Posts published in “Challenges”

National Novel Writing Month, Camp Nano, and similar challenges.

[twenty twenty-six day two]: what i call blogging every day

Published January 2, 2026 by centaur

What is Blogging Every Day? Well, that seems simple enough, right? If you blog every day, then you blog every day. Bloggers like John Scalzi at Whatever and Caitlin R. Kiernan at Dear Sweet Filthy World pop out a blog post almost every day, so, that would count, right?

Well, no, because they're blogging machines, and I'm not. If they happen to blog every day, then it's because protons haven't decayed. If I happen to blog every day, then that's damn dumb luck that there were a few days in a row that I blogged. That's just "happening to blog on consecutive days".

No, what I mean is taking on the challenge of producing a blog post for every day of the year.

I've had great luck with challenges in my creative career - 24 Hour Comic Day (draw 24 pages in 24 hours), the 48 Hour Film Project (shoot a film in 48 hours), Script Frenzy (to produce 100 pages of script in a month), to the granddaddy of them all, National Novel Writing Month (write 50,000 words of a new novel in one month, a challenge at which I have succeeded at forty-plus times).

So I've invented my own challenges. Drawing Every Day was initially difficult, but I succeeded at it last year for the first time - more on that tomorrow. Writing Every Day also is scattershot, as is Coding Every Week. Music (Practice) Every Day is deliberately getting sacrificed for the writing and drawing. And Social Media Every Week makes me break out into hives, which we're having some success treating with cat therapy.

As for Blogging Every Day, here's the rules of this challenge:

The challenge starts in a calendar year (say, twenty twenty six).
The goal is to produce one post for every day in that year.
You can schedule posts ahead to deal with obligations.
To count, the post must be intended for that day.
"Retro" posts for missed days are allowed.
Success is scheduling a post for every day in the year within the year.
Completion is writing a post for every day in a year, regardless of when it is written.

"To count, the post must be intended for that day" needs a little explanation. If you've not been blogging, and something happens - like a family party you want to share, or a movie you want to review, or someone being wrong on the Internet - then that motivated post doesn't count as blogging every day. If you are blogging every day, then all topics are fair game - but don't count posts that weren't taken on as part of the challenge, because then you're back to depending on luck, or proton decay.

"Retro" posts and "Completion" also deserve a statement. For my Drawing Every Day project, I draw far ahead - about 80+ days right now for 2026 - since I know my drawing is "bursty". But I can pretty much similarly guarantee I'll miss a post at, say, Dragon Con. So you can "backfill" and have it count - as in my Drawing Every Day project, where I have now started backfilling 2024's missing drawings (I have about 120 drawings left to finish for 2024).

This is different than, say, Vandy Beth Glenn's approach to Running Every Day. At one point her "running every day" streak had gotten insanely large, like over 1,000, and someone asked her: "Do you ever miss a day?" Her response: "No, because I would not have been running for every day."

That's great, but I'm not trying to create a streak of consecutive blogging: I'm trying to create a collection of blog posts for every day of the year. So I will blog, schedule posts, blog ahead, backfill, retro, whatever to put myself in the habit of making sure I've blogged every day.

And what I've found with the Drawing Every Day project is that that discipline - treating it as a collection that I am trying to fill, rather than a streak I'm trying to achieve - has enabled me to build up a buffer and build up my drawing muscles and get my regular practice going.

Here's to that for Blogging Every Day 2026 ... Day Two!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, helping me blog.

Viiictory … forty-three times

Published November 30, 2025 by centaur

a graph of forty-five nano progress stats, forty-three successful, two not

So! The National Novel Writing Month organization may be gone, but National Novel Writing Month lives on! Not just in Nano 2.0, but in my own writing. I've written two and a quarter million words in Nanos over the years, by far the bulk of my writing output, and I'm not stopping now!

For this month, my forty-fifth Nano or Nano-like challenge, I resurrected a fifteen-year-old project ... the Spookymurk! The Spookymurk is a nerfed D&D-like world - a cosy fantasy, in today's terms - which, according to my notes, I stopped work on when I got the notes back for Dakota Frost #2, BLOOD ROCK.

I had four novels come out since I first started playing with the Spookymurk, and I think that's probably a fair trade. But the story was calling to me recently - I even started drawing some of the characters as part of my Drawing Every Day project - so I resurrected Book 1: THE LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT.

