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Shine Cycle 2016 Review, 2017 Goals

At the beginning of another year, I again pause briefly to take stock of the past year and look forward to the next, specifically looking at how what I accomplished compared to the goals I had set and then setting new ones. I looked at my “miscellaneous” goals on Saturday; today, I’ll look back over how much I accomplished on the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation in the past year, and set new goals.

2016 Goals

First, let’s see how I did compared to the goals I set a year ago for the Shine Cycle.

At the time, I said

Because I forgot to check my “intermediate goals” for 2015 until it was time to check all the goals, I’ve decided against setting “intermediate goals.” However, if I remember I intend to briefly check how I’m doing midway through the year, perhaps in July.

I didn’t remember, so this is the first and only review for 2016.

Outlining

Goal: In my iterative outlining, get at least “super-sequence” or “pre-sequence” outlines for at least six Alternate Universes stories.

For once: Success! Not only six, but all the Alternate Universes stories (except for a few that I have decided to shelve indefinitely because I couldn’t think of a suitable story concept) are at the “pre-sequence” level.

Stretch Goal: Get at least sequence-level outlines for at least two Alternate Universes stories.

This, however, I didn’t get to.

Goal: Decide on point-of-view characters for at least six Alternate Universes stories.

Nor this, at least not “officially.” For most of them I suspect the Quester will be the point-of-view character, but I don’t haven’t given the question enough thought.

Goal: Get at least two of the Game of Life sub-series to at least the sequence level, and at least five more to the super-sequence level.

I don’t remember where things stood at the beginning of 2016, but four of the “Game of Life” stories’ outlines are at the “sequence” level, and all the rest are at the “pre-sequence” level. Success!

Stretch Goal: Get at least five Game of Life stories to at least the sequence level. (Including the two from the previous goal.)

Four, as I said, are there, so I nearly met this “stretch goal.”

Stretch Goal: Get at least one Game of Life story outlined to at least the scene level.

On the other hand, I didn’t get to this point.

Goal: Get at least eight other non-“main-line” planned stories outlined to at least the super-sequence level.
Stretch Goal: Get at least one of those stories outlined to at least the sequence level.

Again, I don’t remember where exactly things stood in January, but at the moment five non-“main-line” stories’ outlines are merely at the pre-sequence level, and two are at the sequence level, and there really aren’t any other stories that are in my file of story outlines as mere concepts. So while I may not have quite hit the target I set, I’m counting this as a success.

Goal: Decide on point-of-view characters for Anarchy and at least the first third of the Reignalmia sub-series
Stretch Goal: Decide on point-of-view characters for all of the Reignalmia series.

Done and done.

Goal: Have at least one “polished” logline.
Stretch Goal: Have at least three “polished” loglines.

With a great deal of help from my friend who writes under the name Aubrey Hansen, I revised and “polished” seven loglines this year. (Thank you!)

Goal: Get at least fifteen planned stories to at least step 2 (the first being the logline) of the “snowflake method”.
Stretch Goal: Get at least twenty planned stories to at least step 2 of the “snowflake method.”

Skimming through the version-control log of my “writing” repository, I count twenty-nine “snowflake step 2” additions in the last year. I haven’t done this for any of the “Alternate Universes” stories yet, but all of “the main line” and the “Game of Life” sub-series have “the snowflake method” at least to step 2.

Stretch Goal: Get to at least step 3 of the “snowflake method” for at least one story.

Done: I finished step 3 for two stories, and may yet finish it for a third before you read this.

Goal: Create précis for at least five planned novels that I don’t already have one for.

More than done: I wrote twenty-two précis this year, and except for the story ideas that I shelved indefinitely because I couldn’t think at all of how to develop them into a plot, every story currently planned for the Shine Cycle now has a précis. (Not all have appeared on this blog yet because I’m posting one a month; they’re scheduled to continue until the last of them has been posted in this coming July.) I am again deeply grateful to Aubrey for her help in developing my ideas from “concept spark” to “something resembling a plot,” and especially in coming up with titles.

Goal: Carefully check at least ten previously-posted précis against subsequent development.

This, on the other hand, I didn’t get to.

Character Development

Goal: Write at least fifteen character biographies or histories.
Stretch Goal: Write at least twenty character biographies or histories.

I wrote nearly seventy character biographies, but only one character history (to my surprise; I thought I had written at least five character histories this year). So a great success here.

Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least five characters.
Stretch Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least ten characters.

