Hey members, it’s another huge update for AOS! Here’s what’s new:
All Our Sins Updates
HOTE Gets A New Name
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.
Evolving An Idea
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!
Time for Music
The commercial ended and she came back on the screen.
What is that thing called again? Devek wondered, contemplating the black box on the wall. Ah yes. A television. Forefather of the integrated-vid data stream… The information tickled his brain for a moment. Strange how the ads of this time and mine seem so similar. Did we really lose everything, or is it still there, somehow?
He was sitting at the bar, a glass of scotch, on the rocks and nearly empty, between his fingers. His CO would put him on report for drinking while on duty—and not only that, but drinking real alcohol—but Devek didn’t care. Hell, that bastard had ordered him into this mess. Devek figured he deserved to get drunk. He rubbed a hand through his close-cropped brown hair.
She was singing now. He drained the last of the cool liquid, feeling it bite as it went down. The sensation was disappointingly not comforting. Devek coughed, unused to the drink, and signaled the bartender for another. His eyes never wavered from the screen. Yes, she was singing again, but it was becoming evening and the lounge was filling up. Her sweet voice was almost lost among the clink of glass and the yammering of the other patrons.
Couldn’t they shut up and listen? He wanted to climb onto the bar and yell at them to quit with their pointless small talk. Just listen, he felt like shouting. Too soon music will be dead!
The Slow Writer
When I was in school (roughly twenty years ago now, yikes), I was always carrying around a notebook and generally scribbling something down any chance I got: diary entries, letters, stories, fanfic. I wrote a ridiculous amount of words back then (most of them not very good).
Then what happened? I graduated high school and things changed. The world said I had become an “adult”. The fanfic I was writing at the time turned into a drama-filled burden, so I quit that and decided to put my effort into other written work instead. But I also got a “real” job (then another, and finally another), bought my first house, and started to have “life things” going on, many of them not good. I wrote less. Then a lot less. Projects stagnated, then were shelved. Some of those not good “life things” actually got pretty bad and for several years straight I basically wrote absolutely nothing worth mentioning. Continue reading The Slow Writer
HOTE: Rebuilding
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.”
Putting the HOTE Puzzle Together
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.
