Misplaced Notes and Dragon Training!
Sometimes I wish that I was finally retired, sitting in my air-conditioned office, overlooking the beach and waiting for the customers to show up for a night of Karaoke and drinking as I wile away the hours working on my novels and other projects.
Yes, that is an actual plan. Something that my wife and I have been planning on doing for over a decade now. I certainly will not miss the cold, believe you me!
See, work keeps interrupting my creativity! This week due to having to go see the doctor to get my glucose levels checked (thank CHRIST they’re finally starting to lower!) I had to skip over my lunches and coffee breaks so that I did not lose any hours.
Sometimes I wish that I was finally retired, sitting in my air-conditioned office, overlooking the beach and waiting for the customers to show up for a night of Karaoke and drinking as I wile away the hours working on my novels and other projects.
Yes, that is an actual plan. Something that my wife and I have been planning on doing for over a decade now. I certainly will not miss the cold, believe you me!
See, work keeps interrupting my creativity! This week due to having to go see the doctor to get my glucose levels checked (thank CHRIST they’re finally starting to lower!) I had to skip over my lunches and coffee breaks so that I did not lose any hours.
As long as things do not go badly this week and I don’t have to skip my breaks, I will be finishing ‘Hunger’. Dammit, the story is almost porn! That might excite some of my readers but I have to be VERY careful to prevent it from becoming just that.
Yes, there is a lot of sex and nudity in my novel, but it’s pretty much implied. I don’t go for the ‘bodice ripping’ style of writing that is so prevalent out there. Frankly, I’m too old for that stuff. I really don’t want to cross that line into pure erotica. I want to write fantasy.
Wait… I want to write Science Fiction, but it just so happens that I’m writing fantasy. Go figure.
Anyhow, I’ll also be starting work on getting all my issues of Wisdom from the Wasteland posted to Bookforge. I have quite a few already posted but I need to get them all up and ready for sale.
The reason is that I posted the last of my daily conversions today. It has been one very long project, and it lasted over half a year. I have posted in excess of two hundred conversions and have seen over the past month one of my readers named Eric Fabiaschi, has continuously written up mini-encounters to be used with my conversions. You can find his blog here.
Does this mean that the conversions are finished? Far from it. It just means that I will no longer be posting every day. I will post a couple of times a week on the average, and those will more than likely be done on the weekends. This week I intend on writing up conversions to cover a nasty Vampire from a novel called Seal Team 13, and something rather fishy from a really bad movie that I watched on Saturday night.
I figure I should be finished posting all my Wisdom from the Wastelands issues within a couple of weeks, maybe sooner, depending on how much time I can find during the weekdays.
Due to the number of stories I want to write for the anthology (yes I intend on getting them published that way too), I went over what I have written and what I wanted to write up. I have searched high and low, even going through this blog to find where I may have mentioned the plots for all the stories I wanted to cover.
Right now, including the ones I’ve written and am currently working on, and the two plots that I remembered I really wanted to write, I have SEVEN in total. Wait a second… I was supposed to have Ten! What the hell happened to the other three plots? I even came up with two more that I wanted to put to the pen, and that brings the total to nine. It should go without saying that I am rather annoyed that I somehow forgot the plots of several that I wished to write.
So, to prevent that from happening again, I have decided to list the ones that I have written, and the titles of the others that I will be writing here, just so that I don’t forget them, or misplace the notes. I’m notoriously bad for that.
- Reunion – Master Farthis encounters someone who was very special to him at one time.
- Legend – Viya has always had a reputation for being hot-headed. This little tale covers some of the more interesting encounters during her young life.
- Cost of Freedom – Ioannis learns that having a powerful name and rich family does not mean as much as he thought.
- Hunt – Deadly predators abound, but things do not quite work out the way the hunters had planned.
- Hunger – Certain changes bring on something darker that can no longer be held at bay by sheer will alone.
- First Day – The new students finally discover what they have gotten in to!
- Best Friends – Abandoned and left to die in the streets, Liera somehow managed to survive. Now people are no longer trying to kill her. What to do?
- Challenge – The Five Animal Monastery isn’t the only game in the realms. Someone has come to test the mettle of the students.
- Meeting – Someone very much wants to meet their offspring for the first time.
The first four are complete, the fifth will be done this week. The rest, hopefully two a month over the next two months. I certainly hope that this has piqued interest in my readers!
I only saw one movie this week and I loved it. I’m a huge fan of ‘How to train your dragon’ and saw the sequel on Saturday. Talk about bittersweet. Loved it and really would have liked to have seen it make more than it did. Still, I’m sure we’ll see more squeals in the future and more episodes of the TV show as well.
At this point in my blog I typically mention books I’ve read as well. Only managed to finish one book this week and it was a doozy. I read (listened to) Book 4 of a Song of Ice and Fire: A feast for Crows. I enjoyed it although there were three characters missing from the novel. Obviously I have to wait until I jump into book 5, which will probably be next month.
Speaking of, I have been in discussion with my regular artist and in talks with another one about doing a special commission. I really hope he will come through and I’ll end up posting about it in my blog. He’s quite busy but he said he will be interested in doing the work, although it could take a month. It’s going to be a picture of my three literary heroes, all sitting down in a bar for a nice round of beers.
Lastly, here is my usual observation. I recent trend I have been following on Facebook for the past couple of weeks have been the various ‘quizzes’. Which X-men character are you? Which Character from A song of Ice and Fire are you? What mythological creature were you in a past life? These sort of quizzes bug the ever living hell out of me. You can ALWAYS get the character you wish by the choices you make. Some people love them (which is quite obvious from the number of these I see in my news-feed every day), but I’m not one of them. It is so easy to manipulate the quiz into giving you what you want, and I believe that is the reason I dislike them so much.
Maybe if the questions were not so obvious, it would be a little more interesting.
Anyhow, as always that is it for this week. And as is the case, I would like to invite any new (and current) readers of my blog to like my personal author’s page on Facebook, and to follow me on Twitter. I still don’t post often on Twitter but that is because I have only one follower!
Until next week, Peace!
Chris Van Deelen is the author of the Skirmisher Publishing LLC sourcebook Creatures of the Tropical Wastes sourcebook, co-author of its Wisdom from the Wastelands game supplement and contributor to the 'Sword of Kos: Hekaton' Anthology.