I wrote thirty of these.

Worldbuilding

Goal: Answer at least seven questions from the “worldbuilding questions” devised by Patricia Wrede
Stretch Goal: Finish this pass (which leaves some notes like “TODO: answer this in more detail,” but should give at least some answer to every question) through the Wrede questions.

I did finish this pass through the questions.

Actual Prose

Stretch Goal: Get at least halfway (probably about 50,000 words, but assessed using the outline if the story turns out to be significantly shorter than that would indicate) through a draft of one of the (intended-to-be-novel-length) stories I’ve done at least preliminary planning for.

Sigh. I got a couple of hundred words this fall, and no more.

Blogging

Goal: Post at least twelve Shine Cycle-related posts (not including writing status updates, year-end retrospectives, and the like) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least eighteen Shine Cycle-related posts (with the same exclusions) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post (with the same exclusions) to this blog every month.

Even setting aside posts that are already written and scheduled to run in 2017, I posted 23 Shine Cycle-related posts … very nearly two a month.

2017 Goals

Unlike previous years, I am not going to simply move the “interval under consideration” in my task tracker forward. In 2017, I want to focus on one story and get it as close to a “publishable” state as I can within the year. I still intend to work on worldbuilding and character development, but instead of making incremental “plotting” improvements to each story in turn, I want to apply my thought on that to just one story all year.

Outlining

Objective: Finish a complete and detailed outline of my chosen story.

Goal: Choose the story to focus on by the end of January.
Goal: In my iterative outlining, outline that story by scene
Goal: Follow the “snowflake method” to at least Step 7 for that story.

TODO: anything else here?

Character Development

Since I want to keep making at least some progress this year on filling out my character database, but want to spend most of my effort on whichever story I choose, I’m going to simply repeat my goals in this area from last year, but omit the “stretch goals.”

Objective: Have a biography, history, description, and “character logline” or “motivation summary” for every named character.

Goal: Write at least fifteen character biographies or histories.
Goal: Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least five characters.



Worldbuilding

My previously-usual worldbuilding objective, answering the “Wrede worldbuilding questions” for the setting of the Shine Cycle as a whole, is finally (all but) complete. Those answers could use another pass through them, to fix all the items I marked to come back to to add more detail, but that’s not worth making a whole-year goal.

On the other hand, unless I totally reorganize my task tracker again (after the tedious task of reordering the “plotting” tasks to focus on one story at a time), “at the current rate” all of my “worldbuilding” tasks for the next year and more will be planning tasks, making detailed lists of what needs to be done for creating maps and setting up tasks in my task tracker for “fractalling” secondary cultures. None of which really lends itself to a goal here either—though I may decide to schedule the tasks I create for some of those at the front, rather than the back, of the queue, so I’ll still list Objectives for those.

But on the gripping hand, after all those planning tasks come a series of tractable tasks for actual development, which will make a fine “stretch goal.”

Objective: Create sufficiently-complete, sufficiently-detailed, maps of the worlds and areas with which the Shine Cycle is concerned.
Objective: Develop each race and culture that the Shine Cycle is concerned with sufficiently to portray it distinctly and excite potential readers’ interest.

Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the “race fractalling system” for elves.



Actual Prose

Goal: Get at least a quarter of the way through the first draft of the story I decide to focus on this year, or 25,000 words in, whichever comes first.
Stretch Goal: Get at least half-way through the first draft, or 50,000 words in the story I’m focusing on this year.

Blogging

Objective: Regularly post substantive Shine Cycle-related content here, as an incentive to continued progress and to attract interested future readers.

Goal: Post at least twelve Shine Cycle-related posts (not including writing status updates, year-end retrospectives, and the like) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least eighteen Shine Cycle-related posts (with the same exclusions) to this blog.
Stretch Goal: Post at least one Shine Cycle-related post (with the same exclusions) to this blog every month.


Objective: Create blog posts using “worldbuilding” material created using the various “systems” and question sets.

Goal: In the process of transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” to “background essays,” reduce the length of (the temporary copy of) the former by at least half. It currently stands at about 1500 lines and 36,000 words.
Stretch Goal: Finish transferring material from my answers to “the Wrede questions” into “background essays” and schedule the first post using that material to run on this blog.

We’ll see how the year goes. Fellow writers, do you have any plans for the new year? And do any of my readers have any thoughts on which story I should focus on this year?

