I wanted to post an overview of what I’m planning in the near-future, because I’m getting antsy (!) and I feel like typing a casual, yet somewhat pertinent post.

Through negotiations with my lovely wife, a Wacom board is officially on its way and
should arrive some time this weekend! I will finally be able to do the finishing
touches on my map and post the (long overdue) map-making tutorial.

Afterwards, I think I will go into designing a timeline, talk about the concept of
‘five rings’, talk about how I go about creating key scenes (and bridging those scenes
together), and then go into what I’ve discovered works well with the editing
process.

At some point, I figure I’ll start up an official wordcount and start adding characters and
cities to those empty webpages (on that right side, over there->) as I go. I may do
illustrations for some characters and make more maps, etc.

I may add a few photos of my wife and I as well in the ‘About the author’ page.

Hm, what else is going on? … Ah yes. I’m still reading. I finished Robert
Jordan’s A Crown of Swords and moved onto The Path of Daggers, but then I
decided to finish up the rest of Wizard’s First Rule. To be honest, I’m not sure
my heart is into Terry Goodkind’s writing style, so I will probably move away from
his series … I’m leaning towards exploring Jennifer Robertson’s ‘Swordsinger’ series
I’ve heard so much about. I still have full intentions of finishing Robert Jordan’s
massive epic.

What else? … I’ve had a DeviantArt account for what seems like forever now, but never did much with it. Lately, I’ve submitted a very, very few minor pieces of artwork and a few photos of Japan. If you care to check it out, you’re welcome to at:
http://cirellio.deviantart.com/
Here are a few of my friend’s websites (I think they might appreciate a plug, though these websites don’t really have much to do with writing)->
Drunken Zombie Podcast – A podcast about horror movies:
http://drunkenzombie.podomatic.com/
ILRPG – A website focussed on pen & paper RPG players in the midwest:
http://www.ilrpg.com/

(I hope you didn’t mind the casual-ness and somewhat-pertinent-ness of this post…)

Oh, and I believe it was on April 9th … you guys gave me 500 hits. Geez! This thing has been around for less than a month.

So, of course, I have to ask myself: “Why am I writing about my progress through a novel to total strangers?”

I think it’s because I get incredibly creative and inspired when I read about other people’s progress as they go through the same struggles I do, and I guess I hope somebody out there might get that same level of inspiration from here. It seems many writers like to attempt to ‘pay it forward’, and I’m no exception. And it’s fun to do; even if I had 6 total hits, I’d still be here.

But 500 hits is just stunning to me – I’ve made web pages in the past … none of them could never seem to breach 100 visits, ever … *cough*and I think most of those visits were from my friends and family*cough*. Well, this time, I didn’t tell my friends about it, my family hasn’t visited yet, and my wife’s visits (luv u, honey!) don’t tally because she’s on the same IP address that I am, and any visits from my IP address do not count.

So, I guess it just goes to show me how tight the online writing community really
is. And it gives me hope that some writer out there might be getting as inspired as I do when they visit this quaint webspace. So thanks for all the great discussions so far, thanks for all the support, and thanks to everyone else for lurking!

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