May Brings Change

Starting this month I'm working on a project that will hopefully have me writing considerably more than I have been, and will hopefully have considerably more people reading it too.

I'm posting a Hearthstead novel in weekly portions. Maybe bi-monthly. Still haven't decided that part.

I'm not starting this week and maybe not next week. It depends on how much buffer I've got going by then. But I wanted to let everyone know that it's happening, and that as of today all my writing energies, when I focus them, are honed in on this one project until I get it going reliably. I've got plans. Like accompanying artwork, branches into games and music, and a whole lot of story I think deserves to be somewhere other than just the heads of two cousins.

Here's some stuff I don't know yet that I need to sort out before this actually starts happening:

Venue:  This novel needs an internet home, and it's not going to be this blog. I have one spot in mind, but I'm trying to decide if I need a new URL and if I shouldn't fork over the money for a nice little niche of the web all its own. A brand new website means a good deal of page design and that's quite a bit of work, but the reason I'm puzzling about this now is I'm not sure about moving home sites if this gets more successful further down the line. If any of my readers know for sure I won't be nipping this bud by starting on a free, bloggy website, maybe you could ease my worries on this?

Timing:  When exactly I'm going to start posting is some rancid calculus of everything else I've mentioned so far confinded by the logarithmic curve of my writing pace, which is probably more up in the air than all that. There's also the question I mentioned above of whether posts will be weekly, every two weeks, one great bull of a post a month, or intermittent depending on creator patterns. My first thought is weekly, but... :

Other Content: Like I said, I'd like this to be more than just words I splatter all over the internet. Hearthstead was birthed as a stick figure comic in a notebook with a healthy dose of legos and roleplaying, so I want the full-on commencement of Hearthstead storytelling to be similarly multidisciplinary. I am unfortunately not a polymath so I'll likely be looking to bring in others to help fill in whatever content it is we'll be doing. At the very least there'll be pictures, and at the very least my cousin Nate, whose brainchild Hearthstead is as much as it is mine, will be participating, be it with visual art, mix tracks, or as a sounding board to make sure I'm bringing 100% Hearthstead with every post. I know that visual artwork is often as time-consuming and labor-intensive as writing (I'm sure many artists would consider writing lazy by comparison), so I'd be remiss if I declared a definite density of artwork-to-written-post without a certainty of how all that's working.

All that stuff hanging in the firmament aside, I'm posting this blog for one primary reason: because I really want to do this, and I want everyone to know that I'm dead-set on giving it its fair shot. This isn't a half-baked novella I push for a week and leave behind. I have plans for at least four "seasons" of this thing, and that's gonna take tremendous time and effort and hopefully be a boatload of fun. Hope you're along for the ride.

I'll leave you with this little teaser. The working title I have for this project, or at least its first phase? Forging the Shade.

Peace.

Words

Every morning I wake up before dawn to climb into a box made of metal and plastic and hurtle through what would be a seven-hour journey by foot in forty minutes so that I can spend the day cleaning machines covered in the coagulating, cement-corroding syrup which condenses from a mixture of soda and various alcoholic beverages.  I do this so that every Thursday an abstracted number will be added to the abstracted number "in my bank," said abstraction waiting there to be exchanged for physical goods necessary (or more often tertiary) to my survival and that of my spouse, who accompanies me on these daily adventures.  My spouse and I have aspirations for the abstraction building "in our bank," because this abstraction may serve to facilitate certain improvements to our quality of life, or more realistically the addition of more inscrutable objects by which we entertain ourselves or otherwise occupy our time.

When the determined time has finished, my spouse and I interact with a machine that manages an abstraction tangential to the one that will facilitate the exchange of goods.  Interaction with this machine permits us to remove our obligatory nominating placards and make a temporary exodus from the building where we toil, via the self-same plastic/metal box/machine that makes an otherwise prohibitive traversal trivial—barring the intrusion of Odocoileus Virginianus on the linear space maintained for box/machine travel, which could prove disastrous for the journey and perhaps the vitality of both occupants of our box.  We make such an exodus every day without fail, excepting the days we are arbitrarily given to rest from our toil.

On arriving back at the opulent shelter where our time is spent when not transported elsewhere by the miraculous fire-box, we exchange our (often soiled) work attire for more comfortable wear, and proceed to make use of smaller boxes crafted with the express purpose of connecting us to networks of other human beings through similar boxes, with the secondary effect of stunting our visual and auditory communication with the human beings who share the abode with us.

Which is what I'm doing now.

I'm also telling you about what I've been doing for the last couple weeks in nearly the most obscure way possible without losing everyone.  Though maybe I did lose everyone.

Anyway, that helped me survive a bit.  Don't have much else to say.  Later guys!