Progress. Progress. Progress. (How I Nano My Wrimo 6)

Image copyright some combination of Nickelodeon, Archie Comics and various characters' creators. 

I'm nearing the 35,000 mark as The First: Hero's Dawn continues along. The novel is finally forming into a strong narrative as I've started to define the villains for the heroes I've introduced in the last three updates. Overall, this has proven to be a strong National Novel Writing Month for yours truly. My hope is to work towards a regular writing level comparable to NaNoWriMo every month as I continue to work towards a bigger badder Quadrant Universe.

My plans are to wrap up The First in December, although I will also be putting work in on the final touches for the stories debuting on Patreon starting next month. With more Quadrant and Lightweight ahead, I've still got a lot on my plate. But for the first time in several months, it feels like I'm actually moving along with a relative smoothness. 

Today's image is the triptych cover for Archie Comics' three part Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Universe Sourcebook. It and similar handbooks from Marvel and DC had a profound impact on my universe building.

This will be the last update for NaNoWriMo progress here on the site. Thanksgiving brings its own messiness and with it comes a need to divert myself from the internet more than I might normally do. With that in mind, the next WIP update won't show up until the first week of December.

Don't worry though, as I have articles prepped for the entire rest of this week and next, so stay tuned for a free book, great cosplay and an entire week of stupendous art!

Staying on Target! (How I Nano My Wrimo 5)

Two and a half weeks in and the mid-month doldrums are in full swing for National Novel Writing Month. I think this is the phase that derails most people as they work on their early projects. It's the thing that convinces people they just don't have what it takes to write a novel. Because when it gets into the meat of your novel, it's really easy to question everything you're doing and whether it is the right story or if it's even slightly well done.

Which is another reason I embrace the power of NaNoWriMo. It pushes people to move through that mid-month lull. As I'm writing this, I passed the middle of my fifty thousand words five days ago. I've lost a bit of my head start so I'm not quite as a head of pace as I would like to be. But I am pushing along with new words everyday, even if some of them are proving harder than others.

When I start a story with multiple points of view, that can often be the hardest part of the storytelling. I have to make sure I give each character something compelling to do as the story progresses. The loose plotting I do doesn't always give this beat by beat. Even when it does, I often quickly find one character less interesting than the others. I seek to remedy that as I continue my work though, trying to lock on to the key of each character's narrative.

Kent Morgan is that character for The First: Hero's Dawn. He is the first of the heroes to put on the mask and start the fight against crime. A child of  wealth, he left home years ago to travel the world in search of some kind of enlightenment. But that all ends when an old acquaintance shows up at the door of the remote monastery where he lives and informs him his entire family is now dead. He comes back to civilization to find the people behind his family's deaths. In doing so, he makes himself a target, a name he embraces as he dons a mask to fight criminals.

Making that story compelling in unique ways doesn't prove as easy as my other heroes. Though each hero plays with a heroic archetype, the masked vigilante is perhaps the most used trope in comics. Differentiating him from that trope makes his tale a bit more difficult to expand upon than those of Hero and Sea Sorceress. Yet it's a challenge I'm enjoying the effort to overcome.

Today's target image is an Unsplash photograph from Artur Matosyan.

The Legend of Legaia! (How I NaNo My Wrimo 4)

Sure, it's only been a day since my last work in progress update for National Novel Writing Month. But as I strive to keep up with this blog five days a week every week, it's a lot easier to talk about my writing project than developing a ton of new articles, so expect me to talk about The First: Hero's Dawn more this month than I do many projects.

It wasn't until I was well into developing the story and writing the first few thousand words of it that I realized the name I picked for the story's main heroine also featured in a PlayStation video game series. The RPG series Legend of Legaia has little to do with my character, but I thought it would make an apt title for this blog as I present my second character focus.

Legaia gets her name from a Greek siren (sometimes spelled Ligeia or Ligaia as well.) This fits perfectly as she belongs to an ancient race of warrior women living deep beneath the ocean. Her origins and powers give her the name Sea Sorceress. When she rescues a young businessman named Peter Colan from the cold Pacific waters, she breaks the laws of her own land. This results in her exile and the beginning of her long journey into superherodom.

A few of you might recognize the name Sea Sorceress. This is not her first appearance, thought it is her first significant one. She previously appeared in one of several short stories of the past I published a few years ago as ebooks.

"Summer of Love" focuses on 1967 and the country's premiere super-team of the time: the Defenders of Democracy. Presented as one episode in their ongoing story, it focuses on the arrival of the goddess Aphrodite on Earth as she starts to wreak havoc on the lives of the team's members. Characters make momentous life choices because of this. Sea Sorceress plays only a small role in the full tale, but it does mark her first appearance five full years before The First: Hero's Dawn.

