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NEWS AND VIEWS - NOVEMBER 2024
Work continues on Lillandra, but it's started to slow down now, partly because my insomnia was particularly bad this month (I don't get as much writing done when I'm exhausted) and partly because this whole project just hasn't been as successful as I'd hoped -- very, very few people seem to be reading it. I try to take this stuff in stride, but it's easy to get discouraged, and to lose motivation, when it seems like no one's interested in what you're doing. But I'm still working on it. Also this month, I started writing an outline for a full-length Playground Noir novel called The Treehouse At the End of the World, which might end up being my next project after I finish Lillandra. The first Playground Noir book -- which was not a novel but a collection of short stories -- kind of flew under the radar, but I think this concept (a hard-boiled kid detective) still has some potential and I think the writing in that earlier collection was some of my best work. It might be worth another shot. And I started a new side project, too: "remaking" one of the first stories I ever wrote, The Chronicles of Simon the Light-Wielder. This was an absolutely terrible fantasy that I started writing when I was about twelve or thirteen, and I thought it would be amusing to try to salvage it, taking the original story and outline and rewriting it as an adult (while keeping some of the more juvenile aspects of it intact). I'm about eight or nine chapters into it so far; I'm going to be posting it to my Patreon (and maybe Royal Road). My twelve-year-old self put quite a bit of work into this novel -- I actually managed to write about fifty pages before I gave up on it. But I put even more work into the fantasy world the story is set in. I drew maps, invented histories, wrote detailed biographes of notable people, and even compiled lists of kings and gods and magic spells. I was much more interested in the worldbuilding than I was in actually writing a story set in my world (writing is hard), so I have way, way more lists and histories than I do actual prose. Unfortunately, nothing I came up with was all that interesting or original. The gods I invented were all pretty much just Greek or Norse gods with different names, the notable people I wrote about were almost exclusively famous wizards and warriors, my non-human peoples were standard elves and trolls, and, most embarrassingly, I was absolutely terrible at coming up with good, exotic, fantasy-style names, so most of my histories and lists are full of bizarrely-named people like "Patrin Saot" and "Canasiah Balor Nelewin" and "Fellock Nillanwant", all of which sound like something out of Monty Python. Same goes for place names: the "Six Kingdoms" in the far east of are Zethro, Rapcan, Darnaria, Idine, Tiant, and Espin. Espin isn't too bad, but the rest of those names are pretty silly -- I mean, "Zethro"? Basically I was just slamming syllables together, without any regard for how they sounded. The name of my fantasy world was "Emoh," which my brother came up with. I had asked him if he had any suggestions as to what my fantasy world should be called, and he had promptly replied, "How about Emoh? It's "home" spelled backwards." I don't know why, but that appealed to me, so I decided to use it. I made lots of maps of Emoh, but because of my need to embellish, they all ended up rather different from one another. Here's one of the early ones, which I drew and colored on a big piece of poster board (it's too big to scan, so I just took a photo of it):  The characters in Simon the Light-Wielder do a lot of traveling, so I had to settle on a definitive map before I embarked on this polishing-up project. I finally decided that, since I was already polishing up and professionalizing the story, I might as well do the same for the map. So I created this -- an updated version of one of the later maps I drew: 
It's not anywhere near as complex as my earlier maps, but I think it'll serve the revised story better.
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