Life in a Northern Town

My long-time comics-making friend Jane Irwin is currently running a Kickstarter for her graphic novel Clockwork Game. This is the print edition of the webcomic Clockwork Game, meticulously researched and beautifully drawn historical fiction with a slight steampunk vibe, about an 18th-century chess-playing automaton and the contemporary PR circus surrounding it. This is a gorgeous labor of love on Jane's part, and I know that the print editions will be excellent quality, because I know Jane and she's very detail-oriented about that sort of thing! There's an introduction by SF & fantasy author Nisi Shawl. It's well worth taking a look; you can check out the comic online at the above link.

My ~14K-word Torn World story "The Lichenwold Crossing" has finished its run on the Torn World website. The story begins here and is a part of the Empire Explores the North storyline.

I ran across this intriguingly creepy link today in which the author Alan Gardner talks about the real-life ghost story behind one of his novels. I don't think I've ever read any of his novels nor heard of this one, but it was a fascinating story anyway! Sometimes life is truly stranger than fiction ...

This week kicks off my latest (and most ambitious to date) contribution to ellenmillion's Torn World project: The Lichenwold Crossing - Part 1. For the next seven weeks there will be a new installment every Monday. It's about 14,000 words long, in total.

Torn World is a shared world project -- anyone can get involved -- and I have to say that "adopting" a character (actually two of them) changed my perspective on the whole thing in really interesting ways. I'd been contributing in small ways for awhile, because Ellen is a friend; I've been copy-editing stuff and doing little bits of art here and there. Last winter Ellen talked me into adopting Tiren and Anler, who are major players in the "Lichenwold Crossing" story and other parts of the storyline surrounding it. Somehow this eventually snowballed into me actually writing this part of the story arc, since 2/3 of the characters involved are now "mine".

And it was fascinating for me to notice how my perspective on the whole project changed once I had made Tiren and Anler "mine". I got to write Anler's detailed character description (Tiren already had one) and, while some decisions were already made because they were established characters, I got to make decisions about smaller aspects of their appearance and personality and who in the various Torn World villages they were related to.

But it also made me care in a way I hadn't before. I found myself going back and reading all the stories in which Tiren and Anler appear, trying to get a feeling for who they are as people, especially once I started writing the Crossing Lichenwold story. Torn World has two major settings, the North where Tiren & Anler live (an Alaska-like place with small villages who herd snow unicorns), and the South, where there is a major empire and a rather steampunkish vibe. I'd been sort of vaguely, broadly interested in both regions, but picking Tiren & Anler as "my" characters made me suddenly switch my allegiance to the North -- er, not that it's a sporting event or anything*, but I had never really cared that much before, and now suddenly I'm all invested in the North and what happens to it. It's interesting!

*Although it could be. Now I'm amusing myself with the idea that a century or two from now they might have South vs. North sporting events, kind of like the Olympics.

Anyway, I'm glad "The Lichenwold Crossing" is finally going live on the website so that I can share it with people. It's part of a story arc, South Meets North, which like most of the Torn World arcs consists of a number of (more or less) self-contained stories; the rest of the arc can be found at the Empire Explores the North story collection on the Torn World website. And here's the Torn World intro page.

Poetry Fishbowl today at Elizabeth Barrette’s journal. Explanation for how it works at the link.

The shared setting Torn World has just launched a new core storyline in which the cultures of the South and North meet for the first time. The first story is here, and you can follow the South meets North tag on the Torn World Livejournal to keep up on it. This is something I’ve been rather excited about; I really like the Torn World setting (it’s fantastically complex, with a huge amount of material) but it’s difficult to find a good place to jump in, especially as there are few large ongoing storylines — for the most part, Torn World exists in a lot of small vignettes without a core story. This storyline is meant to be a jumping-on point for new readers and a window for exploring the world.

Today’s main creative project (though I’m currently procrastinating, as you can see) is writing a query letter and synopsis of my novel for an agent submission package. As I was browsing through synopsis-writing advice, I stumbled upon this interesting page on developing a novel’s plot by focusing on the main story goal and the complications that follow from that. I’m still trying to find a method of story development that works for me other than the highly inefficient “just start writing” method; I’ll have to try this!

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