Something Nifty This Way Waddles

I’ve been chipping away lately at several aspects of a number of inter-related projects that, collectively, make up one doozy of a major endeavor and I thought it might be fun to update both of you on what those projects are and how they inter-relate. Or something to that effect.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here previously or not, but I’m taking a deep dive in to world building. At the moment I’m building out the world for my Bloodlines novel – 1885 alternate-timeline Victorian London with monsters and magic. It’s called Lunden, and I’m having a glorious time fleshing out my map and deciding which things should be historically accurate, which things totally unique, and which things somewhere in the middle.

This worldbuilding project is happening on World Anvil, and will include a bunch of tools to help other writers write stories in my world, as well as materials for TTRPG players and DMs to run campaigns in good ol’ Lunden. I’ll eventually have stuff for Pathfinder (d20), Open d6, and FATE role-playing systems.

The reason I’m doing all this world-building work is partly to help me with my writing, but also so that I can offer access to it via my Patreon, which I’m currently in the process of setting up. In an ideal world, I’ll get enough financial support from my patrons that I can really focus on writing and other creative things.

In order to promote the Patreon (and my work in general), I’ve also started streaming again (or will have done by the time you read this). I’ll be on Kick and on Twitch, as well as on YouTube live (I think – I haven’t gotten that working yet).

I tried streaming some world building sessions here and there over the past few weeks, but I wasn’t happy with how that worked out. I really need deep concentration for world building in a way that I don’t need as much for writing. When I’m writing I can dip in and out without losing too much momentum, but for world building I really can’t work that way. I’m also (and this is probably a more important issue) bouncing around between multiple windows and so forth much more when world building than when I’m writing, and that makes it awkward to live stream. So I think I’ll stick to writing live streams and leave the world building stuff to when I’m all by my lonesome.

And on the topic of writing, I have a new writing project that I’ve just started actively working on (plotting and story structure stuff) today.

I had initially planned to write a series of more-or-less unconnected short stories set in Lunden as a way of exploring the world and establishing the look and feel of the place. I have forty or so loosey-goosey plot outlines locked and loaded, ready to go. I spent weeks organizing and tidying them up. So naturally I’ve decided to do something completely sideways to all of that and I’ll be writing an interactive novel (or novella – I’m still not at all sure how long it’s going to be) that has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned short story plot outlines.

The plan at the moment is to write four separate versions of the story, each allowing the reader to “play” a different main character who is navigating the same general set of events. My plan is to publish each of the versions separately, and then to combine them into one mahooosive omnibus version where the reader can choose which character to play at the beginning. I’ll be using Twine to write and publish the stories, and hopefully will be able to publish them in a few places. I’m even going to look at how I might package them up for the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

So yeah, that’s what I’m up to these days. Big things are starting to happen and I can only hope that I’ll be able to keep a good head of steam going on all of these moving parts. I’ll try to keep you all up to date on my progress as I progress.