Greenshore Center Book Series

Greenshore is coming back online after the Summer break. We have a new NaNoWriMo coming up in a couple of months. I'm happy to report that book 1 has been submitted to DAW and that book 4 is under development for November's NaNoWriMo writing burst. This past Spring and Summer has been a busy one at my end. With the new position of Head of Circulation down at the WJN and the learning curve of being a part of 33 interconnected libraries spread across four counties, things have been busy! I'm happy to report that work-life balance has been restored! My writing group is starting up Sept 9th. My tabletop group is also starting up on Sept 21st. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting some new folks! -Dave

I swear I just posted on this blog. Really. School starts up for my little one and time kind of takes off on me. Gutting and repainting / trimming out an office space also spins up the temporal chaos as well. However, I am writing each and every a.m. (once the coffee is brewed). Below is a couple of weeks of notes about the RPG design as it muddles along... Sept 5 & 6: More spell development, along with copying over the ‘Fringe Groups’. LOTS of work ahead of me today… Sept 7: Ah, there’s the wall. I felt it coming and blam-o! Here it is. I’ll ignore it today, reminding myself that chipping away at something in this document (or any writing that is currently in process) is better than the murk of guilt that will hit later on if I don’t. Back to the Fringe Groups, then… Oh, I’m thinking of starting to highlight each section I’m working on to denote them as ASHLAND SPECIFIC information … Sept 8: No ‘wall’ today. Kind of driven to write, actually. Thinking about...

Writing wise, I'm running into an issue more often than not these days. On the one hand, there is the "Work" of writing: Putting those words down on paper, editing them, organizing them in an entertaining way, plotting, research, and all of that. On the other hand, there is the "Effort" of writing: Doing the social media thing (such as this blog, or my Facebook page, etc). I use these marketing tools as a means of recording what my work is doing, where it is going, and just as a kind of journal du jour. That's where the Effort presides. The heart of the matter is that I am a relatively introverted fellow. I'll occasionally pop my head out of my warren, happily hang out with like-minded folks, quickly exhaust my social reserves, then scamper back to the safety zone (while hyper-analyzing every conversation, pointing out where I screwed something up). However; I like people (most of 'em anyway). Anyhew, here's this weeks journal from the...

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...

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 own...

Hello all! Back to the reality of the blog-o-sphere. I just returned from a three week tour of the Greenshore grounds, traveled back through her history, forged something close to a hundred effects, spells, and mystic items for the locations our hapless hero(s) will discover... Dizzying, surreal, and lots of creative monkey fun! In an effort to head off a couple of issues that I foresee in a number of upcoming books, I've taken the liberty to create a buffet line of interred mystics in the Greenshore catacombs. That required me to take a long, hard look at an area of the complex named the "Oodana Circle". This location broke ground in 1895 to house 13 guardian mystics. Yep, I wrote the occupants of each bungalow for the full 123 years of service. The history of the place had already been neatly filled out, so it was simply a matter of determining who lived where when what was happening. I moved between that madness and filling the various vaults of the vario...

Welcome! The past couple of weeks have been dedicated to expanding the mystical buffet line. Yep, I've been creating spells and magic items. Why? With nine Core mystical fonts, as well as a number of fringe groups, I feel the presence of a fantasy-authors demon: The Mystic Deux Ex Machina. Got a problem that might screw up the plot? Well your wizard just reaches into the little 'ole black bag of tricks and POOF! Problem solved! See? We don't need to worry about going back and tweaking plot arcs and character development. We certainly do not have to worry about tension in the story! Just magic your way outta the problem. Everyone does it! James Bond has that tech-magic thing Q gave him... Narcissa Malfoy's completely unexpected little lie (see book 7)... A bunch 'o minor characters in the Hobbit bringing BIG change to the world at large... As you can see, it works. Up to a point. My goal is, as I work through books 2-5 (its an arc thing), I want to pre-b...

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...

