Yes! Finally! Creative musing and spontaneous brainstorming continue for this project, largely thanks to some excellent input from members of my Discord community. At long last, it seems I’ve finally found a new title for the book. It shall now be called…

All Our Sins

Ooh yes! I’m pretty excited about this title, as it speaks directly to a long-established aspect of the story that has recently been expanded upon more fully thanks to the aforementioned brainstorming. This title also gives me a cheeky opportunity to write a shorter tie-in story that a number of community members recently discussed. That short will be called The First Sin.

Over the next little while, as time allows, I’ll begin transitioning existing content to the new title, but references in old blog posts will be left alone. The new acronym for the story is AOS and this will eventually replace “HOTE” in the URLs. (Writing redirects is kinda a pain; I’ll do that last.)

There’s more I want to start doing for this project now that movement really seems to be happening behind the scenes. I’ll wait to talk about that stuff another day.

The other day my muse woke up a little and hit me with a strong desire to update the Heart of the Empire Music article, so I did. The list has gone from twenty to thirty songs and I created a proper playlist too! The ten new additions had been rattling around in my head for a while and it was high time I got them added to my personal playlist as well as here on the website. The choice of these new songs was inspired by (or because they inspired) changes to the story that I’ve been contemplating in the last year. Enjoy!

The plot changes are in-progress (still working on not being a slow writer)…but updating the soundtrack wasn’t all my muse had in store for me!

Continue reading Evolving An Idea

Over the weekend I went on a business trip to the nearby mountain community of Banff. The trip was nothing much special, though I did get an opportunity to spend some time with a few of my newer coworkers and hopefully build on the still-forming relationships (after all, I spend the majority of my time with these people, so might as well try to be friends).

The drawback of going on this trip is that I was away from home for the weekend and had most of my time taken up by meetings and work-related activities…which naturally meant the muse decided to pay me a visit and was pretty annoyed when I had to regrettably tell her, “Not now.”

Continue reading HOTE: Rebuilding

In the last few days, a long-time visitor has peppered some of the HOTE pages with comments, which was wonderful for me to see during what was otherwise a pretty difficult week. So, thank you for that! They made my day. :)

I wanted to take a moment to share a little bit of what has been going on behind the scenes on the creative side of my life. Since I’ve been concentrating on trying to get ready to put my home up for sale, there hasn’t been much, but there is some!

In a prior post I mentioned one task on my “to do” list has been to revisit the plot of HOTE and fix some long-standing problems with the story. Those problems have been the major reason the story itself has not advanced in some years.

To date, writing HOTE has kind of been like putting together a puzzle where I was sure at the start that I knew what the puzzle’s image was supposed to look like, but when I actually got down to putting the pieces together it turned out they didn’t quite fit together as expected, or the overall picture had morphed into something else when I wasn’t looking. Or both.

Continue reading Putting the HOTE Puzzle Together