Filed under: Shine Cycle

Writing status update (#45)

It’s the second day of the Christmas season, but it’s also nearly a month and a half since my last update on my work on the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation](https://shinecycle.wordpress.com/archives/shine-cycle). I got a good bit done, not nearly so much as I would have liked, but I was worried about stalling entirely in December, so I’m at least pleased to have avoided that. For more specifics, let’s look at the goals I had set in mid-November:

Write my by-now-traditional liturgical-year-end blog posts.

Done.

As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, create profiles of all major characters in Space and Time, Third Empire, and The Invasion.

Better than I’d feared, but not quite to this goal. I finished this for Space and Time and Third Empire, and did everything except six of the eight characters’ “paragraph summary” (that character’s thread in the story, condensed to a paragraph, which is the single most time-consuming piece of the profile for each character).

Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least three characters.

Two, I think.

Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.

I think I did a little.

Write at least one character biography.
Write at least one character history.

I didn’t get to either of these.

Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)

Nor to this.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

And, as usual, this fell entirely flat.

On the other hand, I wrote more poetry in the last month than I have in that short a time in years (the “O Antiphons” paraphrases that were my way of marking Advent this year).

I’m in the process of changing my medium-range plans, as will be revealed in more detail in my year-end goal-setting post next week, but I’ll still continue on the previous trajectory in the meantime. So I’ll set much more modest goals, but still along the lines of what I’ve been doing, and change fully over to my new plan at my next report next month. Here are my goals for the next month:

Write year-end review and goal-setting blog posts

As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, finish profiles of all major characters in The Invasion and create them for at least three of the five major characters of The Alliance.

Create at least one character logline or motivation summary.
Write at least one character history.
Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.
Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

I hope that I can finish that much off fairly briefly and turn my writerly attention to my new approach fairly quickly, but we’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#44)

It’s been about a month since my last report on recent development of the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation. The month has not been as productive as I had hoped, but with the time for my usual year-end plans looming it’s time to see how I did this month.

The “piling-on” of “snowflake step 3” continued, and stalled me for longer than I liked because (I eventually realized) Space and Time isn’t really properly planned, in any of the stages I’ve supposedly put it through, as a single story yet. I’ll still finish at least a cursory pass through this stage of its un-split development, but I’ve now added splitting the story up as a heavily-weighted (because while managing my digital notes will take only a few minutes, updating the relevant points in my task tracker will be quite time-consuming) task in my task tracker.

I also realized that Title Unknown is, in my current conception of it, probably not best suited for traditional fiction, but might be better suited for some form of interactive media, whether a tabletop RPG or a computer game of some sort … but that I don’t plan to explore at this point.

Anyway, these were my goals for the month:

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, the last précis.

Done. It’s now scheduled to run in the end of July of next year.

As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, create profiles of all major characters in Title Unknown, Space and Time, Third Empire, and The Invasion.

I got through Title Unknown and most of the way through Space and Time, but no further.

Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least three characters.
Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.
Write at least one character biography.
Write at least one character history.
Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

As I had feared, I got nothing else done on the Shine Cycle this month.

So I’m going to set essentially the same goals, with the “snowflake outlining” section somewhat reduced, for the next month. We’ll see.

Write my by-now-traditional liturgical-year-end blog posts.
As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, create profiles of all major characters in Space and Time , Third Empire , and The Invasion .
Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least three characters.
Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.
Write at least one character biography.
Write at least one character history.
Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

Maybe this month will see more actual progress.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#43)

In the month since my last report on recent development of the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation, I managed to accomplish what felt like a great deal, but I probably didn’t meet my stated goals because I hadn’t estimated the amount of work properly.

The big thing that came up this past month was the first “snowflake step 3,” which is “create a brief character profile for each central character”; when I originally scheduled that, it was as a “to-expand” task “create tasks for doing snowflake step 3 for …” I didn’t create the tasks for the individual steps in my task tracker until after I had posted the list of goals, and as the first story was also the one with the most arguably-central characters, finishing that took (by my admittedly-flawed “points estimates”) more than four-fifths of the completed “effort” for the month. (And a good chunk of the remaining tasks were setting up for the same process for the next two stories on the list.)

So I’m moderately pleased with how the month went for Shine Cycle development, but far less so with my prior planning. Anyway, here’s how I fared with the goals I had set:

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, the last précis.

I didn’t finish this, or even spend more than a few minutes on it, if that.

