find interesting, essays and progress reports on my writing process, world-building material, short excerpts of stories destined for self-publication, and so on. Anything that seems worth preserving as a full-fledged article will also be copied over to the static Sharrukin’s Archive site.

You know the old saying: the devil laughs when we make plans. We’ll see how things go.