SO! My fiendish plan to drill in on finishing LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT, rather than Blogging A to Z, has paid off in the nick of time: I just completed my forty-fifth successful Nanowrimo challenge, out of fifty total attempts over the past quarter century.
You have to look closely to see all the failures, but they're the ones that go down and to the right below the midline of the diagram you see above. But this time I made it, and just in the nick of time.
You see how steep it gets near the end? That's me doing a full court press, right in the last week. That's always a less fun experience than I like, but I have to say, sometimes wonderful things come out of it - in this case Kassandroc, a "prophecy bird" who popped into Novella 7 in the sequence in rather late and complicated it in some very delightful ways.
But getting there required putting in several 5000+ word days, including staying up to six in the morning the night of the 29th (which basically was today) to make sure that I had fewer words remaining on the 30th than I had written on the 29th, essentially knowing "I can do this!"
And I did. I've hit 292K words in the manucript for LEGACY, which has turned into a trilogy at this point, divided into roughly three to four novellas per book. That makes LEGACY my largest writing project, longer than the MACHINERY OF THE APOCALYPSE, another unpublished trilogy which I am looking forward to getting back to once I finish LEGACY and release it to the world.
And now, I have a very late IROS review to do, which I just found out about because apparently the reminder emails were ending up in my spam folder. More in a bit!
Oh! An excerpt. Context is for wimps:
Like so many names in Arcadia, the Origami Gryphon was both a shop and a person.
The Gryphon’s shop was located on the intersection of Fourth Spoke, Fifth Ring, not too far a walk from where Darina and Q’yagon first met. Then, as now, the Origami Gryphon was a sprawling scrollarium, a vast disc-shaped building wider than Helixium. Three steaming water towers surrounded a central rotunda filled with books, slates, scrolls, and encyclitomes.
Inside the main entrance hung a massive, ornately engraved sign—the original sign for the shop, a millennium old, now roped off with its own historical marker, but still legible in pre-post-post-post-post-modern-styled ornate Roman English lettering:
Welcome to the Origami Gryphon
Books Eaten, Scrolls Written
A Million Books of Lore
Ready to be Regurgitated
All You Need is a Question“And some coin,” Q’yagon cracked, patting Darina’s arm.
Onward!
- the Centaur
Pictured: a statue I found at SC Comic Con, which, I swear, looks almost like the ice dragon Frostthorne from LEGACY, complete down to standing on a modified globe which had some of the features of the post-continental-shift world of the Spookymurk.