New Project

So as of yesterday -- the 2nd of February -- I've been invited onto the team at Pure Steam RPG to write two companion novels to their d20-licensed gaming system for Pathfinder.

If you're not familiar, here's the run-down. Pathfinder is a system that is based on the Wizards of the Coast new release of D&D 3.5 rules set. (For those of you who aren't gamers, that's Dungeons & Dragons). It is a unique system with its own worlds and rules and is highly adaptable to a variety of worlds and eras. It was started in 2009 by Paizo Publishing and has a pretty good following in the tabletop rpg circles.

So I've been asked to help Pure Steam market and promote their material with two companion novels about a major character (or two) from the world to help shape the gaming world. It'll be like my own Drizzt or Elminster (look them up; they're cool characters).

I'm pretty damn excited about this. I even get to work with a guy named Crockett. I mean come on. Boone & Crockett. That just sounds like a bad-ass cop-drama team. Way better than those guys from Hawaii Five-0.

I'll keep you all abreast as I learn more and as we progress through development. Thankfully, I am still working diligently on the "Charles" novel, which is going through some of its own major changes. But it's working out well, and I'm exciting for the new material I'm writing.

New Story!

So I completed my first short story of the year. Hooray! I am currently typing it up -- being a hand-written kind of guy -- and it's breaking 2000 words right now with plenty to go and plenty of room for expansion.

 It's tentatively titled, "The Temple of Guayna Tuampa" and takes place in the same world as my "Empress of the Danforthe" stories. It was a challenge on one of the websites I participate in to write a story in alternate history Earth that included dragons. So I wrote about a temple-busting explorer who encounters a dragon in a temple in South America. It's a pretty romping good time.

 I'm working as hard as ever on the new Milwaukee Writers Workshop venture. I.E., it's a business now (or will be very shortly) and so it's a bit of a mentality shift to go from "Oh, this is just a fun group I run" to "Hey, this is a business, and I need to treat it professionally." Not that I wasn't professional before, but it's a big change, and I think it'll put a good light on us for the future and help our potential. It's exciting nonetheless, and we've got some good help with a new intern who's very capable.

 On a side note, the revisions to "The Mechanics of Man" -- my steampunk rewrite of the infamous "charles" novel -- have been going very well, and I am nearly through the entirety of Book One with my additions and rewrites.

Eureka!

In a moment of brilliance -- or perhaps just idiot savant-ness -- I figured out the integral flaw in my very first attempt at a novel. It's a project I've long thought was worthy of having been written but more than once person has pointed out error after error. It was never that I didn't think that the errors were un-fixable; I just didn't know how to do it.

At work last week, however, it dawned on me where the crux lay: the main character's passiveness needed to be changed to make him more active. Now, that might seem like a pretty easy thing to pick out when reading a draft -- and it was -- but like I said the problem wasn't in not knowing the flaw; it was knowing how to fix it.

I think the problem is pretty much resolved now, though, which makes me happy. The main character has really blossomed in my re-writes (and I'm only about 20 pages in, with an additional 10 or so pages of new material). Not only has he become more active in his own story, but his actions make him significantly more empathetic, which was a big issue for people in previous critiques.

As a side note, I took comments from a few people to heart and made what was essentially a Victorian-era pastiche piece (as an homage to Charles Dickens) into a Steampunk piece.

Now, in my defense, I feel like this change is worthwhile. Steampunk is a very broad genre, and I feel like this piece can be made into what some chidingly refer to as 'Li-fi' -- literary science fiction. I'm ok with it being that, because I think that it fits more in line with literary fiction, rather than entertainment fiction.

A Burst of Inspiration

For a long time, I've been working on notes and details and maps (nearly everything but writing) in my world of Dalurin. It's an expansive world, and I have a lot of faith in it - and not just because I'm the one creating it. I've written two legends of some length that are based in the world, and those are good material for future writing, but they're not really the kind of thing to try and publish first. And while I believe that my first novel, Shadows of Mati, has some legs, it needs considerable work, and I don't know that I want it to be the first publication based in my world.

Last night, however, I came across a great idea. This next bit is mine (just as a declaration of sorts) so no snatching.

In the world of Dalurin, there is - at present - a great deal of magic. It is present in much of the world, save for the monotheistic kingdoms, where it is used only for specific purposes and almost exclusively under the direction of the ruler of a particular kingdom. There are powerful mages, certainly, and many come and go; however, the catalyst of this particular story is a specific magic ritual that has been contemplated for centuries but never attained and certainly not perfected. So when rumors of the successful accomplishment of this ritual reaches our MC, he is afraid of many things that will happen, and he takes it upon himself to get a commission from the king to go and investigate - and potentially stop the mage responsible.

Unlike a great deal of the great fantasy works, my underlying mission with this and all of my fantasy novels is to extend beyond tropes (not cliches). There are a lot of things that work in fantasy, and there are a lot of things that are just "standard." I want to try and do something new with certain things; one of them is magic. The other is the races in my world. For anyone who's ever role-played with me, I've never been a fan of tradition, even as a student of speculative fiction. I enjoy it; it has it's place; but I like to step outside the box. So I'm hoping to produce something that will make people feel refreshed and yet satisfied at the same time.

In other news, I applied to two editorial positions yesterday, so we'll see how that goes.