I hope I haven’t lost the few visitors I regularly had. I know my absences have been rather long, with very little posted here.

So, quick update on projects. Destiny’s Heir is sitting over 50% completion, but I hit a nasty case of writer’s block that I’ve been struggling with for weeks. I finally did come up with a solution to get past my dilemma, but I got ambushed by Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on sale for $2.49 on Steam. Naturally, it blindsided me when I was doing so well resisting the urge to play X-Com: Enemy Unknown. On top of that, I’ve spent my waking hours in the last three weekends hunting deer with my father.

I really dislike having a day job. It’s really in the way of getting things done.

Fortunately (or not), daylight hours are pretty much not available anymore. I drive to work in the dark and drive home in the dark, with all my daylight expended while I’m in my cell–er, office. The upside is an abundance of hours I can spend in the house when I get home in the evening–hours that I’ve been waiting on KotOR, but which I’m re-devoting to writing.

So here’s the plus side.

I’ve been working on an outline for another story, a tale I’m tentatively calling Thirteen Swords. Don’t worry–the title has virtually nothing to do with the book.

The title is way more interesting.

My current plan is to continue working on Destiny’s Heir. I’ve set a hard deadline for myself of December 31st, so I need to average over a thousand words per day to finish it up, which is virtually nothing. On the side, I need something else to write when I’m struggling with a particular scene or idea, which is what Thirteen Swords should provide for me–an outlet from my outlet.

Thirteen Swords will be posted here on WritingUnderDuress.com. Not just in part, either–I intend to write and post the whole thing right here. Free novel for all!

I don’t have a timeline on when chapters can be expected. I intend to write at least a chapter a week (the average chapter ranging from 2.5-4k words), but I need to get a bit of a buffer built up so my proofreaders can correct all my problems. Believe me, there’s plenty that will need to be fixed.

So, keep checking in, and you should soon be pleasantly (or unpleasantly, depending on which side of the sword you’re on) surprised!

I read an article here, and it got me to thinking on the subject.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/28/aircraft_carriers_in_space?page=0,0

Even someone who doesn’t know me will, after thirty seconds on this site, have a good idea that I’m a huge Star Wars fan. Less immediately obvious is my affection for Battlestar Galactica (the new series). You’d have to know me very well to know that my senior project in college for my English degree was the creation of my own science-fiction universe, a complete 100-page universe bible of sorts.

I do find articles like this a bit amusing–science fiction combat is derided as “unrealistic”, while at the same time, the article’s author admits he has no idea what futuristic combat will look like.

It’s definitely worth reading.

I haven’t been writing much on here because of just how busy my life has been lately.

I was promoted at work several months ago (about the time I was trying to finish writing Siege) to a manager position, which has added quite a bit of stress at work, as well as taking away from my writing time. It was a large raise in pay and has given myself and my wife a degree of financial security we didn’t previously have–security we needed to proceed with some of our plans for life.

Speaking of plans for life, we broke ground on an addition to our house. Me being me, that translates to a whole bunch of manual labor because I dislike hiring someone to do something for me. As of the time I’m writing this, we’ve excavated our front yard, poured new cement walls for the addition, and have been working crazy-busy on getting things in place to ensure we’ll have our new addition closed up by the time winter strikes us. It’s a fast-paced project, and it means most nights I leave work, drive home, and then work on the house until dark.

Needless to say, that hasn’t left a lot of extra time for writing.

After spending some time off the project, I’ve kicked back into gear on Destiny’s Heir. As of right now, the outline I’m working from calls for 20 chapters to the story, four of which have been completed and another four are in varying states of completion. I’ve committed myself back to the writing schedule I used for the first half of Siege, trying to advance the story a thousand words per day. Will I stick to that? I’m trying, but we’ll see what happens as the house project transitions from the cement stage to the framing stage.

Nope, I haven’t forgotten about writing, and I haven’t forgotten about this site. I still need to finish editing The Nalera Conflict so I can post it here and feed the angry villagers…

I’m not sure how to express my feelings about finishing Siege.

There’s definitely the sensation of the shackle being loosed, the prisoner going free. Don’t misunderstand–I love writing–but Siege sometimes felt like a ball and chain, holding me in place until I finished my sentence. Part of that was due to my angry villagers and their pitchforks, of course; missing a regularly-scheduled post was dangerous for my health! Another large part of it was merely the length–nearly double what I had originally planned for the story.

Another feeling is pride. It’s not the first novel-length piece I’ve written, but the third. However, this time I had committed myself to a writing schedule and saw it through to the end (even if it took longer than I expected). There’s some satisfaction to be found in completing a story this long–after all, not many would commit to such a foolhardy endeavor.

And there’s always some melancholy. Siege represents, in many ways, the years I spent playing Star Wars Galaxies and a handful of the friendships I developed during that time. I may have been the one hammering the keys, but this story is as much theirs as it is mine. I didn’t solely develop the relationships that were written here. I didn’t come up with each character and develop their quirks, strengths, and flaws. Well, for many of them I did, but for some I did not.

With Siege finally complete, the question then becomes:

What next?

Well, there’s several projects currently cooking that I want to proceed with.

First, and arguably most importantly, I’m working on a new, stand-alone story entitled Destiny’s Heir. It’s in many ways a traditional fantasy novel (with my own twists on it, of course) that I plan to pursue publication with. As a story, it’s more tightly plotted and controlled than my Star Wars stories have been, including a more careful outline and better-developed characters. It has all the classic elements of fantasy: swords, magic, intrigues, mystery, romance, and mystery. (*gag*) No, really, it’s not nearly as boring as I’m making it out to be. At least, I hope not! Anyway, it’s currently about one-quarter written.

