It’s a terrible affliction, plot expansion. Many writers suffer from it, where it seems as if every time they turn around, their story is getting bigger and more complicated.
I suffer from plot expansion. Continue reading Plot Expansion
All Our Sins (AOS) is a work-in-progress galactic fantasy series. This project includes artwork, character profiles, worldbuilding articles, a soundtrack, and story chapters. See the Appendix for more information.
It’s a terrible affliction, plot expansion. Many writers suffer from it, where it seems as if every time they turn around, their story is getting bigger and more complicated.
I suffer from plot expansion. Continue reading Plot Expansion
It’s done.
Actually… It’s been done for a while. I finished the first draft of The First Sin on August 26, 2023! That’s four years, nine months, and six days to write. Incredible. I did feel a bit like Frodo when I realized I could finally write “The End”. Continue reading Revisions Are Go! And SBR!
Greetings! It’s been a long time since I’ve written about The First Sin or anything to do with All Our Sins, so let’s see where things are at, shall we?
Just as a reminder, The First Sin is the first book in the All Our Sins series. I have public information about the series posted in the site’s appendix. The abbreviation I use for The First Sin is TFS and for All Our Sins it’s AOS. Continue reading TFS Progress Report
Happy 2022! I hope you’re getting this year off to as best a start as you can, despite the pandemic.
If it’s been a while since you’ve been to my website, you’re probably wondering, What the heck? Yes, it’s had a makeover! This actually happened at the end of November. 2021 presented me with some challenges, and in the end, I decided to pivot from yarn dyeing to focusing on my writing. The yarn shop is still up and still has skeins in it for sale, but for the time being I’ll be stepping back from dyeing unless I happen to have some spare time and feel in the mood for it. Continue reading Happy New Year!
Hey members, it’s another huge update for AOS! Here’s what’s new:
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…
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!
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
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.”
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.