Blog Archives
Nanowrimo 2017
As I write this, midnight approaches on the East Coast of the United States, bringing with it the month of November, or for me, National Novel Writing Month. During this month, also known as Nanowrimo, I will attempt to write 50,000 words along with several thousand other people. I’ve successfully managed the task every year since 2009, but each year brings its own unique challenges.
If you’d like to join us in the attempt, please go to www.nanowrimo.org. When you sign up, you gain access to tons of support, from fellow authors to organized writing events in your area, to the website’s own tracking system. Three of my indy novels, In the Service of the King, Souls of the Everwood, and Balefire and Brimstone, were all written during past Novembers. The wonderful thing is that whether you finish or not, you’ll be closer to a completed novel than when you started. Souls of the Everwood was started in 2008, and I failed to write 50,000 words that year. While I only managed 8,000 words, I still ultimately completed the book. More importantly, I learned how much was happening in my life which didn’t help my writing, and how to make more time to write. If you have lots of ideas, there’s never enough time to write. I look on the entire endeavor as a chance to clean house on my writing efforts and become more disciplined and organized. If you’ve been looking for a good excuse to finally write that novel, please consider National Novel Writing Month. It’s a tough but great experience. Read the rest of this entry
Dungeons, Dragons and The Dark Lord
On November 1st, The Dark Lord, which I co-authored with John Peck under our joint penname of Jack Heckel (Wonder Twin powers, activate!), will be released as an ebook. It’s the start of a new series, unrelated to A Fairy-tale Ending and The Pitchfork of Destiny. It shares a sense of humor with The Charming Tales, but overall, it has a different tone, a touch darker and slightly more serious. The novel parodies epic fantasy, much in the same way our first series has fractured fairy tales.
In the book, Avery Stewart, grad student at Mysterium University, has assumed the identity of the Dark Lord on the sub-world of Trelari, a world similar to Middle-Earth, Azeroth, the Forgotten Realms, Krynn, the world of the Belgariad or any of a number of other fantasy novel settings. His purpose is to cause the Heroes of the Age to unite to defeat him, basically inoculating the world from evil, like a vaccine causing the body to protect itself from disease. Everything goes well, and with a few days to go, he leaves his experiment running. When an undergrad, Vivian, steals the key to Trelari’s reality, Avery has to go back to Trelari to set things right. The problems? His only ally is his roommate who made a boardgame out of his dissertation. Without the key to reality, he has to follow the rules of the sub-world, which means, among other things, going to a bar and recruiting a group of adventurers. The final problem? He’s allied with the same heroes who fought him as the Dark Lord.
And that’s not to mention dark riders, gelatinous slimes, golems, trolls, gnolls, and a plethora of traps… and more. Read the rest of this entry
Harry Heckel 