As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, create profiles of all major characters in Stone of Power, Title Unknown, Space and Time, Third Empire, and The Invasion.

I finished this for Stone of Power, but not any of the others.

Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least three characters.

One.

Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.

Nope.

Write at least one character biography.

Done.

Write at least one character history.

Nope.

Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)

Didn’t do anything on this project.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

None, as usual.

Now, for the next month or so:

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, the last précis.
As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, create profiles of all major characters in Title Unknown , Space and Time , Third Empire , and The Invasion .
Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least three characters.
Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.
Write at least one character biography.
Write at least one character history.
Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

We’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#42)

It’s now been about two months since my last report on recent development of the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation. The lack of an “update” post has been due more to the difficulty of adjusting to a new and busy schedule than a total slump, which more usually explains such an unplanned hiatus, though productivity did slip some.

Here are the goals I had set for the first half (or so) of this period, when I gave my last report at the end of July:

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, précis of at least eight Alternate Universes stories.

In the extended period, I did ten. (Which will appear in this space in due course.) There is only one already-somewhat-developed story left, with two more minimal ideas that I’ll write précis of if I can come up with workable concepts, but file away instead if not.

I should mention that without the help of my friend who writes as Aubrey Hansen in coming up with titles for several of these alternate-history stories, many of the précis would be sitting on my hard drive waiting for titles instead of being already scheduled to appear here in the coming months. Thank you, Aubrey!

Create at least nine character biographies. (As before, if a character’s name comes up and I already have one for that character, I’ll look over it and consider revising, but count that as creation for the purpose of this count.)

In the extended period, I wrote seventeen of these. What’s more, for one of those characters, I already had all the other pieces for his profile written, so I could assemble it and schedule it to run on the blog in a few months.

Write a “character logline” or “motivation summary” for at least three characters.

Seven in the extended period.

Assign POV for all of A Calculated Wager.

Done.

Outline by sequence at least the first quarter of the Reignalmia sub-series.

Done, and beyond to the point I think I would have expected for the extended period: I’m now a little less than half-way through it.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose”: an opening page for the first Reignalmia story would be one idea.

For once, I did write a little “actual prose,” which came to 130 words.

Here’s what I’d like to finish in the next month or so:

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, the last précis.
As part of “snowflake outlining,” following the guidelines for that process, create profiles of all major characters in Stone of Power , Title Unknown , Space and Time , Third Empire , and The Invasion .
Create “character loglines” or “motivation summaries” for at least three characters.
Do at least some outlining of the Reignalmia sub-series.
Write at least one character biography.
Write at least one character history.
Reduce the length of the part of my answers to the “Wrede questions” not yet incorporated into “background essays” (future blog posts) by at least 15%. (It currently stands at just under 1500 lines and about 36,000 words.)
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

We’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#41)

The four weeks since my last report on recent development of the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation have been anything but consistent, but I do have some progress to report.

In addition to exhaustion and ordinary distraction, this past month included my family’s annual trip to the “Non-Electrical Musical Funfest” put on by the Original Dulcimer Players Club in Evart, MI, which disrupted routines, made it impossible for me to work on a few of the tasks on my list, and (as travel so often does) left me more exhausted than before the trip began. But that still left some weeks in which, with God’s help, I managed to be quite productive.

And speaking of those goals, here’s how I did with them:

Create at least six character biographies.

I managed nine.

Check at least four existing précis against more recent development to see if they need to be revised.

Five.

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, précis of at least two Alternate Universes stories.

I didn’t get to this; these tasks are stacked up at the top of my task queue.

Assign POV for at least “Dracon Heights” and the first half of Third Empire.

I assigned POV for all of both “Dracon Heights” and Third Empire.

Create a logline and do “snowflake step 2” for Third Empire.

Done.

Write a “character logline” or “motivation summary” for at least four characters.

Five.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

While I wrote a letter that amassed forty times that many words while I was at Evart, my hope and plan to get some fictional-prose writing done there didn’t come to pass.

Now, for the next four weeks. Here are my goals, calibrated from what my task tracker thinks I’ll get to so as to ensure I don’t fall too far behind the pace I’ve managed to set recently:

Create, and schedule to run on this blog, précis of at least eight Alternate Universes stories.
Create at least nine character biographies. (As before, if a character’s name comes up and I already have one for that character, I’ll look over it and consider revising, but count that as creation for the purpose of this count.)
Write a “character logline” or “motivation summary” for at least three characters.
Assign POV for all of A Calculated Wager .
Outline by sequence at least the first quarter of the Reignalmia sub-series.
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose”: an opening page for the first Reignalmia story would be one idea.

