The Book of the Shadows

Hey folks, it's been a while. I bring word of good fortune on the horizon - new art and new writings.

It's Saturday! Why am I here?

Man I'm wiped... really tired right now. But, things roll on. There's a story chapter coming out today, and updates to my website are going to be done in the not too distant future.

It's about that time again. This Friday I will be releasing a new chapter for the Book of the Shadows series, Second Star Saga, on FanFiction.net. So today, I'll have a little bit of discussion about the chapter.

So, after some more hard work, and then some fun work, and then a lot more hard work, the time is nearing when I will be able to launch the website I've been promising forever. In the meantime I've got some updates to pass along.

I was going through some Book of the Shadows information over the long weekend, and I rediscovered a topic I spent some time thinking on back early on in writing the original. Magic is treated very differently in the East and West when it comes to age.

I took close to the last minute, but I decided before work yesterday what story I would publish. But know that this is a first, not a period.

I've made some decisions. Things start later this week.

Were any of you in the States up early/late enough to catch any of the total Lunar eclipse last night?

Over the course of any project there are time you will arrive at ideas or plans that you will subsequently abandon for various reasons. I thought I'd share a few of those here.

I'll pick up today where I left off yesterday. I've explained a little about where Anzu's development came from, and that plays into who Drusilla is as well.

Getting this one out a little early. Well, I managed to get most of the kinks worked out, but I still need a little more time to get the production done on the full image I was planning to spoil. So, a change in plans for this week from what I originally had in mind.

It's been a long week for me, so I'll be ending it on a bit of a lighter note. I've decided I will be doing a full preview for one of my stories next week. Tentatively that will be next Friday. The title, as this post indicates, is the Second Star Saga.

There are some times when I look back on the stories I’ve created and I can know exactly what I was thinking about and what kind of story I was planning to tell. I then look back at the progress I made in developing that story and can’t see where I was going. Sometimes I look back and have no idea what the impetus was, but can see very clearly where I was planning to take it. Third Star Saga is a lot like that.

As a political scientist I don’t really find any form of government necessarily boring. In fact I’m probably a bit unconventional in my approach to the viability of various forms of government. But as I began working on my creative writing hobby, I realized a few things that are retrospectively simply obvious. First, most fiction stories of note take place in worlds with non-democratic governments. Second, democracy is boring. The second point reinforces the first. That is, the boringness of democratic governance leads to the writers of fiction stories to instead pursue more interesting governmental systems, thus using a government that isn’t a democracy, or at the very least only vaguely resembles a democracy. Democracy is driven by the most boring endeavor in the history of mankind – bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the system by which operations are set to happen. In the abstract, everyone hates it and tends to say they can’t understand it. But it’s a simple concept. It ...