I had intended to get caught up with my fiction writing yesterday. Instead I wrote a post about Mr. Bradbury, read a couple of his short stories, and watched several interview/discussions/talks with Mr. Bradbury. I even watched the Dead Alewives Ray Bradbury skit. It’s funny, but insulting. And funny. I love Bradbury, but it’s still funny.

Anyway, so I also went to the Millican’s son’s Lacrosse banquet. That was great fun. My favorite daughter had many practices in the gym where the ceremonies were held. The best comment of the night was about his son: “He shocked us at tryouts”. He was one of two freshmen that made the varsity team. He’s a freakin BEAST on the field.

Even with all that going on yesterday I still got my daily update done along with the post on Mr. Bradbury. There were a lot of great posts yesterday including on from Mark Evanier and Neil Gaiman. If you have time, I don’t have the links. But I’m sure if you do a google search on their name + Ray Bradbury you’ll find them quickly enough.

I got sidetracked. What I mean to say was that even with all that going on and getting my regular job work done, I also managed to squeeze out a few words. Yesterday’s word total was nearly 6000 words. I was a typing fool before the banquet and after the banquet. I’m on a roll right now. I’m about to write a chapter that will turn out more like a short story involving Slick and a job he needs to perform. The good thing is it’ll cause Slick to cross paths with Maus and Willie. Soon the three of them will wind up together, though no because any of them want to be together. It’ll all make sense when you read it 🙂 honest.

It’s nice when I’m writing Maus and Willie. They’re interactions at this point are adversarial which makes for great dialog. Once I introduce Slick to the equation it’ll be even more fun. When we used to play D&D Sean and Cam played Willie and Slick (respectively) and I played Maus. Needless to say I had the gnome, the cart, I hauled around out ‘loot’ and they would do everything they could to make my life a living nightmare. They would often pass notes back and forth to ensure I stayed sufficiently paranoid about what they were plotting and planning. Even though most of those notes consisted of “hi” “Hey” “Think he’s going to go off about this note?” “No, I think we should keep writing notes until he gets upset” “hahaha” they still made me paranoid. Looking back it was a lot of fun gaming with them and Pat, our DM tolerated their antics much to my dismay.

I did not and will not include a lot of things like this in he story. That was part of our D&D gaming and will forever stay there. Instead I will build on the character traits we developed during the game. This is a story using those characters, not a retelling of their adventures. I will not include stats, none of the encounters will be random no matter how they initially come across, and I will never use D&D terms when referring to the characters other than to specify their race. I won’t call Willie and Maus fighters, I won’t call Slick a thief (even though he’s a member of the thieves guild). I won’t call Reeg a paladin. You get the point.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m doing everything I can to make this story my own and not an extension of D&D adventures. I’m having fun with it and will continue to have fun with it. My hope is someday people will read it and also have fun with it. At some point I’ll record and podcast this story as well as release it as an ebook. It’s the first in a series and at this point I’m not sure how long the series will be. I just know Maus and Willie have a lot of story to tell and I hope to tell it all.

At this point my plan is to write the next installment of V&A Shipping after the first book for Of Gnomes and Dwarves. If all goes well, I’ll write the next Astel book after that. There’s still a lot of year left and a lot of words to write. There are also a lot of pictures of ducks I need to download so I can post a daily duck photo. I will get that dock post done one day soon.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!