We’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#40)

It’s again been four weeks since my last report on recent development of [the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation). And I’m pleased to be able to report that the trend of continued steady progress continues.

Here’s how what I accomplished compared to my goals for the period:

Create at least four “character loglines” or “motivation summaries.”

I did five. And I also wrote eight (paragraph-length, as usual) character biographies.

Do “snowflake step 2” for four planned novels.

I met this, and I had thought there aren’t any more at that stage except for stories planned for the Alternate Universes sub-series for which I only came up with concepts a few months or so ago. (In looking over the next weeks’ tasks I have discovered I was mistaken.)

Decide how to divide “snowflake step 3” into discrete tasks.

Done, and I set up such tasks (“fairly soon” in the task tracker, instead of at the bottom of the queue) for three planned novels.

Assign point-of-view characters for at least four-fifths of New Ground

Done. I assigned POV for the entirety of the Reignalmia sub-series, the “Creatures stories”, and New Ground, and also Castle Commander.

Check at least four existing précis against more recent development to see if they need to be revised.

Nine. With one exception, or perhaps two, they do need revision, but I’m putting that off to coincide with the next time I’m immersed in the stories in question.

Investigate points about “The Adventure of the Royal Wedding” raised by a reader years ago that have been sitting at the top of my task list (essentially) since.

I didn’t get to this.

Make and at least begin to implement a decision about at least two of the ideas sitting in my files unconnected with the Shine Cycle series outline.

Done. I decided to put both of the ideas “up for adoption”; my post about the first idea ran on Saturday, and the other will follow in due course.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

I didn’t get to this either.

Now, for my goals for the next month or so.

Create at least six character biographies.
Check at least four existing précis against more recent development to see if they need to be revised.
Create, and schedule to run on this blog, of at least two Alternate Universes stories.
Assign POV for at least “Dracon Heights” and the first half of Third Empire .
Create a logline and do “snowflake step 2” for Third Empire.
Write a “character logline” or “motivation summary” for at least four characters.
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

As ever, we’ll see.

Filed under: Status updates

Writing status update (#39)

While it’s still the same month, it’s been four weeks since I last described recent progress developing developing the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation, so it’s time for another report.

Let’s look at my stated goals for the period:

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).

Success! In fact, I think that I need to make sure that my progress continues at a rate that is (closer to) sustainable in the long term. Non-Shine-Cycle priorities suffered this month.

Write at least five character biographies.

Nine.

Create at least one “character logline” or “motivation summary.”

Eight.

Do “snowflake step 2” for two planned novels.

Seven.

Outline five planned novels to at least the pre-sequence level.

I more than matched my goal, but exactly how many “planned novels” I did this for depends on how one counts them. If “the Creatures stories” and the “Dratted Campaign” stories each count as one, then I did nine, but the former was set up in the task tracker as if it were three novels, and the latter as if it were four.

I also made POV assignments for [Anarchy](

Create a logline for New Ground.

Done.

Check at least three existing précis against more recent development to see if they need to be revised.

Six … but in each case I merely made a note to actually do the revision of the précis after I finish its next stage of outlining instead of doing the revision now.

Answer at least three of the remaining “Wrede questions.”

Done. Except for a few that I’ve explicitly put off until I have a good enough map, all of the questions now have some sort of answer. (Many of them are still marked as needing further development of some sort, but they have enough that I’m satisfied for the moment.) That was about five or six, if I remember correctly. The next step is to condense, and reorganize, the information elicited by the questions into blog posts.

Investigate points about “The Adventure of the Royal Wedding” raised by a reader years ago that have been sitting at the top of my task list (essentially) since.

This, I didn’t get to. Perhaps I need to break it up into smaller tasks. Or perhaps I’ll just make the time for it in some future month.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

I failed to do this. As usual.

And again (both for an additional month, and having delivered them in private already), I am grateful to my friend who writes as Aubrey Hansen for her encouragement, prodding, and help.

Now, for some goals for the next few weeks.

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).

-Write at least two worldbuilding blog posts based on material elicited by the Wrede worldbuilding questions.
Write at least four character biographies.

(I’m now reaching tasks that say “check, revise, or finish biography of X”; I’ll count determining that a biography needs no revision at the moment as “writing” for this purpose.)

