I was invited to participate in this forum earlier this year. And it is good. The forum owner really tries to make it great. It is one of those places where all mediums are there music, art work, videos … if you create it … it has a home.   But unfortunately the people are more lurkers than posters. Especially if your not in the genera they follow.  And to be fair, I am new and they have been there for a while.

Which means I am just reading and reacting to things that to them are done. But still I feel a lot of the time like I am talking to myself. Which of course is abundantly clear when it comes to my writing project.

So I figured if I am going to talk to myself then it should be on my own blog…. LOL. For a while I will be doing double duty.

Which brings me to the point of this topic.  The site owner is doing a NANOWriyear.  That is one project that takes all year to write. (the first month was about planning) The only requirement is to check in everyday with a word count, which of course has a minimum of 300.

I jumped at the chance… I keep failing the novel in a month … one because 50 -70 thousand words in a month …holding a full time job, kids, life is just beyond me. But I can easily do it in a year. I am actually in a good place right now with about 11 thousand words and we are at the tenth.

So the idea came from… Dragon Age. I had picked up the game and played it again for probably the fifth time… third time completely through. Of course I played it again as a mage. What’s new there. But I had a story started from the very first time I played but spent so much time playing the game I lost the story in my head. Which means… I have a six paragraph story sitting on my hard drive that I haven’t been able to hit the delete button… but I haven’t been able to finish it either.

December was the 10th anniversary of the game … and the game was pretty important to me ten years ago… so much so I named my dog…. Oghren P. Bull.   It had a lot to do with pushing me into what would become a dream. A visual version of books. Quite a jump from a game to a book.  But bear with me. The game presented as a chose your own story.

Trust me it would take more than one post to explain it. But just know that it put me on the path I wanted to be. That was huge because at that time I was floundering.  So back to the original train of thought.  Playing it again I got to thinking about what happens to this character you have created and become so immersed in. That was the story I wanted to tell. But to do that I had to let the reader know about the choices the character made in the game. So now I have two stories to write. And suddenly I found myself writing a backstory trying to flush him out and low and behold now I have three stories. Ugh.  Well as things happen and you start planning some kind of ending it gets longer and unwieldy and just to make it better you divide it your up to parts five and six.

This must be how George Lucas got Star Wars going. He wrote the original trilogy and found he needed the reader to understand the past so he went back to the Origins which gave us the prequels and I am going to stop right there. Because the new ones aren’t… well without offending fans, they’re not GL’s.

So now I have a Dragon Age Saga on my hands. Its all good though. I have a year and the characters have been pretty compliant…. so far.  Whats even better is as soon as I have my computer back I am going to start editing a film to go with the writing.  The vision I have in my head is pretty cool… if I do say so myself.

The next couple of post will be about catching up with my other postings for the word count.