Anyway, Edge of December is currently experiencing technical difficulties which is making the Glenn sad. Hopefully we’ll be back online soon because we’re getting ready to close out the current saga which is going to lead to awesome things. I’ll let you know when we’re back up. In the meantime, I’m out to get to my writing. Maybe I’ll think of something to get down here later on. I wouldn’t hold my breath though.

Some of it has definitely been gaming.  I’ve donated an inordinate amount of time to Dungeon Defenders over the past couple weeks.  The game is crack.  I’m bad enough with RPG’s anyway, but this one is a combination of Tower Defense and RPG that has really gotten to me and my friends.  I think the clincher is the loot and the desire to always be looking for, getting, and upgrading the stuff that you have.  They’ve also been running a kind of treasure hunt in the game for the last week or so that I’ve gleefully participated in as opposed to writing.  Is this an excuse?  Yes.  A good one?  Probably not.

Another contributing factor is that my fiance and I just got done with … or rather close to done with a move.  Our new apartment is now pretty much set up and looking good, but there’s still some work left to do.  One of the changes that affects my writing is that I’m not entirely sure where my writing area is anymore.  Oh, I’ll get my writing spot figured out, but I had really good spots back at the old place that really let me get into a rhythm.

One of the bigger things though, is that I was trying to write.  Trying really hard but it just wasn’t working.  I’m sure none of the authors who I follow know anything about this blog but if they did I’d ask them to comment on this.  Ok, quickly, Glenn and I are working on the next book (OK, Glenn is working on it mostly since he does all the artsy stuff) and I was supposed to be writing a short story from Baron’s point of view for it.  Its on the time he spent in the Ukraine that had only been briefly alluded to in the comic.  I had good ideas for the plot, villains, some characters and more than a few false starts but none of it was gelling in my head.  It all felt forced and wrong.  I spent just about as much time writing as I did trying to figure out what was going wrong and I think I discovered what was going on.

I realized that in my mind, Edge is just about completely visual and intimately hinged to Glenn’s art.  There just isn’t a Baron in my mind if he isn’t attached to one of Glenn’s drawings.  I was writing, and I just couldn’t make it match the style and evoke the feelings of Edge.  We’re talking about a world where we leave Baron being chased by tanks and its a funny thing, not a dangerous thing.  Where Kieron and Trife are jumping from rooftop to rooftop evading helicopters wearing fake mustaches and eye-patches like nothing was amiss.  Thinking back, I was making the story I was writing too serious, which isn’t something that I have to worry about when writing chapters, because usually the images in my mind aren’t that different from what Glenn produces… but I’ve got a block when I’m writing the text in that story.  I’m considering some options to get it to flow better…but given how serious that part of the story is… I’m uncertain how I’d go about it.  I haven’t written anything like that before and I’ve got to do some exploratory work to even get the voice down.  Is all that bullshit?  Maybe.  I’m not sure.

And above everything else, I’m GETTING MARRIED IN A MONTH AND A HALF AND OH MY GOODNESS I’M GETTING EXCITED!  So, maybe the excitement isn’t keeping me from writing, but there’s enough to do that writing days don’t happen quite as often as they used to.  I’ve kind of got this feeling like I can sit back and relax on my writing until after the wedding and then pick it up again.  Well, that just isn’t going to fly at all.  So, even though I don’t think that I’ll be doing the 25,000 word month in April (or June for that matter) I will be going back to my 500 words a day minimum routine.  If I can stick to that until after the wedding it will be much easier to jump back into the routine I’m trying to set up.  So, even though the Edge project might be on hold, barring creative problems, I’m going to get Impervious up and running again.  The last 25k month saw most of the first third finished, and that’s just waiting for me to write out the end of the first arc.  So, if you read this, stay tuned.  Things will be happening again.  Assuming that Diablo 3 doesn’t eat me whole.