Lent. So, once upon a time there was this guy who got baptized and then spent forty days in the Wilderness being tempted by raw aspects of Evil. Now we eat fish on friday. The gang around this end are trying something new this year. We've 'drilled down' into the concepts of Lent and have come up with our own goals. Kind of like a New Years Resolution, but with a more 'follow your heart' kind of vibe. What does all of this have to do with Greenshore? Well, I suppose it works with the aspects of the book that deal with spiritualism, Good Vs Evil, and the generation(s) of older folks that populate the text. However... In the Real World, amid cold and flu bugs, Girl Scout camping / cookie issue therapy, work, and 60-degree temperature swings, the Lent issue that this author has been working on is "Entering the Wilderness". In this, I have been skulking around agents and schlepping book one of Greenshore. I should point out that I'm not accusin...

Found this unpublished post from last November... On the 15th day of NaNoWriMo I crossed the 28,000 word mark. That sets me roughly 3k ahead of where I need to be. Celebration time, right? Nope. I'm happy to be where I'm at word count wise. But I'm looking ahead at the rest of the passage that will take me to the 'peak' of the story. The nice, winding trail through this tales foothills are starting to break away to the more rugged stone paths and untested ground of the latter third of my tale. Oh, it's plotted and still on track, but there's a sense of struggle ahead that brings a bit of tension to this author. I've been at this place before. I know my weaknesses and my strengths. I am my own best coach in this matter of Tenacity, Faith, and Perseverance. Yah, I got 'er done. Passed the 50K mark at the end of the month. There were incomplete passages and some rambling notes, but the final chapter closed this book nicely. Here I am, sittin...

Book 2 of the Greenshore series is done. I've survived NaNoWriMo and pushed the book past the 50,000 word mark. My plan was to work on books 2-5, as I have that lot all plotted out. I got lost writing the second book. I also got a LOT of additional material for books 3-5, along with concepts started for books 6 and 7. Gawd I love writing this series! This month is the month that I try to contact an agent. Might be next month too. And the month after that... HOWEVER, during 2017, I have been honing my 'stacked projects' skills. With that being said, I also have a sidebar job kicking off with the new year. The bouncing among a couple of projects and keeping up the blogs has been fun so far. Seeing that I'm nine days into it and all... On Monday, Jan 15, I'll be at the Niederkorn Library's Writer Block from 9 am 'till 11-ish. Hope to see you there! -Dave

Happy mid-November to all! As we near the mid point of the month, I'm nearing the mid-point of my NaNo goals. It's been a steady and uphill climb, some days a slog, some days an energized run. But I've been doing a great job of sitting down to write every day . Can't fix it if it ain't on paper. On the subject of 'fixing', I've been speaking with other authors lately about the subject of Style. The Chicago Manual of Style has come up time and again and it looks like that's where I'm going to turn my attention to first. http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html I love telling stories. I love building worlds and sending characters through them. This is my RPG background shining through. However, RPG-ing entails a much more verbal interplay rather than written prose and that is where I tend to falter. Something like a good race driver who knows little about the mechanics of the car. Well, I've gone in. I signed up for a 30-day ...

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...

Halloween... Gaming and trick-or-treat night with friends and family... Stranger Things... Must keep free time to focus on NaNo prep... Focus... Write... Focus... ...then the cats wake me up at 2 a.m. and I binge out at Netflix. Mischief Managed. -Dave

Greenshore Series Book 1: The Old Hollow   Introduction     John Barmin lives in the city of Ashland, Wisconsin. He works at the Greenshore Senior Living Center as the live-in maintenance man. The Greenshore Senior Living Center is the place where wizards go to die.   Chapter 1: The Offer May along southeastern Wisconsin's shoreline is a time when Spring gives way to Summer. The nights are cool, the days warm and everything is green again. Much like the cover brought on by heavy December snows, the new greenery brings a false sense of renewal. In May, the flora covers over most of the open lots and cracker box yards throughout Ulao Village. The vegetation makes shadows of the refuse, dampen the sounds of the nearby highway and trap the flying waste in its ever-entwining snares. However, there were certain buildings resistant to this green veneer. Sagging Sal’s Pub was one such property. This establishment brooded beneath th...

