More Talking About My Writing

 I am going to talk about all the writing I am doing lately again. I have lots of story ideas. I have been coming up with stories since I was a kid and I have been trying to make something of a career of it for my adult life with varying results. And I have now lost the thread of where I was going with this paragraph so lets just get to the story stuff.

 

BALLAD OF THE DREADWALKER

The series of short stories I am working on for the Twisted Westerns anthology. I wrote some rough drafts for about half the stories during Novel Quest last November. I was getting ready to show one to my writing group but then I got an idea for a whole new framing device for them. The tales follow the adventures of Seamus of the House of Draeden AKA the Dreadwalker but he is not the one narrating those tales. I thought what if his best friend Mordecai is the narrator in the form of entries from his personal journal and cowboy adventure dime novels he wrote based on the stories Seamus told him. Now I am rewriting them with that framing device in mind so it will take a little longer before they are ready to share for critique.

 

THE BETRAYAL

This dark fantasy revenge story is one I have described as The Count of Monte Cristo meets Berserk by Kentaro Miura. I know the plot of this story. I know all the characters and scenes. I need to work a little more on some of the worldbuilding but I am not worried about that.

The problem with this story has been the first chapter. I have a solid prologue but the opening chapter keeps stumping me. It is not a complicated scene. The mysterious hero arrives in a town in a land that is oppressed by the corrupt lord. The people in the town are not friendly to strangers. The mysterious hero sees an old man and his daughter being harassed by local knights, who are basically just thugs with swords.  Mysterious hero picks a fight and kills two of them but lets the third get away to draw out the corrupt lord.

Its a pretty standard cliche scene you have seen in many stories before but I just can't seem to get it to work in a way that feels right to me. I have considered asking another writer to help me with it because this is a story where I am open to creative collaboration.

 

TALES FROM THE CROWNWORLD

My idea for a science fiction podcast that takes place on an ancient super space station in some far flung part of the universe. I wrote a few episodes but still have not done any recording. I had this idea to have a certain number of episodes ready to go before I tried to put it up anywhere. But I only have a certain number of stories and I wanted to open it up to other creatives to help flesh out the Crownworld and its characters.

 

Those are the main things I have been working on that I can think about now.