How long has it been?

I suck at the whole blogging enterprise. This much is obvious. I haven't posted since February.  SINCE FEBRUARY! And who noticed. Not all that many. I could count them on one hand; and that would me my imaginary hand with no fingers on it (lost to an imaginay combine harvester - oh, God, what a mess; imaginary blood everywhere and bits of imaginary bone stuck in the imaginary gears of the harvester (which is, of couse, itself imaginary), causing said harvester to burst into brightly-hued imaginary flames: I was just lucky to get out of there with my sense of whimsey intact).

I can write that because absoluttely nobody visits this little corner of the web. They just breeze through in their electron-guzzling PCs and their sporty little iThings without so much as slowing down to yell obscenities at this particular rest-stop on the way to somewhere more interesting.

Should that worry me? Aren't I writing this for my self? For my own satisfaction?

Who can tell anymore. Lately I've felt untethered from a lt of important things in my life; work, writing, cooking, friends. Some of this I don't have a whole lot of control over. Other bits I do have a little influence on, but I've been too busy wrestling with the angel that I've forgotten to demand the blessing, forgotten what it was I was going to ask for.

Maybe getting back to writing is how I ask for the blessing. Maybe it's a way to let go of the angel. Maybe everything else can look after itself for a while.

Sometimes life gets in the way...

I know that sounds feeble. The fact is, I haven't written a single word toward the rules-part of my world-book, and am reconsidering whether the best strategy is to link to a specific rules set in the first place (which may put me back to square one).

I haven't been completely idle, though. I've been making some notes on the world, mostly with a pretty dark thread running through. I'm toying with teh idea of doing a separate supplement that I'm calling Gothic Eyliarenn. That sounds like I'm making grand plans for a publishing empire before I've even got the first draft of the foundation book down, but hear me out.

The way I imagined this place was as a gritty-realist fantasy setting (I mean, it doesn't even have real magic or gods). One of my keystone directives was that I wanted to create something like a pseudo-magic setting, more science-based, though the science is rudimentary and dealing with processes barely controlled, let alone understood.  The ideas that I have been developing of late have been more 'horrific' in nature than fits the flavour of the Eyliarenn setting, but they do work within the internal logic of the setting.  I don't want to 'pollute' the basic book with varying visions of Eyliarenn, but rather set out a solid foundation that can be built on by myself and others, and that can stand multiple interpretations (I also have in mind an Epic Eyliarenn supplement - I'm not such a fan of the 'bigger than Ben Hur' style of game, but I know I'm probably in the minority among fantasy gamers on that one).

So I am working, just not so much on what I should be.  More to come soon I hope.

(This post has been simultaneously published on my Eyliarenn project blog.)

Not 30,000

The word count on my book now sits at a little over 27,000 words. a little more than it did just before Christmas. I had a really productive spurt for the two weeks leading up to Christmmas. I had hoped to get it up to 30,000 by New Year's Eve, but it wasn't to be - too many family commitments and a healthy dose of relationship maintnenance. No regrets.

Now I'm settling back into work routines and will be writing like some writing fiend in the evenings in no time.  But tonight it's Trafalgar.