I may, or may not, have mentioned back in November (probably just on Facebook) that I started play a bit with writing a, more or less, original story. After a few days of writing in November, I fell away from it until this weekend, when I have come back and done some expansion and started moving the story forward, at least a bit.
The original reason I started writing this was because I had an idea for a D&D (or similar) campaign that I couldn’t really run since I lack a current group of people to play with. Instead, I ended up playing out the campaign first in my mind, and then by writing out the story. I returned recently with my interest awakened agin by listening first to the Chronicles of Narnia, and then following on with The Prydain Chronicles, which inspired some of my earliest D&D adventure ideas.
Just now, I had an experience that I’ve heard authors describe that I didn’t expect. While not quite the experience of having the character step up and tell me to do something, I did have a minor character (one I had only introduced in today’s writing) step up and give one of my point of view characters some unexpected advice, and I am thinking that the character may follow it. While it won’t change the basic direction of the story – it will make a big change in the character.
I have been fighting a bit with something else. Since the world I’m using was built to be a D&D world, I ended up with some buit in assumptions about the world and the characters. While I am not breaking some of them since to do so could change the overall story I have planned, there are others that I’d like to break from. In some ways I’m finding that harder to do than I’d have first thought. I also worry that I may be stealing more from other authors than I really want to.
I am not sure if I’m ready for anyone else to see what I’ve written or not. At some point, I will probably want friendly critique. And I may want to even share this publicly.
Now, only in my wildest dreams – and never in my realistic dreams – do I think that I could ever get this published. I’m not even sure I’d be brave enough to submit this to a real publisher. If I ever actually got this finished, and felt that it was safe to do so, I might be tempted to put it out through some publish on demand self-publishing site. I’d be slightly more likely to see about putting it in some friendly e-book format and distributing it for free (or at cost). But, before I even get there I have to finish it.
And I need to be comfortable that I actually haven’t fallen for my usual ability to distill novels down to a paragraph when I actually try to write them out. (OK, that is a bit of an exaggeration).
But, as long as time, energy and inspiration hold out, I’ll keep working on it.
