I'd written the latest posting previously - back in October - and gave it a quick brush-up to get it ready for release. This is the second-to-last bit I expect to post as fully-developed prose: I've got the next scene half-written, and so I'm going to brush that up and either finish it or summarize what I haven't written yet. And then, on with the travelogue style. I'm excited to get you guys (finally) to some stuff that's lived quite vividly in my head for several years.
Folks, it's a day that I think many of you knew was coming, but it's one that I resisted as hard as I could, as long as I could. After long bouts of banging my head against the wall, I've reached the conclusion that I am unable to finish The Murloc is Lonely as a long-form novel. My love for the story, for its characters, for its world and for its community has been all that's kept me going over the years (years!), and all but one of those loves has finally and fully flamed out. Writing has become a chore, and one that I'm increasingly unable to confront. I've written several pages beyond what I've released, and there are some exciting scenes coming up, but even with an impending battle to draft I can't force myself to sit and write long enough to accomplish anything.
The last love, of course, is for you. I owe you all so much, and this isn't quite goodbye yet: I have the plot mapped out to the end of the third book, in varying levels of details, and it would be poor thanks for the years of joy and support that you have given me to simply disappear. As I said, I've got the plot - and I don't want to leave you without it. I'm open to suggestions, but for now my plan is to switch styles, from the close first-person narrative to a more distant, third-person style, providing a summary of events with more details as they inspire me.
The story grows quickly - it doesn't take a very discerning reader to discern that there are great forces at work in Az. You don't know the half of it yet. I had always worried whether my plot would be too ambitious, too large for its own good - and I'd always planned on earning the plot with prose and characterization. I'll lose that now, and the plot will have to stand on its own. I hope it does.
After a week or so open comment period (I will check in to duly accept invectives) on my style shift plan, I will begin delivering summaries shortly. I will dedicate one night a week to working on them, and with less lofty goals I like my chances of being relatively productive.
Serious Murloc fans... I'm sorry. I know that there is an implicit trust placed in the leaders of such communities, and I'm under no illusion that I'm not failing that trust. I wish I could go back to the early days, when writing this story meant everything to me, but I've tried for a year and a half to do so and failed. I'm sorry. Thank you all for being part of this.
Immediately upon my previous declaration, I embarked upon something of a life journey (fewer miles covered than the one that shut me down in 2006, but almost as big). I'll spare you the details, but, at any rate, although I'm mostly done, I've ended up with more demands on my time than I had previously. So, as always, the inestimable patience of my fans is so, very, greatly appreciated.
One of the pieces that's been slowing me down is my transition to - drumroll please - a mac! It's purdy, and it does stuff well, but it also does things different(ly)... and I haven't yet figured out how to manage my website workflow work on it. I installed Office, downloaded a basic text-editor (bbtext), and got a(n excellent, free) FTP client, but I gave up in frustration when all of my formatted quotation marks and apostrophes turned into accented Os and Is. It kills me, but I'm currently booted in Windows, and doing things the old-fashioned way. So, anyone with web-dev experience on a Mac - email me!
As for the story post itself, it's another several pages of Chapter XII - The Emerald Queen. There's an easter egg in it for anyone that wants to go digging, a link hidden in one of the words. There are benefits to being friends with your main characters - like having access to things that have probably fallen off the face of the Internet, and like having access to the people involved to ask if it's okay for you to put it back up. Caydiem has kept her sense of humor after all these years.
My new resolve has born its first fruits: the first four pages of Chapter XII - The Emerald Queen. The first scene is the reason this post took so long - it's a place that I'm very unsure in my footing, theme- and style-wise. Fingers crossed. The next scene - and, actually, the rest of the chapter - is being fantastically fun to write. There are little snippets of prose and conversation that I've had written for months, or years in some cases, waiting for their moment, and this chapter is where a whole bunch of them are slotted to go. I've been writing unexpected, unplanned, or just plain difficult scenes nonstop for the last few chapters, that it feels good to get back to somewhere where I've got a semblence of a longstanding plan.
You'll have to be the judge of how much quality I've given up for quantity. I'm looking forward to the comments.
