Mike’s Comments (group member since Feb 11, 2016)

Mike’s comments from the Foreworld group.

Thx for the update, Chris.
Unfortunately work and an illness back in Feb kept me from CruxP.
Then a week ago Sat went to the er in renal failure and still in hospital with a diagnosis of diabetes insipidus, very rare. Also newly diabetic with type II, and hypertension to boot.
Not so happy days but I feel good. Good and betrayed by my body :-)
Looking forward to M & D!

Was delighted to stumble upon the latest Foreworld novella on Kindle Worlds by group member M.L. Roberts this morning!

Can't link to it on Goodreads as it isn't showing here yet, but y'all know where to find it on Amazon. Note the cool cover.

Looking forward to reading this new story about...Illarion! Yea!

M.L. Roberts wrote: "Mike wrote: "M.L. Roberts wrote: "(I didn't realized how many Ms there are!)
Well, I'll put my stake in the ground (hope it isn't quicksand). The plan is to publish by end of Feb. This is a segment..."

44K sounds good, enough to flesh out most plots and a few characters, given 50K is the low end for a short novel. I inadvertently exceeded that with Crux Passages and my sequel looks to be shorter by quite a bit unless something new squeezes its way in by the time I get there. (There's an obvious additional sequel to make it a trilogy of short works, but still not sure I'll write that one. The stories that I want to tell wrap up neatly enough with the one sequel. Then I have a story further up the timeline, about 40 years after Crux Passages, focusing on one character, and I'm trying to adjust some of the early material to more naturally point toward what happens then. Hope to dive back into the partial rewrite and final edit of CruxP soon, before my beta readers forget it entirely!)

M.L. Roberts wrote: "(I didn't realized how many Ms there are!)
Well, I'll put my stake in the ground (hope it isn't quicksand). The plan is to publish by end of Feb. This is a segment of what I was working on, should ..."

Sounds like a full novel in the making :-)
Keep pounding away, don't give away anything you don't,want to unless you need to bounce ideas around. We're pretty good at bouncing back around here :-)

who's gonna finish sump'n cool in '17??

Finish this year? That or die.
Cool? Sigh....

Last months have me frazzled as I've been worrying over my first change in job status in 36 years. Corporate entity is taking over former single-owner operation Wed Feb 1. Much nervousness ensuing. Haven't done more than post some snippets and notes to Scrivener spanning three or four different projects over the last month or two, doing a lot more reading, tv, eating, other escapist fare because real thinking gets hard sometimes right now. (Reversed some decent weight loss, but not completely, lol).

C.B. Matson wrote: "Mike, sorry to snark about the dragon... it's just been that kind of year, y'know? Besides, after 'The Hobbit' and GoT, dragons have become perhaps a bit over-used... but, but a giant Pleistocene v..."

No worries. You kinda played into my hand there, lol! So my apologies instead.

No dragons hitting the Foreworld on my end. But I do have a burning need to introduce something really unconventional into the Saga. Maybe a comedy of manners. Fortunately I haven't the time to pursue even my serious Foreworld projects after those I'm working on now. After those, I expect 2017 to be one original novel and as many original shorts as I can manage.

M.L. Roberts wrote: "By the way, I hadn't heard of the title Marshall Versus The Assassins and read through some of the reviews. Each reader of course is different as to the amount of detail he or she prefers but the m..."

Just as much variation among readers as writers, yes!

Count me as one who got hooked on the swordplay early in the saga (which is a testament to the reasons it got started in the first place!) I only hope I can learn to do it half as well. I see a lot of historical fiction in my writing future (as well as sf, which as of now I have maybe a couple thousand draft words of experience under my belt, but at least 3 novels worth to eventually write) and I want to get the details right, Foreworld or not.

Yet I have always enjoyed hf that is not so welded to either the settings or the details of those settings. Depends what the author is aiming for. As a whole, the Foreworld franchise got started as a way to employ the experience of writers who know those details to tell both a compelling and a realistic story. Which I think they did exceedingly well. Then they threw in a bunch of mystical stuff that not only failed to undermine the realism for me, but took the stories in even more exciting directions. It became precisely the kind of world I wished to write about, and I ain't looking back!

Here's a post from M. Harold Page, author of the Foreworld Sidequest Marshall Versus the Assassins, that may be of interest:

https://www.blackgate.com/2016/12/08/...

Lots of food for thought, and an interesting array of examples.

Mark wrote:" It's much harder to herd cats when they're not all in the same room"

You need to drag 'em back to the killing field - er, practice room - with their swords and then sit 'em down to think up a new collaborative project :-) (Brains storm better when other brains are staring them down, fingers tapping restlessly in an implied "who'll go first?")

C.B. Matson wrote: "Hey, Mark... good to see you around. I know that FS was a bit of a collaborative experiment in its day, and the Creatives... well, they gotta be creative. New projects, new experiments, all good.
..."

