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WIP-it Wednesday: August 16th, 2017

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

Things are finally moving forward on Vivian’s Last Cigarette again, and continuing to progress for my two other creative projects at the same time.

Regular readers following my work on the novel probably already know how my writing mojo got put out of whack by Portcon in June. Getting back on track after that took a few weeks, and then the new chapters I was adding to Viv’s got to hit a difficult stage. I was feeling stuck, and when I got a burst of inspiration to write a couple different pieces, I decided it would be a good time to take a break from the novel.

This lead to last month where I ended-up writing a new 9,300 word novelette, Cretaceous Queen, and a 1,600 word short story, Far from Acheron. Both are now in a second draft and on their way to third revisions. I’m quite pleased with both, and glad that I took a detour to create these stories. In addition, they got me back into the right headspace to return to the novel and I was eager to do so last weekend.

If you read last week’s WIP-it, then you’re aware that things didn’t go as I had planned after I got a physical and 10 year TDAP booster shot from my doctor. I ended-up having a moderate-severe allergic reaction to the vaccination that gave me a pretty rough weekend, but I soldered through it to write.

To be honest, though… physically I’ve been on the scale of feeling “off” to “pretty lousy” for months if not the better part of a year. I’d been attributing that to stress, lack of sleep, and lately summer heat. But when my doctor followed up with me on my bloodwork mid-last week, she disclosed that my diabetes had gotten out of control.

I’ve been mildly diabetic for more than a decade, treating it with a combination of oral medication and diet. But starting with the finical pinch and stress of becoming unemployed last year, I let my eating get undisciplined. I didn’t gain any weight, but I was eating far, far too many carbohydrates. I knew it was bad… I’d stopped being consistent about testing my blood sugar levels and then just stopped period –out of frustrations with them– because we couldn’t afford to eat any better.

Financially, my wife and I have been doing better now for many months. However, I’d gotten into a bad rut with my diet, fueled by stress and the fact that too-much sugar is a feel-good drug. I’ve give up a lot of things I enjoy to pursue my dream of making a living as a writer, and stubbornly didn’t want to give up my love of yummy sweets and bread as well.

It happened gradually. I have to be disciplined to keep up with my writing: It takes willpower and stubborn toughness. But the problem with having a strong grip like that is sometimes you don’t know when to let-up or let go. You just keep pushing forward ignoring your physical discomfort. When you’re like that, it’s really easy to feel a little worse every day until feeling like crap is accepted as your normal mode.

My blood sugar after a 15 hour fast tested at 280 mg/dL. That’s really bad. 300 mg/dL is considered a severe problem, and it’s likely it’s been spiking way higher than that for months after I eat. 600 mg/dL or higher can kill you, or put you in a diabetic coma.

At least the choice for me was a clear one:

I could continue enjoying the comfort foods I love, keep feeling like crap to the determent of my writing and all the other things I’m passionate about, and slowly kill myself over the next decade or less.

Or, I could radically alter my relationship with food so I can feel better, function better, and live as long as I can to accomplish the things I want to do.

I’ve chosen the latter.

I’ll miss sugar laden treats. I really will. But I like waking up with hope and passion more. I want to be able to write and do things, and make this a long and rich life. Compared to that, being physically miserable for a far shorter time on this sphere really isn’t an attractive option.

After that call from my doctor, I’ve made changes. We’re attempting to work in some new medication –and dealing with resistance from my insurance company about that– but the biggest change needs to come from me. To that end, I’ve massively cut back on the consumption of carbohydrates in my diet, cold turkey.

I did a few days of ramping down so I didn’t crash and to line up new foods with some planning and care. Now that I’m done with that, I’m eating with a target cap of 90 grams of carbohydrates a day. That’s not a lot compared to a typical diet. In the United States, an average consumption could easily be 300 to 500 grams a day or more. For comparison, 90 grams of carbs is about equal to three, modestly large apples.

That, or something near to that, is going to be my daily cap for the rest of my life. No exceptions… Because invariably allowing one day of treating myself to lots of sugar and carbs a month has always become twice monthly. Then it becomes weekly, then every other day, and finally every day. And regardless, binging on carbohydrates and spiking my blood sugar as a result is simply a stupid thing for me to do to my body, at any time.

I have to stop the cycle. It’s time for me to use the same discipline that I’ve used to write every day with, and apply it to maintain this aspect of my health.

And I am happy to report that positive results have been swift! Less than a week in, I’ve started feeling much better with only the dietary changes in place so far. :-)

It’s a very noticeable reversal. I’m far less tired, particularly with regard to my eyes. I use my eyes a lot at work, and obviously to write, but for months I thought I had chronic eye-strain. Now it seems that my blurred vision after hours of writing was seemingly from the dehydration caused by my high blood sugar. I’m literally seeing things more clearly now. ;-)

I’m also sleeping better and feeling more awake afterwards, just more energy all the way around. One of the things impacting my sleep was persistent leg cramps waking me up at night. As I sit a lot between work and writing, I’ve been blaming it on that. And I was wrong again… Just a few days into changing my diet and the cramps are mostly gone.

