A Writer’s Writing

The last blog, not including my Contest Wrap-Up post, was my Content Blues blog. I was struggling to produce just about any content. I’ve managed to continue to post videos, although not as often as I have in the past few years. Not only has my video production been affected but my writing has been nearly nonexistent. That, is hopefully changing

This blog is dedicated to talking about my writing, both in and out of the Amtgard sphere. I’ll be talking about two main topics. First I’ll be talking about an exciting project I have lowkey mentioned a few times over the last year. Then I’ll be talking about some struggles with my writing as it relates to Amtgard contests and how that has affects my psyche.

My First Novel

Unknown to many, I completed a rough draft of a novel in 2015. I took the NaNoWriMo challenge which was to finish a novel in one month and to my surprise I succeeded. I managed to write a manuscript that was a little over 50k words. It was barely a novel but it was still a novel. That was nearly 10 years ago

If you’re interested in the story of the novel’s journey, read on. However if you just want to know what’s happening with the novel now, and where to start reading it, skip to the subheading, Now What.

It’s Origin

The inspiration for this novel actually goes back several decades, all the way back to my early high school years. The main characters of the novel were originally three characters that I roleplayed in a RP chatroom dedicated to a flash game called Dragon Court. I spent countless hours of my early teenage years in that chatroom. I even found myself a Canadian girlfriend thanks to the chat.

It’s been so long it’s hard to recall them all but I had many adventures through the years. This lead to some odd, but well developed characters. I was the annoying kid who’s character was handsome, broody, charismatic and of course absurdly powerful. Eventually I had three main characters I played, Klavis, his brother Kamilis and Xecran, their cousin.

Much to the annoyance of my high school nerd friends I tried to embody these characters in various pen and paper RPGs. They got sick of it! When I joined Amtgard I was told in no uncertain terms that if I picked Klavis or Kamilis as my game name I would be murdered.

The Concept

Fast forward some fifteen years and I was trying to decide what I could write a whole freaking novel about. I searched through my box of old writing scraps that I had been keeping since high school and I found several stories about the trio; I knew I had to attempt to write about them again.

Rather than try to repurpose the stories I had roleplayed in the chat, I decided to delve into the character’s backgrounds They were set thousands of years before the time of the roleplay chatroom’s events. I remembered the basics of it. Without much spoilers, the characters grew up in a highly magically developed secret sanctuary realm of elves. The character’s manage to leave the sanctuary and they find they can’t return home.

The concept was a bit more developed than that, but that was the gist of it. I had the personalities of the characters down, their basic skills and specialties were well known to me but the story of their origin was more of an outline than it was a developed narrative.

The Writing

With the concept and characters in hand I sat to writing. The actual process is somewhat of a blur. I spent a lot of time on my laptop, sitting at Starbucks, drinking coffee and pounding keys. It just flowed out of me like no story had before.

While the characters, in terms of D&D, are pretty powerful as written. They are not so when compared to the culture from where they were raised. They are also a lot less powerful than the incarnation of the characters I played in the Dragon Court Chatrooms. I thought, what if I made those annoying over powered characters kids used to always roleplay but give them some depth. So that is what I attempted to do.

The end of the month was just around the corner when I managed to hit the goal of 50k words. I then ended the month by wrapping up the novel and giving it an ending. I was not happy with what I wrote. It was a mess and I knew when I “finished” it I still needed to write a few more scenes to make it more well rounded, but I decided I would leave that to the rewrite.

My First Publishing Attempt

For the next several years I would infrequently come back to the story, I would edit it a little bit here and there, but I mostly just sat on it. While I was ecstatic I could write a novel, even if it was a rough draft, I never really knew what to do with it and it just languished on my hard drive. Then I found Kindle Novella.

Kindle Novella was Amazon’s attempt to create a platform for serialized content. It sounded like it would be a fun way to publish a story and I thought my first novel would be the perfect candidate. I set about doing some serious deep edits within the first few scenes and started posting them.

The whole endeavor failed spectacularly. I only published a few scenes before my editing fell off and I lost the drive to work on the project. I went back to it every few months and managed to publish a few more scenes but it was a failed attempt. Eventually Kindle Novella as a platform died and when I went back to work on it again, there was no point. The platform was only going to exist for another half year and then be shuttered.

My Second Publishing Attempt

When I was lamenting the death of Kindle Novella on Facebook, Puck, a fellow Amtgarder and writer, told me about the website Royal Road. It is a site dedicated to authors who publish their stories in bite sized chunks, usually weekly. I gave it a good lookover and I became excited by the possibilities.

I set to work on editing the novel once again. I’d learned a lot over the last few years and I took my improved editing process and writing skills and began to reprocess the material.

I worked pretty hard in a short amount of time and managed to create several scenes I was happy enough to publish and in December of 2024 I made my first post. I managed to publish weekly all the way till March. It felt great to finally be getting my novel out there. A novel I never thought would see the light of day, but eventually I ran out of steam and I was hit with the big. All progress stopped.

