This is actually a fairly large body of characters spread across the two volumes of Star Master, even if they didn’t require as much work on my part as Shenti and her family did.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Lanati, Menevis and Family”Tag: Publishing Plans
Where Did THAT Come From: Why Such a Jumble of Influences
I began making up stories at a fairly young age, 5 or 6 years old, I think. At that age, my family moved around a fair amount, lived out of hotels from time to time, and some of our videotapes didn’t necessarily have the whole movie on them.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Why Such a Jumble of Influences”Where Did THAT Come From: Shenti and Her Family
Shenti and her family have probably the most complicated development history of any of my supporting characters to date.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Shenti and Her Family”Where Did THAT Come From: Samar, the White Knights, and the Red Knights
The White Knights are largely my response to the Jedi: a fallen order of psychic warriors formerly revered for their nobility of character, now hated and propagandized against. They were called Paladins, and the Red Knights were called Pioneers, until the early stages of editing Shadow Captain, when I decided these names would cause too much confusion with the Partisan faction in the same story. Akira Kurosawa, although certainly extremely gifted, didn’t have quite as much influence on me as Howard Pyle and the Story of King Arthur and his Knights, so that accounts for some of the differences between the White Knights and their inspiration, the more samurai-influenced Jedi.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: Samar, the White Knights, and the Red Knights”Where Did THAT Come From: The Star Master Setting
Star Wars. The Star Master setting comes from Star Wars. Maybe a little from Battlestar Galactica, because I’m pretty sure I saw the original Galactica on tv at around aged 3 or 4, based on where I was living at the time, and might have first seen Star Wars: A New Hope on tv as late as age 5. But I would go on to see A New Hope many, many times, because my family owned a limited number of child-friendly movies on videotape* and A New Hope was one that my siblings and I could all agree on. A lot of what I know about plotting, I first learned from A New Hope.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: The Star Master Setting”Where Did THAT Come From: The Self-Publishing Gig
This was a result of me reading a book about self-publishing by Dean Wesley Smith* and then reading Jack Campbell’s The Lost Fleet series in about a week on Kindle.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: The Self-Publishing Gig”Where Did THAT Come From: The Jaiya Metaseries
I spent part of my childhood “abroad,” where I discovered anime (dubbed into various European languages) and foreign cinema, due to my family’s fondness for French and Italian comedians like Jacques Tati and Terence Hill. This led, in my thirties and early forties, to an interest in films made in India: mostly in the Hindi language, but also some in the South Indian languages. There was a big learning curve, in terms of sourcing the more obscure movies, getting a feel for the cultures involved, and figuring out what appealed to me beyond the famous song and dance numbers.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: The Jaiya Metaseries”Happy New Year!
I hope it goes well for all of us. Right now, I just feel kind of mentally tapped out, but here are my writing/publishing plans for 2022:
-Star Master Book 2: The sequel to Shadow Captain. Originally supposed to be the middle book in a trilogy, but is now going to be the second half of a duology. I have a new ending to write, and some character scenes and loose ends to take care of as well before I start polishing. The Gantt chart I made for myself in Excel gives me the first week in January to work on cover art and such things, before I have to buckle down and start writing. Optimistic release date: sometime between late May and early July 2022. Pessimistic release date: Christmas 2022.
–ThornMaster: A prequel storyline about the parents of a character in the Star Master books, the three initial episodes haven’t picked up any interest on Vella. May work on it some more once I get Star Master Book 2 to the polishing stage; alternating between drafting a low-intensity work of fiction and polishing/editing a related work of fiction has worked for me in the past. I hope to keep putting up chapters on Vella as time and energy permit; I will need to do some more digging into Amazon’s policies before deciding how to handle the part where I compile it into an ebook.
–Ancestors of Jaiya: still need reediting and new covers. New covers might happen in one of the periods where I’m trying to respark my creativity, but reediting will most likely happen after Star Master Book 2 is done, because I’m pretty sure I won’t have the mental energy for it before then.
-Epic Fantasy: Very early stages of planning, so early that one key plot element is just called “Maguffin Artifact” in my notes and the main characters are being referred to by their dayjobs (wizard, princess, knight… etc) because they don’t have names yet. I’m torn on whether to go forward with this; on the one hand, I’m having a lot of fun with the early world-building stages and feel more invested in it right now than the alternative (see below). On the other hand, my level of interest could change very quickly, and this series would be in an extremely competitive genre.
-Gaslamp Fantasy: The advantage to this one is that I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of Regency/Victorian/Edwardian fiction. The disadvantage is at this point that I have characters and a rough idea of a setting but no plot, and not much interest in developing it further at this moment. The other thing is that it’s a much less competitive genre than epic fantasy, to the point of maybe being a niche with not enough readers. All of that could change very quickly though.
From a Certain Point of View…
So, NaNoWriMo2021…not a success in terms of wordcount. It looks like I will finish the month around or slightly under 18,000 words, the lowest results for any NaNo I have attempted. However, I did have a helpful insight yesterday in terms of what I was working on.
Continue reading “From a Certain Point of View…”Happy Thanksgiving! Just Got Done with NaNoWriMo 2016!
Finished my novel-as in, finished writing the whole plot-with a total of around 52K words yesterday, about 11:30pm. This was not the easiest year I’ve ever done this, nor was it the hardest, but it was one of the less melodramatic. I went through some setbacks in terms of wordcount and stuff distracting me from my project, but I didn’t spend as much time being huffy and upset about it as I sometimes get, and I didn’t end up hating the novel project or the characters the way I sometimes do.
This was a prequel novel to the main Jaiya series; dealing with the parents of Vipin, the hero of Marrying A Monster. I enjoyed writing it, and right now I feel good about how it turned out. Catch is, now I have to polish up and publish the second and third book in the Jaiya series and write, polish and publish two more prequels before anyone gets to read this thing I just wrote.
Lessons learned: I need to not plan on being able to write ~4000 words per day on my days off from work. I can do that under exceptional circumstances, but I can’t do it on a consistent basis, and the times when I did it were the only times my wrists and elbows really protested.
I didn’t do as much dictating as I hoped, and the Windows Dictation tool proved to be very squirrelly. I used it for a couple of scenes early on. One scene I just found difficult to write because of what it was about (not ‘triggering’ or anything like that, just difficult), and in that case I found dictation helpful because it forced me to focus on getting the computer to understand what I was saying, half a sentence at a time, instead of getting hung up on the things about the scene I found difficult. The other section involved a lot of description of military hardware, and it was handy to have Google Images open on one screen (I use a dual screen setup) and Word open in the other, and just talk out loud about what the hardware looked like to me and what it would be like to use.
Something which was amazingly helpful was the integration between OneDrive and the new version of MS Office I picked up over the summer. Save the main NaNoWriMo doc to OneDrive, open it up in Word just like any document on my hard-drive, and write away at home. Commute to work in the carpool, write between 80 and 200 words in Office Mobile using the same main NaNoWriMo doc on OneDrive. When I had free time at work (not that often), I’d try to fit in a Write or Die timed writing session, copy the results into a document on my work computer, email it home in the evening, copy/paste the new bits into main document. Those little niggling bits of writing really helped a lot on the days when I didn’t have time or energy left to write at home.
To those of you who also made it: congratulations! To those of you who are still plugging away: You can do it! And let me leave you with what were for me this year’s NaNoWriMo theme songs: Half The Battle, and Eastbound And Down.
Jaglion Press 