I have been following @KindleWorlds for a while, and RT any Foreworld mentions I see there. I believe Brother Lussier brought it to my attention. (They follow me too! That must be...interesting for them - or Ms Rogers, I suppose, if she's doing all the work there).

Like other tweets that favor interests of mine (a big one is @GailZMartin's #HoldOnToTheLight tweets promoting blog posts by SFF authors on Mental Wellness) I suppose I should go a bit more "all-out" RTing them, considering much of my "core" following don't appear to be seeing my posts anyway (which I assume means I've been muted by many of my best friends!) so I don't think I can offend too many more if I go to three times a day RTs rather than just once when I first see a relevant tweet. Only question how many will see 'em :-) (I did get over 6000 views responding to a tweet by Joyce Carol Oates, but I don't think she'd appreciate my injecting Foreworld into her timeline). Truth is, while RTing is easy and fast it won't propagate very far without being picked up by people with lots and lots and lots of followers. But we should do it anyway. Because it's near to our hearts.

"...not the dragon Mike, just no..."

Okay, but that huge buzzard drifting in the sky ain't gonna be nearly as interesting as a dragon...

Mark wrote: "Brit Rogers, who used to be the Author Rep for 47North, is now working with Kindle Worlds. I like to think we were always favorites of hers, so I'm not surprised to see KindleWorlds doing mentions...."

I guess we'll need to try and be more interesting :-)

Would dragons be more interesting? (Just kidding - I think!)

From what I've see, there are rotating mentions on Twitter for various Worlds, if not all of them. Foreworld seems to get abt 1 a month.

C.B. Matson wrote: "Mike, I thought of another one, Harlan Ellison wrote a 1969 short: "Along the Scenic Route" (I had to look up the title, it's been a while). I first heard it as a radio-play (yeah, Audible done bac..."

Looking up the Ellison as I type.

Yeah, starting with middle or end is a strategy that many use regularly to avoid that story-drift that occurs so often writing in a linear fashion. Haven't had occasion to try it yet, and only did it this time because I was half-brainstorming this potential "too pat" story resolution to see if I could take it in a less pat direction (that box got checked, cool!) And because it was easier than choreographing the battle scene. As you can tell from beta-land, I usually just jump right into those and do my best. For this (and in particular the stick-fight when I get back to Forest for the Trees) I'd like to walk through it (almost literally) blow for blow before writing them.

Link just popped up to summary of the Ellison. Nice Billy the Kid link there. More of a car duel than hand to hand. A ref to a Fritz Lieber story from there looks like pedestrian vs car/driver.

Nothing sinful about writing for other Kindle Worlds. Unfortunately, the ones I know best (Veronica Mars, forex) I'm not qualified to write and others I don't know well or at all, or would just prefer to read within versus write for. Wish I had time to explore some, a bunch look very cool. This story doesn't seem suited to any AFAIK, though.

When I've got a beta - or, at 5000 words or less, maybe polished draft ready I'll let you know, and probably throw that one at SIA for additional beta exposure, since you and Brother Lussier are the only ones showing interest here. Probably bound for semi-pro submissions grinder if beta readers approve.

Regarding Foreworld, a side-question. Given that both published and unpublished KW stories in our world have taken the supernatural elements of the saga even further than what finally surfaced in Katabasis and Siege Perilous - would dragons in the Foreworld be pushing too far? I really want to write a dragon. I suppose it doesn't have to be a real dragon - there could be ambiguity. (But a dragon, not a croc as cleverly used for a dragon stand-in by Roberto Calas in one of his Scourge books). Hey - don't look at me like that! I could be joking! Maybe.

I've been complaining for months that I can't seem to come up with any ideas suitable for short story treatment. I was still in that boat when I read a story in the Warmachine gaming universe that detailed a months-long retreat from enemy territory. Pretty sure this unconsciously prompted a question I posted on Twitter, looking for something quite the opposite: a short story consisting of a single battle between two opponents, and nothing else.

That animal must exist somewhere - closest in print anybody noted being a GI Joe comic that was all action and no dialog. So naturally my eventual reaction was "So write it yourself, doofus!"

So I brainstormed a bit, made some notes, and sat down to start, in a pantsy way 'cos, y'know, short.
The odd thing was, I started in the middle - of a story that originally wasn't going to have a middle. Just one scene, composed of the fight. The brainstorming took a left turn, though. After it ended, a second ending would put a twist on what came before. Now I had two parts!

Thinking on that, I developed a rather unsatisfying addition that felt too pat. I could add the twisty ending to that new middle, but had some doubts. Only way to find out was by writing that middle, as both the front and back would tightly integrate with it, three different views of the details that gave the story life and depth.

