Summer Shenanigans - Part One

Why hello there, fellow ninjas. How have you been?

This has been a bit of a busy/crazy/tumultuous summer for the Ro. Big life changes, some minor(but salvageable) disasters, a constant thorn in my side that somehow also acts as its own morphine(I'm looking at YOU, League of Legends), and the day job(booooo). To be honest, it's been pretty hard to work up the motivation to come back and resume renovation and new construction on ACN, especially over the past couple of months.

That being said, I took a look at all of the things I have in the works, and it's actually been getting me kinda pumped again. I may be slightly(read: "woefully") behind on my convention entries, but I've also done what I said I was gunna long ago and started once again expanding my range of topics beyond just my travels, as was always intended for this blog. I'm looking forward to getting back to rambling on all things geekery, and not just the Convention of the Month/Week.

So along those lines, I hereby begin the first in a series I'll be entitling "Summer Shenanigans," to help y'all get up to speed on the things I've been up to lately, in no particular order. I hope you're excited.

Go on. Get excited. I'll wait.

Do it. DO IT! GET PUMPED!

... But not too pumped, or else you'll be underwhelmed if it's not atmospheric. Dial it back a notch there, buddy.

...

OK, good. Sufficient(but not crazy) levels of excitement have been attained. So here we go!

Summer Shenanigans, Part One - We're Writing Again, Baby

Ya' should have known I would go here - I'm a badass novelist, this has been established. But yes, the Ro is once again writing, working feverishly on story construction and dialogue and character design. This is only slightly related to NaNoWriMo starting in just over ten days, though that is quite a big deal in and of itself. The real reasons are as follows:

1. I'm still serious about finding a literary agent and getting published.
2. I've had a desire(and some fresh inspiration!) to return to writing my Kai stories.

The first item needs no explanation by now - if you're reading this blog, you probably know that my dream is to leave behind Le Day Job and start making Le Big Bucks as a novelist. As for the second, what you may not know, if you haven't been a Ninja from the beginning, is that I have a library of short stories and short novels about my character from a Ravenloft tabletop game some years back, Kai Stadtfeld. Writing about this character was pretty much how I started honing my short story craft, so as with most things I do, I went completely overboard and fell headlong into it. You can actually read the first two(in terms of written, not chronological, order) stories, "A Raven's Feather and "Siblings" right here on ACN, with the others joining them sometime in the near future.

Why would I return to this series after so long, and so eagerly? Well, if you've ready any of my Kai stuff, you know that it's very heavily anime-inspired - despite his happy-go-lucky attitude, there's some dark stuff in his past that creeps into pretty much every aspect of his life at some point. However, a lot of that was resolved, or at least heading towards a resolution, by the end of the actual game, and the last story that I consider to be part of that long arc, "Dreams and Nightmares," is the one I'm plugging away at now. Which means that once it's finished, I'll be free to strike out on a markedly-different chapter of the character's life story. That's right - the depressing, melancholy sub-plots finally wrap up, and it's on to high-flying action adventure with a far more optimistic bent. In short, I finally get to tell the kinds of stories I most want to tell with one of my most beloved characters. And on a more personal note, I'm at a point in my life where I really need to channel someone who has blown through his biggest problems and never gives up no matter the difficulty. I won't lie, it's a pretty big rush.

So expect to start seeing more stories posted here, to help back up my claims at being a badass author cyborg totally normal human. Follow along with Kai's story - it's been a real blast to write, and I've been told it's fun to read. It won't be the really fun risque stuff I've written in other settings, but that's a story for a different time. I'm working on some other writing projects too, though. I'm probably doing another Soldiers novel for NaNo this year, since the last two have turned out rather well; I'm considering trying my hand at some League of Legends fiction, thanks to the urging of a good friend whose enthusiasm for the world is infectious; and of course there's always my Magic Touch series, which is pending an edit and will hopefully be the flagship that carries me into Published Badass Novelist waters. Like I said before, a loooot of stuff in the works.

With that, I think I'll get back to working on said things. As always, thanks for reading, Ninja Faithful, and I'll catch you again in the (hopefully not too distant) future. Until next time, this is Resurgent Ro, fighting the good fight.