This was my forty-third successful Nano, and as always, great inventions come from the pressure that writing ~1700 words a day puts on your story. But, as I went over my old notes, I'm surprised at how extensive they were: this was a rich world, and I'm kind of sad I put it away for so long.

Other than a brief blip around day 8, where I was as far behind as I ever have been, this project was pretty typical of recent Nanos: a slow start as I re-acquainted myself with the world, and a strong finish as I typically ended up with more ideas than I could write down in a day. I'm going to write more tonight, in fact.

Progress bar for Nano 2025, showing a slow start and a strong finish.

And, at last, an excerpt. I liked this bit and thought it turned out well, though it was perhaps one of the most difficult pieces of writing I ever had to write, since I was under spiritual attack (as I have been for a lot of this project, for some reason). Almost every interruption imaginable tried to stop this text from existing:

The “book” is perhaps the most amazing development since the invention of language.

The invention of “language,” itself, of course, had serious drawbacks, requiring evolution to greatly expand our gooey, calorie-hungry brains, with a consequent increase in later-life lower-back problems from all the extra weight, and a rise in complaints from women in labor that whoever this “evolution” person was, he could go fuck himself if he really wanted to push an entire human head out of that small a hole, and she’d take the epidural now, thank you.

The “speech” invention greatly improved on language by letting people actually share their ideas, but it required flapping one’s mouth so hard that the literal air figuratively knocked your ideas into someone else’s head. The concurrent “signing” invention greatly improved the accessibility of speech, both to hearing impaired individuals and to anybody who happened to be dying in the cold vacuum of space, but at the cost of angry debates among linguists, many of whom didn’t like having to study gesture and language at the same time, and had become overly attached to the idea of titling their masterworks on the origins of language something like “It All Started With the Word.” This debate was resolved, however, by Moan Skychomp’s development of the unified cognitive theory of profanity, which proposed that speech and gesture developed together when some forgotten genius stubbed their toe on a rock and simultaneously invented both “swearing” and “the bird” while cussing the very first “blue streak,” a hypothesis documented in Skychomp’s popular magnum opus, “It All Started with the F-Word.”

With the release of “writing,” language really started to jazz it up. This invention went through a rapid sequence of “point updates”, from tally sticks to cuneiform to hieroglyphs to scrolls, and soon there was an absolute explosion of people writing things down for no damn good reason. But, even written down, language was still hard to share, as tablets were heavy, scrolls were cumbersome, and pharaohs tended to send armies after you if you carted off a wall inscribed with hieroglyphics.

The “book” changed all that.

A “book” is an idea. Now, the book is strongly associated with its popular “codex” form factor consisting of thin leaves or “pages,” bound into a portable rectangular prism noted for both its random access features and its tendency to close upon itself unexpectedly just when you’ve found the page you want. But the actual book invention per se is the simple notion of gathering the ideas you want to share into a precisely-defined, self-contained, and, well, share-a-ble unit. Whether as text gathered into a codex, words spoken aloud, bits transmitted into an e-reader, or substantial form conjured into an infinite scroll, all editions of a book can be seen as sharing the same essence of “book” (except audiovisual forms, which often lose something in translation, leading to the common phrase, “the book was better than the movie”). In essence, a book lets the same piece of writing be shared as multiple copies across a vast reach of space and time.

And so, as an idea for sharing ideas, the “book” became the most successful tool for disseminating knowledge in the history of human civilization, enabling “authors” to share their ideas with “readers” not just all over the world, but even across the ages of time itself.

At least until a mad wizard decided to set every codex in existence on fire.

The structure of LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT leaves me a lot of room to work in little sidebars like this between the actual action chapters, so I am having a great deal of fun with the story of Q'yagon Nightstrider the zebra elf, Darina Voidweaver the spidaur, and their many fun misadventures.

Of my post-Dragon Con projects, this was #3 of the ones that have urgent deadlines before the end of the year. There are 2 more, one due tomorrow, and one that was pushed back to January 15th, so hopefully starting on Tuesday I can return to blogging on a more regular basis.

Onward!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Stats from the last 45 nanos, and from this year.

viiictory … forty-two!

Published July 30, 2025 by centaur

Whew! What a few months it's been. I've been so busy I haven't even had time to publicize some of the stuff that I'd naturally use this blog for (like the Embodied AI Workshop). But, we're through most of that now. And the most important thing is completing my 42nd successful Nanowrimo challenge!