Create at least four “character loglines” or “motivation summaries.”
Do “snowflake step 2” for four planned novels.
Decide how to divide “snowflake step 3” into discrete tasks.
Assign point-of-view characters for at least four-fifths of New Ground
Check at least four existing précis against more recent development to see if they need to be revised.
Investigate points about “The Adventure of the Royal Wedding” raised by a reader years ago that have been sitting at the top of my task list (essentially) since.
Make and at least begin to implement a decision about at least two of the ideas sitting in my files unconnected with the Shine Cycle series outline.

(By “make a decision” I mean decide whether to use the idea myself, pass it on to someone else to use, or simply discard it. By “at least begin to implement” I mean that if I decide to use it myself, set up the tasks in my task tracker for further developing the story and add it to my series-outline file; if I decide to pass it on to another writer, add it to a list of ideas to post somewhere; and if I decide to get just discard it, then delete it.)

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

We’ll see how the month goes. Do you have any thoughts?

Filed under: Status updates

Shine Cycle Character Profile: Angela of Glasscoast

This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.

Angela – Princess-duchess of Glasscoast, mage, and Visiting Scholar. One of the Shine and Wild Empire’s most notable experts on emergency, Power-enhanced, and military engineering.

Angela is a slender, striking woman of medium height with straight light brown hair flowing past her shoulders. She prefers simple, comfortable yet functional robes, usually in gray or dark blue. A delicate but sturdy pair of spectacles rests unobtrusively on her nose, a pen is often placed carefully behind one ear, and she carries a surprisingly heavy bag of books, blueprints, and other papers, usually slung over one shoulder.

In the engineering community, the College of Mages, her demesne of Glasscoast, and the House of Peers, Angela is known as a diligent but charming and good-humored colleague or leader. Her close friends know her tendency toward overwork, and have helped her develop and maintain a less hectic and more healthy schedule and lifestyle. As duchess, she spends about half of each year in Glasscoast, a quarter in the capital, and a quarter visiting other districts to promote trade and defense improvements and learn about possible innovations.

Soon after her arrival, Angela learned that there were some significant differences in the practice of engineering between the world of her birth and the world in which she now found herself, even beyond the differences in local codes she had expected, and enrolled in the Academy at the next opportunity to study engineering as practiced in the Empire.

Her tendency to study to distraction rapidly pushed her ahead of her classmates, because of the Academy’s system of per-student pacing, but also interacted badly with her developing latent (but strong) metaphysical talent, bringing her to a minor breakdown. Her healer prescribed a week of complete bed rest and at least a month’s vacation, which she took in the seaside district of Glasscoast, in the Electrian Kingdom. While there she noted many untapped possibilities in its geography, but also the sad state of its maritime defenses.

On her return to the capital, she transferred to the College of Mages to learn to get her heretofore-instinctive use of the Power under control. She continued there until she achieved journeyman status, then transferred back to the Academy to finish her engineering studies.

After completing the Academy engineering curriculum and passing a guild examination, Angela returned to Glasscoast, where she put in a bid for a local government contract to improve a section of the port that was in drastic need of repair. When she began preliminary work at the site, it proved to be in even worse shape than anyone had thought, so she quickly designed some structures to prevent them from collapsing entirely before proper repairs could be made, then hired workers and used her own skill in the Power to put the temporary reinforcements in place.

After she and her workers finished the repairs and improvements she had proposed, she established a “consulting engineering practice” in a previously-abandoned building just inside the wall of the Glasscoast citadel, intending to practice her craft in relative obscurity while she learned about the world and about the Glasscoast area in particular.

But after only five years, she became very concerned when she realized that her work had been the only major repair or improvement to the infrastructure or defenses of the district since she first saw it, despite the somewhat-high tariffs and other taxes the district government levied. Discussions with her neighbors and colleagues persuaded her to seek political office, so she stood for and won election to the district council, and immediately began pushing her agenda of trade and defense. Over the course of her first two terms, the council and the contractors it hired made the necessary repairs to bring the district back to its nominal strength and its infrastructure up to the standard of the neighboring districts.

Even with those improvements, trade did not seem to significantly improve. And with the recent rapid advances in technology, she thought the district’s defenses seemed outdated. So, when the council, led by the mayor, voted against her proposals of further improvements, she stood for the mayoralty and was elected to the post. Her proposals for more ambitious defense and infrastructure improvements were passed the day she took office, and the construction was completed only a few months before the war began.

