Just so you know, this isn’t going to be you normal blog post. This is going to be posted on November first, which many of you who follow me, or just writers in general, know to be the start of National Novel Writing Month.
For those of you who don’t know, National Novel writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an event designed to get more people to get off their asses and put some words to paper. A LOT of people always talk about wanting to write a book, or all the ideas they have and NaNoWriMo is an excuse and an incentive to actually give it a try.
This will be my sixth crack at NaNoWriMo, and the event really has special value here at The Descendants. This site wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t found myself unable to take active part in it in 2007 and ended up challenging myself to write a chapter a week of an ongoing story. You’ll also recognize last year’s effort, my second win and my first with a single story, was So I Married a Supervillain.
And finally, (and most important to this point), you might recall tow years ago when I got my first NaNoWriMo win with ‘Projekt November’, a concentrated effort to write a nice buffer of stories for myself by splitting my 50,000 NaNoWriMo words between LI: Generations Aflame, Liedecker: Life and Times II, and The Spider’s 7.
This year, I’ll be doing the same thing again, only this time tackling the stories I need to finish in series and then working on upcoming (ongoing) stories. Some of this month’s blog posts might be samples of those works just to give me more time for writing this stuff instead of blog posts (which take about a day’s worth of writing normally.). This post will be a preview of what’s in store for Projekt November
Rune Breaker, Book 4 – Evil Unto Evil
I’m never completely sure on my demographics here. I know some people come to the site for a specific story that’s on here and some of you read everything I put out. Some of you even read the blog. Whatever you’re here for, I’m glad you are. You’re wonderful.
Anyway, a non-zero number of you come here for my fantasy web serial novel, Rune Breaker (the first book of which is totally free on multiple ebook platforms, by the way). I’m proud to say that the end is nigh and I will be finishing Rune Breaker this month with the fourth book in the series: Evil Unto Evil. The plan is to finish it by mid-November and have my friends who do my editing kick it back to me by the end of the month so you good folks can be reading it by Christmas. And yes, I am very close to fishing. I estimate around five more chapters are left to write.
Here’s the blurb for the book [Contains Mild Spoilers for Rune Break, Book 3 – The Path of Destruction]:
Taylin’s long journey has brought her many blessings: has new friends, a new family, and even a peace of sorts with Ru Brakar, the evil mage accidentally bound into her service. She also has a new name: Pele, and a past she isn’t certain she wants to remember.
All of her joy, however, has been threatened at every turn by the demon Immurai the Masked and his quest for something called the Soul Battery. Now, the truth about the Soul Battery and why Immurai wants it have been revealed and the only hope of saving Taylin’s adoptive nephew is bringing it and the awesome power it promises to the demon’s own doorstep.
Faced with an island fortress protected by an army, not to mention the demon himself, Pele and her companions will need to tap every resource they can for even a hope of victory. One mistake might damn the world to Immurai’s rule and cost Pele everything she’s gained.
[End Spoilers]
Don’t worry, Fantasy fans of mine. I’m not done with the World of Ere setting by a long shot, or even with Taylin and Ru. I already have the plot for the followup series, Soul Battery planned out.
So I Married a Supervillain
So. Remember how I said I won NaNoWriMo with So I Married a Supervillain last year? Well the thing about NaNo is, you ‘win’ at 50k words, not with a finished book. In fact, 50k words was a novel back in the day, but these days, most readers don’t even consider that a novel (for example, the first Rune Breaker book is 63k words and people complained about it being short).
As such, while I did knock out sixteen chapters of SIMaS, it wasn’t done. I figure I’m about two thirds of the way done with it.
The thing is, SIMaS is a story that is deeply dependent on the set-up. We have to establish Link and Amanda’s family and married life, then establish Amanda’s… supervillainy and Link’s reactions. But because I’m me, there’s got to be a complication. If you’ve been reading as I’ve updated the novel, you just saw what that complication.
I got to chapter 14 before I introduced the complication, so you can see where this is going. Really, it’s delivering on the promise of the premise. I can’t have this whole thing built around a guy finding out he’s married to a supervillain (his universe’s Dr. Doom no less) without there actually being a super-battle in there somewhere. That’s part of what put people’s asses in the seats (and I’m told that my action scenes are my strong point).