And it will not be posted here.

I’m currently in the process of editing two other stories about Halyn: X-Wing: The Nallera Conflict and X-Wing: Arms Race. Combined, they’re about 150k words long and were written during my years in college. When I’m finished editing, they’ll be posted here as well; I hope to start posting chapters of The Nallera Conflict within a week or two.

After that?

I’ve got several other old half-completed stories that need some completion, including X-Wing: Cadet, which stars Allanna Saret as a new recruit in the Rebel Alliance training to become a fighter pilot. These, too, are on my short-list of one-off writing projects that I would like to complete and post. There’s at least two more X-Wing stories I also need to write; X-Wing: The Talus Crucible which was outlined and briefly started but never followed up on, detailing Halyn’s captivity at the hands of an Imperial inquisitor during the Galactic Civil War, and X-Wing: Rara Avis, which would revolve around Halyn’s time as the head of the flight academy on Rori–which was when Kelta Rose first entered the picture.

You know, for someone who claims he’s done writing about Star Wars, I’ve definitely got a certain theme going with the stories I need to finish. I may be just a tad self-delusional.

Keep checking in–I promise more stories will be posted.

For those of you who are regular readers, you’ve probably noticed a string of days with no posts. For those of you who aren’t regular readers, these are not the posts you’re looking for.

I apologize for missing multiple posts here. I spent last week in Las Vegas (sent by my company, not for personal pleasure) working twelve-hour days, and I’ve still been trying to recover from it. What free time I’ve had has been spent working on the house, as well as sketching out the outline for my next story.

The next story, by the way, will be the first work I’ve written novel-length in entirely my own universe. I’ll (hopefully) be pursuing publication with it while wrapping up Siege and editing/reposting some of my earlier stories.

On a positive note, I found my full draft of X-Wing: Cadet. So I now have several side projects to work on, not to mention my day job, my house project, and day-to-day maintenance.

Someone should pay me full-time salary to write so I can actually get this done!

As an unpublished writer who works full-time with a forty-five minute commute to a mentally challenging job, I have found it difficult at times to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. By “at times”, I of course mean almost every day.

Siege isn’t just my farewell to characters I’ve developed and loved over the years; it is also a training tool. When I started writing Siege, I made the conscious decision to write a thousand words per day on the story. Generally speaking, that meant I would grab a quick bite on my lunch break and spend the rest of the time pounding away on the keyboard. I stuck with it longer than I thought I would—nearly two full months, producing over fifty thousand words of prose which may or may not be any good.

I don’t know how these writing experiments will turn out. I don’t know whether I’ll ever be a published writer. I don’t know if my stories will be read by anyone other than a few visitors to this site.

I do know that, regardless of publication, I need to do this. I do know I have stories to tell that at least a few people will find enjoyable. I do know that if I don’t make the conscious commitment to writing, I won’t ever get it done. I do know that if I set goals and rules for myself, I can produce an amazing amount of work in a not-very-long period of time.

Writing is like anything else worth doing—it requires commitment and investment. I hope you get as much out of my scribblings as I do.

Perhaps the most formative moment of my life was a boast from one of my best friends as a three-year-old: “I’m in preschool and I’m learning to read, so I’m going to be ahead of you in school.”

I couldn’t have that.

Growing up on a ranch, I spent a lot of my youth in solitude, playing by myself or with my older brother. As I began to read–and boy, did I read–my imagination grew by leaps and bounds. With the first stumbling steps learned from my mother, I quickly started devouring everything I could lay my hands upon. I learned to sight-read and my vocabulary expanded quickly as I figured out words from context clues. [pullthis]Years later, when I was “taught” to use context clues in school, I was amazed to find that other people didn’t do it naturally.[/pullthis]

Another formative moment was finding an old typewriter. For a kid with a wild imagination who loved to read, it was the next natural step. I pounded away on that old mechanical clunker with hunt-and-peck; my hands were too small to keyboard more traditionally, especially with the keystroke required for that arm to whip up and smack the page. I turned out pages of typo-ridden pages, and my parents never discouraged me…though in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve had the patience with me that they exhibited.

In the years since then, I’ve had a number of people encourage me to pursue authorship. An English teacher in high school wrote on one of my papers, “I can’t wait to read your first novel.” Friends have asked me to make sure I give them autographed copies of my work. People I don’t know well who have read some of my yarns have compared me favorably with some of my own favorite authors.

Am I that good? I doubt it, but I’m too close to see it even if it is true.

[pullshow]And in spite of all that, it was a pursuit I’d largely abandoned. I graduated college in 2008 and promptly took up a job in IT. Oddly enough, every boss who has hired me since then has said it was my English degree, not my Computer Science degree, that made me stand out from other candidates for jobs. I’ve often found myself asked to create directions, notes, meeting minutes, and so forth, because they find my prose clear and easy to read.

Guess I’ve been doomed from the start.

What are my ultimate goals? Publication, obviously–isn’t that every writer’s dream?

This blog is intended to be a tool for writing. I’ve worked on a variety of projects, and have several going on right now in my free time. The most public is a Star Wars fiction I’ve been writing as a capstone to six years of writing in the Star Wars universe. I’ve actually written two novel-length Star Wars pieces, called The Nallera Conflict and Arms Race. This final piece, Siege, is my farewell to it. It’s time for me to give those characters closure and move on to more professional authorship.

So what follows that?

I’ve spent several years developing some universes to write in. My senior project as an English major was actually the creation of a full fictional universe; it’d be a shame for it to go to waste.