I know, this sounds like a lot of excuses for not writing, and truth be told its just that. I didn’t set any writing goal for the month; no word count that I had to hit or project that I would absolutely have done. I think that’s a large part of why I haven’t actually been accomplishing anything in terms of producing a word count. That being said, April is coming, and I’m going to be so poor from paying double rent that I won’t be able to afford to do anything other than sit at home and write for the first two weeks or so.

While I haven’t been making time for my writing, I have been making time for reading. You can usually keep up with what’s in my queue with the little Goodreads widget on my homepage, or by following me on Goodreads. Once Impervious is ready to go, I’ll need a few followers to spread the good word. That’ll be a while, but it will happen, sometime next year I’m hoping. Anyway…books! I just got done with the Dragonflight, first of the Dragonriders of Pern series by the amazing Anne McCaffrey. I haven’t read this one since I was in high school and now I remember why I loved them so much. I’m not even going to bother anything like a review of Dragonflight, because I can’t possibly say anything that hasn’t been said before. Its a sci-fi classic for a reason. If you haven’t read them, do. Now, I’m reading The Hunger Games, because just about everyone I know is telling me that its worth my time and so far I have to agree with them. Coming late into the game though its hard to avoid spoilers, but I’m doing my best.

While we’re on the subject of books, I noticed on the Twitters today that the Harry Potter eBooks are FINALLY on sale. I mean…really. Publishers, you can’t complain that the HP books were the most pirated in the world. Do you know why? Because it was impossible to buy them before now. I would have thrown money at you the instant I got my Kindle if they would have been available before now…so, this fail is on you. For the record, I didn’t go out and download them, as I have them in physical form…just saying. If you want my money, then make it easy for me to give it to you and get the product that you want me to buy in the first place. Alright…now that I’ve spent a little time on the soapbox, I should actually get to writing. I’ll let you know how that goes next week.

I’m thoroughly in love with the world of Mass Effect. Its just good sci fi. Well written, awesome characters and some real good emotional engagement. I’d pre-ordered the game, but I was committed to doing another play-through of 1 and 2 before I dug into 3, just so I was ready and had what I thought was the “correct” story progress when I started. I should never have opened the package. From that point on it was a lost cause and FemShep was on the job again, meaning that I was no longer on the job.

In non-video game related topics, I made it out of February with 23,000 words finished. While that fell a little short of my 25,000 word goal I still feel pretty good about myself. Impervious has 16 full chapters completed, which is more than I’ve ever written on one story before. Ok, I may have written way more words, in total, for City of the Sorcerers, but most of that was rewriting things that I’d already written. Impervious continues to make steady progress at a pace that makes me think that at least the 1st draft will be done by the end of the year.

Right now, I’m focusing most of my efforts on Edge of December. We’ve got a new chapter starting in a week or so, and a new Saga shortly there-after. We’re getting into material in the comic that’s been born completely in my fevered imagination, so I’m getting really excited to see it play out visually. Also, I’m working on a short story that will be exclusively available in the third eBook as an extra. That’s proving more of a challenge than I originally thought it would since its a story that’s following a character that is only secondary at this point. Keeping everything in canon, interesting, and leaving enough for future volumes is a huge challenge.

In other news, the second Edge of December eBook hit the Amazon.com Kindle store a couple days ago.  So, ya know, go check that out and lay down $2.99 for an awesome graphic novel that looks great on you iPad, Kindle Fire or your regular old Kindle.  We’d also love a good review or two if you’ve got the time.  This one actually has copy written by yours truly!  My very first published words.  They aren’t much, but by gum, we have to start somewhere.  That’s all for me right now peeps.  I’ve got wording to do and it ain’t gonna do itself.

Edit:  This is something I actually wrote earlier on this weekend and forgot to post it.  As of this time I’m sitting at nearly 23k words.  With one day left to go, and just a little over 2k words, I should be looking at another successful 25k word month!  Also, I’ll have the Act of Impervious finished!

