Skip to main content

Well... It's got "Green" in the title...

Hi all.

Well, today I shot out another book to a contest

Blockgarten:
Gaam's Green Valley

This little ditty is a very weird fiction work. It was kicked off back in 2015 during a particularly nasty oil change.

Yah, you read that correctly.

Okay, story time: It was early Spring, after the thaws. Probably around the month of March. It was overcast, cold, wet, and my sinuses were closed for business. It was early and there had been very little coffee (like, NONE) in my life at that time, due to fasting for a blood draw. I had settled into a nasty mood for a nasty day.

So I'm sitting in the waiting room with my iPad in hand. To further embrace the moment, I decided to go full-on gloom and doom: I began browsing through Lovecraft works. The browsing took me into the history of the Lovecraft properties (apparently there are three broad definitions of them: those works that H.P. wanted to give to the world to inspire other authors via family, later works owned by Derleth and his crew, and then the various gaming industry folks).

I pulled some ideas from the pre-1926 stuff and began plotting out a story.

Naturally, being me, a story turned into a full-blown plot covered across 5 (very unique) books!

I wrote the first one during a NaNoWriMo, then shelved it. It was too dark. Too depressingly heavy.

However, after being introduced to the Wisconsin Author Project a couple of months ago, I pulled that old clunker out of the file garage and gave it a good going-over. Smoother lines, nicer shiny bits, and the madness of chaos has been neatly organized...

Now it has been submitted.

Write on!
-Dave

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

About "Ashland"...

It dawned on me that should this book series be published, there will be certain folks who start pointing out the flaws in the facts about Ashland. Being the kind of guy who likes to stay out in front of such issues, I thought that I would set a couple of things straight... "Ashland does not have that geography" Yep... and nope. From the macro point of view, most of the Ashland in this series is written to the scale of our Real World. However, there are changes in the landscape caused by a ritual cast a few centuries prior. Greenshore is located on a plot of land that has a much larger (and much less soggy) footprint than its Real World counterpart. The Old Hollow is in a lumber region lifted up out of the marshy landscape by the creation of the Omni Magna some few hundred years ago. The artist guild's mall is located on public park in town. Many of these changes came about from the arrival of the various mystical fonts, which spurred landscape or developmental chan...

Letting the Inspirations Happen

Hi everyone! Well, the first week of NaNoWriMo is winding down and I'm hitting the marks (so far!). It's been a very writer-y (Dave English) year. Looking back at last year's NaNo, I've come to realize that I have put together three novels / novelettes. This has been the year for me to 'put it on paper'. Not just the planning and the copious number of notebooks and Word files. Write it! Has been my mantra. I've been preaching this at my bi-monthly Writer's Block down at the Niederkorn Library and (up to 2017) and personally, I've had varying degrees of success at that myself. This year has been different. The question is 'why?'. The big thing is that I've moved from keeping my structure and research in various places, shifting to putting all research and planning down in the document that will (eventually) become my final edit. One-stop writing, as it were. The other big thing is that I've been open to any and all thin...

FLOODED (with ideas)

Had a storm two weeks ago. Basement attempted to turn into a pool. We won this battle... The up side is that I got inspired to get off of my butt and begin REALLY  working on a RPG rule set for the whole Greenshore book series. It's something I've been kicking around for the past year or so, but I've been putting all my writing energy into the first three books, plotting the series, and filling in an offline wiki with all my Greenshore musings and such. In late August, I gave myself a week to get the framework for the RPG down, if only to have something to play around with in my spare time. With the flood came a desire to simply step out of the normal routine and fully embrace something game-like! The weird thing is, I was also inspired to begin keeping an electronic journal of the day to day along with the writing. Below is the first week of said journal... Design Notes:   Aug 21: Day 3 of creating the Game! After looking over the plans for the book series and al...