I’m still adjusting, but this weekend went well. My focus is better and my energy consistent. I used that to finish the novel’s new chapter six, Oliver’s Army, at long last!

I thought I had this chapter done last weekend at 3,500 words by splitting the second half of it into it a new chapter seven instead. But over the course of the week, I thought some more about it and decided to add a scene to its end that works better there than where I’d planned to place it later in the book. That brought the chapter to 4,500 words, and by Sunday afternoon I had a second draft ready and sent off its next critique partner.

I jumped right into writing the new chapter seven after that. Between the content I’d written before I split it off from chapter six, and the new material I wrote and edited in this weekend, it’s at 2,100 words as of today. It still has a way to go, but my plans for this week are to make a strong effort to get the chapter finished before or by the end of the upcoming weekend.

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

WIP-it Wednesday: August 9th, 2017

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

It’s been an eventful week. On Thursday I received the critique feedback on the first draft of Cretaceous Queen and started working with them. By about midnight, I had a second draft and sent it over to Madicienne and had ended up dividing the novelette into five chapters: “Extinction Event”, “Urruatta”, “Last Best Hope”, “Countdown” and “Overtime”.

Friday kicked-off a four day weekend. Writing-wise, Friday was a washout as the day was jam-packed with long delayed errands and appointments:

This included my first visit with my doctor in over a year since I lost and then regained health insurance. She gave me a physical and the works, including my 10 year TDAP booster shot. I’d regret this shortly.

To be clear, my wife and I had planned the long weekend with vacation time specifically to paint our back porch, not for me to have a double weekend to write with. But the weather shifted, and alas it rained:

Okay, maybe I was a little like this kid at the same time:

Yeah. So… bummer. But hey, more time to write, right? ;-)

Well, by early Saturday morning I also wasn’t feeling that great. Aches, pains and fatigue like I was coming down with the flu. In truth it wasn’t the flu, I was having an allergic reaction to the vaccination.

I soldiered through pretty well that first day. I’d had an old story idea return from a few years ago and it got stuck repeating itself in my head for days thanks to a writing prompt Bryan Aiello had shared on Wednesday. I decided to excise it as a few hundred word warm-up piece of flash-fiction before I got to work on the novel. Instead, I spent the day writing a new 1,600 word short story I’ve titled Far from Acheron.  It’s now in a second draft and soon will be in its third.

I went to bed feeling worse, and a restless night brought me to a Sunday where I felt truly awful. My allergic reaction had become moderately severe, with cold sweats, shakes, chills, and tingling numbness in my fingers and toes added to everything from the prior day.

Not an ideal way to feel getting back into the novel in general, and more-so with the difficult time I’m having with this chapter in particular. But even if I could only half-feel my shaking fingers, I could still hit keys with them. It was time to just keep swimming writing.

Although it was far from a stellar day’s work on Vivian’s Last Cigarette, I added a thousand words I wouldn’t have otherwise.

By Monday morning, my condition had improved to something slightly better than how I’d felt Saturday. I spent the last day of my vacation working and reworking that tricky new chapter six. Writing-wise, the chapter grew by another thousand words. But more importantly, I think I finally figured out a bunch of the plot snarls that have been hindering me with this part of the book.

Chapter six has been a very complicated affair to write. It starts with a tense foot chase that pushes forward with several peaks and valleys. At the height of its last peak, a door is literally slammed in the face of the bad-guys as my intrepid orc protagonists escape into the sanctuary of the Magic Moo-Shroom Metaphysical Shop.

It’s a super abrupt change in pace. Inside the shop Viv and Gronk have finally attained some safety, but the threat of the antagonists remain: Although they are reluctant to enter the building, they still have the orcs trapped inside. Keeping that threat warm and tangible while introducing the new allies the protagonists meet in the Moo-Shroom –as well as introducing the character of the shop itself– has been a tough juggling act.

It’s like a wide valley in the action, because after some introductions and formulated plans, Viv and Gronk attempt to sneak out of the besieged shop. This results in a madcap and final round of action where little turns out as anyone had planned. But our orcy duo do, at last, fully escape their pursuers in the end.

Yes, that is a lot going on in one chapter: A huge chase through several new locations with lots of action that expands on several new antagonists introduced in the prior chapter… Then a total shift in scene… Then two entirely new characters and an eccentric setting are introduced… And then after that there’s a round of comedic action before a final escape.

It’s all… a lot to digest in a single chapter, isn’t it? ;-)

I’ll also relay that I intended this chapter to be the one where I join the book’s completely revised and expanded opening to the rest of the pre-existing novel. So there was that on my mind as well.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to think of a way to cover all this ground in this single chapter for weeks between other projects. But on Sunday, I let go of the idea that six would be the “last new chapter” that I’d stubbornly held onto for so long. By doing that I can reconcile the narrative shift after the initial action of the chase by simply starting a new chapter at the point where the protagonists enter the Metaphysical Shop.

That transforms the “wide valley” of the original take into the “starting plain” of a new chapter. From that level beginning, I can then ramp up the action leading to the mini-climax of this arc of the story. It’s a more standard means to reach this end, and I think it’ll be better all the way around.