Further Note: The new Edge of December eBook is out.  Remember to keep an eye on the site for when the book goes free for a limited time.  We’d also appreciate your purchase as it keeps the servers running and Glenn in art supplies.

Is it impossible? No.  I’ve got 10 days left to write just under 20k words.  It will be hard, but it isn’t impossible.  From everything that I’ve read, writing is hard.  It’s a commitment and in this case it’s not just a commitment to myself.  It’s a commitment to my story, it’s a commitment to my fiance and family and it’s a commitment to anyone who happens upon this blog.  Someday, I’m going to have to ask these people to trust me when I say that I want to do writing full time.  First thing they’re going to do is ask themselves if I’ve got the danglies to back up what I say I’ll do.  Next thing they’ll do is check my cup to see if I’ve gotten into the drain cleaner again.  Assuming I haven’t been huffing paint, they’ll need to see that I’ve done this thing.  I’ve written a book or four.  It’s making money.  I’ve done the hard work, seen it to the end.  This month is just part of that goal, part of that hard work.  ]

I can’t talk about writing in the fashion of anything like an expert.  I can only give you a blow by blow of how I hopefully go from shlub to published author.  I’ll still probably still be a shlub, but I’ll have done something awesome.  So, I continue on.  Here we go into the breach.  My word count for the night is 340 so far.  By the end of the night it needs to be over 2000.  Check in next week to see how things went.  To quote Chuck Wendig, “I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.”

I’m under no pretenses that you can just crank out a full novel in a month.  Though 50,000 words is an impressive feat, its definitely not a whole book, most certainly not for me.  Still, writing that much in a month is a feat I would relish, and probably brag about to no end.  All this being said, November sucks for NaNoWriMo.  Whoever put it there needs to have their heads examined.  There’s family, pre-Christmas preparation, and my birthday is in November (hint hint).  You take that many days out of a month and your word count per day is climbing dangerously high.  On a really good day, I can crank out three to four thousand words.  That’s on a really good day.  More realistically, if I’m writing every day, I can expect a good thousand to fifteen hundred words.  I feel really good on those nights.  Given all that November has going on in it, and my own time limitations, NaNoWriMo is a pretty hard cookie to crack.  But I wanted to do something.

A couple friends of mine were doing their own writing challenge in December.  I know, not much better on the time format thing, but I’d already missed NaNoWriMo and I figured that something would be better than nothing.  I set a goal of 25,000 words, half of what a NaNoWriMo participant would do and went at it.  That puts my average writing at about 1,000 words per day and gives me a few days off, which is pretty much double my weekly word count goal from last year.  I’m not sure that I’d ever tried to write quite that much in a month or that consistently.  But I was game for a challenge.  Long story short, there were set backs, pushes, and writers block, but with the word count goal in mind, I pushed through it.  I didn’t have time to go back and rework the last section, if I didn’t like something, I blocked off the section and started over, counting all the words written.  The lack of backtracking and constantly looking over my shoulder spurred me on in a way that was … well, pretty frickin’ awesome.

25,000 words turned out to be just the perfect amount to push me, keep me on task and make me feel like I’d made a major accomplishment by the end of the month.  It worked out so well that I decided I was going to do six of them this year, every other month.  In December, I cranked out a rough ten chapters of Impervious and while not everything I wrote will end up in the final novel, I got a huge start on the project.  Two or three more 25,000 word months will see a first version done and in between I’ll have time to work on side projects like prepping my short stories for submission.  Or maybe I’ll just keep writing on Impervious.  Who knows.  But there it is.  Why I’m going to be doing 25,000 word months.  I can’t say if the same thing will work for you or not, but challenging yourself to achieve something greater is always a good idea.  Maybe a different word count would be better for you, but give it a try.  You might find the results equally thrilling.