The Nanowrimo organization imploded this year, but the challenges roll on - and for me, this year, it was working out the complicated plot of JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. Finding out what the Watchtower really was and what the bad guys were up to was hard enough, but weaving into the plot all the threads of inspiration that led to the story was ... quite the challenge. But I got there.

Still, it led to another blood-in-the-water month, which felt pretty bad, but which (after I fixed a bug in my tracking system) doesn't appear to have been too much worse than other bad months: other than a few blips around the 22nd to the 24th, it seems to have been slow but within the envelope:

And, oh great, images are doing something weird again. Joy. Okay, that seems to be fixed. But I will say, this month felt like the research required on this novel was much greater than normal. No matter! I finished! Oh yes, the traditional excerpt. Sometimes we're our own worst critic:

“What an untapped well of self-loathing I have discovered,” Jeremiah wondered. “Yes, I’m a thirty-two year old three-star general and award-winning athlete, and that’s exceptional. But I’ve cracked my skull, broken my arm, even broken my back through my own carelessness—”

“Oh, the hard life,” Firamiah scoffed, “of the decorated veteran—”

“—and, also, I’ve been exiled, dismissed, even temporarily blinded, because I’m such a whiny Cassandra,” Jeremiah said. “I don’t understand how I rub people so the wrong way that they’d rather stand on their heads than help me fight a monster standing in the very room—”

“Ever consider,” Firamiah barked, “it’s because that smug, annoying smirk of yours annoys people so much that they want to punch you straight in your smug, punchable face?”

Firamiah got nose to nose with Jeremiah in a roaring display of righteous flame.

“If you’re quite done browbeating me,” Jeremiah said stiffly, “please get on with delivering your nodes of the directed acyclic graph, so I can connect the dots and get your self-righteous, unfortunately not-punchable face out of my suitably-chastened, yet still-punchable one.”

Anyway, no celebratory dinner yet: time to move on to the two scientific papers I need to finish editing, one due tomorrow, one due in a week.

Onward!

-the Centaur

viiictory, thirty-eight times …

Published April 30, 2024 by centaur

Woohoo! I have successfully written 50,000 words in the month of April, completing my 38th writing challenge (counting November Nanowrimos, April/July Camp Nanos, and Script Frenzy).

This was a pretty rough Nanowrimo, given the prepwork that I had to do ahead of Clockwork Alchemy.

But, I did it, and learned so much about my story and the overall arc of the series as well. So, huzzah!

So, I am really churning with the edits on this one, but here's a segment which is relatively coherent:

The trim, egg-headed man emerged from Air Force One like royalty, the crowds of military personnel actually cheering him as he descended. At his heels, a lantern-jawed, white-haired man followed, grinning broadly, waving awkwardly at troops that seemed to like him even more.

Both kept smiling as they strode towards Jeremiah, but their body language …

“Oh, my,” Jeremiah said. “They hate each other, don’t they?”

“Now, that,” Marcus said, “is an understatement.”

The pair stopped twenty meters from Jeremiah, on one side of a rough ring of Secret Service agents that made Jeremiah feel like she’d just entered a gladiatorial arena; she wondered what the agents thought they would do if the Scarab decided to go all apocalyptic on them.

“So,” the President said. “You’re … Commander Willstone, correct?”

“Sir, yes sir,” Jeremiah clicked her heels, watching, without appearing to watch, a larger group of dignitaries forming up just outside the ring of Secret Service agents. “I am Senior Expeditionary Commander Jeremiah Willstone, and I am at America’s service, sir.”

“Are you?” the President said. “I hear that you gave our security detail some trouble.”

“I heard that too,” the challenger said. “I notice you refused to be disarmed.”

Jeremiah nodded; her blunderblast remained slung over her back.

“My people use nonlethal weapons,” Jeremiah said, “even this impressive blunderblast, which I will demonstrate later. From a security perspective, however, consider it just show: I’m the weapon. If I had wanted to blow up your plane, I would just have pointed at it.”

The President shifted, just slightly, but the challenger grinned.

“Will you demonstrate that for us later?” he asked.

“Er—yes,” Jeremiah said. “Of course, sir—”

“Not on my plane,” the President said.

“Ah!” Jeremiah said. “No, of course not, sir. I’ll use our psychic’s car instead—”

“Commander!” the Owl said. “I just got—you’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding—”
Jeremiah Willstone and the Watchtower of Destiny

Oh my. I hope they manage to convince each other to work together without blowing anything up.

Nevertheless ... viiictory!

