NaNoWriMo 2020: MoebiusWar

November is here once again, and that means it’s time to write another book! National Novel Writing Month is an event where hundreds of thousands of people around the world commit to writing a 50,000-word book in one month. This year is my fifth.

The story I am writing is MoebiusWar, the sequel to my 2018 novel MoebiusQuest. Yes, I know how cheesy these titles are, and it is on purpose. These are stories my friends and I built when we were teenagers, and writing them brings back a flood of nostalgia for those days. When writing them, I let myself loose, throwing in tons of silly things I would never put in a real book, and not worrying too much about the craftsmanship.

In MoebiusWar, Conner and his friends journey to Shaper’s Next, a version of their galaxy 400 years in the future, to find the galaxy at war. The evil Spellcaster, ruler of the Tarran Empire, has the nearly unlimited ability to manipulate his subjects’ emotions to coerce them into serving his conquest. Meanwhile, the remaining free worlds have banded together in an allied Resistance to stand against his tyranny. With space battles, time travel, and magic, this book follows multiple personal stories on both sides of the war. The theme: how to remain positive and enthusiastic when the universe around you is going to hell, and your own emotions are being magically manipulated against you. Perfect for 2020.

In keeping with the tradition of breaking new ground during NaNoWriMo, this is the first sequel I have ever written. I did begin Mind and Mirrors, the sequel to The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster, [link] but I have lost interest in that story and I doubt I will ever finish it.

When MoebiusWar is finished, I intend to release it online for free. You can read MoebiusQuest right now, if you like. [link] The current version has been edited slightly, though it is still far from publishable.

In other news, I am about halfway through the second draft of my first real adult novel, An Odyssey through the Stars. The first draft was written during NaNoWriMo last year under the title, Earthbound: A Galactic Odyssey. It will need at least one more structural draft after this one, and another draft for line editing after that. Hopefully, within the next few years you will be able to find An Odyssey through the Stars in bookstores near you.

You can see my progress on MoebiusWar and An Odyssey through the Stars in the bars at the top right of this page. Happy NaNoWriMo to any of you who are participating in it, and I hope your week is at least ok.

NaNoWriMo 2019

It’s November again! That means I, along with hundreds of thousands of other writers, will be jamming out a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo three times before, and each time, I upped the ante. In 2016, my goal was just to finish a story, which ended up less than 30,000 words. In 2017, I made myself write no less than 1,000 words every day. In 2018, I aimed for and reached 50,000 with a junk novel, using the sense of fun to motivate myself to meet the daily goal. And now in 2019, I’m going all in. This year, not only am I aiming for 50,000 words by the end of the month, I am writing the first draft of a story that I want to continue to work on afterward, and aim to get published.

That’s right, I’m about to start my first book that I’m aiming to publish. Goodbye fanfictions and practice stories, the real game is beginning!

This book’s working title is Earthbound: A Galactic Odyssey. It’s a hard science fiction story taking place a million years in the future. Inspired by Isaac Arthur’s video, “Hitchhiking the Galaxy,” humanity’s first gardener ship has seeded colonies to the edge of the Milky Way, and is ready to head off for the Large Magellanic Cloud. One of its citizens, an augmented, immortal human, decides he would really like to see Earth again. The story follows him as he travels back across the galaxy at slower-than-light speeds, revisiting some of the civilizations that have grown out of the colonies he helped plant. There will be space ships, AI, technology, speculative societies, and all kinds of futuristic stuff, almost all grounded in known science and realistic speculation.

Since it is intended to be a full-on adult sci-fi novel, chances are high it will end up much longer than 50,000 words, and take longer than one month to finish a full draft.

The writer’s group I was in last year didn’t work out, but I found a new one, which looks promising. Hopefully, this group can stick together, and we can give each other the feedback and energy we need in order to succeed as authors. If any of you from NaNo and Beyond are reading this, hi! Here’s to realizing our dreams!

The Fool's Gift – The Well of Images Part 4

Read “The Fool’s Gift” at WritersCafe.org.

The saga of Samuel Locke and Hope Emmerich and their adventures in the Unconscious Realms continues! Hope and Samuel have followed the symbol of the torch on its path through the Realms, and have arrived at the doorstep of the Sage. Before they are granted an audience with the mysterious archetype, they must pass through a gauntlet of tests. However, in the shadows behind the scenes, the deck may have been stacked against them.

“The Fool’s Gift” is part 4 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster of the short story series, The Well of Images. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.

As October started and NaNoWriMo approached, I held the first draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in my hands, knowing that if I did not polish it to beta stage by November, it would be delayed by another month. Having just published a blog post about the value of hard work, I knew there was no choice but to put all of my effort into getting the second draft and proofreading run done in just one month. It was a looming challenge, and I did not know if I could do it, one month later it was finished, and now two and a half weeks after that, it is up. It reminds me of some advice I recently heard from the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who I consider a real life sage, “we need more people to over-promise and over-deliver.” Telling myself that I would finish the revision draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in a single month was an over-promise, and getting it done was over-delivering.

The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game

If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per month would be a great encouragement.