New Blog, continued

Ok, here's how my update schedule is going to work. Every Saturday, I wil post story content - either a new segment of one of my three major stories, or a stand-alone story. Every wednesday, if at least one person has commented on my Saturday post, I will post something else - perhaps a story, but more likely a poem, picture, or piece of Dungeons and Dragons game content. The first three story posts will be synopses of the three major stories on this blog, so no back-reading will be required to get future updates. If people actually read this, it will be a lot easier for me to convince myself to keep updating. My success or failure in this effort depends on you!

New Year, New Blog!

Seeing my brother's success taking advantage of Blogger Beta's label feature, I've decided to do the same. In doing this, I had to look at more than three years of blog posts, and it made me think about a lot of things. I may be starting a weekly update schedule soon. Either way, here's a brief description of each of those lovely labels in the side-bar.


Dragon Story (42)
The major story of the blog, despite that it hasn't been updated in almost a year. I will return to it eventually though. Its about a boy who can turn into a dragon. The plot is complex and convoluted, with way too many characters. An exciting ride, even if it does stop rather abruptly.

Meta-blog (28)
Here are gathered all of the posts which refer to the blog itself. These range from technical issues to continuity fixes to insights into my writing style. My favorite part is when I pledge to finish the Dragon Story by June 2005.

City of Mages (20)
The second longest story of the blog, City of Mages is a political fantasy story centering around a group of loosely connected characters in a world where magic is geographically distributed. Kind of hard to explain.

Emo Rants (17)
Pretty self explanatory. The vast majority of this stuff is from my break-up with Ashley Junior year. I'd appreciate it if this was never read by anyone, ever again. I have no idea why I archived it.

Pictures (12)
This includes photographs of me, illustrations for my stories done by Amy, and stuff I did in paint.

X-men (10)
This series of posts chronicles my attempt to construct a Nightcrawler costume in ten days.

Telepsis (9)
The latest addition to my stories, Telepsis was my failed NaNoWriMo story. It's about a girl with a telepathic energy creature inside her, and global warming. Really hard to explain. Will likely be updated again soon.

Doom Pixies (8)
My first attempt at a story. It sucked. Wait a minute, why did I use past tense there? It sucks.

Stand Alone (8)
All the stories I've written that only lasted one post. With most of them, that was intentional.

Other (5)
Everything that somehow fails to fit into my exhausting list of categories.

Dungeons and Dragons (4)
Game elements I designed for the most popular RPG of all time. Expect frequent updates if I start a weekly schedule.

Idea file (4)
New ideas that I don't feel like writing on at the moment. This will also likely grow quite a bit.

Poems (4)
Sometimes I write poetry, but not very often. Clearly.

Tournament (4)
Something I strated, then stopped because it was way more trouble then it was worth.

Funny Rants (3)
Rants that are not Emo.

Harry Potter (3)
For all Harry Potter related things. All of these are also tagged under some other category.

Songs (3)
Songs I've written. Mostly silly. Will post more later (as more are written and simply waiting to be posted.)

Books (1)
This will be a place for book reviews, once I finish the first book on my list.

Dragon Story (2) (1)
This is for the second draft of the Dragon story, so as to avoid confusion.

Update

I'm having trouble coming back to either COM or the Dragon story. It just feels like they belong to a completely different time. High school is like a whole other life, and it feels strange to go back to the things I was writing there.
Being here has also made me think about my style and my process, and I think it needs to be reworked in general. Hopefully I'll beng taking a fictional writing course next semester and then I can come back to these stories with a fresh eye. Until then... well I don't know. Starting a new story I feel would infuriate people, and it annoys me, seeing as I've still never finished one (a long one, that is.) So for now I think I'm gonna stick to trying to write short, artsy stories without much plot and poetry. I'm also thinking about using this site for some writing excercises I've been playing with in my head.

If I think of anything to write, I may post something today.

Argghjhh

I'm sorry for the lack of updates - I currently do not have a home computer. I'll do what I can on school computers and borrowed laptops, but it might be a while before I post anything.

