So, just a heads up.

I had a very rough time with many things going on that forced me to stop my writing altoghether. Now, I won’t continue it for the time being due to me being in the military and away from any form of privacy and bearable pc access. Logically in 4-5 months I’ll be trasfered somewhere near my home and I will be once again able to write.

The bad thing was the above, the 1 year of service that is mandatory here. The good news is that at least this time has, and will, offer me some time to think about my problems, given me a respite, taken my mind away from any problems and given me new feedback on things that I can use for my writing. Also, due to empty hours on guard-duty I have already expanded my (legible) poem collection, unfortunately I don’t have enough free time right now to upload those.

So, take care.

I’m very sorry for my sudden dissapearence in both my stories and here, but unfortunately things have taken a wrong turn somewhere in my life and I need some time to figure out some… things.

I have so much to do that just now is the first moment that I’ve found free to check my mails and post this sort announcement. Until things get steady again I’m afraid that I’ll have to put everything on hiatus.

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Sorry for the late update but things were a bit ugly here with various stuff popping out of nowhere and my hard drive crash and other -annoying- little details that I won’t bother you with.

I’ve managed to post a new chapter for ‘The soul of Charoden‘ although I think that I’ll have to check it again tomorrow for further proofreading and general editing.

Unfortunately the chapter of ‘What lies unborn‘ has been delayed enough that I’ve reached the next publication date, meaning that in actuality I’ve missed an update altogether… that would be my first one .

Sorry for not publishing chapter 4 and 5 for ‘the soul of charoden’ and adding a new chapter to ‘what lies unborn’ yet but unfortunately my hard drive crashed. Actually it seems that something happened to some windows files and the hard drive can’t be read right now… I’m getting my files recover as I type but some of the ‘not-backup-yet’ files were the edited Charodian chapters as well as about half the chapter X for what lies unborn. So, since I’ll have them pretty soon (the latest on Monday but I’m working on retrieving one of my external hard drives that I’ve lent away and I may have it on Sunday) and I’m too lazy to re-edit or re-write the same stuff, I’ll have to postpone those chapters till Sunday night-Monday noon.

Thanks for understanding.

So many things right now to tell that I don’t know from where to begin…

I guess from the start?

I had a planned update for ‘What lies Unborn’ for today, unfortunately this isn’t going to happen for multiple reasons.

First of all, there were some changes in my work schedule today. The good news is that I’m going to actually work less hours, thus giving me more free time to write, the bad news are that until my program fully adapt to this new schedule I’m kinda in the dark regarding when I will have free time to write in the middle of the week (weekends are free so there is no problem there).

Secondly, I got a really bad review for this place and for What Lies unborn. It didn’t piss me off, on the contrary it made me think. This story has started as an experiment from me, I guess this is obvious from the way it is actually written. I really liked the story and where it was going, but from the lack of responses and the bad review I guess it’s not as ‘nice’ as I thought. So, instead of focusing solely on this story I have decided to start again ‘Crescendo’.

But the reason is not only so that I would have something else except What lies Unborn. Crescendo is a ‘normal’ fantasy story, no experimentation, no weird tenses, no weird format. I want to believe that I improve as I write, so this will give me an opportunity to strengthen my writing enough to succeed at what I tried to achieve in ‘What lies Unborn’ at the first place.

On to other matters. There was a massive wipe here. ‘Without a word’ got deleted and so did the ‘removed’ stories. The first one was due to the quality. It was severely lacking, it was a short story of ~1000 words that didn’t manage to communicate what it was about. The ‘removed’ stories got the boot because they had to. I’ve decided to let in this blog only the short stories that I really think that are good so as not to blemish the general appearance of this place.

