Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Relaunching the blog

I haven't posted here in a very long time! A lot has happened. Among other things, Crowns Threnody has gotten pushed onto the back burner and a few other projects have taken its place.

The Shadow of the Quiet Dark is my current full-length fantasy work, and I'm roughly 32,000 words into its first draft. In the year-and-change since my last post, I came up with the concepts that would form the skeleton for this project, began drafting, hit a creative wall, and recently broke through it. I do intend to return to Crowns Threnody at some point, but a few things will likely have to be altered when I do since this project has cannibalized a few concepts from it. I aim to finish the first draft of SotQD by the end of the year, with the goal of fixing all that will inevitably be broken about it in editing in 2014. Whether or not I end up with a publishable work at the end of the process remains to be seen, as it is a first novel, but even if I don't, I need the practice!

Another project I've put a lot of work into is A Heart in Winter, a short story of roughly 10,000 words. I'll be diving into the third draft soon, and when it's all finished I plan to see if I can sell it. The thing that I've found most surprising about working in short fiction seriously for the first time is how very different it is from larger-scale storytelling. It's a completely unique process. It's necessary to define characters, establish setting, and induce immersion on a very short timescale. In a novel, you have potentially hundreds of pages to stretch out in, to play out your arcs and achieve impact and emotional involvement. In a more restricted space, the process of plotting, pacing, and writing becomes almost a kind of puzzle to be solved. It's an interesting challenge with a more specific set of requirements, and I've been enjoying it.

Alongside my prose fiction, I'm also knee-deep in production on several shows for the web-based entertainment journalism channel I'm launching. My flagship series, Cybercrash, is a video game review show with a high cyberpunk/comedy meta-narrative, and the channel will also be home to several other regular non-narrative shows focused on gaming and pop culture.

Basically, I'm determined to never not be writing, haha.

In any case, watch this space! I'll be trying to journal my creative processes and thoughts here on this blog more regularly.