2016: The Year I Write 7 Books
It's been four years now since I started doing NaNoWriMo. In that time I've written five books. Three which were completed, two which were not, and one of which was written outside of the actual November period. And while they've only been read by people who know me personally, I do intend on getting them published and available for the public to purchase. A Much Needed Vacation, the one I wrote in 2014 has been undergoing continual editing, and hopefully be good enough to go sometime this year, the other two complete ones aren't long enough so will need some more writing to them, and the two incomplete ones I intend to complete and possibly look at submitting to publisher.
But even with those five books all or mostly written, I've started a lot more books that have very little done to them. Some just outlines, some a few chapters were written. I've got such a huge backlog of things I've already started that it would take a drastic step to catch up on it all. And so that's what I'm going to do. Take that drastic step. And write them all in NaNoWriMo-like blitzes. Every even month this year I'll hit a book from the backlog, as well as November itself. The three books of the Spiral Island trilogy, the sequel story to The Pocketwatch, all of the rest of Red Ice, and two more books in the same universe of Spiral Island that are in particular related to Vacation, which together with the miniseries Eliza's Notes which will be posted over the year will complete that arc of that story. That's almost everything that's currently on my backlog, the only remaining thing being the text adventure I've been working on, which I was going to do December but shelved it when I realized there was a lot more content then could be written out in a single book and I didn't want to wait a year to get back to novelizing it since I had everything else scheduled.
And so that's the plan. Seven months, seven novels. The off months will be for other software development, and try to get some kind of game work done, but for this year I plan on mind dumping into written pages.
I still have to wonder if it still counts as a novelization of a video game if the book version ends up coming out before the game does...
Sun, 17 Jan 2016 14:00:00 -0600Eliza’s Notes - 01: Age of Sorrow
A time of great mourning. The people are filled with sorrow. The end of an era has now come to pass.
The final colonist to survive, Hellen, has died. She outlived everyone else by a long amount, living past my own ‘death’ for about twenty years, making her final age, if I’m doing the math right, to be nearly a hundred years old. Or maybe over a hundred. It took me some time to get the conversion defined properly and I may have lost a few years in there. Nonetheless, a great funeral was held honoring her memory, and with it the memory of all who came from Aughylia, and in its aftermath, the people of Vaudios are now lost, unsure of where they will go next.
Vaudios. The name they have taken for this world. Derived from an old Varilan language from the colony name, Vau Dios, new Dios. The town itself retains the name New Ildios, though. There are many differences on Vaudios than Aughylia, things that were strange to all of us from Aughylia but the new generations on this world don’t understand when we try to describe the differences.
The lack of significant seasons, for one, as this planet’s axis has no tilt and stays constant, although some semblance of seasons come into play once Aughylia moves into the path to the sun and absorbs some of our light, as our worlds share the same plane of orbit on the path to the sun. It’s not quite large enough to completely eclipse us, but the lessened solar output during that transition has been enough to effect the weather for at least a month or so. Vaudios’s moon, however, appears much larger in the sky than both the sun and Aughylia does, and while the orbit seems to suggest it would be quite rare, with it’s slow orbital period of 41 days any eclipsing from that could lead to some significant and immediate temperature drops during that transition period.
Since there are no regular seasons, defining a year is done by the stars, and it takes a whole 587 days to orbit our sun, a whopping 244 days longer than on Aughylia. The people are still using a converted year rate from Aughylian time, but I suspect with the last Aughylian dead now it will quickly fall to the wayside. Part of the night sky is unfamiliar to people and they’ve been making new constellations, as we seem to be in the southern hemisphere of Vaudios, and the Ildios continent was in the northern hemisphere of Aughylia and there were relatively few who had traveled to the south and knew its stars.
In conversations I had with Hellen after James left our world, she mentioned she had learned from visions about the plan Dean Yan had for repopulating this world led to his choices for population for the immediate growth of the world. The needs of the first generations fulfilled, the more recent generations have been more varied in what they’ve been seeking. On Aughylia, inter-species coupling was met with taboo and scorn, and any children of such pairings were met with mocking and violence. Now people are trying to shake off that ancient tradition of hate. Unfortunately, while all five species are capable of producing children with each other, a trait no doubt attributed to the genetic modifications by that evil power the original colonists of Aughylia escaped from, in practice it seems the taboo apparently rose from practical results, as it seems the chances of a child successfully coming to term are very low as no such pregnancy has yet been successful.
The lessons of James are not yet forgotten. The curse by the lord of the underworld, an amusing term comparing to Aughylian lore I’ve come to hear describe James’s final transformed state before he left, still weighs heavy on everyone’s minds as people actively try not to fall to the sins prescribed on each of the individual species. A significant effort is put into their everyday lives to include regular inter-species mingling, with policies for mixed-species councils, staffing, and so on. It seems, as they have come to take it, the best way to avoid falling into the sins is for them to never allow themselves to be isolated in large groups of any single species, a policy which seems to be working, but for how much longer as the population grows it can be sustained I do not know.
For now, at least, the people are getting along well enough. Food needs are met, with great effort, and the town expands steadily. The nature of magic use has changed from what I knew on Aughylia, with one species not able to use magic at all and the rest much more significantly limited by the lack of free energy to cast with geomancy, but people have fallen into new roles with working their magic into their day to day lives. The roles of healers are ever significant, more so with the dangers this untamed land presents, but the healing has expanded from the old world’s belief that just the Light magic that individuals such as myself and the Pol’ech can perform, as people have begun finding ways to apply the elemental magics in certain ways to accomplish different injury and illness treatments. With the Hokeno and the Raln the only ones capable of casting the complete gamut of elemental magic, though, there’s been an attempt to scale back from elemental magic as a reliance to just an aide, only assisting them ease work that they’re otherwise able to do without it.
All in all, things are doing fine so far. Once they pull themselves past the mourning of the last deaths of the Aughylians, the town will move forward, grow, and prosper. I await a view at where they decide to push forward from here, where they decide to go next as a people.
Fri, 01 Jan 2016 13:00:00 -0600