First Week Assessment

“Above him the skies glowed and crackled with strange lights and gleams.  The snow shone weirdly, now frosty blue, now icy crimson, now cold silver.  Through a shimmering icy realm of enchantment Conan plunged doggedly onward, in a crystalline maze where the only reality was the white body dancing across the glittering snow beyond his reach — ever beyond his reach.”

(excerpt from, The Frost Giant’s Daughter, by Robert E. Howard)

New Blog Pages

I created two new pages titled [My Writing Projects] and [My Reading List] for my blog (see links above).  On the first page you will find my current writing projects and long-term writing goals.  It is a reference page for all of the stories I will be discussing in my blog.  I will update this page frequently with new ideas and progress reports.  On the second page you will find a long list of stories I plan on reading.  Most of these stories fall under the genre of “Sword & Sorcery” and “Heroic Fantasy” because that’s what I love to read, and hopefully someday write.  Many of the stories (like the Conan series) I have read as a child, but I want to read them again with fresh adult eyes, studying the prose while rediscovering the magic.  I will update this page on a regular basis as I complete each story and as I add new ones to the list.

Project Organization

Besides updating the look and feel of my blog site (more changes to come later), I’ve been organizing my new writing project in Scrivener (I highly recommend this writing software).  Lately, I have been wading through all of the rambling sentences of my 54,000-word NaNoWriMo world-building manuscript, copying-and-pasting all the “good stuff” onto new pages.  So far, I’m half-way through this process.  I will have a lot of good “raw material” for story-crafting once I weed-out all of the “bad stuff.”   Within my World-Building folder, I have several sub-folders, such as Characters, Places, Story Outlines, Scenes, History and Lore, and Magic.  I have been using the World-Building Questionnaire provided by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as my organization guide.   I have also been reading The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy: Volume One, by Darin Park & Tom Dullemond and The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction, by Philip Athans.  These are great resources for fantasy world-building.

Writing and Reading

For my daily writing exercises, in a sub-folder called Brainstorming Ideas, I have been free-writing my generic characters into practice scenes as I try to develop their personalities.  Some are coming to life nicely, while others, not so much.  I will get more serious about this in the weeks ahead as I work on a few of my favorite characters that I think have the most potential.  With only one month to go until the “Spring Round” of ROW80, I want to have three or four main characters sketched-out, a few plots outlined, and several location settings established in the month of March.   My tentative goal is to write 60,0000 words during the 80 day period, focusing mostly on world-building and possibly a short-story or two, depending on how well the brainstorming sessions go.   I’m doubling my word-count goal for next week as I blasted past the measly 250 words-per-day goal I previously set for myself.   My reading goal remains the same; at least one “Sword & Sorcery” story a week.  I’m really enjoying this goal, having just read, The Frost Giant’s Daughter, by Robert E. Howard.   I’ll be sticking to Conan short-stories for the foreseeable future, until all of them have been read.  More on my progress mid-week…