The end of Phoenix and the Pelican, for now at least

Well, I did it. I won NaNoWriMo, and I finished the story leading up to the NaNoWriMo story. There's still a gap of something like five or ten years between them, but most of the events aren't really important to the story of Saint Emmanuel, and it really mostly makes sense on its own.


These two stories are why I've been stuck on this epic for so long. Adams' first mission under Emmanuel, Walt's battle, the Dyson disk. . . these are what I had in mind when I first decided to do a space epic. This is still just a first draft, so there's a ton of work yet to be done (just like literally everything else I've ever written), but it's at least sixty percent canon and it gets the story finished whether the ending sucks or not.

So here it is, the thrilling, ridiculous conclusion to the Phoenix and the Pelican.

Learn to Run:
The Pheonix and the Pelican - Learn to Run


Saint Emmanuel:
The Pheonix and the Pelican- Saint Emmanuel the Scourge


If there are any suggestions or criticisms for the next major revision/next series I write, I will take it into consideration. All feedback is encouraged.

It's nanowrimo!

OH GOD I forgot how hard it is to do NaNoWriMo while having real responsibilities and being so crazy that I can't tell anyone I write. Despite that, I'm less then a day behind, and have several days of freedom approaching as well as a much more detailed outline then last time (see Freefall, my 2007 failure).

The story I'm telling now could be seen as the whole point to the phoenix and the pelican series- the name will finally be explained, the characters will come back to do what they were supposed to do the first time, and everything is going to explode forever. Basically, the story of Emmanuel (a sort of protagonist) is still going to be the poorly written, vague drivel I always write, but it's going to be the best damn drivel I've ever put out, and when it's done I'll be done with Phoenix and the Pelican for a while, and feel like I can work on something unrelated without abandoning my precious epic.

October's story is only a couple of scenes from complete, BUT I can't write them until I'm ahead in Nanowrimo, so that's sort of not close at hand. Oh well, not like anyone but me cares about Adams and Cecilia anyway.

Talk Talk Talk

I don't like how this turned out at all. I keep trying to write about things I have absolutely no experience with, and it shows, but there's a handful of scenes that I couldn't let go of even if they felt wrong by the time I actually got them written out.

Here it is, the august/september story and part two of the July story: Talk Talk Talk.

Criticism is desperately required.

The Phoenix and the Pelican - Talk Talk Talk

Second part of the story from last month

I've always liked to call myself a writer in my head, but taking the title without even finishing a short story is just stupid. Even now, having never actually published anything, I don't like being called a writer. In the summer of 2007, I'd never finished anything and began to wonder if I ever would, so I sat down and told myself that if I couldn't go through with an idea by the end of the month I'd give up on the idea and get serious about something else as a purpose in life.

I've never been good with prewriting, and probably never will bother to do very much. In this case I started listing words in my head and waited for one to catch my fancy as a potential starting point.

"Beautiful."

One of my favorite words, easily, as undescriptive as it generally is. So I wrote the word down, and started listening. The rest of the conversation flowed out automatically, and the rest of the story followed easily. Though I like to think Pale Blue Eyes can stand on its own, there were a lot of finer points that I thought important which never got addressed, and I knew patching them in would slow the narrative flow I'd managed to build up, so a sequel it was.

The original:
A Dream of Pale Blue Eyes

Part two:
A Dream of Freedom

There's still some mysteries to the series, or so I like to hope, and if I have any choice they're going to follow me to my grave.

as always, I'm fucking terrified of never getting any feedback, any anonymous insults or compliments would be spectacular.

I failed

Well, I've been pretty consistent with updating these subpar little scifi stories for most of this year, but this month I just haven't been feeling the muse like usual. I think I can still finish the current story and expand the line of Carpathia Adams and Cecilia Dawes into something interesting, but it'll have to wait until next month.

In the mean time, I offer the first half of the first story I ever finished, and the last story I ever felt even slightly satisfied with: A Dream of Pale Blue Eyes.

As always, PLEASE, PLEASE COMMENT. I'm stuck with the writing bug, and I'll probably still be turning stories out until I die, BUT if the few people who click through to this terrible little blog actually give me advice on how to improve, I will presumable improve and you will eventually get to read good stories.

A Dream of Pale Blue Eyes

This is part one of two or three, with each story ending in a fragment of a poem I dashed off in ten seconds at the end of each part. Part two will be posted next month, at some point after I finish the next Phoenix and the Pelican story.

Two Ships in the Night

Almost everything I post here is a first draft for the simple reason that I have absolutely no idea how to edit myself. I'll write something with some good parts and some bad parts, delete one of the scenes which doesn't fit right, and then rewrite the scene exactly how it was before. All part of writing in a vacuum, I guess.

About halfway through writing this month's short I realized that I was writing a pilot, or some sort of part 1 of a serial. While there's nothing outright wrong with serializing, I didn't really like the premise enough to stay with it that long. Adams still doesn't feel right, and the ending is much more jagged then I'd hoped, but after a few rewrites this is the best I could come up with. I've been toying with the concept ever since I came up with the Phoenix and the Pelican, so even though it's still written by my own amateurish hand it's nice to see it all out.

And so, for this month's crazy, part one of the story of Anowara Telamon, Two Ships In the Night:

The Phoenix and the Pelican - Two Ships in the Night

Another new story

A lot of people offer a lot of advice about how to be a good writer, but very little of it makes any sense. The most common nugget that I've ever bothered to notice has to be the painfully obvious "JUST WRITE." It doesn't matter if anyone's reading you, or if you're any good as long as you keep practicing and pay enough attention to your own material to correct some of your own mistakes the next time.

Different people have different numbers, but almost everyone agrees every single day, so I guess that's what I do. A few sentences or pages every day, as long as something goes from my head to my hard drive every day. It doesn't matter if anyone reads me (they don't) or if anyone who does read me bothers to comment (you don't, so far), as long as I can get a few words on paper and not feel like I'm moving backwards.

Of course, not FEELING like I'm moving backwards might just mean that I'm too dense to notice my slow descent into gibberish, but if I'm going to write this madness to myself I might as well keep it optimistic at the very least, right?

Now that that's out of the way, ON TO JUNE'S CRAZY!
The Pheonix and The Pelican - Sunday Morning

This is another first draft, so I don't know if anything important slipped through. I'm not entirely certain how to edit documents on Scribd anyway, so I guess it's all a moot point for the near term.