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Monthly Update

September Update

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August went by fast. It was dominated by a Fiverr order that had me writing several histories of wars set in a client’s fantasy world. It was a fun experience, but did take up a chunk of time.

Writing

My work on Book 3 this month was focused on the last Act. I have the beginning I want, but the middle is suffering because I don’t know where I want it to end. So by working out where I want it to end, I know what I need to build up in the middle. Some writing, a lot of planning. I’d really like to get more done this next September.

With my Lightstar Sci-Fi book, I missed my mark of having a Beta Copy done. Much like Book 3, I have the first half and the last act, so I need to get the two to connect somehow. To this end, I’ve pringted off copies of the scenes I like and my goal this month will be to work to connect the two ends in the middle.

I only added about a thousand words to my Fantasy novel last month. I want to write it, but since it’s the furthest project from done, it’s lowest priority. I’m still picking at it.

For other projects, I’m keeping my promise of outlining, plotting and researching and not writing until I have a much better idea of what I’ll be writing. My goals is that when I finish one of my current projects and move on the next, the next project goes a lot quicker.

September Goals
  • Book 3: Finish Last Act, work out bridges between beginning and end.
  • Lightstar: Get book to Beta Readers
  • Fantasy: Add 5,000 words.
  • Other Projects: Keep outlining and planning

Movies and TV Shows

I watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I enjoyed it. It was a fun movie, with a lot of action sequences and a villain that I really liked. Plus, it ended each character’s story at a place where they could or could not come back to the MCU.

I finished the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This season had several episodes I really enjoyed, including the crossover with Lower Decks and the musical episode. There were a few I’m okay not seeing again, but every season had those. Overall, I liked it and I look forward to a third season.

I started Ahoska, and at the time of this post I’ve seen the first three episodes. I’m not sure what to think yet. It has a lot of cool sequences, and so far it’s done a good job of honoring the characters its brought in from previous shows. But so far it is a lot of build up, and I don’t know the payoff yet. I’m optimistic (look at how Andor finished) but I’ve been burned before (look at Boba Fett).

September Goals
  • Watch two new movies
  • Cross two shows off my list

Books

I finished The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes eBook I’d been reading. My final impression is the same as I reported last month: it’s a bunch of fun short stories from a time with different storytelling expectations. Some of them I figured out early one, some I didn’t. A lot of them had the ‘gotcha’ endings that bug me. Maybe next time I’ll read a longer book of his and see how it goes.

The next book I read was from the library, called The Siege of Washington by John and Charles Lockwood. This is a history book about Washington, DC, at the start of the Civil War, before volunteers showed up and there was a real fear that southern forces would capture the city. I really, really liked this book. I even added it to my ‘buy this’ list. Why? Well, because it gets into the decision of the first 12 days of the war, and why some of them paid of and why some of them didn’t. I’d almost do a blog post on it but I’ve got enough on my plate right now.

Finally, I read through the Star Wars book Heir to the Empire. The series that introduced Thrawn to the Star Wars universe, it’s part of the old Expanded Universe that was dissolved when Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas. I know Thrawn from some of the newer books Timothy Zahn has written, and from the Rebels show, so now I get to see how he started. All in all it was a good book, with an old-school Star Wars feel that brought me back to some of the EU books I read in middle school. It’s book one of three, so I have more ahead of me.

September Goals
  • Finish one library book
  • Finish one book from my own collection
  • Finish one research book

Games

Working through FarCry6, which I expect to take a while. FarCry games have a huge open-world component to them, with massive towns, mountain ranges, and deep forests to explore. Even focusing on the story only has me running across miles of territory. Plus, I like the fact that it’s in a Hispanic Caribbean island nation. The main character isn’t an American, and the dialogue has a lot of Spanish thrown in.

I think I’m about a halfway through the campaign of Gears of War Tactics. It’s not that I’m not enjoying the game, but I don’t find myself gaming on the computer as much as I used to. Part of the challenge is that you can’t advance the story missions until you fight side missions to level up and equip your characters. So sometimes I spend a night playing through a mission or two, and don’t feel like I’ve done much.