The initial chase portion of the chapter runs just shy of 3,500 words, a length comparable to many of the novel’s other chapters. So that’s a good fit. It also takes me from being at an awkward point of a potentially very long sixth chapter, to having a completed first draft of the sixth chapter and 1,500 words into a new chapter seven. :-)

This has been a very rough patch of water, and I’m sure all writers hit them with their books. But you just have to keep swimming…

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

WIP-it Wednesday: August 2nd, 2017

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

After three weekends of writing, I finished a first draft of Cretaceous Queen on Sunday afternoon. :-) It totals 9,300 words currently, taking it beyond the realm of a short story to become a lean novelette. I’m happy with this, as I have a good track-record with novelette-sized pieces.

Novelettes allow me to craft an amount of story equal to a few good chapters from a novel, so I can go a little deeper with the tale than a short story would allow. But because they stop shy of a novella length (which usually starts around 18,000 words) or a novel by far (around 50,000 words minimum) they aren’t huge commitments to either write or read. Novelettes also have the benefit of being able to be serialized readily, as you can easily work the natural ebb and flow of chapters into them.

And turning Cretaceous Queen into a short serial for the blog is exactly what I have in mind.

It will easily convert into at least a four-part piece that I can share with you for as many weeks, my plan being to share its chapters progressively on Saturdays. I’ve been trying to increase the amount and frequency that my own writing appears on the blog this year, with longer one-shot pieces like Crossing and Aniyah joining my weekly microfiction offerings of Mid-Week Muses and Fifty Word Fantasy. Running Cretaceous Queen as a serial fits with that goal perfectly. :-)

I’m not sure when I’ll start sharing it, but it’ll likely be at least a few weeks. Currently the draft is in the hands of my wife, to whom I almost always grant the first read and critique of my pieces. Once I work in edits from her notes, Queen will be headed to Madicienne; my friend and fellow author who provided the spark of inspiration that got me writing it in the first place. The story is, in a real way, a gift for her as much as it has been a gift to myself. And after Madicienne is done, I have at least two other writer friends waiting to read it.

Those readers alone will get me to a fifth draft of the piece, and there may be more. But given my past experiences with similarly sized works, editing in changes shouldn’t take great lengths of time unless I really missed a mark somewhere and they need to be extensive.

By design, Cretaceous Queen opens in media res and ends with a few questions and a new problem unresolved. I wouldn’t call it a cliffhanger ending. But I would say that it’s more than a passive, open ending in that I think it will leave readers that liked it with a strong desire to find out what happens next.

That ending is by design as well: My goal with both the opening and ending was to capture the feeling of stepping into series already in progress.

This tactic could easily be confusing. To prevent that, I designed the story as if the reader was stepping into the building climax of an early or the very first story arc of the series. That allows me to start the piece literally on a running pace, but not with an overwhelming amount of backstory that needs to be relayed for it to make sense.

The story opens with an exciting introduction to protagonists Katie and Max that doesn’t require any knowledge of prior events to understand. Thereafter, the reader is brought up to speed on vital parts of backstory dropped while the pair deals with a challenge and converses trying to solve a sudden, and serious, problem stemming from it. I was pretty happy with myself for getting all that done within only a few brisk pages, and all the while with enough action that it didn’t become a slog of exposition either.

From there, it’s right into the meat of the story. The stakes have been set high. The reader knows what they are, and why, at this point. So it’s all about how and if this pair of fifteen-year-olds can rise up to the challenge.

I don’t really let-up on the kids as things get rolling, either. Instead, I throw a toolbox full of wrenches at them over the course of the plot. ;-)

When I finished Cretaceous Queen on Sunday, it legitimately felt like I had finished the pilot for a series. I’d done worldbuilding to get my concepts straight, and plotting for events both before and after the story to form something akin to a rough series bible. It was a good feeling: I’d created something inspired by early 90s anime including battling robots and magical girls, and combined that with dinosaurs and American style superheroic conventions.

My inner teen fanboy loved it, and I think I’ve written it in such a way that many others will too. I’m really curious to hear their reactions, and I’ve got this feeling that they’re going to want more. Having had such a positive experience crafting this “pilot”, I’m not opposed to writing the rest of the series so that it becomes worthy of a bouncy, 90s J-pop theme song in the future. ;-)

But aside from edits to Queen, that can wait. The time has come for me to return to Vivian’s Last Cigarette in a major way next week!

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

WIP-it Wednesday: July 26th, 2017

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

Cretaceous Queen –my epic tale of magical girls, superheroes, dinosaurs and giant alien robots–  is just shy of six thousand words as of today. I hadn’t expected the short story to get this long, figuring that it’d top-out at around five thousand last week. However, it’s been a lot of fun to write!

Putting this together has been satisfying on multiple levels. For my inner-child, it’s like I flipped over my toy box, picked up my favorite playthings, built a set piece with the other stuff, and started telling this wild story with it all. Conceptually, there are many disparate elements going into the piece… So as an adult writer I’ve had a nifty challenge weaving all of it together. It’s allowed me to get pretty creative with the unseen foundations, and with the actual characters of the piece.

And then there’s my inner teenage superhero fan.

