Goals achieved and worlds destroyed! My 7th Camp Nanowrimo is in the books!

Image by Javier Estaban via Unsplash.

Over the weekend, I hit my goal for my seventh Camp Nanowrimo event. The twice annual free-form writing event has always been a fun one for me, and while I developed some issues with my pacing midway through the month, it's been all engines forward for the last week or so.

The main focus was playing catch up on Quadrant and I managed that quite well. I'm fast working through the latter half of volume two, otherwise known as the time travel arc. I don't want to give away much on this one, but I will reassure everyone that it continues to prove how much fun developing new tales of the Morgan brothers is for me.

I'll have more on the future of Quadrant in updates very soon. Over the next year, I hope to make the brothers' saga as important as Lightweight currently is in my publishing schedule. With that in mind, I have big plans for the characters in the weeks and months ahead!

Before I wrap this blog up I wanted to remind everyone that The Good Fight 5: The Golden Age will be available to read as of tomorrow. Go get your copies pre-ordered now!

It's Camp Nanowrimo time!

Today is April 1st and while many will celebrate the fools of the world, I will instead be turning my focus to the twice-annual Camp Nanowrimo event. Unlike the 50,000 word sprint that is the November event, Camp Nanowrimo is far more free form with open project types and goals.

This year my effort is going into finishing up the current cycle of Quadrant stories, which have fallen behind the continued progress of Lightweight and Shockwave. If all goes as planned with this month and next, I should have pretty much every release I've got planned for 2019 done in the next two to three months

From there, I have more big plans for 2020. I'll write more about that soon though.

If anyone is interested in following along at Camp Nanowrimo, you can find my account here. And if you're a fellow writer of the super or heroic that's also participating in the event, let me know and I'll add you to our shared cabin!

The next month will feature weekly updates on the project as I work through first an editorial phase and then the completion of a year's worth of Quadrant tales. Those will hit every Wednesday, with other content already planned for Mondays and Fridays! So be sure to stay tuned into the blog as we get this show on the road!

It's a marvelous life! (WIP Wednesday)

Over the last three weeks, I've fought two head colds but still managed to get a decent amount of work done on the ongoing projects that have been debuting as part of Patreon. I clocked about five thousand words in the last week on Shockwave and Lightweight. Lightweight is just about done while Shockwave currently sits at four chapters of a planned six in the first book.

Next month will be my twice annual Camp Nanowrimo month, where several of my writing friends and I get together and push each other forward on writing projects. My plan is to complete the next three chapters of Quadrant over that month of writing. That will bring me right up to the finishing line with that one as well.

My big goal is to wrap all three novels by the end of May and set out on the next writing journey, which will include a short story or two plus the next phase of Lightweight!

I'm also working on a new scheduling format for Patreon releases, one that will see all the ongoing books update about every six weeks. That one will depend a bit on how things go as I move into the second half of 2019 however.

I went with my wife and the youngest to see Captain Marvel over the weekend. The family and I loved the very different take on the mythos of Mar-Vell and Carol Danvers. A lot of the negative reaction is confusing to me, as I felt it was the best use of Carol since the Brian Reed Ms. Marvel series of the mid-2000s. It gets a thumbs up from me, yet another in a solid string of really great Marvel movies in the last two years.

Today's image is of Carol in costume, drawn by the always amazing Sana Takeda, taken from a variant cover of Life of Captain Marvel. Character owned by Marvel.

Summer writing boot camp

Sorry that it's been a bit quiet here. Been a bit busy working on projects. Here's a little bit on why: 

I'm a big advocate for the entire concept behind NaNoWriMo, so it should come as no surprise that I'm also a fan of its twice annual spinoff campaign Camp NaNoWriMo. While the original in November is set for a distinct 50,000 word novel, the camp version is far more freeform. Writers choose their project type, from novel to short stories to poetry to scripts. Additionally, they can pick from a variety of goals. The most basic is the return of the word goal, but that goal can be altered up and down by the project creator. But words aren't the only goal option. Writers can also choose to measure hours, minutes, lines or pages. It opens up a wide variety of projects to anyone that wants to participate.

Just like the last camp in April, my focus is on short stories. I wrapped Project Independence early in the month. I'm now splitting my time between another chapter of Lightweight and Quadrant. They will be the main focus of my writing for the rest of the year, as in 2019 I plan a large push for both. That doesn't mean I won't continue to produce side projects over the next couple years however. I still have Walking Shadows to finish, the local hero project I plan to launch sometime next year, three or four other projects in various states of completion and the final edits and production of two books before the end of the year.

