WIP-it Wednesday: July 6th, 2016

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

I got a lot of writing done this week, but not a ton of the fiction variety. I crafted two blogs on my convention experience this year, and now that’s out of my system. My long holiday weekend was mostly divided up between errands, job hunting, and time well-spent with my wife… But I did manage to finish a forth draft of my short story, Tears of the Joyous Mare and send it off to a fresh pair of eyes for a new beta read. I got their feedback last night, and I’ll be fiddling with a fifth draft of the story soon. ;-)

What free time I did have this weekend I used to start a few visual projects related to my writing. I completed a pair of title cards for the eventual blog releases of The Unicorn Hunters:

…And Tears of the Joyous Mare:

I thought that both turned out pretty good. It was a refreshing break to work with a different medium for a while, and it inspired me to start something I’m sure I’ll be plunking away at for some time: The Burus Mapping Project.

The goal of the project is to produce a decent map of my fantasy continent of Burus. It’s the setting in which the collected stories for my upcoming book take place. Personally, I feel that maps can be over emphasized in fantasy works, so I’ve been hesitant to craft one. However, my stories for the book are flung all over this continent. Although they’re independent tales, the shared geography makes having a map a useful and unifying feature for the reader. After the idea was championed by my wife, I decided to craft one.

It’s got a ways to go yet, but here’s a small and rough snippet focused on The Albine Isles… the setting of The Brynesmark (which, specifically, is set on coast of Maduc):

My writing goals for the upcoming week include getting to work on writing an additional chapter to serve as the new opener for The Unicorn Hunters. The current opening isn’t working well in beta, so I’ve decided to add to the current four chapters that are already written and lengthen the piece. That will turn the story into a full-fledged novelette (thirteen to fifteen-thousand words).

Superficially, that’s fine as it’s more in line with the length of most of the other stories both planned and completed. However, it left me in an odd position because Hunters was written specifically to fill a short story slot within the book (five to eight thousand words) to balance out the other short slot held by The Old Man of the Elder Trees. But I found a simple solution to the problem by deciding to place Tears of the Joyous Mare into the book to fill the short slot instead. The Unicorn Hunters will take the “to be determined” open novelette slot… now that it’s going to be a full novelette. ;-)

I think that Tears will be a good fit for the book too. It’s a good mystery tale, and will add even more variety to the compilation. It’s also been very well received in beta reads, so I think it will be a quality piece of mine to include in the collection.

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!