Jon Ray's Blog: The Writer's Tower - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

Last month I completed and published my first novel. It's called "Gorp: Goblin Janitor" and is a fun fantasy novel I wrote during the 2010 NaNoWriMo competition. The book was written in 30 days, while I was working a full-time job in Arizona. I finished the 50k word deadline and had my manuscript, where it sat and await a rewrite and edit that never came until this year (2017). I never mentioned in the book or elsewhere, but all the artwork for the book was created by myself as well.

In 2011, after having written my first novel, I was looking for another self-challenge. That year, I decided to do a fantasy related drawing/art piece every single day of the year and called it "Drawing a Day". It was very hard at times while working 16 hour days at work and having a young child to take care of, but I was able to accomplish this feat giving me 365 original works of art at the end of the year. While, drawing I sometimes took the opportunity to draw up characters and places from my Gorp novel and planned to use these for each chapter in the final book. I was contacted by a French magazine/book publisher and ended up having all of my art published in their magazine "Collections: Volume 3" with an interview as well. In addition to these, there were a few chapters that did not have what I wanted, so I drew these just for the novel right before publishing.

After moving around and spending sometime in Hollywood, I eventually ended up in Sydney, Australia where I currently reside. Having the time to dedicate to my finished manuscript, I worked on the rewrite and edit for the novel, which went much better than I had anticipated. The self-publishing world however was a bit of a hassle trying to navigate. After a step learning curve I was able to get all the pieces put together with a new book cover and convert the paperback version over to eBook. Now begins the long task of selling my book and trying to get it out there for others to read. To date, it's still be less than a month since my book was first published and I've not year sold my initial goal of 10 books, but I have sold a few copies, which gives one hope. Diving into the fantasy world I created for Gorp, ignited my imagination and love for writing again, so I've begun the task of turning Gorp into a series and am currently preparing to write the second book in the series. Being a book author was one of those childhood dreams and today as I sit here typing this from Australia, I feel very accomplished, but still yearn to create fantastical worlds for others to explore through reading.

Gorp: Goblin Janitor

To order the book directly click here.

Today, while researching topics on self-publish promoting, I came across a sub-genre I'd not heard of before "LitRPG", short for Literature Role Playing Game, is a literary genre based on combining all the key components of MMORPGs with science-fiction fantasy novels. Currently, I have a 2nd book in the Gorp series and a new Game Book / Choose Your Own Adventure fantasy series. After reading up on LitRPG and a few samples of works like The Land: Founding and Eden's Gate: The Reborn, I decided to add one more project to my growing love of writing and will now be writing a new Sci-Fi LitRPG series set on Mars in the near future. As I see most of the novels are written in a first-person POV, this will complete my yearn to write in all three perspectives.

If you'd like to learn more about LitRPG this is a good starting point website - www.litrpg.com

When I was a kid there was the Scholastic Book Fair that came to my school's library once each school year. For me it was once of my happiest childhood memories. It also happened to be where per chance I discovered my first Choose Your Own Adventure book. I was amazed the first time I read one, as it felt like I was playing a computer game in my mind. There was a narrative, but I got to make choices that decided the outcome of that narrative. I finished the book, re-read it a few time for different outcomes and couldn't wait to find my next CYOA book. Eventually, I came across the "Wizard, Warrior, & You" series and being a huge fan of fantasy, I took to the series like a fish to water. These books were a bit more evolved into what are called gamebooks, but the center concept of CYOA was still there.

Recently, with the publishing of my first fantasy novel "[Gorp: Goblin Janitor]" the writing bug bit me again. Harking back to my days of youth, the urge to create my own CYOA series is just too great and I feel now is the time to embark on this endeavour. As of this week I have started work on the series which I have titled, "Agrobathe Adventures". Agrobathe is a fantasy world I created years ago and spent some great length in developing. Unfortunately, after a few server and hosting moves, I lost all of the personal Wiki data I used to create and flesh out the world. I do however still have all the maps and a few drawings of the creatures of the world. I also have some of the remnants within my head and like the phoenix, am rebuilding the world of Agrobathe from memory to set as a rich backdrop to my CYOA books.

The first thing I've done is research everything I can get my hands on for writing and designing a CYOA adventure books, surprisingly this is still a somewhat popular genre, but not too many good resource our at there to guide you. Most are geared towards computer game programming or selling a finished product already on the market. However, I did happen to come across a fellow GoodReads author who had some of the best information on writing your own CYOA I've found yet. If you're like me and this is something you'd like to do as well, I highly recommend Karen Woodward's How To Write A Create Your Own Adventure Story. In the coming days, I'll be blogging more about my process in how I came to create this wonder knows as the Choose Your Own Adventure book.

