Can you spell cacophony?

The Great Empire of The Gristika was formed on its maritime power and for centuries had ruled the oceans. Its polar opposite was The Rozan Empire, created out of a forge of magic and violence. These two great peoples conquered The Known World. Ultimately their rivalry peaked and there was war.

Neither could gain the upper hand. They had such enormous armies that the chance of either making any sort of great advance was minimal. An arms race of sorts developed. Weapons that had never before been seen in the world were used. Explosives of the most violent sort. Flames from the very pits of Hell. Artillery that could attack from vast distances.

While this unending war raged on, the people of the central territories of the Empires barely knew anything was happening. The front would move tens, even hundreds of miles at a time, but always back and forth. The central peoples were untouched. The common man in either Capital wouldn’t even know there was a war on unless the prices for his favourite delicacy increased or if his son was conscripted and sent off to the front.

One hundred and years and more this went on. If the truth was really to be told, the war was off more often than it was on. On the frontiers there would be clashes; some small, some larger. Every few years a great conflict would arise, shifting the front to the advantage of one Empire or the other and then the armies would settle back into their uneasy routine. The war became part of the daily life of the Empires. Something that was just always there. Something to talk about in the market place. A jingoistic rallying point for the leaders. A place to go for the searchers for glory.

Hot on the heels of my second NaNoWriMo win, and thanks to a post from fellow wrimo Natnie, I’m going to have a go at the inagural Project52.

I’ve complained regularly of spending more time fiddling with the theme on this site than I do writing on it. This could be a good way around it. I had already set in mind a goal to do more writing here this year but Project52 seems to be a good idea. It’s concrete (write once a week), there’s community (one of the great things about NaNoWriMo) and hopefully some accountability.

So this year expect a bit more traffic here. It will be no more focused than it normally is. Maybe once I get into the habit of writing more often, I might be able to “brand” the site a bit and maybe focus on one particular topic. But we’ll leave the future for the future.

Another post that spent far too much time in my drafts folder. The original title was “Why did I win this year?”. Sorry ’bout that.

I am speaking of course, of my finally winning at NaNoWriMo. It was my third attempt last year and I think it would be quite a stretch to call my efforts in 2006 and 2007 “attempts” at all!

Creative commons licensed image

So what did I do differently? What made the difference?

Here’s what I reckon (in no particular order):

1. I got started straight away. In previous attempts, I fell behind on day 1. I don’t think I need to explain this further
2. I got involved in the community. My primary community was the “Elsewhere in Australia” regional forum (we have even continued our association at the new Elsewhere Wrimos forum. The Fantasy Genre Longue was just too busy.
3. A bit of competition. Had a month-long word war with my writing buddy Kamu. She got to 50K first, but I was never more that just a good day’s work behind. It kept me motivated.
4. Used my bread maker to keep me up. We eat home-made breadmaker bread at home. I set the bread to cook every night so that it finished at about midnight. Once that is done, I can’t do to bed, otherwise the bread will be soggy in the morning. I have to stay up to get it out. This saved me from quitting early (for the night, not the month) on more than one occasion.
5. Realised I can write 2000 words in a stretch without too much trouble. Once that clicked, I knew that I could do it. Good days could net me 4K or more, but I knew that on any one day I could the minimum required without any trouble
6. Made and kept to a writing quota plan. I set up a spreadsheet table. Calculated how many days I had and how many words I had to write. Each day was given a weighting: either 1 for a normal day, 0 for a day I was not going to write at all or 0.5 for an easy day. It turned out a normal day was 2.5K (see above) and 1250 words for a lighter day and I had planned days off (eg Friday nights). I never fell behind in my total plan (I kept track of that too) though I did have a couple of days where I didn’t quite make my required total for that day. But because I knew where I was (and I had a great day 1, see #1 above) I could do that safely.
7. Almost killed myself in the first week due to lack of sleep (funny how the headaches went away during week 2).
8. Listened to the podcasts. I even got my voice on one episode! I was always looking forward to the next one coming out.
9. Plan. I’m a bit ambivalent about this one. It was good knowing where the story was supposed to go, but I think with all the other positive things that went right this time I might have managed without it. For this year I am tempted to start blank with the Mythic Game Master Emulator. Don’t ask me to explain now, I’ve got a Mythic post in my drafts folder too!
10. Jer’s Novel Writer. To be fair, I used JNW in 2007 and yWriter in 2006 (when I was still a Microsoft slave), so this is not a new thing. But I could not have managed this without the appropriate software.
11. Mini-goals with cheese. What? I set myself little goals through the night. “You can’t have your first coffee until you hit 500″. “No toilet break until you finish another 100″. “You can listen to the podcast once you’ve done 1000″. That sort of thing. The cheese was Blue Castello cheese. My favourite (actually, red is my favourite but no one sells it!) and I couldn’t have any until I had done 2000 words.

Please don’t take this as a how-to-win guide, you can find plenty of those around the place. This is simply a list of some of the things that gelled for me in 2008 and helped me win! Roll on NaNo ’09.

Since November, I have finally read my novel and on reflection is what a lot less pathetic than I first thought. If there are any masochistic readers of derivative fantasy out there who would like a look, just leave a comment to that effect.

I’ve recently been involved in preparing a couple of supplements for Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

Creative Commons licensed image

One of these is all my own work; a selection of pre-generated equipment packs designed to make the already easy character generation even easier. Check it out here: Equipment Packs: A Basic Fantasy Supplement.

The second is a bundle of options for Backgrounds (that is: what your character did before adventuring) and Specialties (what your character does in addition to general class duties). These rules just give a few small changes to what your character can do. Of course, you could (and should) just write all this stuff in your character back-story but this supplement puts a few things in concrete for you.

Note, 99% of the work in this supplement was done by James Roberts, I just took the stuff off the Dragonsfoot workshop forum and formatted it. The publisher (Chris Gonnerman) just decided that was enough to get my name on the credits! Get it here: Backgrounds and Specialties: A Basic Fantasy Supplement.

And while you are there, check out Quick Character Generation: A Basic Fantasy Supplement by Chris Kutalik which does much of what the other two supplements do and more!

It’s been almost three months since I’ve posted. A far cry short of the 15 posts in the month of August last year and even less than the two I managed during NaNoWriMo (when I managed to finish a 52k+ novel as well).

Creative commons licensed image

You know why I haven’t managed anything? It could be that I had nothing useful to say (I’m sure there would be plenty out there who would say that most of my posts were also made when I had nothing useful to say). I could perhaps have been too busy. Having a rest?

No, none of those.

Simply put, every time I do into the admin section, I fiddle. Fiddle with the plugins, the themes, the widgets and whatever else looks interesting. Tweak things to make them look or work better. Generally procrastinate.

From someone who makes a point of saying that presentation is a lot less important than content, this was a bit of nasty revelation. It wasn’t that long ago that I was telling my #2 son off for writing a project with colours and fonts and everything organised as he went (didn’t help that he kept getting grumpy with it when it wouldn’t work like he wanted) instead of worrying about what he wanted to say first.

So I won’t make any promises, but from here on it, I’ll try to post more often than I change the theme!