My RPG games are moving along nicely. Caw-Pow, Montague and Morgad are all still alive and kicking. I even got to try out a new system this month, called Traveller. I hadn’t heard of it before, or if I had I don’t recall the conversation. The character creation is fun: you roll stats, and then roll through several years of your life to see how you grow. Do you go to college? What happens there? Do you graduate? Etc. Apparently you can even die in character creation. Good times.

in related news, I might be running a short Cypher system game that’s set in 1st Century CE Gaul. It’s going to have the feel of a superhero campaign in the Roman empire. This will actually be my second time running it; the first time fell apart kind of quickly, so I have some lessons to learn. Then I get to try again.

September Goals
  • Finish Gears of War Tactics
  • Advance FarCry 6
  • Don’t lose a PC

What’s Next?

September is going to be focused on getting one of my two book projects to a readable draft. I think the SciFi novel is closest, but both are within quick distance. So I will hit both of them and see how far I get. My goal of publishing early next year is still well within reason.

Until next post, keep on writing!

-Michael

Monthly Update

November Update

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Man, the monthly change really sneaks up on you. No sooner am I planning the update, then BAM, we’re past the first. Well, I’m only a day late to cover what I managed in both September and October.

Writing

I have been making a lot of good writing milestones the last few weeks. I got past the last big issue with Book 3 and I’m writing through that act. Then I’ll have to keep writing into the next act and start ironing out what doesn’t make sense, and iron it into the act before. I’ll have to take a few passes to make it work, but then I’ll finally have my rough draft. The downside is that even though I’m finally over 100,000 words (yay!), a lot of the work ahead is re-writing, so the word count won’t increase as much.

The SciFi and Fantasy novel re-writes are going well. Each is over 20K and progressing daily. Both are a lot stronger than the rough drafts were. It’s nice to be able to jump between them as I need to.

NANOWRIMO Note: My goal for NANOWRIMO is to add 50K words between the three projects. The Book 3 Re-writing will be a bit odd to count, but I’ll make it work.

Movies and TV

I cannot say I watched a lot of new Movies or TV the last two months, in part because I tried not to turn my TV on a lot over October.

I watched through She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the MCU show on Disney +. I liked the show, especially how the main character kept breaking the fourth wall to share joked with the audience. The misogyny the character experienced was hard to watch, but I don’t think you could tell her story without it. At least the character had a fulfilling arc. I hope to see her in future shows.

Started the Andor show. I’m enjoying it so far, though I’m watching it more for what they’re doing with Mon Motha, the political character, than I am for what they’re doing with Andor. I mean, I like Andor, but I find her arc much more interesting. We’ll see how it turned out.

Books

Read through a five-book young adult series called the Phantasmagoria series, written by a Minnesota author named El Holly. The five books follow five middle schoolers who have to travel to a world of imagination called Phantasmagoria. They go to find balance between the worlds and save both from destruction. They’re books written for a younger audience, so there’s some wackiness in the story and some odd decisions, but it was still a fun series to read through.

I also read through a 40K book called ‘Battle of the Fang’, about the Thousand Sons attack on the Space Wolf homeworld of Fenris. A pretty decent book, as 40K books can go. A lot of cool combat sequences, some fantastic sci-fi, and a bunch of ‘seriously?’ moments. About what I’d expect.

Games

Finished Terran Command and Farcry: Primal. I may go back and finish some of the extras in both, but I don’t have to. I’ve got the stories done and that’s pretty decent. Playing through Epic 40K: Final Liberation, which is a game I played through way back in the 90’s when it first came out. I’m having another experience (like I did with C&C) where I’m playing much more competently now than I did as a child. Very much enjoying the playthrough.

Not much changing on the Role-Playing Game front. My Sunday night ‘Homecoming’ game should be wrapping up soon, so we’ll see if that ends on a high note. Hot Springs Island and Known World are still running great.

What’s Next

Focusing on NANOWRIMO (at least how I’m doing it this year). Got my eye on some conventions and events come the new year, hit 2023 swinging and selling. Keep selling on Fiverr if and when I can. And of course trying to blog more often.

Cheers!

Michael

Monthly Update

March 1st Update

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Well, February was short.

Writing Projects

I added a few thousand words to Book III, but most of the work was outlining the final campaigns and getting a map together to work out how it goes. Some work towards blog posts on various topics.

Movies TV

Surprisingly knocked out five movies and shows off my list, though to be fair the four shows were all one season or less to watch.