Onward.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one two one]: light at the end of the tunnel

Published April 30, 2024 by centaur

Less than 3000 words to go on Camp Nanowrimo. This was a challenge, but we're close to the end now.

I think I was behind for essentially the entire month this time:

Note to self: don't try launching an anthology, launching a Kickstarter, serving as guest of honor at a con, and running a business all at the same time as doing a Nanowrimo project to write 50,000 words in a month.

Still, almost there ...

-the Centaur

Pictured: Sunshine through a really cool tree in Alum Rock Park, and some scary yet hopeful graphs. Yes, that was 8,000 words this last Sunday. That was a day.

[twenty twenty-four day one two zero]: aaalmost there …

Published April 29, 2024 by centaur

Staying on target. Wrote 8,000 words yesterday, only ~5000 words left to go for tomorrow. Gonna try to put a bit more of a dent in that before I crash tonight.

One cool thing happened today: I figured out EXACTLY WHY a certain mysterious plot event happens.

Now I just need to figure out PRECISELY WHO is responsible for it ...

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one one nine]: still behind

Published April 28, 2024 by centaur

Still trying to get ahead on WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. Lots of progress today though, on multiple levels: a lot of words written, and some very good ideas for both this book and the overall series, based on some background reading about computation and technology based on closed timelike curves, from the computer scientist Hans Moravec and the physicist David Deutsch. Nevertheless ...

This is not the worst I've been behind, but it's in the top three, and it ain't pleasant.

Back to it. I want to push it a little bit more today if I can.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one one seven]: still behind

Published April 25, 2024 by centaur

Well, not as far behind as I've ever been, but, still, not good progress on Camp Nano this month.

Quite a hill to climb, or, in this case, build.

Onward!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one one five]: prioritizing wordcount

Published April 24, 2024 by centaur

Way behind on word count, please enjoy this picture of sushi at One Flew South in the Atlanta airport.

Lots of work to do, not much time left to do it.

-the Centaur

P.S. Oh good grief! This blogpost is having trouble uploading its images, so I'm rabbit-holing on trying to post a simple update, instead of typing words! AAA! Turns out the problem was the wi-fi in this Barnes and Noble Cafe, which allows me to download gobs and gobs of images, but chokes when uploading even relatively small files. I have seen this before at internet cafes and I can't quite tell why that is happening.

[twenty twenty-four day one oh five]: going back to victoriana

Published April 14, 2024 by centaur

Hey folks! I've got just a quick post for you now, because I need to go heads down on Jeremiah Willstone #2, CITADEL OF GLASS, for Camp Nanowrimo. Prepping to be Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy next week - and creating the Kickstarter campaign for The Neurodiversiverse, which we want to go live before CA - has put me behind on my word count for the month ... so I need to make a few changes.

In "normal" circumstances, I have a pretty simple day: take care of food, cats and laundry, work for several hours on the project of the day, and then break - on Mondays and Wednesdays, a late break for dinner where I catch up on reading, on Tuesdays and and some Thursdays, an early dinner break before writing group and the church board meeting, and on Fridays and Saturdays, an early break for coffee and drawing / writing before a late dinner and more reading (with date nites with my wife thrown in). This structure makes sure I'm both making progress on life and work projects during the day, and creative projects at night.

But you can't do that during Camp Nanowrimo or regular National Novel Writing Month - at least, not if you get behind, because if you do, you will fall farther and farther behind. Writing in Nanowrimo actually makes it easier to write more in Nanowrimo - generally, you can raise more questions for yourself than you can answer in a writing session, creating the fuel for future sessions. But once behind, that can jam up - stuck in "writer's block" where you haven't raised enough interesting questions for creative mind to answer, or not thought through the answers enough when you get to the point of writing the outcome of a confrontation.

When I'm behind on Nano, I have to drop my normal "read and eat" strategy in favor of "crack open the laptop at every available opportunity". And I won't limit myself to "write and eat" during meals and "laptop in the coffeehouse" sessions: at the very end of the day I'll set up the laptop in the kitchen , sitting down to bang out the day's wordcount before I let myself crash for the night, where both I and the laptop recharge.

"Autistic inertia" is the way many autistic people describe their inability to start or stop tasks, and some feel it is one of the most disabling aspects of autism. I don't have a formal diagnosis of autism, but informal tests put me on the spectrum - and being aware of your own neurodivergence and the experiences that other people have with the same neurodivergence can help you find strategies that work for you to cope.

