Greenshore Center Book Series

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...