I got the idea for this post from Seanan McGuire. Initially I felt I simply didn’t have enough going on to do “update” posts. I’ll say it’s still true that I don’t have enough going on to do them every month…but I’ve got a lot to say, and I’ve got subscribers that I’d like to keep up to date.
To start with:
I’m not sure if I’ve ever officially announced this, but it seems that keeping oneself accountable to one’s audience is conducive to the deadline writing process. So, henceforth, full disclosure.
For some time now, I’ve been writing and intending to publish a sort of “Reader’s Guide” to the Star Wars Universe – what is now known as the Legends Universe. This was intended to be a collection of my reviews, split into books by era. The reason I canceled this is because…it was going to be a collection of my reviews. Over time, I’ve reflected on this. I added segments to the draft, tried to add something that other collections of reviews didn’t have…but rather than making it more interesting, they made it less interesting. Perhaps worse than this, they made it less interesting to write, which aided in grinding progress to a halt while I reflected on this.
It is still my dream to write something about the Legends Universe. What it is…I don’t know, nor what form it will take. It is of note that as The Old Republic is the only portion of the Legends Universe still active, the first volume – focusing on the years from before the dawn of the Republic to the time of Darth Bane – would have been the only one to become outdated after publication.
To continue full disclosure, I have two ideas of what I might write, but both have their drawbacks. The first is character studies. This is something I have always been interested in, which might be related to my Psychology Major. Had I continued producing detailed video reviews, the majority of them were intended to become “Case Studies”: videos focusing on a single character, with the review of the source material viewed through that framework. This, of course, is a struggle with the Sith Wars era. Dawn of the Jedi, Tales of the Jedi, Lost Tribe of the Sith, Knights of the Old Republic…there is perhaps one character between the three who has enough story to write about, and certainly not as a start to the story.
The second idea, well, somebody else has that blog. But it’s not about Star Wars. Philip Sandifer’s “TARDIS Eruditorum” blog (and book) series does what I originally wanted to do with my reviews, except better. What that is, is to look at each material in greater depth: to focus less on how good and bad it is, but on how it got that way, and on what circumstances surrounding its creation and reception were. I may yet have some unique ways to implement this, but the idea needs to cook for a while.
For the time being, then, this project is ended. Given enough uninterrupted time, I will return to episodic reviews of Legends material. After that, I will likely return to this project in a new way. Until then, I am focusing on smaller blog posts, academia, and fiction.
Moving on from Star Wars…
I’m back to working on Not Enough to be a Ranger (NETBAR), though I’m more and more convinced that the title is going to change sometime between now and the completion of the second draft. Because I’m a full-time undergrad with a full-time job, I’ve set myself a 1/1/17 goal for the first draft. As of right now, I’m at 26,300 words into the first draft. For public consumption, the word count really means very little at this point – every chapter that I’ve written is going to be re-written at least twice before I even show this manuscript to a publisher, so it’s not really a reliable measure of my progress when it comes to buying the book.
What it is a very valid measure of is momentum. Right now, it’s still a ball rolling uphill. A solid chunk of that wordcount is reworked from the partial draft that I had as of 2015, which means I’m still gaining momentum. For those that want to cheer me on, that number is for you.
This has been a lot for one update (I had originally intended to write separate posts about each of these topics but decided not to make you wait) so I’ll wrap this up for now. I’ll fill you in on what else is going on with me soon.
Insomniatic 