Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "adventure"

In the last blog post, you got washed ashore to a mysterious tropical island, unexplored and full of peril.



You are all alone, but you are not safe. Here are some of the things you might encounter here:

Trees
Monkeys
Snakes
Giant apes
Tigers
Mysterious ancient temples where neither apes nor tigers go, but that may also contain traps and angry skeletons
Cursed treasure that makes your teeth fall off
Cannibals and their drums
Cultists and their knives
Pygmies and their spears
Amazon warriors seeking for a new king (and after what you've been through, you might even qualify)
Erupting volcanoes
Dinosaurs
Giant birds
Giant bugs
A swarm of mosquito-sized snakes
Cat-sized worms that eat all your food
A bigass frog
Slugs
Brain slugs
Eels
Electric flying eels
Crabs. With wings.
Jellyfish disguised as trees
Exploding crabs that were actually dead zombie crabs controlled by fungi
Octopi that crawl on dry land
Bloodthirsty penguin swarms
Sea urchins that roll around the beach surface and bury themselves into the sand to wait for prey
Ancient and eldritch divinities, possibly in the shape of an iron giant
Shapeshifting smoke monsters
Locked hatches leading to the depths of the island
Shipwrecks
Ghost pirates
Imperial patrols
Carolean conquistadors
Fishmen
Explorer remnants, cause of death unknown
Bizarre and annoying infections
Bananas. But turns out they're poisonous.
The voices in your head
And Hagley's started up his blasted jig again, even though he can't sing or play the fiddle any more than he ever could... and even though you saw him blown apart by the hull splinters and sink into the ocean in pieces...
The dead haunt you, even in your dreams
You hear the Lords of Chaos laugh at your plight
You've gone a week without so much as a shut-eye, and here come the mists again... the kingdom of the lost is rising
You've run out of Huntvapour, yet you're addicted and crave for more
As you look out to the sea, the trees crawl closer to you behind you - they don't think you know, but you know

On the other hand, if we're sticking with the theme of loneliness and isolation, many of these will probably not work too well. Although the amazons could still work if you've got a bad case of anxiety.

Moments before writing this, I finished writing the first, roughest draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea. It packs a good 126488 words and took me only 43 days to finish, which is easily a new record for me!

The previous holder was probably The Vagrant's Wings: its first draft stood at 140743 words and took 62 days. Rather slower, all in all. Here's hoping I can still keep on breaking the record.

So what happens now?

Well, now I'm going to take a break out of this thing. I've hung it to dry for a month, clearing my head and getting involved in other projects and activities. 15th of November next month, I can return to it with an open mind and rewrite the whole damn thing. By new year I'm hoping to have something to throw at my editor, and then barring sudden cataclysms it should be ready for publish sometime 2019.

I rather like how this one turned out, and it's gotten rather good reception in my test group as well. I hope it will find a bit larger audience. It remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.