It's Finally Done!

Well, it's official. The second draft is finally complete. For those of you who have been following this from the beginning (or nearly), you can find the last chapter here, and the epilogue here. For those of you who have been waiting for me to finish before starting, you can find the first chapter here.

And now is finally the time for all that constructive feedback I know you have all been dying to give me! If possible, I would appreciate you posting it in the comments section of this blog post, so that I can easily respond and carry on a discussion with anyone willing to help me edit this thing. I know it needs a lot of work: I am already working on cleaning some sections of it up for the next draft, but I think that you should all know that I am getting more serious about publishing it by the day, and for that I really need any editorial help you would be willing to give me. So, if you loved it, let me know. If you hated it, let me know why. And if you think I could do something better or differently, don't be afraid to tell me so. Every good novel has an acknowledgements section after all; no one does this sort of thing alone. Thanks to all of you who have been hanging on my every word so far. Enjoy!

The Place For Comments

The next chapter of my story is up, and I find I am fast running out of things to say in a separate blog post for each chapter. I had hoped for more feedback on each chapter, but since that is not forthcoming, from now on this will be the place to post any and all comments about the current and future chapters. I hope that people are enjoying the story; don't hesitate to let me know if you are, and really don't hesitate to give me constructive criticism.

http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_eight.html

A New Chapter, and a Few Other Changes

Here is the latest chapter of the story that still has no title:

http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_seven.html

Also, I have reformatted the webpage I was posting the story to, posting every chapter on a separate page, and I have updated the links in previous posts to reflect this. Let me know if this new layout is good, or annoying, or whatever. Enjoy!

Another Chapter is Live!

For those of you who have been waiting with breathless anticipation, I give you... Chapter Six!

http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_six.html

Chapter Five Is Live

See what I did there?

http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_five.html

And Now For Chapter Four

No big intro this time. Chapter four is up. Enjoy!

http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_four.html

To read the story from the beginning, go here: http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_one.html

Chapter Three Is Up

I don't know how long I will be able to keep up this blistering pace, but chapter three of my story is now up at http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_three.html. You can read the whole story from the beginning at http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_one.html. And, not that I'm begging for comments or anything, but if you are reading this and enjoying it - or not - please drop me a line in the comments section of this post and let me know what you think. Thanks, and enjoy!

Chapter 2 Is Up!

The second chapter of the story with no title is now available for your reading pleasure at http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_two.html. As requested earlier, please leave any comments or constructive criticism in the comments section of this post. I am currently most interested in critiques of my writing style, especially since this chapter moves between the main character's past and present. I have tried to make those transitions seamless yet recognizable, but since I know where they are already, I don't feel that I am a good judge of my own effectiveness at conveying them. Let me know what you think, and enjoy!

As Promised: Something to Read

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, I have taken a brief hiatus from my epic, never-ending story to write a few (relatively) shorter stories. I have finished the rough first draft of the first of these, and am now ready to share it, chapter by chapter, with anyone who is interested in reading it. I hope that everyone who does read it will give me feedback, or at least let me know whether you like it or not. If you wish to leave feedback, please post it as a comment on this blog post.

I make no promises as to the frequency of my posting of each chapter except to say that I will put each one up as soon as it is ready. The first one is available now at http://www.orionstarmedia.com/foreststory/chapter_one.html. The story has no title yet, but I'm sure inspiration for one will come in time. Enjoy!

Sometimes, There Is A Good Excuse

I can't believe my last post on here was over six months ago. I don't think even I've looked at this blog in six months. However, there is a very good reason for that:

As those of you who are actively involved with my life and what I do in my spare time know by now, I have spent the last year and a half working on what is evolving into a truly epic story. I completed a rough draft of that story over a year ago, but decided after doing so that it was not nearly complete, and that the ending was not at all what I wanted it to be, so I decided to start over and just write down everything that came into my head about the characters that I had come up with, their pasts, and what had brought them together, in hopes that something would come together out of it. Whenever I would reach a standstill in one character's story, I would move on to another character and see if I could take them further along the story's timeline than the first. The result is that image above: fourteen journals, all handwritten, detailing the backstories of the five main characters of said unfinished novel. So why am I posting about this now, when the novel is nowhere close to done, much less readable? Partly, it's so I can update and inform everyone about the story's status because I am currently putting it on hiatus in order to work on a new story (see the next blog post for information about that). But mostly, it's so I can brag, because the other day I accomplished something big.

Back in January, when I finally ran out of characters to write about and realized I still had no idea how the story was going to end, I also realized that I now had too much reference material to reasonably carry around with me if I wanted to do my writing anywhere besides my desk at home. I insist on doing all first drafts by hand - I write substantially slower than I type, so it gives me a chance to think through what I am trying to say, makes it easy to glance back over what I've written, and keeps me from getting overly verbose - and I need access to all that information to continue the story, so I decided to transcribe it all into the computer. I have a little netbook that is the perfect size to carry around with me, so I took on the lengthy task of transcribing all of my current work, with minimal edits, into that computer. I finished this project just a few days ago. And the total number of pages I have written, when typed out in ten-point Verdana font, was...467.

467

That's over the course of approximately one year, and the story contained in those pages covers only about a third of the whole story that I want to tell once the book is finished. So now you see why my blogging has been sporadic. Even I was blown away when I realized that that's more than one page of typed text per day. And that was when I realized that this writing thing has become a pretty serious hobby of mine. This story isn't just going to fade away, even though I'm not currently working on it. Ideas will come back to me, and in the meantime new ideas for other stories have come to me, which I have already started working on and plan to share with you here on this blog, starting in my very next post. And, insofar as this hobby has become this important to me, I ask you this: Is it okay for me to call myself a writer now? I always felt that I wouldn't deserve that title until I had something to show others for it, but I think I am more of a writer now than I am a gamer, or a programmer, or an animator, or any of the other titles I have given myself over the years that pertain to my hobbies. And I do have something to show for it. It may not be a manuscript that I am ready for others to read, but that shelf full of notebooks is proof of my dedication to my work, and to finishing what I have started nonetheless. So, I think that I can say now that I'm a writer, which I think is pretty cool.

As a footnote, here is the breakdown of the five separate manuscripts by images of the journals they are in and the number of pages each one was when typed.

Four journals = 109 pages typed

Four journals = 154 pages typed

One journal = 46 pages typed

Three journals = 112 pages typed

Two journals = 46 pages typed

Oh yeah, and one final note to put all this in perspective. The original story I mentioned, the one that started all this? From start to finish, it was only 119 pages long.