Benjamin Medrano's Blog, page 55

June 25th Update

This past week went well, despite a rather annoying day where my internet was flaking out and causing my laptop to freeze in mid-sentence. Even with that, as of last night Halls of Power was sitting at just over 103,000 words. While I don’t claim to be certain, I have fairly high confidence of finishing the draft this upcoming week. If not this week, next week pretty much for certain. Incidentally, I’m beginning to wonder if a different name would be more appropriate, but I think I’m going to...

RPG Misadventures: Vampires & the Lich

This was a suggestion from Brian P. in the comments the other week. I play and run Tabletop Roleplaying games, particularly Pathfinder but also including Dungeons & Dragons when I was younger. These are some random stories of the insanity that ensues when players get involved in a game, and how they can screw with your plot with far more regularity than a mere character in a book. I’m going to put one of these up a week until I run out of them. Should take a few weeks, at the least.

The Vampi...

June 18th Update

First and most importantly, Halls of Power is at just over 84,000 words. This is something of a surprise to me, as this past week was a rolling disaster.

I’m not going to go into the details, but the week started with a power outage just as I was going to start writing (I was using a laptop, so I got some writing done, but it distracted me). Things were just weird through the week, and for my wife’s birthday we went out, which was another distraction, though a pleasant one. As if there hadn’t...

My Goals

I think I’ve said it before, but I think it bears reiterating. When I first started writing Ancient Ruins, I had no intention of publishing it. It was a one-off story that I expected to die after 2 pages, no more. When I finally decided to publish it, I was going off conventional wisdom that said I should expect very little success, and thus that I should expect money to pay for my supply of soda at best. Thus, I had very little in the way of goals for writing. I’ve had to think about the sub...

June 11th Update

Despite reviewing the audiobook of Spells of Old last week, I met my goal, giving Halls of Power approximately 67,500 words! If I keep up my current rate, I might, might have the rough draft done by the end of June. Mind, this is the first draft, so don’t expect the final too quickly. I also want to point out that in my mind, the story takes as long as it takes, so this very well may be a shorter book than either Ancient Ruins or Spells of Old, but will very likely be 100,000 words or more.

N...

What to Talk About

So, I’ve been a bit flummoxed about what to talk about lately. With my wife waiting to hear back on a potential job, I don’t dare start commissioning art that I don’t have a specific need for. I don’t want to spoil plotlines for future stories, so I’m keeping my mouth shut there. I don’t want to talk about story ideas that will never see the light of day, so I don’t want to mention those, either. And with Halls of Power about halfway to 2/3rds done (first draft), it’s not close enough to star...

June 4th Update

So, as I put in previous posts, I’m home! Aside from a dust storm in the outskirts of Boise, the trip went well. The dust storm dropped visibility on the interstate to nothing in about a second, and since everyone was doing 80 miles per hour, it apparently caused a three vehicle wreck just a little ways behind us. My wife and I had pulled off the interstate, so we only heard what happened. Still, I hope those injured recover well, as last I heard one man was hospitalized.

Now, as to progress....

Discord

So, I mentioned that I was thinking about setting up a Discord server the other day. I decided to actually do it, so I’m putting up a link to the server below. I will state that this link is only good for a day, so if you want access after that, email me. I’m also not doing voice chat, just text, and am busy on the side listening to the audiobook of Spells of Old, so replies from me will likely have long pauses.

https://discord.gg/c5hXX5

Tools & Discord

I’m taking a brief break from reviewing the audiobook of Spells of Old to update people on some things that’ve been rattling around my brain.

First off, there are two tools I want to bring up. First is the computer program Campaign Cartographer. You may have noticed the map on the Ancient Dreams page, which was made by me, using Campaign Cartographer. If you look on Profantasy’s website, you’ll note that I’m not very good at using CC, but I enjoy it. While not cheap, if you’re the artistic ty...

Home Again

I’m home from PaizoCon! I got crap for writing done while I was up there, but I had a blast in the doing. First, updates.

Shortly after I left, I found out that the audiobook of Spells of Old was ready to review. This was made more difficult because I hadn’t uploaded the edited version of the book to my laptop, and I was busy. Thus, I’m starting the review of it tonight. As the book is 14 hours long, this means that I likely won’t be working on Halls of Power until sometime next week.

Second,...