For me, I can work on tasks for hours and hours on end - but if I don't have a long enough block to do a task, I tend not to start a task. Now that I understand that I may be struggling with autistic inertia, that helps me understand what may be going on. The feeling that I won't be able to get anything done if I don't have time to get everything done is just that, a feeling. In reality, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step towards it ... and the journey towards 50,000 words in a month begins with one word on the page.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Normally, there should be an open book or sketchbook next to those delicious fish tacos.

DON'T FORGET: Please sign up for our Kickstarter at neurodiversiverse.com - my understanding is that the more people who sign up to be notified when it goes live, the better the campaign will go on launch day! And if you're in the Bay Area, please come see me at Clockwork Alchemy where I'm the Author GOH!

Blog This

Published November 5, 2023 by centaur

In ATL for the Conference on Robot Learning, very tired after a long day, please enjoy this picture of a Page One from Cafe Intermezzo. Actually, today was a really good example of "being where you need to be" ... I ran into a fair number of colleagues from Google and beyond just by being out on the town at the right time and the right place, and was also able to help out a fellow who seriously needed some food. And when the evening was ending ... three more Google colleagues appeared on the street as I sat down for coffee.

I don't actually believe we live in a simulation, or in the Secret, or whatever ... but if you're doing the right thing, I find that Providence tends to open the doors for you right when you need it.

-the Centaur

P.S. Being in the right place DOESN'T mean you get all your nano wordcount done though. I am making progress on "Blessing of the Prism", my Neurodiversiverse story, but on Dakota Frost #7 I found myself spending most of my writing time sorting chapters in the big manuscript into sections, as I realized that one of the ungainly sections I didn't like was actually a coherent start for Dakota Frost #8.

P.P.S. On my blogroll, I saw someone say, "no writing is wasted", and in a sense the chapters I just saved are not wasted. In another, and I say this as a bloviating maximalist, a big part of writing is selection, and sometimes having too many versions of a thing can make it hard to pick the right one and move on.

Okay, really going to crash this time, peace out.

Two at once

Published November 2, 2023 by centaur

So! National Novel Writing Month is here again, but I haven't finished my story for the Neurodiversiverse. So I'm working on two stories at once. Hopefully this will not become confusing.

But, if you see something from me in which space centaurs fight werewolves, or Dakota Frost goes to space, you know why - hang on, wait a minute, I already had those storylines going.

Hmm ... this might be trickier to debug than I thought...

-the Centaur

Viiictory, Thirty-Five Times

Published April 30, 2023 by centaur

Woohoo! After being just about as behind on a Nano challenge as I have ever been and still won, I managed not only to complete 50,000 words in the month of April, but to blow past it to 53,266 words! Hooray!

progress chart for PLAGUE OF GEARS this April

To be frank, that steep slope over the top there feels really good, and I'm quite proud of the effort that I put in to make sure I made it this Nano. But, to be equally frank, the steep slope there PRIOR to going over the top really su-u-u-cked, and I pulled two almost-all-nighters (and one actual all-nighter) to finish.

what, me eating breakfast before noon? it's less likely than you think, though I do like it

Early in the month, I prioritized Clockwork Alchemy, and the Social Navigation paper, and getting work done in our old house in California that we're trying to renovate. But once I was back in the East Coast, I really had to knuckle down, writing up to 6,000 words a day near the end.

But, by the end, I was so far ahead that the "velocity required" to stay on track actually went negative (as you can see at the very end of the graph). I broke 50,000 words yesterday, but I still had a scene in mind involving the Big Bad of the Jeremiah Willstone stories, the dreaded Black Queen, Victoria. I didn't want to lose that inspiration, so I wrote it today, and the next scene, which is starting to roll back together with other parts I've written already. So now will be a good time to take a break and take stock of my life, to resume editing Dakota Frost #4 SPECTRAL IRON, and to get my new consulting business, Logical Robotics, rolling.

According to my records, I've attempted Nanowrimo challenges (Nanowrimo, Camp Nano, and Script Frenzy) 37 times, with 35 successes, producing over 1.85 million words in successful months. If I'm lucky, and I can keep up the pace, I may crack two million words next year - wish me luck. But I think it's more pressing to get the editing of the existing books done - so wish me even more luck with that.

