Status 2018-08-19

The writing proceeds well this week, as I get back on track. Word count this afternoon stands at 75,267, and I may write a bit more today but I did just finish 1,000 words, so I probably won't get much further. Still, having written 4,000 words for the week (most of it yesterday and today, to be honest) looks pretty good to me.

Status 2018-08-13

I wrote about 600 words yesterday, and broke 71,000 words. Still behind schedule, but starting to catch up.

On an unrelated note, I was thinking about goblins recently. In The Hand of Tyr, they feature as a fairly basic monster and menace to civilized peoples, though they are not a great threat at this time. But historically, they were an existential threat to the early human empire of Shandollëa and the various colonies of Elefdar throughout the West.

In Tolkien's The Hobbit, they are one of the main groups of antagonists. And if I recall correctly, orcs are not mentioned in The Hobbit at all. There is a good reason for that: orcs are actually goblins. The word orc is Elvish (the Sindarin dialect), and was their name for the creatures that Men called goblins.

Does it matter? Not really, I just thought it was interesting. And if you prefer, as a reader, you can think of my goblins as orcs. Given the contemporary understanding of goblin (small, kinda of cute in a psychotic way, and only marginally dangerous) vs. orc (human-sized or slightly bigger, ferocious, very dangerous and cruel), it would be more accurate to imagine my goblins as orcs anyway.

Officially Behind Schedule

So as of this morning, I am officially behind schedule--but not by much. I worked out the math last spring and figured I would need to average 550 words per day to complete the book, at my word-count target of 150k words, by the end of the year.

I just noticed this morning that my average daily word count now needs to be 558 if I am still going to reach that goal. I had previously seen the required number drop as low as 523, when I was ahead of schedule a couple of months ago.

So what does all this mean? Not much, really. I spent the last couple of weeks pretty focused on the Pathfinder Playtest, reading the rules, rolling up sample characters, and learning the system. My gaming group will be starting the playtest this week, but that shouldn't impact my ability to keep working on the book (we were already playing a weekly Pathfinder game anyway).

So yeah, I'm a bit behind schedule, but not really worried about it at this point. I'll just write a few extra words each day, and eventually get caught up, or maybe even get ahead of schedule like I was back in June.

Gaaaaahhhh!

I promise I didn't rip off someone else's idea on purpose. As far as I know, we came up with the idea independently, and happened to also come up with the same name.

I discovered over the weekend, in reading the Pathfinder Playtest materials, that the world of Golarion (Paizo's published campaign world) has a region with the exact same name as a region I have in my own world, and which figures significantly in my work in progress.

Arrrghhh... I really don't want to rename my region just because someone else used it in their own published materials. So, call me a ripoff artist or copycat if you want, but I'm going to keep going with the book as planned, and keep the region and name that I'm using.

Status 2018-08-05

Made it to 69,350 words this week. Work on the book basically stopped after Wednesday, because the Pathfinder Playtest arrived on Thursday and I've been reading the rulebook and the associated other books that came with the package.

Not to worry, I'll be back to work on the novel starting no later than the middle of this week, say Wednesday.

In the meantime, I am really looking forward to joining the playtest and giving Paizo my feedback on the new edition of the game.