Ill & Rambling

Sick. Fevered. Living on ice cream and popsicles. Not exactly the ideal state to be writing in. But here I am. I also don't want to just spend five minutes whining about the normal human experience of illness. I guess I'll just ramble a while.

I've been focusing a lot on Council of Dawning lately. The idea from 1994 that continues to propagate in my head and, occasionally, onto a page somewhere. It's gone through so many iterations. It almost feels like it's getting somewhere. At the least, it's much more mature of a story than it was back in high school. The characters are fleshing out, I'm becoming more aware of the impact setting has on story and vice versa.

If there is anything I'd like to see made into a novel one day, it's Dawning. Keeping at my current pace of development, it's even possible that it could be accomplished in my lifetime. Assuming life doesn't keep getting in the way – and I'm including my highly variable mental and energy state in that category. I still don't know what the actual plot is, of course, which I've been told is a key detail that is rather expected in a novel.

Bad books are often described as a series of vaguely related events that start somewhere and then stop somewhere. That certainly applies to my previous attempts at novelizing the Dawning setting. I clearly needed a different approach. For now, I'm focusing on feeling out the characters. What they want, what they can do, how they interact. I'm hoping that will eventually lead them to tell me what their story is.

If nothing else, I'm getting some entertaining, likely non-canon scenes for the Five Minutes project.