The Grim Reaper's Friend

TGRF's Fan Fiction Chronicles - Entry #101

I wanted to write this quick update, because things are stirring and plans are forming. First off though:

Dilmir:
Dilmir 4 is continuing to move along at a decent pace. According to my outline, I'm around 1/4 of the way through, though my guess would be closer to 1/3 through the actual material. Either way, the story is looking to be rather hefty, once again leaning towards the 150 page area. I'm having to rework the outline a bit as I go, because some areas I'm not super happy with from a convenience stand point, but so far everything is working. I'd say a late February/early March release still looks likely.

Writing:
In my last FFC, I wrote down my thoughts about how I've been rushing the development of stories. In summary, I basically haven't been giving story premises enough time to really flesh out, and have instead been going ahead with only parts of the premise, extrapolating...

TGRF's Fan Fiction Chronicles - Entry #100

Welcome to the 100th FFC. I wanted to save this number for something special, perhaps the final FFC before I went to my novels. Alas, it was not to be.

Nothing has changed regarding Dilmir 4. The writing is underway, and I anticipate it being finished somewhere around the 20th. There's some edits I might want to make - particularly to some of the early chapters, but they shouldn't take long.

The reason I wanted to write this FFC is because I've had some thoughts about my writing, and I wanted to get them down before they fled from my mind (which has been known to happen).

For the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to Utgar, my first telling of Utgar's tale, as Utgar 1. Valkyrie, my second version of that tale, I'll refer to as Utgar 2.

Stretching from before HiS, all the way to Utgar 2, my writing was in a major slump. I've written about this before. I had no shortage of...

TGRF's Fan Fiction Chronicles - Entry #99

I've put off writing this update, because honestly there isn't much to tell. However, since we're now into January, it's time for an update on how Dilmir 4 is progressing, and also where I stand with novels and other future writing projects.

Dilmir 4
Dilmir 4 is continuing in the outline phase, which is basically what discovery writers would call 'writing the first draft'. This is something I could potentially do very quickly, probably getting the whole thing done in a week or two.

I'm still not 100% sure why I can't seem to make myself do that, but my working theory is that once the story is more or less designed, I lose interest for going back over it and whacking out miniscule details. Which is about 50% of the outlining phase.

For this reason, progress has been slow. I'm getting around a chapter outlined a day if I'm lucky. Some days go by with no work done at all. I'm trying...

TGRF's Fan Fiction Chronicles - Entry #98

It feels like it's been much longer than just over a month since my last update. This is probably because it feels like it's been a long time since I worked on Dilmir 4. And it feels this way because that is exactly what's been happening. At least until recently.

For most of November, I made barely any progress on Dilmir 4. Several RL things conspired together to take my focus away from the fan fiction, and when I did sit down to work on it, various minor problems with the plot allowed my attention to wander to other things.

I finally forced myself to sit down away from all other distractions, with only what there was of the plot to work on. It wasn't much of a story. When I started work on it, I had a vague idea of how things would end, but not much else. Because I had planned on everything ending with book 3, I now had to invent or extend the arcs of the various side characters, and find ways to...

TGRF's Fan Fiction Chronicles - Entry #97

It's been a bit since my last FFC update. Since then, I've posted Dilmir 3, received input on it, and begun work on the final installment in Dilmir's story, Archmage of Feylund.

So far, the development has progressed quickly, with very few issues. The main development is done, and the core pieces of what needs to happen are in the outline. But predictably, because anything worth reading is going to have problems in the development phase, and because I've set myself up for this without even knowing it, I have now run into DIFFICULTIES.

Not the kind of soul-crushing hope-extinguishing difficulties I normally have when it comes to development, granted, but still difficulties nonetheless. This is because, despite my earlier confidence when posting Dilmir 3 that I could easily handle every character I had created, and weave all of their plots together into a cohesive whole, achieving such a feat is proving...