That means it's been almost a year since I last posted.
Yeah, honestly I'm shit at blogs. Life rises up and I forget about them.
If you're wondering, Eastgate is not finished. While I managed to push through NaNoWriMo, and meet the word count, I did so at the cost of the story. The tone was wrong, the characters went in weird directions, and I ended up realizing that a lot of the decisions I'd made in developing the story were actually wrong and went against things that I wanted as core facets of the story.
I sort of cracked the nut of what was wrong in the spring, but then a very good friend of mine took ill and was in the hospital for 2 months, and it just frankly began a series of things that have sort of fucked me over for writing for the better part of the year.
However, it's almost November, and that means a fresh chance to tell a new story.
Unlike last year, this year's story isn't the product of a lot of planning. It isn't a story that I see being the first of a series. It frankly isn't a story I feel a lot of myself invested in.
And that's not a bad thing.
This year's story is the subject of what I refer to as the "Jim Butcher challenge". You see, several years ago Jim Butcher (author of the Dresden Files) was talking to some fans about hot you could make a story out of anything, and it was purely the execution that would determine if it was a good story. Someone didn't agree with Jim. Jim said to give him two random items and he would make a story about them. The man, whose name no one seems to remember, offered the items of Pokemon and The Lost Roman Legion.
From these suggestions, Jim gave the world Codex Alera.
So, not wanting to try to delve back into Eastgate, which still needs some thinking and needs, I think, a slower pace than NaNoWriMo affords, I decided to take up Jim's gauntlet and make a story out of two unrelated items.
Yesterday, almost as a joke, my wife gave me the two items to make the story from. Those things were:
1) Robocop
and
2) Dungeons & Dragons
The general story sort of unfolded in my head pretty quickly once I had a chance to sit down and think about it, and I decided "what the hell".
Like I said, this isn't a story that I'm holding extremely dear, or one that I'm thinking could be the basis for a series or anything. It could be a total mess, and it could crash and burn completely. I don't know. But, honestly for the first time in NaNo, I'm not really concerned. I'm just writing this one to see where it goes.
So, I have a week, and I need to figure out the characters a bit between now and then. I have general character ideas, but I'm lacking things as basic as names.
I'll update as often as I can between now and the end.
And hopefully I'll remember that this blog exists afterward.
Until then..