And I’ve got a bunch of cute family stuff to put in there. Considering the SIMaS world is the world where I put all the stuff too Silver Age for Descendants, I would be remiss not to take advantage of that too. The hope is to finish this series off as well and have it out as a book by February.
Magi Club 5
I’ve been promising this and hinting at it and now it’s time to roll up my sleeves and getting something done on this front.
For those of you who haven’t seen me going on about it, Magi Club 5 is the continuation of the characters introduced in the Morganna’s Body arc; the quartet of college-age mages who have had access to other magic books not part of the Four. During the climax of Morganna’s Body, they took on and distracted the Knights Amore Detestabilis while the Descendants assaulted Morganna’s tower.
The Magi Club 5 mini series picks up just a few weeks after that. The club has just started trading knowledge with Occult, but more pressingly, they find out that they didn’t manage their big show super-battle completely in secret and have become minor celebrities on campus.
Oh, and the ley lines Morganna was after have been attracting supernatural beings, including people with emerging supernatural ancestry to Mary Washington. And those folks are looking to the Magi Club for protection from nastier things, as anything that attracts large groups also attracts predators of that group.
The main arc will introduce us to the first werewolves of the DU and expand our understanding of the farther-reaching effects of the green flash event caused by Morganna during A Magitech Crisis. There were a lot more people effected in a large range of ways.
And of course, more giant groundhogs. This is my promise to you.
Magi Club 5 will be taking over the spot of Spider’s 7 this December.
Cowboy King
How to explain Cowboy King…
Let’s start at the begging: about a year ago, I posted a blog entitles Step into My Madness, which was all about the especially weird and/or stupid sources of inspiration I’ve had over the years. One of those was from last Christmas when the free webgame Kingdom of Loathing held a special holiday event parodying anime (you fought anime elves and eventually got in a giant robot fight). Part of the event was that the elves you fought had randomly assigned names mashing up the names of anime and manga series.
One of those names was the glorious ‘Cowboy King’, a mash-up of Cowboy Bebop and Shaman King, which were incidentally two favorite shows of mine at different times. It also evokes Trigun, another favorite. I really had no choice but to start brainstorming a story for it.
What I came up with as a variant of the Weird West genre where imperialist powers are pushing into an ‘untamed’ (read: inhabited by people who don’t build huge cities) magical land in ways reminiscent of westward expansion during America’s obsession with manifest destiny. Imagine if instead of just America trying to take the west, England, Spain and France were there too. Also shadow beasts from another world called (of course) Tarnation.
The story here takes place some seventy years after the initial press where the legendary Cowboy King, a gunslinger turned land baron managed to pull the colonies together and form the first permanent footholds in the magical world at the end of his incredibly powerful magic arms. He died trying to expand his territory and his weapons were lost in the wilds.
Enter Wesley James ‘Jim’ Wesson. He’s got himself a bit of a problem. His hero complex drive him to stand up for the little guy wherever he goes, often ending in gunfights. He’d probably be dead by now if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s secretly got one of the Cowboy King’s guns, which gives him a massively unfair advantage. Now every gunslinger in the land wants to be the one to shoot him down and take his title as best gun in the world from him.
Even worse, the pile of bodies he’s leaving behind from idiots throwing themselves in his sights has gotten him a bounty that ‘Bonetaker’ Kate Winchester can’t refuse—and she might just be the actual best gunslinger in the world.
On the run, Jim and his buddy Bartlett Colt find themselves between death (the Bonetaker) and something much worse when a land baron named Duke Beretta recognizes Jim’s weapon and decides he needs it to seal his claim as the new Cowboy King and take hold of the dark power of Tarnation that secretly formed the backbone of the old King’s power.
After a teaser and the release of Chapter 0, I’ve had a number of fans really wanting to see more of this story and who am I to argue? So the final entry into Projekt November is going to be working out some chapters of the webserial novel, Cowboy King. Though I’m not sure where I’m going to slot it into the update schedule… We’ll see.
So there you have it, dear reader. Just like every year, I’m about to attempt something foolhardy and ambitious. Then again, I keep hearing that it’s already pretty ambitious of me to put out two chapters a week the way I do, so there’s that.
If anyone else is up to taking part in NaNoWriMo, my name there is SoulfulBard; feel free to friend me and I’ll friend you back. We can be write-buddies and stuff.
