Many, many things to tell

October 8, 2008 at 4:35 pm (General, novel) (, , , , , , , , , , )

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

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Getting physical

October 5, 2008 at 5:40 pm (General, literature, novel, stories) (, , , , , , , , )

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.

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Failure…

October 4, 2008 at 2:30 pm (Poems) (, , , , , , )

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

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Bonus chapter

September 29, 2008 at 10:07 pm (literature, stories) (, , , , , , , )

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

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A muse and a change

September 28, 2008 at 11:20 pm (stories) (, , , , , )

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

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Saturday’s chapter +extra chapter (because I can!)

September 27, 2008 at 3:10 pm (literature, stories) (, , , , , , )

I’ve told you that if all things went well, I would be able to post a bonus chapter on Friday night. Unfortunately they didn’t go as planned. On the plus side, I was able to scavenge some time late in the night to start writing the sixth chapter, but drowsiness and tiredness caught up with me, and I had to abandon the idea of an update.

But that left me with a ‘half-done’ chapter. So, today, I finished it, AND wrote another one (albeit both of them are not as lengthy as the previous chapter). I tend to separate my chapters according to the material within them, not according to how many words they contain. So, I couldn’t just squeeze them together and call them ‘chapter 6’.

With the finale of chapter seven, I hope that I’ve given you enough feed to know most of the main character’s abilities, but (hopefully) leaving out massive chunks of how and why, just enough for him to keep a veil of mystery around him. The side-characters as well, have gotten their first chapters too (and in case of Sister Maria, even more) and they are starting to shape up a bit. Offering a glimpse of what they can do and what’s their role in the upcoming mayhem. A mayhem that is evident through our protagonist eyes and mind. What and why it is coming… well you’ll have to wait for that!

As always, I hope you’ll enjoy the story, and feel free to leave a comment now and then to give me too hope that they’re people there that actually read this story!

-Phoenix vanishes in his shroud

p.s. here are the links to the chapters for easy reference if you’ve already read the rest of it: Chapter VI, Chapter VII

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Stupid machines…

September 24, 2008 at 11:56 am (General, novel) (, , , , )

Well, I was almost certain that I could scrap some free time between work and setting this new blog in order (I still have one major problem, but for that I’m waiting for an answer from the support) so that I would provide you with an extra chapter on What lies unborn, but unfortunately a grand problem arose in the work that I have to personally deal with.

So, until this situation is resolved I don’t think I will be able to provide you with the extra bit (the normal weekend update will continue of course). I hope that until friday at the most I will be set, and maybe, maybe, have some time to post a new chapter.

My new goal, for mid-October would be to update what lies unborn twice per week, and start a new serial with one update per week too. That will make it about three scheduled updates on my stories weekly, and I honestly don’t think that I could pull out more than that.

My only gripe about the above plan is that both of those stories are in infant stage (at least in the writing department) and I’m not so sure about splitting my time in-between them or focusing only one one of them. The thing is that what lies unborn is more of a web novel, meaning that I have a set plot with beginning, middle and end, while the new project that I want to start is more of a web serial, almost completely character driven and without a definite end. More of like a series of plot hooks that help develop an ongoing story, something that I’ve not tried before and something that I would really want to do…

Oh heck… I think that I’ll stick to the plan and see if it will work out, after all, I can always change the update frequency later on, after I have some set data to work upon.

-Phoenix crawls back in his shroud

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