Briefs
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I played The Last Spell late last night, and it was a lot of fun. Now I need to work hard on writing Dungeon Runner so I can play more of it!
It’s a turn-based roguelike where you survive against waves of undead enemies. After every wave, you improve your heroes and town. There’s town building, loot, XP and skills and perks, and lots of fun options to play with.
I don’t normally play turn-based games, but this one has me excited to dive back in. Check it out if you’re looking for a fun game. :)
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Ended the week with just under 16,000 new words written on Dungeon Runner 2. This brings the project to 40% completed. Woot!
These last few weeks have seen many schedule changes to shift priorities around. Because of these changes, I didn’t get to study as much as I would have liked. Next week, I’m bringing back my study time. :)
I feel that 15,000 new words per week is a healthy rate. If I can maintain this, that’s 6-7 novels a year, depending on their lengths. I’m aiming for 90-100k.
Let’s see how it goes!
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That /kind/ of looks like me (click image icon).
Crushed my writing goal for the day with 4,301 words (yes, that 1 is important, thank you very much). My goal is 3,150 words per day. If I can maintain that six days a week, that’s 8 novels a year.
I figured that if I aimed high, I’d land somewhere much better than what I’ve done in the past. :)
Today, I finished up Part 2 of 5 (Dungeon Runner), which is similar to an Eizel story. This shows the perspective of other characters in a new dungeon that’s completely unlike any other. I hope people like how absolutely whacky that dungeon is, haha.
Tomorrow, I start on Part 3, which is back to the main storyline. It will be hard to focus, though, since Diablo 4’s beta starts tomorrow. Got to work hard so I can play hard!
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Another week down! Projects have been updated with what I’ve been doing. But if you don’t care to check the details, here’s the overview.
Dungeon Runner 1’s audiobook has been moved to the Upcoming section. I’ve decided (again) that my focus should be on writing. But the audiobooks are still coming, just not from me.
I added 10,000 new words to Dungeon Runner 2 and threw out my outline. I’m going to play with discovery writing again and see how it goes. This latest dungeon has been a lot of fun!
I’ve officially started on Secret Project 1. My focus is on worldbuilding and lots of studying. This project won’t come out until after I finish my current series.
If you want more details, head over to the Projects section. Otherwise, have a wonderful week!
(The image is because Sundays are for good food and video games!)
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Every day, I give myself 1.5 hours to explore art in relation to my projects. This work is for covers, promotional material, website graphics, and—what I’m most excited about—art from the worlds I create.
Attached is a short video of me cutting out a female Tiek. This is a Naufling (updated from the previous spelling Naughling; if you prefer the original spelling, let me know!), a spirit creature in the world of Eternal Fantasy Online (Dungeon Runner).
Nauflings come in all types. They are meant to be cute creatures with small benefits. A Tiek can help things grow. A Timberwood Spiritfish locates secrets. A Morsitor alerts of nearby undead. A Materan generates fabric gemhearts, which can be combined to create fabric. And so on!
I really like the Nauflings. :)
We’ll see how this art page for the Tiek goes. If it doesn’t take too long, I’d like to make more pages. Feel free to skip to the end of the video to see what it looks like. I’ll be posting the full image later. :)
Click the image icon to see the video.
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Narration!
Two years ago, I built my sound booth with the intent of narrating my books. But given all the shadiness that is Audible and my struggles with writing, I decided to put audiobooks on the back burner.
It has been too long! So, this year, my goal was to give all of my books the audio treatment. I gave up my dream of narrating and picked out narrators, read lots of contracts, and negotiated with a distribution company (for an entire week!).
The problem with hiring a narrator after investing countless hours preparing to narrate my own book is that it’s impossible for them to handle the material the same way I would. I didn’t realize just how hard it would be to listen to someone else’s version.
This experience pushed me to get back into my booth.
For the last three weeks, I’ve been spending two hours every day in my booth. A lot of my time is just acclimating myself to how I sound talking into the mic. I’ve also been going through all of my many courses and books on the art of narration, which has made a drastic improvement in my breathing, pacing, and acting.
It’s so much fun!
Anyway, I snapped this picture yesterday after extending my Mac’s display to my iPad so I could read the tutorials on one screen and work on the other. I thought it would make for an interesting behind-the-scenes photo for those wanting to see what the booth looks like. :)
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Milestones!
Arachnomancer has officially surpassed 500 ratings on Amazon. It has been an adventure, one that has taught me many lessons. The next milestone is 1,000 ratings!
Thanks for reading and reviewing. :)
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My recent change to stop posting humorous micro-stories (on a slave master’s schedule; please don’t whip me) has allowed me to return to one of my favorite activities: studying!
Being a writer isn’t simply learning about grammar, story structure, and character arcs. The fundamental truth is you can’t write what you don’t know (and you don’t know what you don’t know).
If you don’t know what it was like in medieval times, what weapons they used, what their politics looked like, what they ate, and how they talked, you might find writing fantasy to be quite difficult.
Building believable worlds require you to understand a whole swath of topics. This is a never-ending pursuit.
When writing Bookworm to Badass, I studied Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology and The Monsters Know What They’re Doing (absolutely fantastic for writers and tabletop roleplayers).
I have books on demons and witchcraft and psychology, all mythical things… I particularly love my visual encyclopedias for animals, plants, and resources.
I’ve attached a few pictures of my physical books. I have a lot more eBooks…
(Dammit! Looking up the title for The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I found that he released two more books, and I just had to buy them. They are that awesome!)
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Making Changes
I didn’t post yesterday because it was a day of silence for all the people like me: loveless.
Joking… But I’m willing to take all the sympathy I can get.
No, I didn’t post because I hit a wall. A figurative wall. No bones were broken. I didn’t post because I realized just how much time and effort I was putting into making up humorous micro-stories.
My goal was to write something funny every day. I thought it would be good practice. But it quickly became something to stress over. Then, once I finished my micro-story, sitting all proud in my office chair, I felt like I accomplished something and was less motivated to do the actual thing needing doing: writing books.
I’ll return to making behind-the-scenes posts about what I am working on, playing, watching, and reading. Humor will only make an appearance if it’s feeling cute and playful.
See you tomorrow. :)
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I have decided to come clean. I am a big fat liar (or, honestly, a skinny-fat liar). Today is Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air. It might be a disease (see 2/11’s post), but everyone seems to like it nonetheless.
So how could I not take this opportunity to profess my deep affection? There is, in fact, a special someone in my life. Me. And the thoughtful me in this relationship got me a chocolate and caramel-covered apple with cute tiny hearts on it.
I feel so special. :)
“Ohhh, you shouldn’t have,” he says to himself. “I mean, you just bought five pounds of black licorice Allsorts. Where do you think all of this sugar is going?”
But in this case, there’s an apple somewhere beneath all of that chocolate. So, you know, it’s healthy! That’s how this works, right?
To celebrate this holiday, Octoralis—from my Arachnomancer series—has made you a card. Printed behind her paper cutout is a cute scribbling in arachling, the language of spiders. I’ll translate it for you.
“I love… how you taste.”
Umm, please take that within context. She’s not “that” type of spider… And with that, have a wonderful Valentine’s!