The folks at Literature and Latte released beta 1.1.0.3 for Windows. I am ignoring their friendly warnings and using it for my precious, irreplaceable novel project despite the fact that it could destroy all of my work at any moment, because I live dangerously like that.

I finally finished The Fires of Heaven, the fifth book in the Wheel of Time series. I say “finally” because, compared to the three Hunger Games books, Fires of Heaven reads like an encyclopedia. Apparently this is the book where most people gave up on the series, and I can certainly see why. It’s kind redundant at this point to say “half of the text could have been removed without any effect on the plot,” but it’s never been truer.

Read using a Seinfeld impersonation: What’s the deal with first person writing? It seems like nearly every popular book these days is written in first person. And it seems to be a mandatory requirement for the Paranormal/Urban Fantasy genre. They all have the same sort of dry sarcastic narrator. It’s almost like reading a blog post, except a really long one. It’s getting to point where I groan whenever I see another first person book.

I was scheduled to finish the first draft of Tel on April 30. I think I did pretty well on that, in that I was indeed finished Monday night. Until I thought of a tiny thing I needed to add to resolve one plot line. Then on Tuesday morning I thought of one other tiny little thing I needed to add to explain what happened to one of the characters.

“What’s your book about?” It seems like a simple question, until I, as a newbie author, try to answer it. In my mind, my book is about 100,000 words of carefully interwoven plots that took months to get right, complex characters that grew and evolved on their own, colorful and exotic places and worlds, literary devices, clever uses of punctuation, good parts, bad parts, terrible parts, loathesome parts, unfinished parts, and a title.

Brainstorming for my next writing project is scheduled to begin in June. I intentionally left a month of “space” between projects because I figured I would need time to recharge, but I realized I didn’t want to stop writing altogether, so, when last we left our intrepid hero, I had decided to revise Kubak in this “off” month of May. I’m relatively pleased with the revisions so far. At one time I thought I needed to break it into two novellas, but then I realized that I couldn’t query two novellas, so I went back to working on it as a single novel.

There are a few bad habits that the characters in The Wheel of Time have that they don’t seem to be able to stop themselves from doing even after six books, so I think it might be time for an intervention: Scrubbing their hands through their hair. Knuckling their moustaches or their backs. Gaping at anyone or anything. Smoothing their skirts. Sniffing. Obsessing over the neckline of women’s dresses. It’s sort of laughable to see these things in the seventh book.

Okay, this is not good. After a couple of weeks of brainstorming, I started writing on my new project, tentatively code-named “Curses.” I’ve written perhaps 4,000 words, starting not at the beginning, but at the first sort of exciting milestone. I did this because I wasn’t really “feeling” it so I thought I would start at a “high point.” I hate it. It’s not exciting. It’s not even interesting. The characters are dumb.

The other day I mentioned that I hated my current WIP (work-in-progress, for you non-writer-types). That night I decided to use the nuclear option. In NaNoWriMo, they say if you’re bored with what you’re writing, you need to shake things up by adding an explosion, or killing everyone off. That’s what I’ve come to think of as the “nuclear option.” So, I blew things up. An angry god descended and pulverized everything.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention this: Raking a hand through his hair, he made himself turn to face her. Jordan, Robert (2010-04-14). A Crown of Swords: Book Seven of ‘The Wheel of Time’ (p. 668). Macmillan. Kindle Edition. Rand raked for once! He didn’t scrub!

You know what the world needs? Wikis without spoilers. I just finished A Crown of Swords, Book 7 of the Wheel of Time. If you haven’t read these books, let me assure that you will not remember everyone and everything. It is physically impossible. You’ll see a name pop up and wonder who or what it is, and where you last saw him/her/it. In those cases, there’s only three things you can do: 1) Keep reading and hope that Robert Jordan fills you in on the details, 2) Use the handy search feature of your Kindle and hope the name is found somewhere earlier, or 3) Lookup the name on a helpful Internet Wheel of Time Wiki Page.

I think this sums up everyone’s feelings on the matter. Write Like the Wind (George R. R. Martin)

I’ve had a burst of gaming enthusiasm in the last month or so, ending my streak of playing basically nothing since Christmas. As usual, I tend to gravitate toward RPGs and MMOs. The last MMO I played before my break was Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I found enjoyable, but not enough to keep playing past the free month. Then recently, on an impulse, I bought TERA, which boasted a totally fresh new action-based combat system, but again, it didn’t keep my attention past the first month.