Don't worry though, as this is far from the last time Sea Sorceress will appear. I hope she will prove a character with a long tale to tell, not just in history, but in the future as well.

It is back to writing for me now, but I encourage everyone to check out "Summer of Love" for the low low price of just 99 cents. Or if you're a supporter of the Patreon, you might just see it appear over on that site for backers very, very soon.

Today's image from Unsplash is by photographer Houcine Ncib.

Finding a Hero (How I Nano My Wrimo 3)

As I write this, I've reached the half way point of National Novel Writing Month. The First: Hero's Dawn continue just a little ahead of pace for the NaNoWriMo goal.

Art by Steven Butler. 

The main story revolves around three main heroes and a private detective character that brings them together. I thought I'd expand on each of those characters over the next couple work in progress posts here on the site.

We will start things off with the character whose name appears in the title: Hero. The key figure in the earliest days of the costumed heroes of the Quadrant Universe, much of the tale will revolve around his path to wearing that costume. As the story begins, his legend already exists though. Over the last several years, Henry Carson has wandered Depression era America in search of answers about his own origins. In the process, he's quietly helped thousands in a multitude of ways, from stopping armed robbers to diverting waterways to pulling lost kittens from trees. But as the story progresses, Henry Carson comes to embrace that name more and more.

At the same time, he will struggle to keep parts of his life secret from mankind, even as he learns the frightening truths about his origins!

Henry proves to be the character most different from my original sketches of him as I've developed him over the course of the novel. His journey should be a grand one as I continue to work my way through the novel!

Today's image features Barry Gregory and Steven Butler's John Aman, Amazing Man. While A-Man has nothing to do with my story, I thought it would be great to share another amazing independently produced golden age super-story!

The heart of the matter (How I NaNo my WriMo 2)

As week two of National Novel Writing Month nears an end, I find my productivity slowing a bit. Part of this certainly comes to my day job in retail where increasing business definitely means I want to spend more time relaxing and less time focused on a few more hours of writing each day.

This doesn't mean I'm not keeping pace with The First: Hero's Dawn. So far I've stayed above par for the NaNoWriMo count day by day, helped along by those strong days at the beginning of the month. With more vacation days ahead for me as November continues, I expect I will use some of that time to play catch up.

As the four sub-plots that make up the over-arcing story continues, I find one more of a challenge than the other three. Interestingly, the hardest one proves to be the most traditional super-tale of the bunch, as I introduce the first costume of the novel, that of the vigilante The Target. (No relation to the public domain Novelty Press superhero of the same name.) While designing a thirties style pulp superhero lets me have fun subverting those tropes in a modern setting, it doesn't compare to the exploration of the outsider status of that era.

Against the backdrop of the waning days of the Great Depression, social upheaval was the name of the game for most of the decade. Yet for the common American, a baseline was in place that simply seems almost backwards by today's standards. Homosexuality. Non-monogamy. Even interracial relationships. Just one would push a person to the fringes of society. All of them might present a world radically different from the sanitized version of the thirties and forties we see and hear far too much about far too often.

I didn't want to simply present super powers as a metaphor in those times however. This is a story about real people in a real time that won't accept them. Ultimately, it may only be their powers that mark them as part of a rational society. Because their powers are the only way they can truly connect to the "norm" as it was seen.

This is just a sampling of the themes I build upon as I work my way through The First: Hero's Dawn. Yet pushing these limits is exactly what I wanted to do here, especially in what I hope will be my first full length novel in the Times Past series. How well will I make it work? I certainly still don't know: I still have tens of thousands of words still ahead of me!

Today's image is of former White Collar star Matt Bomer. His handsome good looks certainly make him one of the actors clearly starring in The First feature film currently playing inside my head.

It all starts with The First! (How I NaNo my WriMo 1)

I set out to write something different than anything I've written before as I started Project TEAM. As I write this, I'm now a quarter of the way towards the goal for the novel as part of NaNoWriMo. And it's started to take shape as a pretty solid character piece as much as it is a key moment in the history of the Quadrant Universe.

Photographed by John Austin. DC Bombshells characters owned by DC Comics.

Character is important to me in all my writing, but as I worked on this story I wanted to truly write a tale about people that have felt like outsiders all their lives, even as they come together to stop a threat to the world. Kent, Abel and Legaia are far from the only players in the novel, but they are all figures far beyond the basic archetypes I initially built them from.

Those that have followed along with me on my NaNoWriMo page know that Project TEAM now has a working title as well. The First: Hero's Dawn currently looks like it might clock in as one of my longest novels to date at my current pace. But I'm sure I will be able to talk a bit more about that as the novel continues towards its final shape as I continue to NaNo my WriMo!