At any rate, I digress.  This is going to be a big year for me.  How do I know?  Well, a lot of things are going to change.  First and foremost, I’m going to marry the most awesome woman in the history of mankind ever.  I will fight you over this.  Tonight she agreed with my idea to have boxes of Legos at the tables for our wedding reception for guests to play with.  Put very simply, I win.  Nyah nyah.  Bragging aside, though, (well, never really aside since I’ll be doing more of it in the months to come) going from single to married represents the biggest shift in my life since I went to college.  Things is gonna be different, but in a very good way, I think.

Beyond marriage though, things are going to change in how I approach writing.  First and foremost, I’m going to be writing more.  A lot more.  Last year I tried out a weekly word count of 3500 words.  This worked pretty well and I kept to it about two out of every three weeks.  Sometimes less, sometimes more, but I got a lot of work, and story done.  In fact, I’d have most of a book done now if I didn’t decide that it needed some heavy revision and that it needed to be taken back to square one.  That’s besides the point.  Point is, I set a goal, and shit got done, son.  Maybe not as much as I wanted, but stuff happened.  Also, I started writing for Edge of December, which has been an entirely different experience.  I’ve had to get to know a little script writing and focus a lot more on dialogue, background, and a couple dozen other different things.  It has been, and is going to continue to be a lot of fun.

This year, I’m going to continue to build on that model.  This is going to be the year of the writer.  In December I completed a 25k writing challenge.  Yeah, you can point and laugh at me all you want you NaNoWriMo winners, but this is big stuff for me.  I pounded out ten chapters of Impervious in 31 days and I intend to build on that success. So, here’s what I’m going to do this year:

First, I’m going to do six 25k months, every other month, except in June because, ya know, I’m getting married and that’ll take up just a little time.  Just a bit.  Second, I’m going to complete Impervious, making it my first completed novel.  Third, I’m going to write, and prepare for submission two other short stories.  Forth, I’m still going to be writing for Edge of December, just more.  This is a tall list of goals, but I think they’re doable.  I’ll write on Impervious during 25k months and work on my other goals in the off months.  If I keep to this, I can easily have the first draft of Impervious done by the end of July.  I don’t know now what I’ll work on after that, but it would be extremely exciting.  I’m also going to keep blogging on a regular basis.  Hopefully not as long as this monster, but we’ll see what happens.  I’m an author and pretty long winded once I get going.  So, there you have it.  In a nutshell, I’m going to get married and write my butt off this year!  If I can do all of that, then next year might even see me published, even if only self-published.  Who knows.  Maybe by that time someone will even be reading my blog.  Though, I’m not going to hold my breath.

I think it will be a moderately interesting journey.  You see, to date, I haven’t published anything.  I haven’t finished a book, not even a first draft.  What I’ve done is had skads and skads of ideas, written hundreds of pages worth of stuff that has never amounted to anything.  Thing is, I turned thirty this year.  My ultimate goal is to become a professional author and be able to live on the means that provides, writing full time.  If I’m going to do that, then its high time I go off my butt and started putting some actual printable material together.  More than that, I need people who are interested in reading  what I write.  Thus a blog.

So, here’s what I’m doing as I take a journey from unpublished, unknown schlub to super-famous ultra-author drinking martini’s in my summer home in the Bahamas (Note: I know this is never going to happen, since it doesn’t happen for anyone except movie stars and I couldn’t tell you what an “ultra-author” actually is); I’m going to attempt to update the blog at least once a week and ask myself, what was the biggest question I tackled this week.  It might be an issue having to deal with my characters. Maybe it will be something having to deal with the world.  Maybe one week I deal with my own personal questions of whether I’m going to pursue traditional publishing or the more and more appealing route of e-publishing.  You’ll undoubtedly hear some stuff about Edge of December and the fun and challenges of writing for an awesome web-comic.  I may even go off topic.  Ok, I’m A.D.D., so I will go off topic.  Until then, I’m hoping you enjoy what you see.