Now What

It’s been five months since I posted on Royal Road, but that is about to change. Over the last few weeks something has changed, I’ve had a few days of intense editing. It started when I had parsed out the magic system for the second novel I’m writing. I had so much fun doing that I thought it might be fun to do the same thing with my first novel.

I got to working on solidifying the magic system for the novel, while doing that I did some worlding for the setting as well. It’s something I hadn’t done much of when I’d worked on the novel previously. I was eager to incorporate some of these new elements so I dived into the story, trying to find an appropriate place to interject some of this new world building I had done.

Fast forward through two long hyper focus days (not back to back, there was a week or two between) and I now find I’m ready to start posting on Royal Road once again. I managed to edit nearly 11k words and I have six weeks of content ready to go as I type out this blog. I’m looking forward to doing more editing over the next several weeks.

The big news is that The Baelath Chronicles are back! If you’d like to read the story so far you can find the first 17 parts, live, on Royal Road. The next part will be published on August 20th.

Amtgard Writing and Me

I had something of a mini existential crisis with my writing recently, at least in terms of Amtgard. This lead to me to creating a new section on my webpage that allows me to post some of the writing I’ve done for Amtgard contests. You can find the few snippets of writing I’ve posted HERE.

The Five Page Limit

It’s very common for the contests in Amtgard there is a limit to five pages. That is fine for some forms of writing, poetry quickly comes to mind, but for a lot of fiction this is severally limiting. That is especially true for my prefeed form of fiction writing.

I think I’m beset able to demonstrate my writing skill in longer forms of writing. Not necessarily novels, I never finished one to my satisfaction, but certainly short stories. While you can write a short story in five pages, most of them are longer than that. It’s a valid art form that, in most cases, you can’t put in front of any A&S judges.

A few weeks ago, when trying to decide what to enter for a contest at Amtgard I once again felt frustrated with the constraints of five pages. I then did what I normally don’t do and posted a rant on Facebook. I of course know that for a normal A&S contest, the five limit is necessary. You can’t expect a judge to read more than that the day of the contest. Honestly, I find most judges can’t even seem to fully read a five page entry in the time allotted to them.

In the end the rant I posted was well engaged and created a genuine conversation. People tried to problem solve the issue and the most common solution was to allow writers to submit there work a few weeks in advance of the contest. This would give the judges the time to properly read the entry. I’ve seen this done a few times but to say it’s uncommon is an understatement.

Contest Despair

Eventually I found something to enter into the aforementioned contest. It was four pages long. Nothing especially great, but a solid piece of writing with, what I thought was an interesting twist. The comments were devastating. All comments were critiques, there was no positive observations of the work. Many of the comments were not about the content but about the form it took, which in at least this case was mostly subjective observations and did not speak to the quality of the work.

I tend to take critiques to heart, I know it’s a personal problem, I probably have some level of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, but I try to manage it, still, it can be emotionally painful. Despite my decent score I felt like giving up putting effort into entering Amtgard contests. This wasn’t the first time I felt that way either.

However, one judge who nod not gotten to write down their comments, pulled me aside and gave me some actionable feedback. It was pretty good feedback too, however I noticed two things that made me question how useful it was. One, his suggestion would have required adding more to the story, likely making it to long to have been entered.

Two, for this specific story it didn’t make to much sense. They admitted they had to read it quickly and had not read it as thoroughly as they would have liked, they had to get to the rest of the entries. Based on their feedback it seemed like they had not caught the whole reveal that would have made their suggestion not really fit the story.

This just highlighted to me that even a 4 page entry seems to be to long for it to be properly read. A rather disheartening realization. The conversation with the judge did make me feel slightly better about the experience though. Still, part of me felt like giving up trying to write for Amtgard. The process was causing to much heartache.

Finding Reassurance

Fast forward a few days and I was looking at some of my old scraps of writing. That’s when I reread something I wrote a few years ago, “The Bitterness“. It’s only a little over a page long, but I think I managed to accurately describe and explore the core feeling the character was experiencing. I found myself feeling particularly proud that I had wrote it.

That story showed to myself that, even if no one else agreed, I knew I was able to write something I thought was good in under five pages. I decided maybe it was to early to give up on writing for the five pages Amtgard contest.

Rereading “The Bitterness” also reminded me I really have no way to share any of the short form writing I submit to Amtgard contests. That is what led me to set aside a place on my webpage where I can post snippets of writing to share.

The Wrap Up

Oh boy, that was one long blog! Let me summarize the key points. Firstly I’m continuing to edit and release my first novel, The Baelath Chronicles, in a serialized form on the website Royal Road. There is already over 25k words of content and over the next two months I’ll be releasing another 11k words worth of writing.

Secondly, I have decided I would like to be able to share the snippets of writing I’ve submitted for Amtgard contests and I have created a new section on the website to allow me to do just that. At the time of the writing of this blog there are only two posts, but there are sure to be more to come. You can check them out HERE.

I won’t lie, entering Amtgard contests have been rough on me lately, despite finding the will to continue this time, I’m not sure if that will always be the case. However, this hasn’t affected my love of writing and the joy that I find in creating a narrative. I will continue to write, even if in the future I don’t directly write to compete in Amtgard.