Today's image is a bonus Cosplay of the DC Bombshells, photographed by John Austin. I won't even pretend that Ant Lucia's alternate thirties and forties era designs for these characters isn't something of an inspiration for me as I continue to develop the earliest costumed heroes of the Quadrant Universe.

The basics of Project TEAM

The Quadrant Universe has featured several books that have defined many corners of the shared world. But I think its key to eventually explore the very cornerstones of why my universe of adventure exists in its current form. With that in mind, I planned a cycle of novels called "Times Past" which will show vital moments in the history of metahumans from the beginning of time to the modern day.

One central conceit of the Quadrant Universe is that metahumanity existed since the very dawn of mankind. Yet costumed heroes only started to rise in the 1940s, even as war built in Europe. Though they've had ups and downs in public acceptance and popularity in the following eighty years, most metahumans put on a costume at one point of time or another in their careers. 

But why?

TEAM seeks to answer that question as it focuses on the first costumed heroes as they fight against a startling foe that beings with super powers are the only hope to defeat. Built around heroism and the tragedy of impending war, the book builds on classic comics archetypes to tell the stories of flawed men and women fighting for the very future of mankind.

I kick off the work on the series today and for much of this month, I will fight to bring the novel close to completion. As part of NaNoWriMo, the goal is only fifty thousand words, but I'm striving to surpass that and get this one completely finished in that time.

If all goes well, you should start to see the roll out of the first "Times Past" stories in the second half of 2019. More are in the works, including one already announced project, the completion of another novel long in the works. Of course, this won't slow the release of the planned Patreon serials either. Lightweight, Quadrant and Shockwave are still on their way next year!

So stay tuned for more on TEAM as the next few weeks progress. Until then, folks. 

Wake me up when September ends! (WIP Wednesday)

Thirty thousand words written. That was my target for the month of September as I pushed to raise my regular writing schedule to the level I feel it needs to reach to really know I can fight back the inner demons that want to derail me from my regular writing projects. So how did I do?

I finished the month at 30,621 words.

Photo by Hafidh Satyanto on Unsplash

This month, the goal raises to 40,000 words as I prepare for NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word challenge.

My writing schedule for the serial fiction I produce has long been to continuously switch from one to another as I go. This keeps me from burning out with the various projects I'm working on. My brain generally goes in just too many directions to not bounce a bit between tales. Right now Lightweight and Project Supernatural are both in great places as I continue their narratives. My focus is back on the local hero project, which is now tentatively titled Shockwave.

Like so much of what I write, Shockwave is a labor of love. I built it to both explore my own local community but also to open a few different corners of the Quandrant Universe at the same time. I've hinted at corners of the cosmic landscape in the pages of Lightweight: Beyond, but Shockwave will start to reveal some of the connective tissue that binds things together.

In addition, I'm continuing my work on Atomic Werewolf 2000 and my edits on Dino Force as well, but I'll talk more about those in time.

And since it's October, NaNo-prep means I've started to lay out the basics for my project come November. I will share more about it in my next newsletter, so be sure to subscribe if you to get the first peak on the new title.

#NaNoWriMo

Off writing. Back soon.

Succubi and sucky jobs

This image of Suicide Girl Ginary is currently
the placeholder image in my head for one of
the two leads in my November project.
Image copyright Suicide Girls.

It's been a strange couple of weeks. I've in the midst of my final days at my job of the last three years. It's one I have never been totally passionate about, but in recent months I have come to realize the culture of that employer was nothing but poisonous. Thankfully I had a second job in place that could easily become a full time job. Next week, I'll leave behind overnight shifts and the back and issues given me by concrete floors and move into a comfortable job at a local bookstore. While entering the retail field full time in November isn't the best idea ever, I look forward to the free time it will open as I start to rebuild my writing schedule.

As I mentioned previously, I'm setting up for NaNoWriMo right now. With the new job starting on Halloween, I'll have free time open just in time to get working on fifty thousand words for the month of November.

But the move to one job with far more satisfaction in it than two jobs with one being a soul-sucking miasma should free up a lot more time for everything. I hope to use the next month's novel as the springboard for regular writing projects. I have a few ideas already percolating for the days after the novel, but I'm taking baby steps right now.

Anyone interested in joining me for some novel writing in November, can become my writing buddy at the site. My screen name might even be a clue to an upcoming project I have in mind.

In the mean time, I'll be continuing to develop my female lead for the new book, a reluctant succubus in a world far too easy for her to find prey.

What are you currently doing to develop your novel before November? Let me know in the comments or on social media?

