Four days until NaNoWriMo kick-off and I find myself getting bogged down in the greater world-big picture minutiae again. I need only to identify a tentative overarching maguffin-like problem that ties all the players together within the bigger-picture framework and then cast that sucker to the side until this story is written. Easy to say; harder to do. Much harder indeed. (more…)
I spent a little time playing with about a dozen different random name generators — partly for something like fun, but not enough to really justify doing so; partly trying to spur my imagination to come up with something that beat the pants off the rather stupid naming scheme I had come up with about 15 years ago for the characters in my Last of the Esharim project. (more…)
I’m not writing a damned thing. I am — actually, have long been — in a prolonged writing drought that is pretty much crushing the joy of writing right out of me. And the cause of it all is that bastard staring me in the face when I shave — okay, whenever I bother to shave anyway. (more…)
A couple of years ago, David Liner and I were going over notes to prepare for NaNoWriMo 2006 and I came up with a name for a city that was going to be the capitol of the Camorran Empire. I called that city Miravur, and it wasn’t a really bad place. Miravur, as we pictured it, was just kind of under a heavy religious regime. We were conducting an experiment that year. David would write the antagonist’s side of the story while I wrote the protagonist’s side. We thought it would be interesting to try and for the most part it really was. (more…)
For no other reason than because I can, I guess, I’ve chosen some rather bizarre old books to read lately. Maybe I’m looking for inspiration, but where I’ve been looking is way back! (more…)
It’s mid-August, which means that, despite wasting most of the year up to now on other pursuits — including throwing away countless hours gaming, writing suddenly starts to get back under my skin. Yes, November looms large on the horizon, bringing as it does that annual madness we know as NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. (more…)