I've been having a lot of fun with both tales as they take both my solo hero and my premiere team into new settings and introducing new villains and heroes. I don't plan on slowing down either. My current plans are to focus most of my work on both projects for the rest of the summer and early fall, but I'll cover more on that in early August in a new WIP Wednesday.

For now, I just want to encourage everyone to check out and support both NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo. Both are great nonprofit projects with a worthy creative cause.

NaNo my whatMo? (WIP Wednesday)

As April comes to a close, I am deep into my Camp NaNoWriMo project for the month. I kept it relatively simple this time around, aiming for 15,000 words over two short stories, just a bit higher than my average writing rate for the last few months. So far I've moved things along quite nicely with both tales.

I just wrapped a new Quadrant story. This one will start the second cycle of stories in that corner of the universe, and send the Brothers Morgan on a new set of adventures in more far-flung locales. It really did feel like visiting old friends again to create this one and I cannot wait as I start to cycle again between their tales and those of Lightweight over the next several weeks.

My other project remains un-talk-about-able, but it will hopefully appear in an upcoming Pro Se Productions book. Right now, I'm referring to it by its fancy codename (because who doesn't love fancy codenames?) FOXHUNT.

I have a couple other stories proposals in the works, but it looks like May will be spent with a lot of prep work on other projects.

Today's image, inspired by Quadrant member Kodiak's looking for love, is a classic internet meme very apt for our mutated bear hero! Image copyright, TheMetaPicture.

WIP Wednesday: Early April 2017

April this year, much like last year, has been all about Camp Nanowrimo. And while last year's project ran into roadblocks that caused me to at least temporarily abandon it after the Camp, so far this year's project is firing on all cylinders.

This year I'm deep at work on a project called Outlaw, a mixture of super powered fiction, classic action adventure and urban fantasy. It is also planned as the first book of a proposed multi-author series. Regular Metahuman Press cohort Travis Hiltz is my co-creator on this one and will have his own volume down the line. Right now, I'm working to lay out the basic world and supporting cast so other writers can see where we're going with the character.

I expect to work on this one both this month and at the next Camp Nanowrimo in July. While it won't see publication to (at the earliest) this time next year, it will have an important part in a new Metahuman Press project down the road. But I may have already said too much about that one...

I also continue work on Dino Force. I am just about done with the main section of my contribution with only a brief epilogue to the shared universe anthology to add on. Fans interested in this one should stay tuned for next week, when the Kickstarter launches for the project!

And that pretty much wraps up my work on the writing front. But if you're a wrestling fan, don't forget to check out my thoughts over at The Wrestling Weekday.

Work-in-progress Wednesday: The Spaceman

I have been buried in a lot of quite writing projects of late, hence the lack of updates for this site in the last few weeks. But at the beginning of April, Camp Nanowrimo started, one of the two sup-novel writing events ran by National Novel Writing Month. I decided to start one that I can talk a little bit about on Super Powered Fiction.

David Bowie by Mike Allred, for Gosh London. Bowie's
inspiration will be apparent when The Spaceman is released.

The Spaceman is the one novel I am starting this year that I am fairly certain will be released in 2016. I have three other books in various stages awaiting endings, rewrites and edits, but The Spaceman is one of the four current novel concepts I am sitting on that most felt like it needed to be on the page.

The basic concept is one I have touched on before in the pages of Quadrant, but I really wanted to explore more in an original novel. I am fascinated by the idea of aliens walking among humanity, so much so I produced an anthology called Aliens Among Us, a sequel to which is in the development stages. But I wanted to take a look at what it would mean if an alien truly tried to replace a human intelligence. The Spaceman of the title is an energy being that inhabits the mind and body of a struggling rock star after he is left nearly dead in a gruesome automobile accident.

From there, the adventure becomes something of a travelogue of our hero's adventures, as well as his interactions with his body's wife, loved ones and acquaintances.

Phoenix TV series title card.

The basic concept is one I have had in my mind for years now, but never quite had the little extra to make it gel. But I have recently hit on inspirations that made me understand the directions I wanted to take the novel in: the writings of Jack Kerouac, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the music of David Bowie and an oddball 80s television show called The Phoenix. Each had bits and pieces I took inspiration from and all of them will go into The Spaceman.

As I write this, I'm about ten thousand words into the new book, a bit behind my planned schedule but still on track to finish at least the first third of the novel by month's end. It already has went in directions my work hasn't traveled before, but I am sure I will talk more about that in future installments of this column.

And with that I have only one thing left to say: keep reading and I'll keep writing.