Online Novels

There's been a lot of chatter in the last few years in regards to what's popularly called online novels. More than one writer has started blogging his novel and suddenly found his way to fame and fortune. A particular example that I can cite is the online novel 30 Days of Night. Obviously most people know by now that the author originally started his blog story posting chapters every day or every other day or so and this eventually grew into a novel that was published in print and eventually became a hit movie.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing the author of 30 Days of Night. Indeed, I'm considering following his example.

As most of you probably know I wrote a game about 15 or 20 years ago called Fire On The Suns. It's never been hugely popular, but it has had its fair share of fans over most of those 15 or 20 years.

About seven or eight years ago I actually started writing a novel based on a game within the FOTS universe that was one of the best games we've ever had as well as one of the most memorable games that most of the players has ever experienced. It was so memorable that it stayed with us for a long long time. At various points in time through the years I've worked off and on on this novel cutting it adding to it moving pieces of it around and variously editing it for wider consumption. Last year or the year before I decided it would probably be too embarrassing for me to seriously consider trying to publish this novel not because it's bad, but because it's a gaming novel and most of them generally end up pretty poor. to be honest there is also not huge market for gaming novels, unless of course you're one of those huge Halo, Warcraft, or other game related tie-ins.

Obviously my poor little game isn't one of those.

However, we came up with a pretty damn good storyline that combines over a dozen different alien races, all unique, a mechanically internally consistent universe, and thousands upon thousands of star systems. There's also ancient technology, ancient alien buried secrets, a race against time, lots of unique characters, conversations between characters that actually developed from conversations between players, and one hell of a lot more.

Given that this book will never see the light of day in a professional publishing environment, I'm seriously considering posting chapters of Fire On The Suns on this blog at least a weekly basis.

If anyone out there is reading this, I'd kind of like to see what you have to say in regards to reading it online space opera blog that has elements of science fiction, horror, real space physics, in a universe that is infinite and vastly expandable.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Naturally, I will intersperse postings that deal specifically with more intricate and detailed writing topics. I will not completely abandoned that topic in favor of a novel. I just thought it might be fun for some of you to read a bit more of what I write. Let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Starting Again

I haven't been up here longer than anticipated because last November 4th my 15-year-old dog, whose name was Shadow, died suddenly.

It came as a tremendous shock since I had to rush him to the vet and then make the tremendously hard decision to put him down because he was in such tremendous pain. I don't know if any of you have ever heard a dog scream, but it is a terribly heart-wrenching sound. Since this boy had been with me since he was 13 weeks old, it was also gut-wrenching and a terribly difficult thing for me to do personally.

I've watched relatives die with less personal pain.

Having to put down a personal friend was a tremendously difficult decision.

So I had to take some time off and figure out who I was and where I was in my personal life.

Nevertheless, I'll be getting along with the business of this blog site in the very near future as time and situations allow. Naturally, I'll be drawing from my postings at Absolute Write as inspiration for my posts here.

I hope you all had nice Thanksgiving in that you're all going to have a Merry Christmas. Despite all the hardship and the heartache I too had a nice Thanksgiving and will have a Merry Christmas.

By the way I'm writing this using Dragon Naturally Speaking which is a wonderful program which I purchased today for about 40 bucks at WalMart where, as many of you know, I'm currently working as electronics department supervisor, what used to be known as a department manager.

DNS is a great program so far as I've seen so far and is a wonderful tool for writers and bloggers as well. There's a bit of training that has to be done for the program, but damn is it nice.

I have written the entirety of this blog, with the exception of a few edits, entirely using Dragon Naturally Speaking.

I hope you'll all try DNS and I hope you all have Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll see you all first of the year with new blog entries. Thanks for everyone who has been following this blog and will get back into things at the first of the year.