Here are some of my impressions from playing The Secret World for a weekend of beta and a few days of the head start. Likes: The “investigation” quests are awesome! You can Google the answers, of course, but trying to solve them without is a trip. We’re talking old school adventure-style puzzles and riddles here. (Make sure to turn off General chat if you don’t want to see spoilers, ‘cause, you know, people are lazy.

I had this impulse to put all my gaming-related posts on a new site, so here it is. I had the melanthius.com domain sitting around doing nothing, so it seemed like a fine time to put it to use. Needless to say, I will be modifying the theme considerably. I am not sure why all of the “gaming” WordPress themes all look the same: Awful. The only thing I will salvage will probably be the color scheme and possibly the Opal font (I don’t know what it’s actually called, but on the Amiga, the super-rounded-letters font was called Opal).

This is what my main character looks like in The Secret World. He makes me laugh whenever I look at him. I just wish I could have made him with a pot belly. FYI combining shotgun and sword seems like a bad idea, now that I’ve already committed to it. I was going to use the shotgun for AoE attacks and the sword for single-target attacks, but there’s no compelling need to split them up like that.

I was going to write up a bunch of hints for The Secret World’s investigation quests, but then I realized that 1) I don’t really have the time to do that, and 2) I don’t really want to do all of the SEO to get them into search results. So, if you were dying to see spoiler-free hints for The Secret World, sorry. :)

I’m taking a break after Book 8 of The Wheel of Time and reading some other things. I’ve started Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. Thusfar it’s not growing on me, but it’s still early. It is, at least, a very different style than Robert Jordan. I know, I know, I haven’t written enough in the last few weeks. I’ll get back to it any day now! I will. Don’t look at me like that.

I’m a bit surprised to say this but I don’t think I’ll be playing TSW beyond the free month. In fact, I stopped playing long before the free month ended. I’m still glad I pre-ordered it, though, because it deserves to have a chance. But I realized that I don’t feel much of a sense of character advancement while playing. You don’t get new weapons very often, and you don’t really get new powers very often, either.

I forgot to do a status update in June, so this will be a two-month report. So, yeah, I haven’t written much. :) I’ve been playing The Secret World and Rift and rebuilding my computer and watching tv and other non-writery type things. If I had a deadline coming up and an editor or an agent or something like that depending on me, they would probably be quite distressed over it.

I’ve been distracted a bit by moving into a new place. Which is a flimsy excuse for not writing, to be honest. Even in the middle of moving, one can easily take an hour out of one’s day to write a thousand words if one really _wants_ to. The truth is I have gotten out of the habit of writing every day and getting back into it is kind of hard, which is why 95% of potential authors don’t ever write

I have heard for quite some time that Joe Abercrombie was more of a “gritty” fantasy writer, more in the vein of George R.R. Martin than Robert Jordan. So that’s what I expected in The Blade Itself. What I read was not gritty. I would describe it more as an action-adventure with a fantasy flavor. Actually it felt more like an urban fantasy style of writing in a medieval fantasy setting.

[The following is the abandoned first draft of “Curses.” If enough people say, “Wow, this is awesome, you should finish it!” I might try to resurrect it.] Olivaer Toebem woke from another dream in which had two arms, startled by a loud commotion in the common room downstairs. He threw off the bed covers and tried to stand, fumbling for balance in the near-darkness. He staggered to the doorway of his small room to find out what had happened.

Well I thought it would be a nice Saturday. I’d get up, log into the Guild Wars 2 Head Start along with the rest of the entire Internet, and have a nice morning of adventure. But nooooooo. It’s been down for two hours now. Not just intermittent connectivity issues; we’re talking 100% dead. And the information coming out of ArenaNet is somewhat lacking. About once an hour we get something like, “We’re looking into connectivity issues.

The hype is finally over and Guild Wars 2 is out (if you pre-purchased it, that is). After being down Saturday morning, GW2 worked flawlessly for the rest of the weekend. Usually the hype far overshadows the actual game. But in this one rare case, it’s possible that the hype was justified. Let’s talk about Guild Wars 1 for a second. I never got into it. Certain things just bugged me.