I'm still alive, promise.

Yes, yes. I'm still here. I know everyone has been dying for a new blog post from me in such a long time.

My last post was over a month ago, and it was a very short post. There wasn't much for me to reflect on RIGHT now about passing the hardest part of Dragonsbane. Really, I've written my favorite part, my least favorite part, the hardest part, and the easiest. I have just a few chapters to finish writing before I more on to my last few fixes. After that, I bang on the door of every agent and publisher with an open query to make them love me like Vader just wanted Palpatine to love him.

All in all, Dragonsbane has become more and more fun now that I have an endgame and a clearer picture. The praises I got from a few peers helped a lot too. I still have no idea if this book is marketable or not. If it come down to it and I have no success, I'll just publish it myself like I did with Rising Seas and Regolith.

On that note, let's transition over to whatever else I've been working on. I reread ADAM and the results are grim. It's not good, and I don't like the way it clashes with the rest of the story line of STW. It doesn't pave the way for advancement like I wanted to do, and it feels more phoned in as opposed to actually fitting in. The drastic shift from fantasy to more sci-fi didn't help much and it left gaping holes that I didn't know what to do with.

I was left wandering where I could patch up the story and bring everyone forward for what I had intended as a fourth entry. That was when inspiration struck handily. At this very moment I am working on a different third entry! And plan to write that during the NaNoWriMo this year. Hopefully.

Maybe.

Anyway, I hope that this little shift also allows me to expand the characters like I wanted better and more fully. Additionally, I would love to continue with some of the same characters well past the fourth entry and give them more to do. We shall see.

In my personal time I'm still working on school. Every day gets me a little closer to that sexy, sexy master's degree and a teaching position. I'm dying waiting for a game to come out. No, really, it might kill me.

Within the confines of this blog, I don't think I've ever mentioned this game or the context of it. So, ok, Square Enix has this series called Dragon Quest. It's one of Japan's 'big three' RPG games alongside the well-known Final Fantasy and lesser-known Shin Megami Tensei. Now, when I was a kid, we had a Hollywood Video store. HV was a rental store like Blockbuster and while they carried a lot of the same products, HV carried more niche games like Dragon Quest, SMT, etc in their rental library. Of course, the reason I bring this up is because I had the privileged of renting Dragon Quest 7 for the Playstation.

The game was a titanic wonder to me as a little kid. It was a TWO DISK GAME. At the time, I never knew such a thing was possible. And yes, I was one of those kids who assumed he could skip part of the game by inserting the second disk.

Starting the game, I had absolutely no clue what to do. It was all new to me, the nubile gamer, at the time. I never got far, and I never saw much beyond the first twenty minutes of the game. Those two facts have spurred me for a long time now trying to find an affordable PS1 copy to play...

That was until the announced the game was being remade for the 3DS. There are three weeks to go for that, and I'll stop yammering on about that now. But yeah, might kill me.

Anyway, I'm digging this once a month schedule for the blog (before some authors insist it takes away from the writing process). See you next month and stay tuned!