There’s a couple ideas in Cretaceous Queen that are directly based off of superhero concepts I came up with way back when. Or ideas I was influenced by at that time and always wanted to see better developed or combined in different ways.

I created a lot of superheroes back in those days, mostly within the frameworks of role-playing games like the Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set that was a favorite of mine throughout the late 1980s and early 90s. That game was also popular in my circle of friends, so –as geeky teen boys that love superheroes are prone to do– we created many heroes and teams for tons of adventures.

There were other games, but none ever topped the good-old MSHAS. One of these was Palladium Books’s Heroes Unlimited that claimed to be a “thinking man’s” superhero game. Its focus was seemingly more grounded in street-level heroics with an absence of the demigods that dominate mainstream comics.

This appealed to me because, then as now, I enjoy the flavor of a Spider-Man-ish setup where the hero needs to make do with a limited budget and resources.  It helps to make them relatable: Wondering how they’ll pay the rent next week, or having anxiety about work, relationships or… science exams.

But the rules of this game… oh boy! They were wildly unbalanced and over-complicated, and character generation was so uneven and random that that every other player would end up with a character hard to do anything with but die. I never actually played or ran a game of Heroes Unlimited; the book only ever served me as a source of idea fodder.

This was actually a running theme with the Palladium games I owned: I used them as references and points of creative inspiration, but I very rarely if ever played them. I enjoyed many of their settings much more than Unlimited, for example Beyond the Supernatural and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness… which I still adore and smile acknowledging their influence on my work.

But MSHAS was still king. It was the gateway that exposed me to a vast amount of comic book lore and knowledge of the superhero genre. To this day my trivial knowledge of the Marvel Comics Universe of the 1980s remains pretty sharp thanks to all that exposure.

In my role-playing circle, I was particularly well known… or um, infamous… for my “weird” character ideas. Some of these were indeed downright unplayable after I tried them out, but as we tended to cycle though heroes and teams frequently that never was a particularly longstanding issue. However, a lot were perfectly fine characters that the other boys thought were “dumb” because I wasn’t trying to create supremely powerful heroes like they were. I was trying to make cool ones, and cool stories.

Inkjet, by Will Petrey

This was me playing with concepts I thought were interesting and that I wanted to explore story-wise. The trouble was that I really needed to be exploring them by writing stories and/or making my own comic books rather than trying to do this in the context of a game: Particularly so in games that were running plots and had backgrounds entirely different from what I wanted to do.

The result of all that was frustration for all. Eventually we moved on to other RPGs, but I never stopped making superheroes and plotting stories. And I pursued this in the worst possible way by continuing to create them within the frameworks of the games I loved, but was so discouraged by actually playing.

This would be the beginnings of my Nowhere Man years of 1994-2001 after high school, and the start of my stay in the Worldbuilding Dungeon as well that would last for many years longer. What I needed to do was write. Instead, just I kept using the games to create my characters and find worlds for them. Over and over again I did this, and the stories never left my head and notebooks. They never grew or developed. I never gave them a chance to live in anybody else, because I kept trying to refine them into that unattainable prize that is “perfection” before I dared write a story about them.

Why? Because of the simple but pervasive nemesis all creatives fear: Rejection.

Because I didn’t want my ideas and creations called “dumb” again as they were so often in the heyday of my teens.

It took me twenty years to fight my way out of the Worldbuilding Dungeon and finally start writing. Now it’s my passion like nothing else ever has been. I’ve used it to heal and make peace with the young man I was. And with Cretaceous Queen, I’ve been able to sit down and talk to that creative kid and tell him with experience and hindsight that his superheroic ideas were cool… and not “dumb”.

I told him he’d inspired me to write about a couple of heroes his own age, using some ideas of his, and some of mine. He’s been checking out the early drafts, and so far he thinks it’s pretty awesome. :-)

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

WIP-it Wednesday: July 19th, 2017

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

As I mentioned last update, I started writing a short story for the upcoming FantasyWriters challenge near the end of the month. Although I began Cretaceous Queen on a whim and as a gift for a friend, it became an effective means to get me back into gear writing-wise after my June hiatus.

Being self-contained and small, it’s easier to just sit and write on a short story rather than returning straight to a novel in the middle of rewrites and edits. As I discovered last weekend, tacking a ton of threads, tying them together and forging new ones in an ongoing novel is a tall task made even taller if you’re out of your grove.

I’ve noticed a pattern with Viv’s that, when things get bogged-down, if I write a short story and come back to the novel afterwards I’m refreshed and things go a lot better thereafter. This happened with The Boy in the Jar in November and Ounta in December, so after six months I think now is a good time for another recharge and return.

It helps that Cretaceous Queen has been a fun story to write so far. It’s got humor and action, and I’m venturing into new territory with it which is always good to get the rust off. The new territory is that it’s a modern superhero story, a genre I enjoy but haven’t written a lot in.

My long-on-the-back-burner story Allied Section Alpha definitely has superhero gravitas, but it also takes place in a (very) alternate history World War II setting which is far from contemporary. In addition, the protagonists are all women who are historical personalities drawn from all over time and rewritten to fit the world of this setting. So the overall feel is something more akin to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than fare for a younger audience… Even if a key charter is only twelve.

