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

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.

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.

I've heard reading be described as "Theater for the Mind" or "Movies of the Imagination". As a writer, this is true as well. What I find myself most often doing when writing a story is watching it in my mind and trying my best to document what I see.

If you happen to be a writer and are looking to strengthen your ability to write what you see I have this suggestion for you. Watch a movie in the genre you are writing for or that you like enough to hold your attention span. Then from start to finish, watch it scene by scene and on a piece of paper or on a laptop, write down and describe as much as you can for each scene. The characters, the props, the tone of the scene and location. Try to see if you can determine the character's motives. As an added bonus, try doing this without pausing or rewinding the scene as much as possible. For the shorter version, you can try to just breakdown a scene into notes and see how well you can document what is going on.

The next time you are watching the story unfold within your mind, you should notice an improved ability to capture what you see in greater detail and faster than before. I wish you luck on your writing and remember to never give up.

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!