Week of 10 April to 16 April
I did a bad thing this week. Well, maybe not a bad thing; it depends upon your perspective (as most definitions of “bad” probably do – see our post on moral relativism). What was this possibly bad thing, you ask? Instead of working on Verdon’s Tragedy, I worked on a side story, instead.
This side story doesn’t even have a title yet – the document is just saved as Prodigy. It is a story start that I did last year as an exercise in experimenting with magic systems. Specifically, I wanted to try to craft a more “classic” magic system (more Tolkien, less Sanderson). On the hard-soft magic scale, it probably falls somewhere along the lines of Harry Potter‘s magic system, which was another of the inspirations for the exercise, as I wanted to explore the difficulties of writing a semi-soft magic system in which the magic is pervasive in the story and used by viewpoint characters.
For whatever reason, when I went to write this week, that story was what I really wanted to be writing. There is something fun about it, I think, something light, especially compared to Verdon’s Tragedy, which is heavy in multiple senses of the word. So, I scraped together a bit more of a plot, split it up into three “acts,” and sat down to develop it a little further. It might make an appearance on the site at some point in the next couple of months, if I keep wanting to work on that kind of a piece. I expect that it’s finished length would be around thirty thousand words (it’s at about ten thousand right now).
Despite my digression from Verdon’s Tragedy, I did maintain my focus on Blood and Dragons. Aside from a few, finishing touches, I can now say that the first part (it’s a two-part episode, split over May and June) is complete. It clocks in just under fifteen thousand words, which is what I target for these two-part episodes. I think there’s some good stuff in here, but I worry that it might seem a little slow. There was a lot that needed to be set up for the episode as a whole to work. That’s just how two-part episodes go, sometimes.
I’ll hopefully get a good start on part of Blood and Dragons, and get a few thousand words of either Verdon’s Tragedy or Prodigy written. On the site, you can expect a post on Tuesday about the definition of life (following up on our post about habitable zones), and a book review for a biography of Werner Von Braun. Don’t forget to follow the site to stay up to date on happenings here at IGC Publishing. I’ll be back here next week with another weekly writing update.
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