Something that all published authors go back to is (in some form): "Write What You Know, Know What You Write." I'm writing about a janitor at a retirement village. I work (in real life) as a maintenance guy AND the assistant to the center's director at a senior community center. In many ways, I live among the characters in my books. I get to be a party to the loss, joy, triumphs and failures of both the membership, clubs, and leadership of the place. Being a member of the city staff (our center is part of the cities infrastructure), I also get to stop by City Hall and the other service centers from time to time for various things on the monthly to-do list. In short, there is a lot of day-to-day human interest stuff / dramatic events going on and VERY human reactions / adjustments to it all! Faces, personalities, interactions. All of it has a very humanistic side to it and is very much alive. However; Then comes the supernatural side of this book series. In thi...

What a week. I've been involved in an author's seminar, 68 member luncheon, and musical presentation at the senior center (real life). I've plotted the demise of more than ten characters in the various (future books) of the Greenshore series. I've released sturgeons to the wild waters of Lake Michigan in the morning, then cooled off with Ghostbusters and Storm Troopers at our Curious Kids science museum sci fi day (again, real life). I've detailed mystical traditions, magic items, and supernatural critters for Ashland and the surrounding region. It's time for month-end financials and the October newsletter mailings for our membership of 500+ (real life). Aaaaand I'm starting to do the chapter-by-chapter breakdown and detailing for books 3 and 4 (and possibly 5, just to round out Act I of this series). Bring on the coffee. -Dave

Hello all! National Novel Writers Month is coming up in November and this is the time of the year where I like to start plotting out my goals for that month! First off, although we are given a full month to complete our 50K word project, reality has proven (time and again) that this author really has about 25 days to make it happen. That works out to a clean 2,000 words a day to hit the goal. (I aim for the 2,200 to plan for the burn-out / sickness / to-do-list days) Secondly, This year is going to be different from other years. NaNoWriMo is a time for me to play around in new arenas. I try different genres, or new story arcs. This year I'm sticking to the Greenshore world. It's been too much fun plotting and writing out the first five books of the series and that is where my brain naturally goes to. Third, in writing the Greenshore books, I've got Book 1 down to beta reader edits and Book 2 at a VERY rough draft of 27,000 words. My plan for NaNoWriMo is to hammer...

Howdy all! Back from the madhouse that was Gencon 50. Sat in on some writing seminars, did some play testing, rolled about 8 BILLION dice, walked for miles and miles, ate pizza, etc. Now I'm all recovered and ready to write. I'm looking into some of the upcoming writing contests and I'm considering a few short stories that I've written to flesh out some of my Greenshore characters and plots. Many of the contests in question are around 2000 - 5000 words in length, which is a bit of a test for me. Just keeping each of the Greenshore books in the 35,000 - 40,000 word range is a test... However; today is the Writer's Block down at the library. Next week my daughter starts school. Summer is feeling like it is over and a strange aspect of renewal is in the air. September could be an interesting month! -Dave

Good day, all! Book 2 of the Greenshore series is written. Oh, it is rough and only at about 28,000 (of the projected 35,000) words; but it is also accompanied by a few short stories written for background development. All in all, I've hammered out over the 35k word goal this month and am pretty happy with the outcome. Book 1 is in the hands of three folks whom I REALLY look forward to their feedback (the good, the bad, and the ugly). At the end of the day, I just hope they enjoyed the ride. It's August now and the high heat of Summer is in full bloom. It's a little easer for me to huddle indoors these afternoons to play around with other writing tasks and expand on my Greenshore universe. That's the thing about this project: its still FUN to write. Speaking of which, I've begun to compile the various notebooks and electronic media into a single (offline) source. Now that Greenshore has become a fleshed-out entity to me, I don't want to spend a lot of ti...