If you noticed above, I said short stories. Yes, serials and longer novels are cumbersome with pages. I was told that after I had almost half their chapters in pages already. When I started this blog I knew nothing of blogging, I knew nothing of rss, I knew nothing of accessibility, and the main reason I wrote what I wrote was just for the act of it, never expecting traffic. Now that I know that posts are better, I thought about trying that. In order to have each story in a more ’suitable’ background, I decided to start each one of them in separate blogs. The truth is that I was already doing that for ‘What lies unborn’ and I was pleased with the outcome. So, now that I start anew Crescendo I decided to do so again.

What was really tiring though was the editing of 3 blogs, 1 for the pages here, 1 for the blog itself, 1 for my backup. So to avoid that, and to avoid duplicate material, I’m removing the pages from here.

Now that I remembered… Crescendo is no longer called as such, but ‘Soul of Charoden’

If you had been to the main crescendo page those last three days you you have seen a warning by me. It was speaking of grammar errors and slight typos that irritated me and I wanted to have them removed. Today I fixed the first 3 chapters and they are in their new address. Tomorrow, if I find the time I will add the next two chapters, and after that I will update normally. You may wonder why I’ve split the chapters into parts. I want to see if I can manage 3 updates per week if I make them somewhat smaller. We’ll see how this will work on time.

I’m sure there is something tht I’m forgetting here… but I guess that if I remember it on time, I can just edit.

-Phoenix fades into his shroud

As I have told you, I was in a pretty bad mood yesterday. Well, I slept for a good ten hours awakening in a ridiculously late hour and then the day began…

I made three cupboards and one bookcase from scratch, I emptied (alongside my father) a whole storage for a shop, built up shelves on the spot, and re-moved all the stuff in again. A fine way to pass up a Sunday ^^. My hands kinda hurt, my back definitely hurts, and I’m officially beat. Add to that that some few days ago I was helping in a moving in, I can easily say that those days were some of my most physical active this last six months…

But you know what they say about physical activity… it has that unique ability to take everything out of your mind and -plop- into the drain. Whatever troubles were messing with my head yesterday -poof- they are gone. And finally, now, at 8:30 here, I can start on finishing chapter 9 of ‘What lies Unborn’. Thankfully, it will take less than three hours to finish, edit and post it, and this will mean that it will be my 3rd week on the row, that not only I haven’t missed a planned update, but I’ve actually managed to pull off 2 updates per week.

Now, excuse me, I have to actually start writing. I’ll edit this post when I actually post the chapter.

-Phoenix runs back to his Shroud.

Edit: Hah, despite an abrupt stop for dinner, I actually made it. Chapter 9 of What lies unborn delivered at 23:10. It came out quite big too, almost as long as chapter 8, and is starting to ’spice up’ the convenient (well, not so conveniant, but you get me^^) life of the MC. And it’s time for Maria to start to shine in!

A quick thing, if you haven’t noticed it yet, and you’re fans of rss feeds, you can always go HERE to find the whole story in post format.

Enjoy.

So, I came back half a day earlier than I’d expected… Those are the good news, in fact, the only good news…

I can’t say I had fun, and well… everything was a disaster. To top this off, I’m expected to go there again in Monday. I do have some free time now to finish up the ninth chapter for ‘What lies unborn’ but forgive me I won’t. I’m not in the mood now for writing. Of course, since I will be missing in Monday as well, it means that sooner or later in this weekend I’ll have to finish it off. But as I have elevated procrastination to new heights, and right now I really, really, don’t feel like writing, that means Sunday.

Also I was kinda more despaired than what I’m now on the way back. And since it was a lengthy travel. I found some time to actually write something. It is a poem of a not-so-pleasant memory of mine, but I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy it.

Heart stealer

The day I saw her coming bright,
my heart she stopped, she took my sight.
Her angel wings behind her spread,
beneath them hid a dagger red.

Her eyes, jewels, true sapphire,
my soul they set on fiery fire.
Her perfect smile of pure-white pearls,
stole me away from friends and girls.

I should have know that something’s wrong,
when she unleashed her forked tongue.
And when she washed her hands from blood,
I knew she’d rendered my brain mad.