It’s a project I want to get back to, but that story is going to be a novel. Before I even pick it up again I want Vivian’s Last Cigarette done and released.

Queen is different not only in setting, but also in tone. It’s got a Young Adult fiction feel, which is pretty easy to maintain given that my two protagonists are both fifteen. I’ve taken inspiration from American superhero comics focused on teens such as Teen Titans. However, I’ve also incorporated and adapted many elements of the Japanese Magical Girl and –to a lesser extent– Tokusatsu genres.

The mix is interesting, particularly as I put my own spin on Magical Girl tropes. Some of these are story touches, such as the young-love-but-I-don’t-know-what-to-do romantic subplot between protagonists Max (A.K.A. The Purple Phantom) and Sue. Others are tributes, such as Sue needing a magical widget to transform into her superheroic self.

Finally, I subvert a major Magical Girl trope with Sue’s superhuman persona. Although she is certainly empowered, she doesn’t become a glorified, glamorous version of herself in highly feminine attire… as is so often the case for that genre.

She becomes a Tyrannosaurus.

A full-on, full sized, oh-my-god-it’s-a-dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus.

She doesn’t even get a T-rex sized frilly dress to wear. Or anything, actually… given that her change in scale is too much even for my comic-book logic to apply something like The Hulk’s stretchy purple pants.

But the metaphor is that she embodies something majestic, primal and powerful that both compliments and transcends a fearsome exterior. Sue is discovering her hero’s heart in this story, placing her life and gifts on the line to protect others. She puts aside her insecurities and embarrassment, because people and the world they live in need a Cretaceous Queen to save them.

And that is as beautiful as any dainty magical girl.

I’ll probably end up spending another weekend on Cretaceous Queen before it enters a first draft. It’s a tight-paced story so far that has hit 2,800 words —at least half-done— since I started it last Thursday. Yesterday I reached the point where it’s just about to start a wild climactic battle that I’ve been looking forward to writing since I started it.

Once it’s in edits, I’ll be touching it up to share here and elsewhere… but the dive back into Viv’s will probably take place before I’m even done with that. :-)

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

WIP-it Wednesday: July 12th, 2017

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

This weekend I returned to Bryan Aiello’s podcast to record a second discussion with him that turned out great. The YouTube video above is this latest interview, and if you missed the first one we did back at the end of April, here is a link to that one as well.

Like the last time we spoke, the conversation was fun and lively. I talked about my convention experiences as a writer and game master for a short time, and the dialogue then moved into a discussion on the fantasy genre and the works and influences of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard.

We ended up using those two masters’ different approaches and strategies to writing –and living a writer’s life– as examples that are still quite relevant for modern authors today. It was a really good talk, and I even got to speak about my upcoming novel Vivian’s Last Cigarette for a while.

With the rest of my weekend, I started getting caught-up on a bunch of projects put on hold during the chaos of June. I finished editing a short story that had been on the back-burner since May and posted it here on Saturday. I also did edits and review on a more recently written flash fiction piece that will go up on the blog this upcoming Saturday.

I followed-up on correspondences with several authors that had been on hold, and that work spilled over into Monday as I replied to responses. In particular, my friend and author Lauren L. Garcia and I are planning a few interview exchanges between our respective blogs. She has many interesting things to say, and I’m excited to be hosting an open discussion between her and I that should be both insightful and entertaining!

Given those investments of time over my weekend, the progress I made returning to work on Vivian’s was minimal.

On the editing side, Lauren (who is also a critiquing partner) completed her edit and feedback notes on the new chapters four and five of the novel. She’s excited to read chapter six, and on Sunday I got some work done towards finishing it. I didn’t get as much written I would have liked, but I did give its opening three-thousand words a solid read-through and edit sliding back into the piece again.

I added a bit less than a thousand words to the chapter beyond the editing: Getting started again on the book has proved to be slow going. It probably doesn’t help that the chapter itself is going through a major shift in scene after a big chase at this point, making “getting back into the flow” difficult because my very task is to change that flow rather than to ride it.

But problems or not, I did make progress. And next weekend should have less distracting me from the novel (like an interview) than this one did.

I do have a side project I’m going to try and squeeze in on my workday evenings for the next week or so. You see, last week it was my turn to unleash a new monthly writer’s challenge prompt on the FantasyWriters group. This was my long-planned-but-kept-secret Dinosaur Challenge:

Your Challenge this month is to write a story containing fantasy elements that features a dinosaur or dinosaurs as major components. Imaginary or speculatively evolved humanoid dinosaurs won’t cut it by themselves. Submissions will need to be three-thousand words or less in length to be eligible to win.

Prior to this reveal, another writing friend (and critique partner) of mine made a funny statement on her Twitter:

To which I replied:

Prior to that exchange, I was actually thinking that I would expand this particular Fifty Word Fantasy piece I did featuring a dinosaur into a short story. Yet now the gauntlet had been thrown!

Penning a Magical Girl story likely isn’t something folks would expect me to do, but truth be told I’m not unfamiliar with the genre. I was into anime back when it was still called Japanimation, and thanks to working a third-shift job in the mid-nineties I watched the American syndicated run of Sailor Moon most mornings eating cereal after I came home from work.

