While not making much in the way of progress, I was at least going through RttW and doing some editing from around Chapter 2 to Chapter 7. Regarding Chapter 2, here I am so close to the moment of truth and the temptation to chicken out is really strong, but I’m going to bite the bullet and go for it. I plan on having a little chat with the readers after I post it and we’ll see where things go from there. Sometimes I wonder if I’m too conscientious or not conscientious enough. One of life’s many questions. Anyway, I’ll be back in a bit for that chat. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t count for much, I suppose, but I did some genealogical work for PMGtK. It’s more than nothing, but not quite story progress. Can I turn things around? Maybe. Let’s find out. Stay tuned.

I did some more writing on PMGtK. I’ve got these big confrontation scenes in my head, but once I put the story into production, I’ll have a lot of connective tissue to make. Anyway, I do need to focus on RttW, so I’ll try to switch gears to that. Stay tuned.

You may recall me talking about a random project that I started developing but hadn’t really decided where I was going to place it. Well, for the time being, I’ve decided to place it in the Else Arc and I’ve given it the tentative title The Poor Man’s Guide to Kingmaking. I was making some edits to what I’ve written and the peripheral materials behind it. I was considering some adjustments to place it in the Aurean Empire of Merkab from Tzipi’s Garden, but I’m not doing that for the time being. The Else Arc affords me considerably more flexibility and I’m thinking about integrating a number of other ideas I have lying around while I’m at it. Nothing is definitive just yet. It’s not the progress on RttW that needs to be happening (not that I don’t have considerable lead time there), but it’s enough to at least warrant a mention. We’ll see what follows. Stay tuned.

I continued my adventures with the spellchecker with particular focus on RttW and TWH. Speaking of the latter, I plan on doing a proof sweep like what I’ve been doing with all the Cross Arc stories, which I’m hoping will get me in the right headspace moving forward. Stay tuned.

I didn’t make any story progress, but I did do a fair bit of work in the peripheral materials for the WttW series. It’s got me thinking about ditching the old forum on the site and replacing it with a wiki. It would go a long way toward making the extended content available to the audience. One thing among many to think about.

In other news, I’ve noticed a long-standing issue where the site’s CSS wasn’t being parsed by Chrome. It wasn’t until I was looking into the site’s SSL that I discovered that I needed to add a separate reference to the HTTPS link, and now that that’s done, the problem is solved. That being said, I still need to think about updating the overall code, maybe modernizing the design a bit. I definitely need to do something to make it more user-friendly on mobile. Things to do, things to do. Oh, yes, I also need to be switching gears to TWH. I’ll be honest with you, though. I’m a bit stuck on the upcoming chapter, so I’m not terribly confident I can get it together by the weekend, but we’ll see. Stay tuned.

Monday I was mostly busy with the review update, much as I’d be on a normal Sunday. Tuesday I still had that one as of yet untitled story on the mind. I’d brainstormed a few scenes, but I didn’t get much written due to a fuzzy someone’s interference. I managed to switch gears to RttW on Wednesday and write a bit on what should go in Chapter 9 or 10. I was also doing some peripheral work to flesh out some more of the game system.

Besides this, I was continuing my work going through EM2 and digging into EM3 as well. I won’t say there’s a massive amount of errors to be had but definitely more than enough for me to be glad I caught them. Periods where I was having to do things like transcribe handwritten work or use my tablet to write warrant a decent share of the blame for a lot of the typos, but since I’m my only editor, sometimes it takes time for me to come back to a manuscript with a fresh set of eyes to catch things I overlooked in the initial passes. Anyway, that’s enough for now. Work is keeping me hopping at the moment, but I have time opening up in other places that should mean good things for me making progress. Stay tuned.

I had to go to the office for a few hours and didn’t really have anything to do, so I was able to make some progress on Chapter 7 of RttW. I need to be switching over to TWH, though. Stay tuned.

Monday was another day of me making minimal progress on Chapter 22 of EM3 before conking out and yesterday would have been even worse, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even get to making a simple post like this, but I actually did better than you might think, making some nice headway in Chapter 22 of EM3 while working on the outlines for the WttW series during my free time at work (enjoying it while it lasts, which isn’t long).

I believe I’ve mentioned before that my most recent projects have taught me that writing by the seat of my pants is terrible and a major contributor to all the delays we’ve seen in those projects. I want to avoid that in the future, so I want to go back to putting the proper planning back into the process. That can be a little tricky when I’m pushing myself to consistently release new content, but in the case of RttW, I already have a good headstart that affords me some time to get things sorted out. How well all this works remains to be seen, but if you want to achieve a goal, you’ve got to set it first. Stay tuned.

I consider my primary goal as a writer is to entertain the reader (and myself, as I first set out to write a story I can enjoy and then hope others can share that enjoyment). That being said, I don’t want to just go the safe route and write the SFF equivalent of Hallmark movies (not that I don’t have some respect for the simple business model of delivering what the target audience wants). I do want to challenge both the reader and myself sometimes, and that leads us to the topic of today’s post. I’ve talked before about how my early novels tended to have more Boy Scout-type protagonists, but my protagonists have become more morally grey as I get older. I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly cynical sort, but no matter how sour you think you are, age has a way of souring you further and that gets reflected in the characters I write. Somewhat related to this is the idea I’ve floated before about creating an unlikeable character that the reader is nevertheless invested in. How many bad things add up to a bad person and how bad does a person have to be before it turns people away?

I bring all this up because it’s about time to debut the Welcome to the World series and I plan to be going into some dark territory. That’s not to say I haven’t gone into dark territory before, but there are lines I haven’t crossed with my protagonists that are going to get crossed here. I’ve had my doubts about going forward as planned, but I want to experiment with the audience’s tolerance for a character’s moral failings. Will the character’s good be only seen as hypocrisy or is it part of a more rounded and nuanced individual? Ultimately, this isn’t something I’ll decide but rather the audience. It may be rejected, but I’ve decided to give it a shot and see what happens.

I’ve drawn some inspiration from Westworld (Season 1, at least) for WttW in that there’s an environment where there’s a power imbalance that encourages people to indulge in their lesser nature. People succumb to temptation with varying degrees of enthusiasm and I want to see how they deal with their own internal moral conflict and how that either resonates or clashes with the moral core of the reader. As a creator, I’m dancing in a minefield of my own making. Here’s to it yielding a better result than just me getting gibbed.

There’s definitely going to be a followup post when the aforementioned line gets crossed, so we can have a chat then. Until that time, though, stay tuned.