Oi'm Nought Ded Yet

Meh. Been quiet for so long. Derping on IRC and stuff, feel super-guilty about not updating anything. Had a hard time doing anything the past month or so, because of things involving painkillers and such. Blah.

I have been working on a Sci Fi HiE collab with Jersey Lightning. Religious fanatics, interstellar war, realistic near-future tech + FTL, and more dakka. A departure for me, since we've only got the barest of outlines, but I think good practice as such.

As far as my personal main focus, I'm still working on Advent: Redemption. I've written like five chapters in the past two months, but scattered all over the outline. I do have the next chapter in edit mode, but I'm hesitant about releasing it. The major criticism that's been arrayed at it is that there's just so much dense exposition, but I feel like that's just a part of my writing style and the story itself.

In any HiE where the human isn't show-aware, you're going to have to do some infodumps, and it's especially dense for Advent since I need to build up this magical 'system' that can fully encompass magic from both sources, and also do what I need it to do for the story. The chapter in the pipe and the next one I've got about half-done are both largely about this, and about Trixie helping Gideon to know and understand this system that his prior use of power has just barely scratched the surface of.

So yeah, I need to do all that, so I'm struggling with breaking blocks up for readability, and trying to add smaller, more action-oriented vignettes here and there to make things more interesting. I'm also experimenting with different methods of breaking up infodumps and long-time 'montages' to make them less dense. We'll see how that works. Of course, I also have an academic paper to bang out ASAP--not sure if that'll leave me less inclined to write fiction, or more.