By the time I hit nearly 500 words on the middle part, everything fell into place, a Roger Zelazny homage turned into an integral part of the story, and points of congruence between the three parts made themselves evident. The easy part is over :-) Now I have to choreograph and write a battle between physically very dissimilar opponents with a naginata and a broadsword. And no, it's not a Foreworld story, sadly. With reasons why it really can't be, or shouldn't be, that are spoilery :-)

Once that's drafted, it's back to the idea file. I'm thinking shorts aren't as hard to come by as I thought. Just work with the ideas until something the right size emerges. Easy as word pie. The hard part, as always - the actual writing.

C.B. Matson wrote: "Mike, belated congratulations for breaking 30k in a month. Considering it's your first tilt at the NaNo windmill, I'd say that's pretty impressive. Sort'a like finishing top ten in your first marat..."

"Nano windmill..." hehe, you're reminding me that I just read Sergio Leone was planning an updated Don Quixote. Oh, the things life takes from us. Let's hope we all get to complete the stories closest to our hearts before the windmill grinds to a halt. Hmmm, better take that morbidity to a grimdark place before long...oh for a little short story inspiration. Damn it :-)

Narrative-wise, nothing has changed with Crux Passages.
Per your own beta-musings on the opening and the need to flesh out Elam's family before - well, before you-know-what - I've moved the opening even further back than you suggested. Right back to the beginning, and the sack of Berwick, and Edward I sending Merrill back to his old haunts to think on his misdeeds. A brief set-up, then we move straight to Elam's farm and meet the farmer and his wife. Then their daughters. No idea yet how long I'll tarry there before the "old" Chapter 1 raises it's vor-filled head, but enough, I think, to endear both Merrill and the reader to this interesting family.

Then things should proceed pretty close to Beta1 from there. Brother Lussier complained about Drake's intro, and wanted him shown plotting with The Man Behind the Scenes first ( I shouldn't be going so far out of my way to avoid this particular "spoiler", given the hints I've set out before - but it's fun circling around the point sometimes!) Not gonna pull that trigger yet, though. Drake might be found complaining to one of his lackeys about his lot as a mere Lieutenant, providing some of the necessary setup that will keep readers from complaining "Why don't they just..." That brief interlude should come before things heat up, but placement not precisely thought out yet. I'll know when I come to it :-) The RH dude is a featured player in Forest for the Trees. He'll stay behind the scenes in CruxP. Your thoughts and Michael's welcome as always, and you'll both get first crack at Beta2 if you so desire.

We'll see how the post-Nano wordage goes in revamping the early part of the story, then back to editing in ernest. Skipped the promised post on "finding time to write". It was no more than saying I'm most productive on the way to work and the hour before I clock in, so not really helpful advice. Other than look at where and when you get the most done, and use the hell out of it before ten thousand monkeys pound out the same story ahead of you.

So. NanoWriMo2016 is done. Finis. Kaput.

My first time registering for the event is technically a failure, with “only” 31609 words for the month of November.

Am I crying in my beer? Well, no. A beer would be a celebratory drink. But maybe I’ll crack one anyway, ‘cos by my way of thinking this “failure” is an enormous success! 31609 represents not just a personal best in one month’s time, but a personal best in 21 days. I wrote nothing at all Nov 1-9. All my Nano words came after:
Nov 10-13: 5128
Nov 14-20: 8672
Nov 21-27: 11120
Nov 28-30: 6689

Now let’s do the math: 31609/21=1505*30=45150.

If I’d written every day (an advisable plan for this non-contest contest), I’d have still fallen short by nearly 5K. So next year a little more discipline - about 162 words per day worth - and I can nail it! Just so happened I needed a break at exactly the “wrong” time this year. Not sweating it. I did good. And gooder. And I have a mostly finished rough draft of Forest for the Trees to return to in Jan or Feb next year, whatever time it takes to complete edits and maybe some rewrites on Crux Passages.

I can’t wait for NanoWriMo2017. Really, I can’t wait. From here on, every month is NanoWriMo, in some fashion. Not with a monthly goal of 50K, but a goal of writing every day I can, one foot forward at a time until I reach the end of the month, and start again. Until I reach the end of a WIP, and start again. More on that in a separate post on finding time to write.

So what's my reward for this non-failure failure? I'm gonna sit back and read a story about 18th-century sailing ships plying the ether between here and Mars. As one does after working in this awesomely creative field. [Edit- One might guess this refers to THE DAEDALUS INCIDENT, the first in a uniformly excellent set of stories by Michael J Martinez, which also include a modern component. However, I actually refer to the debut novel of David D. Levine, ARABELLA OF MARS, and confess to a slight error in time above, as Mr. Levine's book is entirely set in the Regency era. Having now finished it, I can now highly recommend both authors. And note that debut novels featuring sailing ships in space seem to come out almost surpisingly good. Still, my own proposed original debut will still be the Ancient Greece to Modern America SPHYNX, featuring a demigod son of Aphrodite grappling with a millenia-hopping villain, and some familiar mythological characters cast in what will hopefully be recognized as a new and original light. That's what all this Foreworld fan-ficcing is pointed at - even as I uncovered just yesterday a quite reasonable idea for another direct sequel to Crux Passages, one I'm entirely uncertain I'll write at all, let alone in the near future. But one never knows!]