Oh, one more thing, the excerpt:

“Alive, but deposed,” Jeremiah said, as the proboscis of the thing behind her touched the back of her head—then bit in with a sickening CRACK. “Aaah! Deposed in 1865—or enslaved by the Plague today,” she moaned, as it dug in. “It’s y-your … choice … your … Majesty—”

The Queen raised the pistol. “I am no-one’s slave,” she said, and pulled the—

Falconer Cadet Specialist Jeremiah Willstone awoke with a start. Staring at the ceiling, she tried to hold on to the dream … no. She knew better than that. It felt like a fading dream … but they were echoes of memories, the last remnants of some disruption in time.

The jumbled recollections were slipping away, the tangled thoughts dissipating: canaries and scarabs and plagues and queens. But she remembered at least three key things: there was a war on, in time; her memories would be out of date; and she had to rise to the occasion.

Jeremiah glanced at the clock: 4:45AM on a radium dial that did not look familiar—no, did not look like her style at all, a frilly elegant thing more French than Austrian. She looked over, found what she expected from seeing the clock, and considered. It was late enough.

“Oi, roommate,” Jeremiah sat up, feet off her cot. “Name, rank, year. No joke.”

The human computer on the cot opposite her groaned. “Wha—” the woman muttered, a dark-skinned woman with impressive curls and chest, who managed to make waking up seem elegant. Then one of the vacuum tubes in her head sparked, and she sat bolt upright, blinking.

“The Lady Westenhoq,” the woman whispered icily, then swiveled to look at Jeremiah. “Liberation Academy Cadet. And, like you, Cadet Willstone, I’m a first year.”

“Thank you, Lady Westenhoq,” Jeremiah said quietly, “but I meant the date.”

Westenhoq looked at her, then swiveled her own feet of the cot to face her.

“Eighteen-ninety five,” Westenhoq whispered. “Out drinking again, Mya?”

“No, and I … think I’m going to start going by Jeremiah.” She rubbed her face. “Sounds more professional, and pet names remind me of my uncle anyway. But, since you knew my nickname and used it freely, I … take it we’ve worked together before.”

Oh, have they. Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Breakfast at Stax Omega, lots of graphs, and the Camp Nano winner's badge.

[sixty-six] minus fifty-three: i made it

Published April 29, 2023 by centaur

I finished Camp Nano. It's late, I'm tired, I have church in the morning enjoy a random picture, victory post tomorrow.

-the Centaur

Well, I did it …

Published November 30, 2022 by centaur

... I finished Nano for the umpteenth time. But it's just shy of 3am, so I am going to hit the hay and do my usual "Viiiictory N times" post tomorrow.

-the Centaur

P.S. (It will be "Viiictory, 34 times", for 1.8 million words written in Nano).

Viiictory, Thirty-Two Times

Published April 30, 2022 by centaur

Well, after a long hard month and many ups and downs, I have successfully completed Camp Nanowrimo, one of the three yearly National Novel Writing Month challenges to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month - and this is my 32nd time claiming viiictory!

This was one of the more challenging Nanos for me, as April is our quarterly planning month, and on top of that we decided to switch managers within our team and to switch to semester planning in our org. So that led to a dip in the beginning, where it was hard for me to get my groove.

The blood on the deck continued almost to the end of Camp Nano. This month's project was my third go at JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS, and I found it particularly difficult to get momentum as the story is more complicated than normal, with a new protagonist Puck taking center stage in addition to Jeremiah. You can see the dip compared to past Nanos:

I felt like I was struggling and stumbling with the story, writing and rewriting scenes, trying out different alternates (I count these as words written; editing can come later). However, as I rolled into the end of the month, these struggles started to pay off, as I understood better what was up with Puck, why so many weird things happened around her, and what role they played in the story.

Over the years of doing Nano, I've reached this particular point of the enterprise many times - a point which I sometimes call "going off the rails". This is the point where the story seems to gel, and I think it happens when I go from exploring the logical consequences of a set of characters in a situation - which is where I start almost all of my writing - to creatively injecting things into the story that could not be predicted from its beginnings. These still need to be grounded in the plot and consistent with the characters, but there's a difference between the things you typically expect to happen in a scenario and truly creative innovations which cannot be predicted from the setting alone - what the Mythcreants writing team calls Novelty in their ANTS framework (Attachment, Novelty, Tension and Satisfaction).

Over almost 20 years, I've had this creative spark, this "going off the rails" many, many times, and stories always seem better for it. I have tackled 16 Nanowrimos so far out of 34 monthly challenges (also counting Camp Nano and Script Frenzy) and have successfully completed it 32 times.