In continuation of my new Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) book series, this week I've tackled the job of world-building and map-making. Agrobathe, is a fantasy world I've been working on for a few years now. Unfortunately, my database backup was corrupted and I lost all the details of my world, but I still have the images, so that is where I'm starting all over again. As, the CYOA books will all take place within the world of Agrobathe, I am building a world foundation before I ever write the first book, however, I have designed the first book and typed out the first few pages, but nothing story wise.

To create the map above, I'm using a CAD program called Campaign Cartographer 3 by ProFantasy. Being a CAD program and having a multimedia background I thought it would easy, but I'm slowly learned that CAD systems are quite different than Photoshop. Other than the slight learning curve, this has been a great program and has some very nifty map-making features.

Work wise, I've traced all the landmass and islands from an older image and added in mountains, forests, lakes, and rivers. With that complete, I'm now in the process of adding towns, castles, roads, and map labels on the map. My writing style may lend itself to having a background in Dungeons & Dragons, where maps were essential to the one running the game. For my CYOA book, I need a world map to root my foundation in the story world. Once I have the world map completed, I'll know of all the major cities, cultures, and landscapes. For my first book I then plan to create another town map for the starting area where the reader starts off. Having a map gives me a better mental picture of the character as they move through time and space within the world. It gives me a strong anchor and also helps with continuity throughout all the books. For me, maps are like storyboards are to a director as they prepare to shoot a film. Once I have the basics of a place to start, I'll flesh out the area more along with my writing. At that point it will be mostly giving all the locations and buildings names and the character who inhabit them. I'm stoked about this series and really can not wait until the map making process is over.

It's been awhile since my last blog, but I've been working on my new fantasy based Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series. I've added more to my over world map and detailed the continent mostly populated by humans as that is where most of my beginning stories will start. As for the book itself, the writing has been very slow, but there is a ton of prep work when creating a new series. I've started a Series Bible, which is a very big and long Word Doc with chapters about my world as well as rules and guidelines I will follow for each of the books for continuity purposes.

One of the most frustrating topics that has alluded me thus far on my quest is how to actually construct a CYOA story. Yes, you write like any novel, you come to a point where the narrative is interactive through reader choice, but what then? No where online have I really found a set of instructions on how to write the stories out. So I'm forced to re-invent the wheel so to say and create my own method. My plan at the moment is write the story out until I come to a reader choice. From there I will create Node numbers for each of the choices (1A, 1B, 1C, 1D...2A, 2B..etc.) Each fork in the story will have a unique number and each choice within that fork will have a letter. I'll then skip down in the document to those choices with a page break between them and continue writing. Each new fork in the story will mean a new number regardless where in the tree it branches. In writing this, it does seem messy, but I will be writing all of this in a separate document and when it comes time to format the actual manuscript for the book, it will be a copy & paste job into all 400 blank entries I have already listed. Once I have a system in place, the next book should run a lot more smoothly and I'm going to need it with for the original 9 books I have planned for this series.

So...I've decided to use this month's NaNoWriMo 2017 to write the 2nd book in my Gorp the Goblin series. Originally, I wrote the first Gorp book back in NaNoWriMo 2010 in 30 days. This year I hope to do the same for book 2, but I will not wait 6 years to sit on it and edit the book. I plan to hopefully have the book edited and published sometime in Dec. 2017 or Jan. 2018. As of this writing tonight, I'm currently 12k words into the story and am trying to reach and pass the 50k word mark. I'm hoping this will be a bit longer book than the first but will have to see what comes of the editing. Sometimes chapters get cut, other times I add in new characters and scenes. So far however I seem to be on track and it warms my heart to know that there are fans of the Gorp series awaiting the next novel.

Last night with 50384 words, I crossed the 2017 NaNoWriMo Winners line by going over the 50k word count. However, "Gorp 2: Dungeon Overlord" is proving to be a much longer novel than the first one "Gorp: Goblin Janitor".

In this continuation of the series, we see a lot more of The Kingdom as it is called, from Hallstorm in the north to the City of Tents in the south. There will also be new and updated maps from the first book. In addition to becoming a series, I'm planning on doing a revision of the first book to format it for easier reading as well as a new book cover. I'll also be updating the few maps that were listed inside.

The 2nd book in the series, which I'm working on at the moment during NaNoWriMo will end up being around 80k words, so I plan to continue writing this novel well into December. Then without skipping a beat, I plan to edit the book and sometime in January or February 2018 will published the novel.

I've enjoyed revisiting and expanding the Gorp universe, but I still have other projects calling to me to pick up the story and finish them as well. Of though will be more short works to be compiled into an Anthology series called "Agrobathe Stories". I'm also looking forward to returning to my Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series "Agrobathe Adventures". 2018 will prove to be a very busy writing year for me and I'm ready!