It was honestly the best thing on at 6 am in 1995…

I also love superhero fiction, and most magical girl stories share a lot of tropes and conventions with the former. The major defining difference is that the latter is focused on pre-adult girls as magic-powered protagonists, and their sub and even main plots often involve comedy or drama unrelated to superheroics.

As odd of a concept as it is, I can’t get the thought of a fifteen-year-old girl with the magical power to save the day by becoming a dinosaur out of my head. It definitely has humorous alludes, but after outlining ideas and background for an in medias res short, I can truly see this actually working as a YA tale.

Seriously.

And that’s why I’m putting aside weeknight time to write Cretaceous Queen when I’m not working on Viv’s over the weekends. :-)

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

WIP-it Wednesday: July 5th, 2017

05 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

I entered my weekend with designs to get back to work on Vivian’s Last Cigarette, but several factors prevented me from achieving that goal. The first of these was plain old exhaustion.

This last month had run me down emotionally with my cat’s illness and then his loss. As soon as I’d recovered from that blow, I had to pull out all the stops to get things ready for PortCon and finish the RPG sessions I was committed to running. This required nearly all my spare time to complete in the week I had left before the convention.

I got it all done with a day to spare, but not without a significant amount of sleep deprivation.

It also ate-up much of the time I usually devote to maintaining the blog and my other social media, to the point where things came to a dead stop. The convention was, however, great fun… I just wish the circumstances leading up to it this year hadn’t transformed it into this big, disruptive event.

My reentry back into the weekly grind post-PortCon was rough. I returned to a workplace in turmoil and with an urgent need to patch-up a situation that could have been avoided with just a little forethought and planning. But instead, I and others scrambled for days racing against the clock to get it fixed.

Stacked onto my existing exhaustion, it was mind-numbing. I’d get home burned-out, and getting out the pair of WIP posts I did last week was a real struggle. The end of the work week saw some improvement –I even completed a 300 word piece of flash fiction on Friday I’ll likely share here in the future– but I still wasn’t sleeping right. So the weekend hit and I, at last, crashed.

There were chores in need of doing around the house that ate-up some writing time, but it was the task of getting the blog back on track that took most of the work after I got some needed rest.

Maintaining my blog is kind of like being a locomotive engineer. When it’s chugging along like it should, its momentum and weight will sustain it and hardly give notice to whatever incidental weekly interruptions there may be. This is because I plan and schedule many of my blog posts a week or two in advance. WIP posts like this one I usually write on Tuesdays, so that they are current with my weekly activities. And my Mid-Week Muses features I compose throughout the week via my micro-blogging on Twitter. But by planning and scheduling the majority of my posts in advance rather than daily, I’ve found that it’s not only more efficient but the planning promotes better quality.

I use a similar tactic of planning and scheduling for the posts on my Facebook Page, which both shares what I post here and has its own unique content. What I do on Twitter, however, is mostly free-form beyond the sharing of links from this blog.

Overall, it’s freed up more time for me to focus on writing fiction while maintaining a social medial presence. And it’s reduced personal stress in my daily grind. :-) Yet to get back to the train analogy, when something derails that process and the engine goes cold… stoking the fires and getting the locomotive going again is a big task.

That was the situation I found myself in this weekend: Getting the social media train going again.

I’m pleased to say that I got the track laid for the next two weeks. So while this weekend wasn’t the big return to the novel I wanted it to be, I’ve now got things back under control so that rest of July can be.

Coming up next week I’ll be doing another interview with Bryan Aiello, which should be a lot of fun if our first talk in April was any indicator. I really like talking writing with Bryan, he’s got a lot of energy and cool thoughts. Creatively, I’m looking forward to having my schedule back to normal and a weekend with which I can focus on my book.

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

WIP-it… Thursday? My PortCon 2017 Wrap-Up, Part II

29 Thursday Jun 2017

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Picking up where I left off yesterday, it was Friday and the first of the two full-days of the convention. PortCon is a four day event, but the first and last are half-days (one into the evening and on the last it closes up shop at 5 pm). Therefore, Friday and Saturday are the “Big Days” with lots going on.

After finishing up my modest shopping and grabbing some lunch, I headed over to the games arena and joined a game of fifth edition D&D. Ben runs great games, and I hadn’t been able to participate in one of his for several years, so this was a real treat! He pulled out all the stops, and the climax of the adventure turned out to be that we’d discovered none other than the infamous Hand of Vecna. This is something steeped in the lore of the Dungeons and Dragons game from its earliest days, so encountering it was super cool!

I had the good fortune to have picked a mallet wielding dwarven paladin that I named Diffin DirtRune, follower and teller of long-winded tales of Karrak the Mighty (who I just made up on the spot along with his lore). This was a great character for me to be playing as things came into focus and it became a question of what to do with an artifact of great evil. I think if I hadn’t played Diffin just so, the game would have been about the hand slowly destroying the party from within and not become a quest to destroy the evil artifact.

