Another busy month. I’m still working on the project that I can’t talk about, although that might be changing soon. I’ve been talking with the publisher about getting some stuff in order which could lead to an official announcement. I don’t think I can mention any more than that though.
Meanwhile, this month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding are now all up.
I’ve spent another month working on the project which I’m not allowed to identify – at least explicitly. Needless to say, it’s taking up almost all of my working time, and it’s proving to be pretty big – both in the sense of what it might end up being and in the sense that it’s probably going to clock in at a pretty hefty word count.
That being said, I suspect there are a few things I can say about it that might give you some hints as to what it’s about without violating my NDA:
1: It’s interactive fiction (which might seem self-evident, given what I normally do for a living)
2: It’s different in a lot of ways from anything I’ve written before.
3: It’s licensed work – which explains the NDA.
Obviously that’s not a lot to go on, but it should give you some idea of what I’m working on – at least until I’m able to reveal it for real.
Meantime, this month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding are al now up, thanks to my supporters on Patreon (as always), so give those a look while you’re here.
Another month, which means more work on the project I can’t talk about yet. I’ve finished the first Act (out of five) now, which means I should be on track to finish up sometime around the beginning of next year, barring unexpected delays, personal crises, or scope creep.
After that, Wars of Infinity is probably on the docket, though I obviously can’t guarantee how long that will take.
This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding are now up, thanks to my supporters on Patreon (as always), so give those a look while you’re here.
Still working on that project I can’t talk about. Now that outlining’s done, I’ve started working on it in earnest, with the prologue just finished this morning.
It should be a less expansive project than Lords of Infinity was, although that’s not really saying much. It does at least mean that it’ll probably only a year or two before I finish up with it and start on Wars of Infinity – although it’ll still be a while before I can reveal what it actually is.
As usual, this month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding are now up, thanks to my supporters on Patreon (as always), so give those a look while you’re here.
New year, still working on the new project I can’t talk about.
I’m well over 100 000 words with it now, although the Phase 2 skeleton isn’t quite finished. However, almost all of the mechanical skeleton for the main story is about done, which means I only have the last branch of the last chapter and the epilogues (there will be multiple endings, and they will be quite different, based on your choices throughout the story) left to do before I can take a step back, make some revisions, and then start filling in all that placeholder text.
Hopefully, somewhere around that point, I’ll be allowed to break NDA.
As usual, this month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding are now up, chosen and funded by my Patreon (as always), so don’t forget to give those a look.
Another busy month this time around. I’ve been finishing up the phase two skeleton for the project I still can’t talk about. I’m almost done now, and I suspect I’ll be finished that part sometime at the end of this month or the beginning of the next one. Note that while I’ve been calling it a skeleton, it’s really more like a pared down version of the final product which will have full mechanical function and probably more than 100 000 words of text and code.
So it’s quite an undertaking even by itself.
In the meantime this month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding are now up, chosen and funded by my Patreon (as always), so give those a look too.
This past month, I’ve had some more time to work on my monthly columns, which means May’s articles are a bit longer and more in-depth than usual.
In addition to the normal Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms articles, I’ve also written a post-mortem of Lords of Infinity for this month’s Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding. It discusses a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten from fans over the course of the past two months, as well as the lessons I’m taking going forward into my next interactive fiction project (which I’ve also started preliminary work on).
As usual, these are funded by those of you who contribute to my Patreon, which is honestly one of the major reasons I’ve been able to keep up writing full-time. This line of work doesn’t make anywhere near as much money as most people think, and even with the surge of income from Lords of Infinity‘s release, we’re still not in particularly good shape financially. It was not easy to go more than four years working on a single project without any new release revenue, and oftentimes it was my Patreon which filled the gap and made it so I didn’t have to get a second job or go to friends or family for help making rent.
So thank you, to all of you who’ve contributed during that time. I wouldn’t have been able to devote anywhere near the amount of time and effort I did to Lords of Infinity without you, which means the quality of the finished narrative owes a lot to your generosity.
Chapter 9 of Lords of Infinity has proven rather larger than the last few. It looks like it’ll probably end up being at least 70 or 80k words by the time it’s done. Normally I manage to turn out a chapter a month, but this one’s definitely going to take two.
That being said, it also wraps up a lot of plot threads (or at least, moves them to the point where the next installment will pick up on them), so we are definitely nearing an ending here.
In other news, this month’s of A Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, and An Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms are now up, as usual. The Patreon’s gone over $500 a month again, so if that holds up, I should be also resuming A Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding in April or so.
A lot of you have been suggesting recently that I hire on other people to help me in my writing process. I suspect that’s because a lot of you have been waiting for Lords of Infinity for quite some time, and would like to see it finished sooner, rather than later – which is definitely something I get. I’d like to see it finished soon too. However, expanding to a two or three person team isn’t likely to help that process, and I’d like to take a minute to address why.
The first reason is a practical one: I can’t afford it. I think a lot of people vastly over-estimate how much money writers make, and that applies to stuff like this as well. While I can support myself on a combination of sales, the occasional side work, and proceeds from my Patreon, that doesn’t mean I have enough left over to be able to afford to hire an additional person for any appreciable amount of work. I’d probably have to be making at least twice what I’m making now to consider hiring on someone even part-time, and still pay them a fair wage.
The second reason is a bit more complex: simply put, most of the Infinite Sea exists in my head. All of the world-building, character interactions, broader themes, and where I want the story to go all exist only in my thoughts. While I maintain sets of notes to help keep those thoughts in order, they’d pretty much make no sense whatsoever to anyone else. That means if I were to bring anyone else into this project, I’d not only have to also take the time to explain all of this to a whole new person, but I’d also have to constantly make sure that their work shares the same themes and tone and assumptions as mine. At best, that means I’d essentially be working full-time making sure someone else is writing what I could have been writing myself. At worst, I’d be reducing Lords of Infinity to a discordant mess, a jumble of two separate streams of thought with two different creative visions.
As things are, I’m writing at a pretty steady clip: about 50 000 words a month. At the current rate, I can expect Lords of Infinity to be finished this year, with a word count longer than most linear fantasy series. It’s a pace I’m more or less happy with, and I can’t really think of ways to write faster.
Part of the reason I can even write this fast at all is because the income from my Patreon allows me to write more-or-less full-time. If you’d like to support that, then I’d highly recommend you do. At $1 a month, Patrons get early access to articles, whilst Patrons at the $2 a month tier get to vote on the next articles I write on, based on a selection suggested by thost donating $10 a month.
As usual, of course, this month’s installments of A Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, and An Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms are also now up for general access.
With Chapter 7 of Lords of Infinity now finished, I’m moving on this week to Chapter 8, which deals with a few major plot points but mostly focuses on the consequences of some major plot twists at the end of Chapter 7.
I’m almost done now. Starting in Chapter 9 and 10, a lot of the “side” plot threads get tied up (either permanently, or in a way which carries them over to Wars of Infinity). The last three chapters are almost entirely devoted to a single event, and how the player character chooses to respond to it.
Meanwhile, this month’s installments of A Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, and An Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms are now up, so definitely check those out when you have time.
Paul Wang 