The second of the Cahuac Cycle short stories has been finished off and upoaded now.
This one is called Wolf and the Stars, and is a little different than the other three in that, though it features Cahuac, it doesn’t revolve around him.
I think it should be obvious what the story is referring too, but it is the kind of thing that would be explained in mythological creation stories.
The third short story of the series of mythological fantasy tales about Cahauc has been added to the site and to smashwords.
This one is called Cahuac and the Bees and follows on from the events of the first two, though is still a stand alone story.
In this one Cahuac must find out why the flowers are no longer growing which is stopping the bees producing their bounty of sweet honey. Cahuac’s journey takes him places both new as well as familiar.
A fourth story for the collection is close to being finished as well.
I’ve got a couple more Cahuac short stories in the works. I’d been turning over ideas in my head for what to do next with him and not one but two stories started taking form. Given how short they are and how fun and easy to write they are, it shouldn’t take long for them to do.
Currently they have the working titles of Wolf chases the Stars and The Bee and the Flowers
August is over and we are now two thirds of the way through the year. Where does the time go?
After a very slow start, I managed to complete about 38,500 words of writing over August, almost 20,000 less than July, but still a reasonable amount of writing.
Four more works were uploaded to the collection over August; Gifts and Sacrifices, Cara’s Choice Part Three, Long Lost Relics and Echoes of Dark Reflections. Admittedly most of the work for them had been done prior to August, but editing and posting of them was done in August.
The work on the rough first draft of Tears of the Mountain continues to come along, now at 31,500 words. The main plot line has been finished and I’m starting on finishing the draft of the secondary plot line and then the ending of it. Once that is done, then it is on with the rewrite and there is a lot to rewrite.
Plans for September are to complete the rough first draft of Tears of the Mountain and then get stuck into the rewrite. In addition I want to complete Cara’s Choice Part Four, the next Primal Tales short story with Braega and Tudhala and, if time permits, another short Sci-Fi short story with Ray the Android.
Another short story has now been completed and added to the Pure Escapism collection. By my count the total amount of words between them comes in at around 96,000 now, which came as a surprise to me when I compiled the numbers.
This story continues on the tale of the giant white minotaur Nhaqosa, following on from The Pit and The Merchant’s Legacy. This one is called Echoes of Dark Reflections.
The world that Nhaqosa has found himself in has always been the most gritty and brutal of the various setting, but this one is darker still, at least for my writing. The story never intended to turn out the way it did. The concept behind it had always been there, to give Nhaqosa something of a different challenge, one that would test even him. However the story took a different path than I expected and I had to ramp back the ending a bit. Even so, the events are going to leave scars on Nhaqosa, and how than pans out in future stories we will have to see when I get around to them.
Given the nature of the story, it seemed logical to introduce a new race, one that I had been trying to work out how to bring into the setting. This is the Talsharan, as mentioned previously in Long Lost Relics. They have something of a dark, unpleasant history to them as well, one that will require further exapnding on at a future date.
The story is also in a way a bit of a homage to Dark Sun setting. It isn’t set on Athas, but it does in parts have a feel for the same brutal setting of Dark Sun I’d like to think.
And so with another story down, it is time to move onto the next one.
I just added one of the short stories I mentioned I found the other day to the list of downloadable stories on the Pure Escapism page. This one is called Long Lost Relics.
Okay, I’ll admit that there is a bit of a bad pun involved there; they story revolves around the recovery of a long lost religious relic, and at the same time the story itself was a bit of a lost relic recently recovered and rewritten.
The story itself originated from a game I played many years ago that sadly ended when the GM got overtaken by real life. It was a fantasy 4X style game – building up a nation via exploration, research, construction and war. The story itself relates certain events that happened during the game itself.
It has nothing to do with the worlds of my fantasy writing, even though I am trying to get the Talsahran, the race I played in the game, into the setting somehow. It has been put up simply as a relic of past writing.
Just finished off the rough draft of the Echoes of Dark Reflections short story, at slightly over 4500 words.
I did this in the new minimalist rough draft style, so it will take a lot of reworking and polishing in the rewrites to get it in a readable form. Not sure how long that will take.
Nhaqosa and his bad go through a bit in this story, which may change them a little in future stories, but I think it may have needed to be done.
More when it is closer to being finished.
…poking around in old files on an old computer.
I ran across two short stories I write many, many years ago, one sci-fi, one fantasy. As it happens both came out of games I used to play.
I’m going to rewrite them both now that my writing has improved a little and hope to have them posted up for all to see in the next week or two.
Over the last few days, in addition to working on the rough draft of Tears of the Mountain, I have also been making progress on the next short story in the Nhaqosa collection, called Echoes of Dark Reflections.
The rough draft is getting close to the end, but do date it has turned out a bit darker than other stories. The Nhaqosa setting was always the most brutal of them, but other events in Echoes of Dark Reflections seem to be making it grittier. Whether that will survive to the final draft remains to be seen.
The story hasn’t quite been finished yet, and I’m trying to make up my mind about something before doing so. Nhaqosa is accompanied by a merry band of mercenaries, around two dozen in total. Most however remain unnamed and only around three have received any real attention in the stories to date.
I’m trying to decide what to do with them. I could kill most of them off so only a handful remain, but this is likely to have a big impact on Nhaqosa given he sees them as family. The other is in each story focus on one or two of them and then cycle them into the background again. The nature of the stories is that there would always be deaths, it’d just be more pronounced in the former option, and it would be the way I’d go if I was truly evil.
Probably closer to two weeks actually. Since I finished off Gifts and Sacrifices I haven’t had as much time to write as I’d like. Very little in fact. Some of it was various events conspiring against me, and some has been generally laziness.
Not that I haven’t done nothing, just very little. I think I have the plot for Tears of the Mountain pretty much sorted and have done a bit more on getting the plot all written out, plus a bit of work on the rough draft, but not a huge amount.
This week hopefully I can get back into the swing of things again, doing more work on the rough draft and hopefully some more short story work. Got a few of them floating around in half done states that I should try and finish up soon.
On other news, I seem to be doing reasonable well over at Smashwords on overall views, bouncing around between #15 and #17 for most viewed author over the last 30 days for over a week now and up to #21 for over the last 90 days, and close to 700 downloads between the 11 offerings there.
Mist and Shadows 