Prep in my step

As I wrap up edits on one project, I am also deep into preparation mode for my next personal writing project. National Novel Writing Month begins on November 1st and I plan on using it as motivation to start my next full length writing project.

While I have done a little bit of short story work in the last few weeks, I haven't taken the time to write anything of significant length since summer. But Nanowrimo offers me a chance to fix that and I will be hard at work on a new project, one that takes me out of my usual super wheel house. 

I'm sure I will speak about this project more as I start actually put word to screen, but this new work will be my first foray into urban fantasy, a genre with its own traits but one at the edge of super powered fiction already. It should come as no surprise that I have a supernatural tinted character created decades ago that I think would be a perfect fit for the genre, but the transition from aged super-concept to another genre offers a few challenges.

Setting has proved the easiest. I made the decision to set the first novel in my own neck of the woods. Eastern Iowa has a few weird bits of supernatural history. Coupled with a location most people outside the state don't realize is a city of a quarter million and I have a fascinating place to drop my leads. 

This is a great piece by Genzoman, but I blame Darkstalkers for the sudden
need to give every succubus wings.

From there I've been working on lore built around various secret societies and ancient fears. Succubi, incubi, Lilith, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Knights Templar are a few of the touchstones that will be featured in the upcoming work. While I plan to make the story my own, I also don't want to trounce all over standing legend. As a writer, I often get annoyed when someone uses a concept in name only. My goal is to introduce these concepts in a way both true to their "history" and interesting to new readers. That means research though, so I'm deep into that as I write this. 

Prep can become its own evil however, so I specifically opened a window of time for myself to do it in. I want to have a good idea where I'm going with the new novel ahead of November and what it will feature, though not enough that I cannot let the characters surprise me as they go. That is the joy of writing for me and I don't like the research to get in the way when I'm barreling through 50,000 words in thirty days. 

Writing Update: NaNo-Complete!

I wrapped up my 50000 words for NaNoWriMo over the weekend. I actually worked on two novels over the period with Lightweight: Beyond being the main focus. But the expansion of Out For Vengeance also came into play as I start to put building blocks of the shared Quadrant Universe together in both stories. Expect a few tidbits in Vengeance’s tale that will come to play in future Lightweight stories.

Over the next couple weeks I will finish up the last chapter of Lightweight: Beyond and get the complete work off to be edited. Then I will throw myself into finishing the Vengeance expansion. But I have a pair of short stories that also need to get done this month, one to complete an anthology and one as a tie-in to T. Glenn Bane's upcoming Wild West Horse Opera RPG.

Suffice it to say, I will continue to have a busy writing schedule in December.

Thankfully all this writing won't come without a couple releases in the near future. Airship 27 has Legends of New Pulp near completion, which will feature my second tale in the "Second Life of DB Cooper". Then my 50s era circus tale will finally see the light of day as part of Flinch Books' Big Top Tales anthology. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how the finished book comes together.

Links to those will be forthcoming once they are released. In the mean time, stay tuned for some great holiday features and super-discussion as December rolls on.

Progress report for the end of October 2015

It's been awhile since I have updated folks reading this on what I am working on while I am also posting all these lovely blog entries. Considering the Kickstarter just funded a few short weeks ago, it should be no surprise I am working hard on Lightweight: Beyond.

While I am still working on the second chapter of that book, it is now a much longer chapter than in my previous plans. Since the second and third books for the next year failed to fund as part of the campaign, I actually changed my plans for where to leave off with Lightweight's third adventure to give a more satisfying conclusion to the readers. Without saying too much, this means I will actually be writing longer chapters for the second and third ones I originally planned to conclude Lightweight: Beyond. I will also add two more chapters after that in order to give a satisfying conclusion to Millie's time travel adventure and Kevin's battle to survive on Nill.

My current plan is to finish the bottom three quarters of Lightweight: Beyond as my NaNoWriMo project, coupled with the new ending I have planned for the Vengeance saga as mentioned a couple days ago. The two books will actually have a chapter that links the two corners of the Quadrant Universe as Vengeance's tale will find him leaving his home turf of New Salem for Lightweight's city of Federation. This should form some interesting connective tissue for folks interested in both books.

As I prep for NaNoWriMo, I am also hard at work at building a larger buffer for my online serial Walking Shadows. Regular readers know we moved into a bit more eerie territory in Hallo-week as Marilyn and Cyrus found themselves visited by strange shades. Today, the Casting Call feature debuted, featuring my thoughts on who would make a great Ian Page should a Walking Shadows movie ever be made.

Future chapters will develop Ian and Phoebe's friendship, reveal Kaihime's history and mission and introduce a new pair of super-villains to trouble our cast. I have more exciting news about Walking Shadows in the days ahead, so stay tuned for details on that in the near future.