Category: Writing

State of the Author, Late 2024

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The sequel to Wolf’s Trail is in the late stages of drafting – about 48K with maybe a couple thousand more words to go. Just moving very slowly because I’ve been sick with some respiratory thing for over a month and a half at this point. Starting to do better, which means the creative brain(1) is starting to come back online. With some luck, I should be done by the end of September, take some time off to work on other stuff in October, polish it in November, release by the end of December (around the same time the first book did last year).

(1) as opposed to the critical brain, which you’ve seen a lot of lately with the Jane Austen adaptation posts and the Rings of Power posts

Weird Wednesday: Worldbuilding the Empire of Noricum

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My main model for Noricum, where Wolf’s Trail takes place, was the Hapsburg Empire, especially the later, more decentralized version at the end of the nineteenth century. But the more I dug into it, the more I discovered that the Hapsburg Emperor had a much more hands-on role, even in that era, than I really wanted the fictional counterparts to have. So here’s the situation with the Emperor of Noricum in the books…

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Writing Vacay, Day 3

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Slept in dramatically, felt much better, got some stuff done around the house. Still got a late start on anything writing adjacent:

  • Some brainstorming
  • a lot of research on the less feudal bits (Switzerland, Frisia, etc) of medieval Europe, vaguely connected with one of the plot bunnies
  • 100-200 words adjusting earlier scenes in the WIP
  • 972 words moving forward on the WIP
  • lower word target met! yay?

Writing Vacay, Day 2

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So, here’s what happened on day 2 of the writing vacation:

  • Couldn’t focus on writing due to AC issues, now hopefully fixed. I have no patience with people who diss the Industrial Revolution and even less with the air conditioning haters who were fashionable a year or two ago
  • Cut 170 words I wrote yesterday on main WIP
  • Tweaked some other bits of the WIP for continuity issues; mostly related to the structure and layout of the airship in the WIP
  • wrote 116 new words
  • Target word count not achieved

Writing Vacay, Day 1

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I took the four days after Memorial Day off, planning to do kind of a writing staycation. My goal was try and do a thousand words a day, stretch goal of 1300 words a day, preferably on my main WIP (sequel to Wolf’s Trail), but anything really would do. First Day’s results:

  • 300ish words on WIP
  • 1322 words on a long, rambling blog post draft I might not put up.
  • Well, I made word count, but at what cost?

Likeable and Unlikeable Main Characters

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Elsewhere on the web, there was a discussion going on about whether readers of popular fiction would tolerate an unlikeable main character, and I stuck my oar in – well, a whole galley’s worth of oars actually. I thought I would try to summarize some of my opinions here:

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