[Estimated reading time: about 3 minutes]
Greetings!
Welcome to The Known World, where I post about my forthcoming book, The Other Side Of The Sun, amongst other things.
Topic #1: A Brief Story Update
Bonjour, everyone!
All has been well for me personally, but for my writing efforts it has been a winter of discontent, indeed.
On the upside, I’ve had opportunities to travel about here and there (most recently to my favorite island in Mexico, Isla Mujeres), I’ve had some great opportunities to network with writers and authors, and I’ve also been diligently working on all sorts of story background and the like.
The only downside has been frustrations with writing the story I wanted to write.
I’ll not bore you with the details, but to summarize, I went against what I’d said I would do in my previous post and started writing the whole thing. Then I got bogged down… then I went back and read what I’d laid down so far… and I realized this particular storyline was going nowhere.
So after discussing things with my Beloved Wife and some writers on Reddit and Bluesky, I decided it was best to perform what in aviation would be called a Rejected Takeoff - where an aircraft pilot decides to abort the takeoff of said aircraft after initiating the takeoff roll, but before the airplane leaves the ground.
So I’m back at the terminal gate as it were.
The core problem is, being candid, I have a parade of many excellent quality characters, I have a mostly well thought out setting, and I have numerous plots sketched out that are of varying quality and viability. After further review, I’ve concluded that I have plenty of material from which to write lots of short stories, but no single story is (currently) worthy of novel-length writing.
After further review, I’ve decided that - silly me! - I should’ve stuck with my original plan and just write the short stories one at a time.
So… I’ve archived the first version (I am always averse to deleting anything creative), and I’m going back to a clean sheet to reset it.
My heartfelt apologies for this! I’m not completely starting over, just taking another shot at it from a different angle, writing it as a standalone short story.
More will be revealed soon enough.
Topic #2: Wizards of Houston
On another tangent… I’ve decided to also write a couple of short stories I’ve been playing around with for years that have nothing to do with the Known World or the Band of Five: The Wizards of Houston.
Short and sweet: It will be a story about a wizard (actually 3 wizards) living on the streets of 21st century Houston and their adventures therein.
It will be in a genre known as Urban Fantasy, which puts supernatural elements and events into the modern world. My 20 years working in and around the Texas Medical Center region gave me a massive cast of potential characters to work with. A week or so ago as an exercise I did a writedown drawing on several experiences I had during my worklife there, and I was so pleased with the results I’ve decided to follow it further.
Wizards of Houston is just the working title for it, and in the next Dispatch (Dispatch #20), which I’ll try to send out later this week, I’ll lay out the premise of it for you in some detail. (If that particular Dispatch turns out to be super lengthy I may split it up into two parts.)
Shareable Ephemera
[A few side notes and thoughts…]
A couple of people emailed me about this over the winter… I still plan to write a Dispatch - maybe Dispatch #21 - about the Other Sight. The Other Sight, as mentioned in passing previously, is the ability to bend the arc of the universe towards your favor in various ways, most often with the mind. It’s not magic per se, but more like using the “Force” as seen in the Star Wars sagas.
I’m also revisiting that map I made of the Meldûn Borderlands, and will be looking to release it in coming weeks. The map of the Isle of Meldûn is on the back burner for now, so I can finish the Borderlands map and also so I can concentrate better on story writing.
Conclusion
That’s it for today! I hope you have enjoyed reading this Dispatch.
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Until next time, thanks for reading!
— B.E. Turpin