Knocked out Girl Meets World, the sequel series to Boy Meets World, which was hugely influential when I was growing up. Also finished Brooklyn Nine-Nine; while that final episode was not great in the annuls of history, it was a very B99 ending to the show. I think it worked.

Saw the movie The Great War of Archimedes, a historical film about the construction of the WW2 battleship Yamato. Though almost entirely fiction, the movie has an impressive scene showing the sinking of the ship and gets into the warmongering politics of pre-war Japan.

I finished off the month by watching the Witcher Season 2 and Space Force Season 2. The Witcher continues to be a fascinating show, set in a world I want to know more about. I expect to check out the books or games soon.

Space Force is amusing but continues to fall short of awesome. It’s such a short show with short seasons it hard to get any development going.

Reading

Read three books in February. Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar, a philosophy book that the Good Place brought up. It was an easier read than most philosophy books, but I probably still missed half of its points.

The other two were both Jane Austin books, Persuasion and Northanger Abby. I still have some trouble focusing past the two-hundred-year difference in writing styles and techniques, but both were good stories to get through. I got through most of Persuasion before I looked the plot up in Wikipedia. Northanger I looked up right away. I’ve concluded if I’m reading something that’s very far out there in terms of style, getting a synopsis ahead of time helps understand what’s going on.

Looking forward to spending some time reading some easy sci-fi or historical fiction, get away from the heavy reading of the last few months.

Gaming

Completed the story for Halo: Infinite. It was okay. It just doesn’t feel like a whole game. The entire story between Halo 5 and now, which I was looking forward to, is gone. The game ends but there’s still more to do. A lot of mysteries were brought up but not completed. What’s going on? Who knows?

(I actually looked this up; the story between games is told through some books and another video game, Halo Wars 2, which is a Real-Time Strategy. So I guess there is a way to learn what happened).

What’s Next

March is dedicated to advancing writing projects. Maybe I can’t finish off a rough draft of Book III or my fantasy novel, but I can get words recorded, complete a few of the Acts. Look into some conventions and whatnot. See if I can get something going.

Monthly Update

December 1st Update

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November was a busy month, with a trip out of state for a family birthday, then a trip back home for Thanksgiving taking up two whole weekends. What free time I have had has been geared towards my upcoming pop-up bookstore (see below for details), but I still managed to get some writing and, just as importantly, some planning done.

Book Projects

I got The Colonel Lieutenant to well over 20,000 words, which is nice. What’s even better is that one of those scenes proved to be a blessing. While writing it, I realized I was going about one of the subplots completely the wrong way. Now, I have a much better idea of how that will play out. My goal is to get a rough draft done by the end of the month. Doable, but a stretch.

Not much work done on Orcfyre or Tales of the Templars, but I’m still picking at them.

Movies and TV

Worked myself to the end of Season 2 of What we do in the Shadows. Still enjoyable, but not bingeable. Saw the first two episodes of Hawkeye with family over Thanksgiving. Looking forward to how that plays out.

Got out to see Dune in the theaters for my birthday. Overall I liked it; they kept to the story but got the feel of the Dune universe. Also saw Shang-Chi when it got to Disney+. A lot to like about that movie, though I could nitpick it if I wanted to.

Reading

Managed to finish an impressive five books over the month, getting me well over my 36 books for the year goal. Now I’m aiming for 45 books.

Knocked out two more books in Philippa Gregory’s Plantagenet and Tudor novels, the Red Queen about Margaret Beaufort and the Kingmaker’s Daughter about Anne Neville. Expect Book Reports on those soon.

Also read through the graphic novel Harlem Hellfighters about the 369th Infantry Regiment in World War 1, an all-black regiment that fought valiantly in the trenches, often to be ignored by the government of their country. Very hard to read as they author and illustrator don’t hold back from the crap those soldiers had to experience.

During my out-of-state trip I read through a Warhammer 40K eBook, Yarick: Imperial Creed. This is a book set about 40 thousand years in the future in a grimdark science fantasy universe, and covers the first campaign of one of the celebrated heroes in that universe. I’d give it 3 of 5; parts of it are pretty enjoyable, but what could have been a book of political intrigue quickly became ‘nope, it’s spiritual corruption’, supported by a cast of copy/paste characters whose names I’ve already forgotten. At least the character came off well.