Like victim old in spider’s trap,
she pinned me hard and flew me up.
Like just another that she loathes,
succubus vile in angel’s clothes.

And as I fell from insane height,
as my senses came to their right,
first time I saw her blood-red blade,
in heart of mine she had it laid…

So… see you tomorrow, with (I hope) a new chapter.

-Phoenix vanishes into his shroud

Yay, here we go again changing subjects!

As always my mind drifted to a new story! And that’s the reason that I didn’t want to post the 1st chapter of the one that I had began some days ago.

I fought and fought with my urges, and finally I had them subdued though. I forced myself to not start a new story, but instead edit one of the removed ones that matched its theme (horror, dark, modern supernatural). So I started the long procedure of editing ‘Lurking shadows’. What I wanted? Less gore, more horror. I ended up cutting the chapters to smaller bits too, making them small and easy to read. So far, the first 5 chapters are ready (what was originally the first 3 chapters). Gore is still there, but far less than before, and I hope that I’ve actually managed to add some more suspense. It’s still not available though. I want to edit the whole thing (that is about two times more of what I’ve edited, but what remains is the actual ‘hard’ part to edit) because I’m afraid that I just won’t get it exactly right.

Of course, since I so totally hate editing, that was as far as I could go for the day (or for the week as far as I’m concerned). And started doing something else:

I started working on chapter 9 of ‘What lies unborn’. As I’ve explained, this Friday and Saturday I will be missing and (due to some things that I don’t fully understand) I’ll have to help my brother move to a new house not today as I thought, but tomorrow. This means that the weekend update will not be ready by Saturday as usual, but I think that I’m still in my mark to deliver it on Sunday afternoon. I’m halfway done with it anyways, so that means just one to two more hours of work (including the editing) to finish it. So, see you on Sunday.

-Phoenix backtracks to his shroud

Chapter VIII, bonus chapter for the week (since I’m still trying to see if I can handle two steady chapters per week) is ready and posted.

Finally, we get to see some action in this one, and some ass-kicking-Liz.

Also our poor MC finally has some crazed antagonists on the loose.

The good news is that this chapter is pretty big, enough I hope to satisfy your curiosity until the weekend.

The bad news are that, starting tomorrow, I’m helping my brother move to his new house, and immidiatly after that, I’m leaving town till Saturday night.

I’ll try to write the weekend chapter sometime before Thursday  night that I’m leaving, so that I can post it on Sunday morning. If this plan fails due to the moving, then I’ll try to write it on Sunday… if even this fails, then I guess I’ll have to hang myself to post the weekend chapter at Monday.

p.s. Also Chapter I of my new story is ready and edited too, but I will withhold it. The reason for this being that a)to not clatter the site with unfinished stories that won’t continue anytime soon, b)to see if the mood to continue it at all comes over me again, and c)since it is something different (as I’ve told you yesterday) I’m still not quite sure if I like it…

-Phoenix retreats back to his shroud

In between a canceled rp session and some beers, I managed to find some free time. I decided to dedicate it to writing, but since I’ve already written about 1+ 1/2 chapter of what lies unborn yesterday I wanted to occupy myself with something different.

So, I started an idea that lingered in my mind for a while now. I’ve written already the first chapter, but it is a style that I’ve never tried before, lighter and more ‘traditional’, and so I will give myself some more time to edit it before I post it.

To add to this, I re-looked a bit ‘What lies Unborn‘. It seems that many readers have slowly stepped away the moment they saw the format of the first paragraph… As I writer, I cannot understand this completely. That is because I know what will happen, and I know why it is formatted this way. But I think, that I can sympathize with a first time reader that stumbles upon such random sentences that are supposed to be the beginning of a novel. And thus, I’ve added a small prologue, maybe 1-2 paragraphs of normalized text to ease the mind of the reader and prepare him for what is to follow.

I would greatly love to hear some input of what you think about those paragraphs since it is a major edit on my part (it basically changed the format of the beginning).

-Phoenix steps back to his shroud