The game ended on a cliffhanger, the first of a two-part game that would continue Saturday. At the end of the game, I was sold and rearranged my plans for the next day to attend it. :-)

After some dinner, it was my turn to game master again. I was excited to run this one, as it was Chaos at Camp Changeling… A game taking place in the same setting as my novel, Vivian’s Last Cigarette.

To be honest, I wasn’t as happy with how the game ran as I could have been. This was in part because the players were very disjointed and failed to cooperate at several critical moments. In particular, there was a player who was very enthusiastic and involved, but their character ultimately lead the group on a wild goose chase. That killed story momentum and wasted time, and running out of time resulted in a downer ending to the session.

However, I think a bigger problem was how I’d structured the adventure. It didn’t have clear goals for the players to follow from the onset, so most of the blame is on myself if they got sidetracked. Things got clearer by mid-game, after they’d felt things through, but by then there wasn’t enough time to get to the cool stuff I had planned for the climax… even if they’d decided to come out of the room they’d barricaded themselves in.

But, live and learn. And the players seemingly ended-up having a good time regardless. After the arena closed, Kim and I got some sleep after a quick round of board games with Ian and CJ in our hotel room.

Saturday morning was uneventful, but things got into gear at noon when the second half of Ben’s two-part D&D game started. I and a number of players from the first game returned, and participated in a wild adventure to destroy the Hand of Vecna and keep it from a lich that already possessed Vecna’s equally infamous eye. Things came down to a pitched fight at the end, and I though Diffin would go down sacrificing himself to stop the big-bad. But that dwarf made it through with a single hit-point after the dust had settled, and the hand and eye were destroyed along with the lich. An epic conclusion, and most satisfying end to the game!

The evening found me running my Great Dragon Escape game. This session went much better than Chaos at Camp Changeling had the night before. There was a lot of humor in the game as the players took the roles of young dragons escaping from a (mostly) evil circus run by a witch. Early on they freed the Fantastopotamus, who followed them like a puppy singing anachronistic songs matching what they were doing and thwarting any of their attempts at stealth.

The game ended earlier than expected, but in a satisfying way when they cut to the chase and bumbled into a fight with the witch. This became a very funny fray, and they defeated her even after most of them were turned into newts temporarily… Yes, she was a very classic sort of witch. ;-)

After the con had closed that night, an RPG staff only game of Monsterhearts was run after midnight that I participated in. An 18+ game, it was both hilarious and horrifying. We had a huge group of thirteen staffers playing, which was the best part for me as I’d gamed with many of them individually, but never with all of them at once. This went on until after two in the morning and we all had to retire quite exhausted. Tired or not, it was a great time. We’re planning on doing another RPG staff-only game next year with better pre-planning, so we can start at 10:30 rather than after midnight. ;-)

Not surprisingly, Kim and I slept-in on Sunday… the last day of the convention. I wasn’t running my Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters game until one in the afternoon and Kim didn’t start her shift at the games arena info desk until 11. So we took our time, got things together and checked out of the hotel early.

I had put the most work into Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters, but I had a hard time getting enough players to run it. This was a big game and by the time we started, it was an hour behind schedule. Things went well for the most part initially, but we lost a player (turns out they were just killing time waiting for another game to start) in an already small group after 90 minutes. This made progressing even harder, and the game ended only halfway to the climax. It was disappointing, but for what was able to be done, the players had a good time.

If I run this game again, I’ll do it as a two-parter and make sure there is enough time to run the scenario.

After that, Kim and I chipped-in to help close the game arena space, pick-up and pack the con stuff, and clean. We joined most of the PortCon staff at a local IHOP for an after convention meal thereafter, said our goodbyes… and that was it.

What a great time. :-)

I’m already making plans for next year, which has a theme of “Spoooooooky” that will offer a lot more leeway on game designs than 2017’s theme of “Carnival”. I’ve also learned a few things during my second year game mastering at the convention.

The first is that allowing the players to create their characters in a con setting, even partially, was well intentioned but a mistake. I won’t be doing that again because even though the system was pretty basic, it still cut into play time. When you only have a four hour block, loosing a half an hour or more is a big deal and I honestly didn’t think that it would eat-up that much time. This became a critical problem in the Godzilla game. So, nope, not doing that again.

Second, I’ll be designing my own RPG rules for my games next year that will be basic, easy to learn, but not as simplistic as the Five by Five system I’ve used this year and last. I think I can come-up with a rules set that’s a bit more serviceable and just as quick. This would also have the advantage of allowing me to publish the games I create as wholly my own intellectually property.

Alright, so that’s my long rundown of my PortCon experience this year. Now it’s time for me FINISH WRITING MY BOOK! Take care, and things will be getting back to normal on the blog next week. :-)

WIP-it Wednesday: June 28th, 2017

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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What a week! The month leading up to it was a real rollercoaster, but I had a tremendously fun time at PortConMaine all the same! By the end of it, I was exhausted –conventions and back to back gaming and game-mastering are rarely restful– but it was a good kind of exhausted as I came home late Sunday night. I was really glad that I had Monday off to recover… I slept until 8 am, and I haven’t done that in ages! ;-)

This was my second year as convention RPG staff and my wife Kimberly’s first after being regular attendees for several years. One wouldn’t think that working as a volunteers (PortCon is all volunteer staff) for half of your long weekend and vacation would be such a fantastic time. And yet it is. It’s not only great fun, but an honor to be active parts of an event that provides so much to so many.

