Creative update

It’s April and you may wonder, what have I been up to creativity-wise?

In November I worked on my Exodus Terram novel during Nanowrimo. I reached the 50k word goal and made some great progress, but afterwards I felt a bit exhausted about the story. It was time to let it rest for a while and return to it at a later time.

Earlier this year there were a bunch of smaller writing related projects, like the hardcover release of my novel and short stories that needed attention. One story was published in a renowned sci-fi magazine and there was a late release-event for last year's fantasy anthology that had two of my stories in it.  We did a reading and a talk on fantasy, which was even broadcasted on a local TV station. It’s in German only, but you can find a recording of the event here on Youtube if you’re interested. All that kept me preoccupied for a while.

All the while I felt like I needed a distraction and went a bit overboard with retro gear. Toying around with the Commodore C64, Amiga 500, doing some refurbishing and some 90s PC-gaming.
I didn’t find much time for game development and still have no info on game jams of previous years that I’m hoping to join again. Not sure what’s going on this year. But I’m thinking about joining one again in late May.

However I’ve spend some time helping my wife with setting up her streaming gear. She will start her creative coworking stream soon and who knows, maybe I’ll drop by and we might even play some retro games.

For my next writing project I returned to my steampunk world and a raw draft I had written eleven years ago. It’s a steampunk urban fantasy novel called Lilar Canea and I always felt it had great potential, but back then I wasn’t ready yet as a writer to do justice to it.

Just a few weeks ago I set down to reimagine that story in my head and worked on it by following the Snowflake method by Randy Ingermanson. It’s an experiment, but I feel like it’s helping me to iron out the problems I encountered in the old draft. I might share more about my process on this later.
Of course my style has improved quite a bit, so this is not just editing, but a complete rewrite. I’m telling myself the story once more.
I’m 9k words in and aiming for something around 80k words.
It feels great to return and maybe this will turn out to be the second novel that I publish after my debut almost two years ago.

There is also another RetroCraze post coming up soon.