Journaling

I think I'm going to start posting on this blog as a blog. Well, more like a journal, or diary. I first started it with the intention of putting down on paper all my many diatribes, in essay form, but that didn't take as long as I thought it would, and wasn't nearly as interesting as I hoped.

I'm not exactly done with that, but as I haven't posted an essay in about a year, I'm clearly not sticking to it consistently.

One thing I think I'd like to do, is start writing more mundanely, posting daily-ish what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, that sort of thing. From some stuff I've read, it's extremely valuable to have that sort of a record, to look back on years later. I recently went through all my old scribble books, and got sort of that effect.

So, y'know, most of the stuff I'll post up here won't be very interesting. I'll try to include details whenever interesting things happen, for friends and family to keep up, but mostly I'm hoping to track on my major projects, and self-improvement-type goals.

Here's a quick list of the big projects I'm working on now:
Publishing:
Taming Fire was rejected a couple months ago. I'd like to get a new submission sent out before July.

From a personal publishing point of view, I think I'm going to let the NewMyth project die.

Writing:
Sleeping Kings and King Jason's War are both nearly finished, but completely stalled. I hope to get back in gear on SK, at least.

Dan and I are also cooking up a fascinating fantasy series, based on the conventions of old comic books. To my knowledge, we don't have a name for the series yet, but we've done two or three months of prewriting work so far, and I think we'll start on the first pages of the first novel sometime late summer or early fall.

Programming:
Toby suggested reviving our old Magic: The Gathering project as something more manageable, based on a game he'd recently played. I'm excited about this project, too. Around the same time he suggested it, I was reading a series of articles about adding compelling storyline to video games, so I decided to put that in practice, in what could easily have been a story-less game.

I think the story I've come up with is pretty cool. As I was trying to develop a very rudimentary model of the map that would allow for symmetrical gameplay (no matter which starting character you choose), I ended up developing the board game I listed below.

One thing I think is really cool about that: I've always wanted to make up a game for characters within a fantasy story to play (in the same sort of way that we play Chess or Monopoly), that would make sense within the fantasy world's history. Every time I tried, though (and most of the times I've read other writers who tried), it comes off either as way too close to a real-world equivalent, or completely cheesy (or both). So generally I gave up on the idea.

In this case, it makes perfect sense. The game board is based on the real map simplified, and the abstracted gameplay represents a historical challenge that fits within the culture. Woohoo!

Other:
I really want to start teaching/leading a college-level Creative Writing class, modeled after the ones I had, for friends and family. Obviously, it wouldn't be good for any credit, but it seems like I know half a dozen people who really want to start writing, and basically what they need is a good CW class.

I've been making plans for this for the last month, that all revolved around using intended (but not yet implemented) functionality within the NewMyth project. Now, I'm starting to make the decision to cancel the NewMyth project, and I'm not sure what impact that will have on the writing classes. We'll have to see.