When the news of the invasion of Held arrived, Angela began the construction of two warships, one fairly large and the other much smaller. She prepared the designs herself, to include the most recent innovations she had read about in trade magazines, but consulted with the district’s shipwrights before hiring them to build the ships. And while she easily convinced the district council to make the district treasury bear most of the cost, she ordered that construction begin before she had secured public funding, since her firm could (if not easily) bear the cost and she felt the ships might be needed.

As it happened, the ships saw very little action in that war. They drove off a couple of small raiding parties, and saw a Dragon capital ship in the distance once, but otherwise lived in the ever-expectant tedium the district’s veterans said they longed for.

After the war, when she was re-elected mayor for the third time (her fourth term in all), Parliament voted to make the position permanent, and she was sworn in as Duchess of Glasscoast.

In the years that followed, she traveled to other coastal districts to explain the improvements she had made and continued to make in Glasscoast, to ensure that the Imperial coasts were as well-defended as possible and that trade continued to flow by sea. After a decade, over her objections, the Parliament named her a princess at large.

Filed under: Character Profiles

Writing status update (#38)

It’s again been four weeks since my last report on my progress developing the Shine Cycle, my fantasy series-in-preparation, and the trend of basically-steady production of the background material has continued.

This past month I had fewer categories of things making urgent demands on my time. On the other hand, classwork increased to a climax, so that there was one week in which I got next to nothing done on the Shine Cycle because I had so much classwork to do. (And the word “climax” is also apt because the class ends today.)

Let’s look at my stated goals for the period:

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).

We’ll call this a success. It’s still not regular enough—I wish I had the habit of working at a specific hour every day for a specific amount of time, instead of working intensely one particular day each week and then continuing in the momentum of that—but except for the one week of time-intensive classwork, I’m continuing to maintain a fairly steady week-over-week pace.

Write at least least five character biographies.

Eight. (These are a paragraph or two each, I should mention, the “personality etc.” section of character profiles.)

Do “snowflake step 2” for at least three planned novels.

Five.

Schedule at least three Shine Cycle-related posts that aren’t already scheduled to run.

Four.

Finish outlining The Counter by sequence.

I finished that only a little more than a week after last month’s status update post.

Stretch Goal: Get at least halfway through outlining The Cross by sequence.

Not only did I get at least half-way through, I finished outlining it by sequence.

Answer at least two of the remaining (i.e. having been skipped in my last pass) “Wrede [worldbuilding] questions” (to my satisfaction for now).

This I met, but only just; three such questions came up in the task tracker, but one of them really needs a good map to answer properly, and that is something I’ve put off for much later, so I postponed that Wrede question too.

Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

And here I again have nothing to report.

In addition to this Shine Cycle work, I wrote one new poem (for a friend’s birthday, however, so it will not appear on this blog unless she says I should publish it more publicly), and reviewed Aubrey Hansen’s new novelette.

I hope this trend of a steady but increasing rate of work on the Shine Cycle continues for the next month, but that this doesn’t “take over my life” as I try to transition from classwork to job-searching. Here are the specific goals I’ll lay out for the next weeks, that, God willing, I would like to at least accomplish:

Continue regular work on Shine Cycle development (the prerequisite for any substantial progress at all).
Write at least five character biographies.
Create at least one “character logline” or “motivation summary.”

(One book compellingly argued for developing “character loglines,” and another for summarizing character’s motivations in a particular way that’s not quite the same, but the concepts overlap so much that I’ve conflated them in my task tracker and don’t plan to do both for any given character.)

Do “snowflake step 2” for two planned novels.

(I don’t say “or more” because except for those stories where I’ve only created concepts for them in the last few months, and thus the further-development tasks are scheduled in my task tracker years away, I’ve about reached the end of the “snowflake step 2” tasks.)

Outline five planned novels to at least the pre-sequence level.
Create a logline for New Ground .
Check at least three existing précis against more recent development to see if they need to be revised.

(If I do end up making revisions that are at all significant, I’ll try to remember to link to the posts from my status report.)

Answer at least three of the remaining “Wrede questions.”
Investigate points about “The Adventure of the Royal Wedding” raised by a reader years ago that have been sitting at the top of my task list (essentially) since.
Write at least a hundred words of “actual prose.”

We’ll see how the month goes. Do you have any thoughts?

Filed under: Status updates