An Open Letter to my Readers

Dear Readers,
A lot has happened since I shifted this blog purely into a story-telling tool. Earthquakes, Hurricanes, wars, birth, death, and everything in between. But a few things have happened which actually have something to do with this blog, and those are the things I need your advice on.
If you know me, you know that I believe my writing doesn't come from me - it seems to come from some mysterious outside source I've dubbed my muse. She's tempermental and demanding, but until recently, she's been working for me rather than in other way around.
At some point in the last couple months, that stopped happening. It's taken me a while to figure out what she's been saying to me, but now I think it's pretty clear: You'll write what I want you to write, or I won't give you any more ideas.
This puts me in something of a fix, because she wants me to start five or six different stories and not finish any of them. Day after day I'm bombarded with incredible new ideas which I don't nearly have the time to write. My "idea file" have grown enormous. And try as I might, I cannot write another dragon story post without her inspiration. (Actually I've written several. They all sucked and I deleted them.)
So the way I see it, I have several options, none of them particularly good. I know the few readers I still have (how many of you are there now, three?) will kill me if I start another story, but I'm afraid of losing all this inspiration. Here's what I propose - I take a hiatus from the dragon story during which I edit, rewrite, and divide into decent length chapters what I already have. While this is going on, I will work on City of Mages, which will, eventually provide an outlet for many of my other story ideas (they can be adapted to the COM world.) Until December 1st, I will also be working on College essays and the Mirror of Truth play, so things may not move along much. After that, we'll see. Please comment to tell me what you trhink of this, and also, if you read this at all please comment to let me know you do.
-Nathan

The Mirror of Truth: The Play

I am adapting the Mirror of Truth into a one act play for a scholarship competition. If it's good, it could win $1,000. Unfortunately, the adapting will require a lot of extra writing, as the play has to be about thirty minutes long and the story is approximately three. Still, I think it easier than starting from scratch. This will, however, probably cut into any time I might have for my other stories. But then, I can't win $1,000 for them.

Bad news

Ok, so apparently the dreaded blog advertisers have gotten ahold of this site too, now. They already got my dream log. If this post is met with five comments which turn out to be advertisements, I'm gonna have to find something to do about it, possibly involving the elimination of anonymous comments.

Stuff

Ok, update:
1. COM is being put on hold in favor of my contrast story, which is being written on old fashioned sheets of notebook paper with a pencil. I know, uncivilized, but what can I do.
2. The Dragon story is at a critical phase, and I've been scared to post any more updates for fear of screwing it up. But, I think I've now nearly caught up with my pre-writing, and I might just post something tommorrow or the next day, unless my computer crashes or the power goes out or my parents force me to spend both days cleaning.
3. Amy and I have finished a wonderful illustration. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a scanner, so I can't post it. I'm working on that, I'll have it as soon as I can.

Apology

I'm in Florida. I wasn't expecting to be. My computer access is inconsistant, and it will be for the next few days. I want to work on the dragon story, but I can't - even when I have a computer, it's in a room full of people, and I need silence to write. So, it'll be at least a week. Sorry.

Teresa's Makeover

Ok, so here's the deal. I'm about ready to write the next chapter, but theres a problem. My illustrator and were sitting down trying to draw Teresa, and we came up with something really awesome which looked nothing like my description from chapter 17. So, as soon as Amy gets back from Spain, I will post the illustration with a modified chapter 17 (or was it 12? I can't remember.) Since Teresa is in Dragon form in the next post, I don't want to post it until I have access to that picture. Amy gets back on the 20th or so, so hopefully I'll have something up shortly thereafter.

Shortest attempt at deadlines ever

I can't do this. I can't write on a schedule. I tried to force an update out of myself today, and it was crap. Like crappier than previous examples of my crap. This is supposed to be my stress reliever, so I'm not going to turn it into a source of additional stress. No deadlines, no schedules- quality over quantity. Sorry.

AARRRGGLLLEE

Ok, a bit of a wrench has been thrown in my "finish by June 20th" plan - apparently, I'm getting my wisdom teeth out on Tuesday, which means the next day I will not be nearly coherent enough to post. However, expect some kind of update tonight and the next two nights, hopefully resuming on Wednesday, and I may try to double-up to make up for this inconvenience.