Each time for me, it's facing those middling slumps, facing the places where I've fallen out of love with my own story, that ultimately kickstart my creativity into high gear and make me fall in love with my work again.

That happened this time, even though I wanted to give up. I know Nano doesn't work for everyone, so your mileage may vary, but for me, as I've often found in other arenas of my life, you sometimes have to work just a little bit harder than you want to to reach an outcome which is far better than you have any right to expect. That was true with Cinnamon, originally a side character in the first Dakota Frost about whom I have now drafted three novels, and it is turning out to be true here with Puck as well, the Girl Who Could Wish, now turning into a truly interesting twist.

Oh, an excerpt. Let me see if I have some rough draftiness lying around here ...

“It’s an ecosystem,” Puck murmured. “There’s a whole ecosystem in the floatbergs—”
One of the jellyfloats wandered under one of the falls, and screamed, terrifyingly human-like, as it steamed and melted—and then Puck realized what the liquid was: sulfuric acid. This was an upper-atmosphere floatberg, its engineered bacteria designed to harvest sulfuric acid from the air—and as the floatberg disintegrated, the collected sulfuric acid which had not been processed was now spilling out in uncontrolled streams, destroying whatever had inhabited this cavern.
“I’m sorry,” Puck said to her little audience. “I … I think it’s too late.”
One of the bigger parakeys, with a crest, hopped up on her knee.
“Is that a vest?” she said, touching a bit of what looked like cloth. “You … you can’t be intelligent creatures, now can you? How could you start a whole civilization up here? Floatbergs only go back a few hundred years, and they don’t last for more than months, maybe weeks—”
The parakey chieftain, if that’s what it was, cheeped at her.
Puck drew a breath.
“I wish this cave could be saved,” she said carefully. The crowd of parakeys cheeped and beeped, and the chieftain pawed at her and cheeped even louder, like a little screech, and she relented. “Alright, a proper, non-conditional wish this time. I wish this cave would be—”
The bottom dropped out from beneath them.

Poor Puck! She can't seem to cut a break. But at least I know who and what she is now, and how she's related to Jeremiah, and can therefore move forward with this story with confidence.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

Transitional Updates

Published November 2, 2021 by centaur

Out with October, in with November, and with it, a bunch of updates. Dragon*Con came and went and was a success. Our Kickstarter for Beyond Boots 'n' Bars was funded; thanks to everyone who participated! But most importantly, the move from California to the East Coast is mostly done.

That last I blame for my lack of posting (and drawing - sheesh, I am ~80+ drawings behind) but, ultimately, that was the most important thing that I and my wife needed to be working on for quite a while. Now, she's got a functioning art studio again, and my library is ... getting there.

But, now it's time to get back to it. I'll be doing Nanowrimo again - JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS, something-like-book 2.75 on my original outline. Since Nano has been so great to me, I'm sponsoring it this year, which in turn, means you can find FROST MOON there!

Welp, back to it. Onward, fellow adventurers!

-the Centaur

Days 189-192

Published July 5, 2021 by centaur

Well, something weird happened with my blog which interfered with updates, so, boo, but nevertheless, it cleared up on its own despite my best debugging efforts, so ... yay? #nervous_laughter And updates. First, here's a quick concept sketch from JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS of the antagonist character "the Parasolite" ... or, more properly, one of her bodies:

The Parasolite prime interrogating Puck in her throne room. Looking at both of these, I'm not getting the length of the human leg correct; I need to work on body proportions as much as faces.

After a long day of writing Camp Nano (oh, I'm doing FLYING GARDENS OF VENUS for Camp Nano) I gave up and did this quick sketch of Brainyon, the brain-jar spider-boy shown earlier, drafted as a mercenary by our "Robert De Niro in Casino"-styled protagonist / antagonist:

Concept sketch for the Parasolite Prime.

Drawing every day, even if I can't always post.

