To the Drawing Board!

Now that I've had a bit of time to rest up after finishing "A Helping Hand", I feel ready to brainstorm some new ideas and maybe bring a few old ones to print.

On the writing front, I plan to read over my short story "The Death of Liberty?" again and possibly make a few adjustments. The idea of self-publishing through Amazon grows more appealing the more I think about it, but I want to do it right. And that's a daunting prospect.

I've recently begun reading Save the Cat!: Writes a Novel in the hopes of using its recommended structure to outline a few ideas I've been toying with. One is a sort of sword-and-sorcery deconstruction of the themes of Robert E. Howard's Conan of Cimmeria stories, while the other would serve as a sequel to "Law, Love, and the Whippoorwill". No clue when I'll get around to actually writing them--I'll need to do a lot of cultural research to get the latter concept right--but I'd still like to have the outlines on hand.



I'll also be diving back into purely recreational writing with the ongoing Dungeon World campaign I'm gamemastering for my little brother. Obviously he's easier to please than my usual audience, but I still want to ensure our adventures are compelling.

During my break, I soaked up a fair bit of entertainment.

We finally finished The Legend of Korra over the weekend; although Season 3 remains my favorite, the themes of Season 4 really resonated with me and I plan on checking out the comics to continue the story.

Colter Wall's cover of "Big Iron" recently caught my attention. He does a great job of singing the song in a way that's both unique and true to the spirit of the original. Having listened to some of his original work, I think he's exactly the kind of artist country music has been missing for a while now.



To keep my mind sharp, I dipped my toe back into Total War: Rome 2 and cranked up the difficulty. I'm trying my hand at a historically accurate campaign, only expanding my territory and progressing technologically at the pace Rome did in real life.

Like I mentioned in writing, I'm currently reading Save the Cat!: Writes a Novel and refreshing myself with Dungeon World's manual.

Life definitely makes it harder to write lately. School ramped up fast, leaving my brother practically drowning complex assignments, so I've spent much of my time acting as a tutor.

Still, we managed to find some downtime to play our first session of Dungeon World in months. Took a little getting used to, but pretty soon we had the party diving into a goblin den to rescue a group of captured children. Things ended on a cliffhanger, and I'm looking forward to continuing the story soon.

Hopefully everybody reading this is well. I'll see y'all next week!