Congrats to all who managed 50k last month - or more! Congrats to my fellow “failures” who wrote - well, just as much as they really needed to. Which is to say, however much you actually wrote: 5K, 10K, 25K - you get the picture. Because you met the most important goal of all: making progress on something close to your heart. Write on!

C.B. Matson wrote: "Ha! Good luck. I think Bre'r Voss is NaNo'ing too. Hope we see a few FS novellas come out of this."

I "played around" with NanoWriMo last year, without registering, and was impressed with the writing pace I discovered I could sustain when I put my mind to it. I registered this year but circumstances had me writing virtually nothing the first week - yeah, always the effing excuses :-) It was my choice to take a break and see how far I could catch up after. Break was refreshing, would have been nice if I hadn't had to check in at the day job too!

The best approach to NanoWriMo, imo, is to go in excited and optimistic - but NOT put pressure on yourself if it doesn't go as planned. If you are prepped with an outline or clear idea what you're going to write, you'll hit or exceed your goal, as long as it's fun and not done as a chore. As long as your discipline doesn't flag, progress will be made. If you hold a whip to yourself, you may reach or exceed your goal but feel thrashed in the end - or worse, feel that way every day. It isn't worth it, to me at least.

Since Nov 10 I've cleared 20K. Not much chance I'll manage the other 30K in 8 days, but that's not the point for me. That's 10 or 15K more than I normally expect to write in 10-11 days, so I'm happy as a clam to be ahead of my normal pace and potentially add another 14-15K by Nov 30. There is also the possibility that this rough draft of Forest for the Trees, the sequel to Crux Passages, may come in under 50K, whether I finish it this month or not. It's got structural problems to hammer out, too. (Outlines aren't always perfect, but I'd have floundered a lot without one, so no complaints).

My best day so far this month was 2491. I had at least a couple at 2390ish too. Worst was 477 (not counting my week+ break of course, where worst was technically 0). Hoping to break the 2500 barrier tomorrow and maybe on a couple more days as well. I remain optimistic, but unflogged. Best of luck to all Nanowriters this month, and congrats to Mark Teppo who hit 50K midmonth! Way to go, fearless leader. Herding words must be easier than herding cats, I guess.

Oh, and if I'd not taken the break and managed the same average per day word count, I'd be at over 54K end of month. In the spirit of keeping NanoWriMo fun, that's a plus, not a flogging offense :-) If I were working on my non-Foreworld fantasy novelette, projected at 10-12K, I'd be done drafting already!

One last note. Whether you make your goals or not, Nano is an opportunity to exercise your writing muscle and cultivate the habit of writing more than you normally might. And habits are important if you want to hammer out stories. The more you write, the more habituated you become to sitting down and writing, versus making excuses for yourself or drifting into Twitterland or whatever. Cultivating the habit now means I can draft that novellette in less than two weeks later on, after I finish edits on the Crux Passages beta. If I had enough ideas for short pieces like that, I'd be writing one a month for the first half of 2017.

C.B. Matson wrote: "A quick progress report: In addition to Beta reading for Mike Voss' Crux Passages, and flogging a couple of GR Groups, I've actually gotten some writing time in. Moonlight has about 17k words in th..."

You, my friend, are an incorrigible tease.
You must take after me.

C.B. Matson wrote: "Not sure how many noticed, but I cobbled together a banner for our FS Group Page (okay, M.L. noticed the font). Any comments + or - ? It's easily changed.

On the same subject, any new Topics we (..."

Nice sword!

M.L. Roberts wrote: "Thanks for the info!
Question on the font. If I want to use this font, is it in the cover creator on KW? It looks like I can't view the cover creator until I upload the MS (it isn't ready yet but ..."

M.L. Roberts wrote: "Thanks for the info!
Question on the font. If I want to use this font, is it in the cover creator on KW? It looks like I can't view the cover creator until I upload the MS (it isn't ready yet but ..."
Actually you can access the Cover Creator once you set up your account, without uploading a book. You need to add a book, fake the title if you like, then it lets you start working with the Cover Creator. Don't know if that font is available, I see it was used with some early KW stories commissioned to get Foreworld off to a start on KW. Might be available if you look, though!

M.L. wrote: "Just brainstorming here. I came back to add -- or, reach out and 'friend' all the KW authors in GR and the ones that reply eventually (after a certain number) invite them to join the KW group. The ..."

I really like that "friend and invite" approach!
Sounds like a great workaround to spamming and randomly 'advertising'.