-the Centaur

Viiictory, Twenty-Nine Times

Published April 30, 2021 by centaur

SO! Once again, I have written more than 50,000 words in a month - this time, on Dakota Frost #7, SPIRAL NEEDLE, which is close to being finished. (Yes, yes, YES, I know, Dakota Frost #4-#6 and Cinnamon Frost #1-#3 are not edited yet, editing is harder than writing, and pays less than teaching robots to learn. I'll get to them, I'll get to them, I promise). I can't figure out the new Camp Nano interface to make it cough up the usual winner banner, so you'll just get that screenshot instead. camp nano april 2021 b

This is my twenty-ninth victorious Nano challenge and thirty-first attempt overall. That's great stick-to-it-ness, but I was behind for much of the month, not getting my feet under me until the 10th, but I managed a big pushes two weekends a go and a huge push last weekend, leading to me briefly getting ahead of the game right around the 28th, making today an easy coast (1500 words finished me off, though I wrote through to a notch over 1,667 words just for completeness). According to my records, that 8,154 word push on the 25th was the second most I've ever written in a day, topped only by my 9,074 word mad push to finish PHANTOM SILVER, Dakota Frost #5, on July 30th, 2016. camp nano april 2021 c

Overall, a bit behind this month, which was pretty rough OKR (Objective / Key Result) planning at work. I love the IDEA of OKRs - say what you want to do (Objective, for example, write roughly 1/3 of a novel) and how to measure it (Key Result, for example, 50,000 words in the month of April), but this time it took us until almost the 20th. 3 weeks is way too long to spend on planning for a quarter's worth of effort. OH, almost forgot, an excerpt:

The questing metal fingers of the Plague Witch's "broom" branched and lunged at me. The Salzkammergutschwert’s black blade swept through the metal spikes, as cleanly as a Larry Niven variable sword through tissue paper. The Plague Witch recoiled, whirling the broom-thing, striking its black kettle end on my overextended sword hand. The Salt Chamber Sword sang out across the street, slamming into a fire hydrant in a hiss of water. But that movement naturally carried me forward, as I thought it would, and the moment the Plague Witch raised her head, I shoved my free hand at her, jamming onto her pointed beak a magical silencing wreath made of glowing vines and Technicolor feathers. “Oh, shaddap,” I said, drawing the wreath tight just as she tried to scream. The Plague Witch squeaked—she had a mask, not a beak, so the wreath couldn’t actually shut her mouth, but it could effectively gag her, and as she flailed her head, I kicked her. “And siddown!” And as she stumbled back, for a moment, I thought it was going to work. The Plague Witch writhed. I seized the Waystaff. Nyissa seized my arm. “I suggest retreat!” she cried. “No argument!” I yelled back—but retreat was not so easy. The silencing wreath wasn’t a free design, like my bluebirds or butterflies, but was an ad-hoc construct made from—and attached to—my vine and peacock tattoos, which tugged at me. “Some difficulty!” “Dakota!” Nyissa cried, pulling me away. “Let go!” “She’s got me,” I said, my feet slipping on the street. Oh, this had been a bad idea: as the Plague Witch struggled, the wreath self-replicated, drawing more and more silencing power from her own strength—but the design was imperfect, and was reeling me in towards her. “Nyissa!” Then things happened very, very quickly. Nyissa—my bodyguard, my bride-to-be, my love—darted forward, seized the Salt Chamber Sword in a burst of spray, and swung wildly at the tattoo vine connecting us. But the Plague Witch, flailing, swung her damaged broom at Nyissa—impacting her stomach. Nyissa didn’t even scream: she just doubled over in a splash of blood. The broom swept through her as the Plague Witch stumbled away, her body taken through a forward tumble, the lethally sharp sword falling from her hand—and severing the magic-tight tattoo connection. My vine snapped back to me, hurling me to the pavement. My wind went out. The Plague Witch tore off her disintegrating crown of vines, and screamed—

-the Centaur

Day 119

Published April 24, 2021 by centaur

Vincent van Gogh from "Vincent and the Doctor". Roughed in non-repro blue on Strathmore 9x12, outlined in Sakura Pigma Graphic 1 and rendered in that and Sakura Micron 08, 03, and 005, plus Sakura Pigma Brush. I erased part of the non-repro blue to try to clean it up, which ended up being a mistake as it destroyed some lines, leaving white marks through the drawing; however, using Photoshop's Black and White feature with cyans almost taken to black and blue taken to white, it dropped out the blue while adding a nice warm shading to it. Overall, not bad, though I am still squashing heads even when I am explicitly trying not to squash heads, and ending up with slight asymmetries, particularly in the left side of the beard, when I am explicitly trying to avoid that. But at least the eyes are not totally oversized this time. vincent headshot

Drawing every day. -the Centaur And just ~600 words too, though much of today was cats, taxes and work. Taxes are submitted to the accountant, the cat is home from the vet after a nasty gastrointestinal scare, work is progressing (RL is hard!), and Dakota Frost is having a great time doing SPOILERS with SPOILER, so, no excerpt for you.