Boy have I missed it here. Sometimes, it might not seem like it, what with my complete lack of activity, but that’s where my Facebook integration comes in, I suppose. I’m still having a blast on Twitch, and I’m steadily building up a body of content on YouTube, so the progress continues. I know that I have a habit of saying that I’m still moving forward with Adventures in Aryest without providing any tangible evidence of that progress, but I assure you, certain things are coming together in kind of a big way.
First off, “Initiation” has a general shape, and the only thing I have left to plan is the ending. Part of what is causing me to drag my feet is the fact that I’m portraying one of the first times an ethnically white person comes into contact with ethnically black people, and in this particular instance, they happen to be aggressors. It’s a natural outcome of the historical period, as two nations from different continents are at war—a conflict specifically surrounding islands with a particular marshy landform conducive to farming an animal intrinsic to the “healthcare” of the world. I’ll be editing the hell out of all of this, just to be sure it lands correctly (also I need to decide what the ending is going to be).
Next, I’ve potentially found a way to address one of the more glaring continuity issues looming in the future of To Save What’s Lost: the problem of the storyteller themself. As an example, Patrick Rothfuss’s extraordinary The Name of the Wind uses a similar conceit (I started TSWL before reading it), and frames the first volume of the series as “Day One” of Kvothe telling his story. The prologue is an evening, then a day passes, then the next day he starts his story, then the epilogue is the evening of that day. The problem is, the audiobook version is the better part of 30 hours long. It’s a delightful little inconsistency that creates no real problems for Rothfuss, but I have young children in my audience. It’s cold for my crowd, too, so how much story is it realistic for them to sit through before growing bored or freezing to death? The answer, I believe, is to divide the story up into sessions. I already have a couple of interludes which act as time lapses, so morphing them into a session change shouldn’t require too much tinkering with the framework, and ideally it won’t change the actual body of the story at all. This will also give me a better opportunity to slowly reveal things about the state of the world during the framework, the narrator, and other such juicy details.
A family emergency is drawing us into Vermont on Sunday, which will prevent me from both streaming and working in the restaurant, so I intend to use the time to get some of these ideas into practice. Additionally, though, it will be a time for me to have a break from the rigors of my hectic life. It seems likely that I’ll be continuing to make changes in terms of what I’m committed to doing over the next month, for it’s unacceptable that I’ve done so little writing this month. Thank you all, as always, for your continued support. It’s only because of y’all that I’m able to keep doing this. I should be back on my updates every week schedule, so I’ll talk to you again next week!
Umbrella Terms 