Deadline

I am doing something I've never done with a story before - I'm setting a deadline for myself. I'm not sure how it's going to work, since most people who set deadlines know how many chapters are left, and I have no clue. I know what still has to happen, but not how long it will take to happen. So this might not happen at all, but here is my goal: to finish part one of the Dragon story by June 18th. I will also try to update daily until then from when school is out, but this is not an official goal.

Second Blog?

So, the fact that apparently my readership iss incapable of following one of my stories at a time brings up a problem with running multiple ones that I hadn't considered. People might confuse the plots. Or worse, people might confuse the psuedo-science. Magic in the Dragon story and magic in Eriliance don't work even close to the same way, and confusion between the two would damage people's understanding of the stories. Plus each story has multiple plots running congruently, which just adds to the confusion. So I'm wondering: would it help if I started a second blog for my new story? Or would that just mean an extra blog everyone has to check? I want feedback on this idea, please.

Title change

Taking a page from Marten's book, I have retitled my blog. The old one was creeping people out anyway. My URL will remain unchanged.
That said, I'm going to start running other stories concurrently. Maybe up to five. I will be careful not to neglect any already in progress unless they are, in my opinion, total crap.

Real people in stories

Not because of anything especially cool about them, or because of anything they did for me, so much as because I happened to meet them while in story-planning mode, two of the Grease techies have incorporateds themselves into my stories: Ariel and Matt.
I was talking to Ariel today, while doing intensive mental planning for COM, and I decided she should be one of the Red Wytches. It just sort of popped into my head, and she was perfect, so now she is. Her name is still Ariel, but I may spell it differently.
While I was watching Matt work, an idea occured to me that I can incorporate into the dragon story. Matt is not so much the template for one character, as for an entire race of Golems.
More people in COM are loosely based on real people then in any other story I've attempted. Zach Dzuba as an eccentric druid and Evan Boggs as an elven Rune Specialist are two more who have weaseled their way in. I think anyone with a strong. distinctive personality is a candidate.

What will become of the Doom Pixies?

Since I started the dragon story, I've been trying to decide whether or not I was ever going to go back to the Doom Pixies. The problem was, while I loved the Pixies as characters, I did not love the plot of the story, and it takes both good characters and a good plot to make a story fun and exciting. So their it sat, for a long while, until recently, when I was working on a new story idea. Some of you have heard me talk about the story I'm calling "City of Mages". One charcter in COM is an enigmatic, god-like figure named Thurigen. The idea was that Thurigen, though powerful, was not especially precise in excercising his power and needed a right hand man (or woman) for more detail-oriented work. As I was planning this, I decided it should be a sprite or pixie. Then it hit me: why not make it Simile? And she could bring the rest of the doom pixies along for support. I liked it. So I'm doing it. I guess this post can pretty much be summed up like this: the doom pixie story will not continue, but the doom pixies themselves will be incorporated into the supporting cast of City of Mages, an anthology of stories in it's own right. COM will began after the conclusion of part I of the dragon saga and, once it's gotten on it's feet, will run parallel to part II.

April Fools!

As most of you probably guessed from the date, the last post is a joke and not meant to be taken seriously in any way. There will be a new chapter 21 soon which will replace this one. No information revealed in the previous post should have any bearing on the actual story.
What you probably haven't guessed is that I didn't actually write that post. My brother did. To read what I wrote, head over to his blog.

Update

Just to let you know, the now unamed dragon story has reach 24 pages long in the word file backup, and at 11,000 odd words is just over a fifth of the way to being classified as a short novel. It's quite firmly out of "short story" and into "Novella" though. I'm considering it's future, but like most novels originally published serially, that most likely looks like so much revision it will be hard to recognize (see the magazine version of "Ender's game").
In the mean time, I've been catching up on some much needed backstory, some of which required cursory amounts of actual research. I'm as amazed as you are.

In other news, I'm considering a career as a professional Dramaterg.

A note about titles

You may have noticed the latest chapters have not said "Revival" - this is because it is no longer the title. It may become the title of part two. Part one, as of now, is title-less.