The fifth book I finished was a re-read; Call to Duty, the first book in the Honorverse prequel series Manticore Ascendant. Set in the sci-fi universe well before the grand battles of the Havenite wars, the characters of this series have to rely on ingenuity instead of technology to solve their problems. I’m rereading the series in anticipation of the fourth book being released early next year.

Gaming

Still working through Horizon: Zero Dawn. Maybe about half-way through the main campaign and a bit into a DLC storyline. Still enjoying the game, though like a Farcry game I’m wondering if it’ll keeps its balance between exploration and story.

In pen-and-paper news, one of my gaming groups is working through an Aliens RPG by Free League Publishing. Set after the events of Alien 3, the game puts your characters in the dystopian future of the Xenomorphs. The game, though, is fascinating as it it built to function much like a movie. Our characters have hidden agendas, there’s the possibility of PvP conflict, and the combat is fast and brutal. It’s a simple system but we’re having a lot of fun playing it.

What’s Next

On December 18th I’m running the 3rd AZ Gallery Pop-Up Bookstore, with nine authors set to display their books. The gallery will be showing their Tiny Artwork, all artwork is less than 10 x 10 inches and $100. It’ll be the first pop-up bookstore since 2019 and I’m excited to run it.

Other than that it’s keep writing and keep reading. Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving and will have a great holiday season. Cheers!

Michael

Monthly Update

November Update

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October was a good month. I figured out the last few big hurdles for my big projects and read a lot. I also completed the Inktober challenge, one drawing a day for 31 days. My drawing is getting better (though it’s not great), but the big thing is comfortable I am with showing some of it off. It kind of reminds me of my writing group preparing me for publishing a book, in that getting used to a small audience prepares you for a bigger one.

Book Projects

The third book the Renaissance Army series (tentatively titled The Colonel Lieutenant) is at just below 20,000 words. The good news is I figured out one of the subplots and worked out the events of the book, the last few hurdles I was dealing with in terms of preparation. A few minor things I’ll have to puzzle out, but I can at least get a lot of writing done.

The big re-write of my first fantasy novel (Orcfyre) is coming along. I wrote the ending chapters of the book earlier this month, because I needed to know what characters I had to introduce and what themes to play up. Maybe it’ll change, but for now I’m working up to it.

As for short stories, I’m still working on a couple. Want to have the first Tales of the Templars collections out next year sometime, so I’m trying to work out what stories to put in. If you’ve read Templar Scholar, feel free to head over to the voting page and chose which ones you’d like.

Movies and TV

Haven’t watched too many new things recently. Still working through What We Do in the Shadows, the vampire comedy show, about an episode every two or three days. I do like it, but I’m well into the second season and I’m wondering if the characters are going to stagnate. Since it keeps getting renewed, I don’t think it’ll be an issue.

Reading

Managed to get through four books in October. Reread Dune in preparation for the new movie. Started a new series, ‘The Plantagenet and Tudor novels’ by Philippa Gregory, a set of historical fiction novels working through the War of the Roses and the following histories. Reading them in chronological order, I got through Lady of the Rivers and The White Queen. Also read through the book 2034, a novel about the next world war and the impact of cyberwarfare on its outcome.

Gaming

Finished off Black Book, a video game set in Russia in the 1870’s. The main character is a witch, but in Slavic mythology that means something different than what we’re used to in western practices. Her quest to gain power to retrieve her dead fiancé delves into eastern mythology, and the company that made the game (a Russian studio) took efforts to help the translation to a western audience. The gameplay itself is pretty good, combat being done as a card game where new levels unlock new combos. There wasn’t a single fight I got into that I couldn’t figure out with what I had on hand.

Started up Horizon: Zero Dawn as the next story game. An adventure game with the same feel as a Farcry game but far sci-fi. I’m maybe a tenth of the way into the game, but it managed to pull a fantastic surprise on me. I don’t want to spoil it, but the introduction game was setting me up for a very different game than the one I found myself playing. It was fantastic.

In the Future

I’ve got a Books and Beer event coming up in December at AZ Gallery, so at least a chunk of November will be set aside to deal with that. No other events planned, but I expect to get into a couple in 2022.