In a world that seems to go out of its way lately to beat our spirits down, we created an oasis for others and ourselves in which those same spirits could find shelter and renewal. That’s worthy and good work, and I’m proud to be part of it.

So what went down? Things actually started last Wednesday night before the start of the con, when my friend Ian came down to my house and spent the night with fellow staffer Patrick. Ian is the Staff Chair of the RPG section of the convention, and one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. This was the second year we were able to entertain him as a guest and the first where we got to do the same for Patrick. We all sat around and had some great conversations about games old and new, and quite a bit of talk was given to my upcoming novel, Vivian’s Last Cigarette.

Thursday morning came, and our guests departed early to attend to the last preparations for PortCon’s 4 pm opening. Kim and I got ourselves packed for the three night stay in a staff room in the hotel, then stopped at the local copy shop to print off colored game handouts. We got to the event, registered, checked into the hotel and had just enough time to settle in before I ran my Toys Against Darkness game at 6 pm.

Toys went really well, and the players were able achieve the best possible ending. Everyone left the table satisfied. :-) A pair of players I had from last year joined in, and would return for two more of the games I would run that weekend. They said I ran some of the best games at the con, and that really meant a lot to me. :-)

After that, the game arena closed, and Kim and I returned to the hotel room we were sharing with Ian and another staffer named CJ whom we became friends with over the course of this year’s convention. Ian was in a bit of a jam as he had forgotten to bring the player characters needed to run his RPG session the next morning, so we assembled a group of RPG staffers in our room and helped him create a worthy batch! This was a great exercise in collaborative creation and storytelling, as we didn’t just create characters but also their relationships to one another and even the story setting and scenario. I loved it, and was up far too late enjoying the process. ;-)

Portcon 2017, day two!

Friday morning began the first full day of the convention. I took in a panel at 11 am called “So You Want to be an Author?” being given by a trio of experienced writers from the Quantum Muse eZine. This was an excellent “101” writing-publishing talk with very practical, sound and no-nonsense advice. These guys have decades of experience and know their stuff. I can’t say that I learned much from the panel I didn’t already know, but I did get a lot of affirmation that what I’m currently doing are tactics they’ve employed and recommend.

What was most instructive for me was getting to talk to the presenters afterwards. I thanked them for their talk, and asked them some more “202” type writing questions about critiquing and editing that they were more than happy to answer. I took note of their advice, and it really put me at ease with what I’m doing so far with the editing of my novel. I bought a few of their printed anthologies, and I’m thinking about submitting some work to Quantum Muse in the future. :-)

Not long after that conversation, I met indie author Melissa Walshe selling her books Autumn’s Daughter and Autumn’s Sister. Her back cover blurb immediately sold me on Autumn’s Daughter, and I ended up having a lovely fifteen minute chat with her and her husband after buying a copy of that first book of her trilogy. Really nice folks. I’m looking forward to getting into her story once I find a moment to start enjoying it!

I finished my shopping with a stop at artist Melissa McCommon’s booth. Melissa is the creator of the Epic Chaos! webomic, and we had a nice conversation. She’s really talented, and had come all the way from California to Maine to vend at PortCon while visiting family… on her birthday! And she also had these awesome fantasy, RPG-ish buttons that I just had to add to my collection!

This one in particular I wore for the rest of the convention:

These were all really cool people to run into, and that’s one of my favorite things that happens regularly at PortCon. :-)

This blog is getting long, so I’m breaking it into two-parts. Tune in tomorrow for part two! Take care!  

WIP-it Wednesday: June 21st, 2017

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

It’s been a packed week.

Leading up to it, my old cat became very sick and then passed away. And prior and post to that sad event I had bookended weekends that required me to work on my house and it’s grounds. All of this prevented me from putting as much effort as I wanted into preparing the sixteen hours of roleplaying games that I’ll be running at this year’s PortCon, which starts Thursday.

It shoved the majority of what needed to be done all into the last weekend before the con. Most of my fellow writers out there should know that means it was deadline and crunch time. I tapped my reserves and chugged caffeine like Popeye downs spinach. And, by gum, even though that last weekend wasn’t enough to get it all finished… I pounded out and completed the last two games this Monday and Tuesday!

Aside from printing the color handouts Thursday morning, the games are ready with a day to spare.

However, this victory came at the expense of the time I usually devote to maintaining my social media thoughtfully, and other stuff… like sleeping. ;-) I apologize if my presence has been lacking, or my posting slapdash. Starting next week, I hope to not only return to working on my novel, but also to getting the blog back on track and regular again.

As I write this, I’m exhausted. This was a lot of effort compressed into a small amount of time while I was also working and commuting to a full-time day-job. But now I’ve met this part of my responsibilities, and once my work is done today, I even have an evening to rest-up with before my vacation and the convention starts.

So I hope you can forgive me if I cut this short, and bid you adieu. I’m going to have fun over the next four days, and you’ll hear all about it next week. :-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! a good night’s rest! Take care!