Toreas Blog

I have been reading the next chapter over and over again in the past days. I’m very unhappy with it. It has two important bits in there and neither is really conveyed the way I would like them to appear. But I am at a loss for words or what I should change.

So tomorrow I will attempt a rewrite of the chapter. Thanks to using a version control software, there is no problem in overwriting the existing one, I can always retrieve the old one. If the attempt gets worse than the original, I’ll just revert to the old version and give correcting that one another stab. All of this though delays the chapter more than I wanted to. The plan was to release this soonish, but now it will have to wait longer.

I like to commit to something fully and then do it until I come to the conclusion it no longer works. I also like to do what I say I will do. So if I were to say that I release one chapter a week, I would commit to it and do it. But I can’t.

Right now, it comes down to about 1 chapter per week, which averages in the 2300 words region. To say it in book terms, that’s about a normal sized novel of roughly 120’000 words per year. Or in about 3 years I have enough material to fill one of larger fantasy novels out there. It also means that in about 17 years I should be roughly done with writing out the entire story that I have in my head.

Committing to a schedule would mean I have to be bale to keep the schedule or I would not do it, simple. If there is a schedule, people want things on time, I know I do. Right now, I’m writing a script that will take care of updating the wiki pages correctly when I add a new chapter, put a note up on twitter and maybe I can even interface the blog for this as well. Then I would just paste the latest text into a box, write the short blurb for the blog post and submit the texts all in one quick go. It will update the stats, the story page, the front page news and links, just everything I do currently by hand.

If I had a schedule I pre-load the next chapter(s) and have an automated script publish them for me, always at the exact same time.

But I don’t have one, because life happens. As of this moment, I have not written a single line on Toreas for almost a week. I have been thinking about it a lot and ideas and wordings I need to place into my text editing tool of choice, but I have not yet found the time to sit down and do it.

So for now, the schedule stays irregular at about “roughly once a week”. If I get a buffer of 30 chapters or more, I will start a regular schedule until I see the buffer runs too low. Preferably I would like to release often, even twice or more in a week, but I just lack the time the writing requires to manage that.

Where did Toreas come from? Why this story? Why did it keep on growing, keep on being important to me?

Those questions I got asked today by a great person I have not seen for almost 15 years now. Good questions.

The real origins are somewhere in the dark for me. I remember seeing some Robin Hood, some Sindbad and something with a blue rose in it on TV when I was a kid. There were some other movies, but those were the most prolific I can still remember and I think those sparked the original story.

I realized that I have written this story already at least 3 times at least in parts. And I have lost it just as many times. First on paper, then on old floppy disks and then on a hard disk. I think this is part of why this story, because I have tried it so many times already, that I just want it to be out there. But it also is one of the more personal stories for me.

Now to explain this personal note.. That’s not easy. Some of my oldest stories were simply put fantasies where I wrote down some adventure I would like to go on or some character I would like to be. Those were simply for my own benefit, as a way to look back on those fantasies, relive them a bit maybe. Toreas was different form the beginning. It was a story I wanted to tell someone else. Nobody specific really, but just something I would like to read some day to someone. Then in school they forced us to write something and read it to the class. That cured me of the wish to read to others. From then on I just wanted to write it down for others to read and that has not changed. It’s personal because there is a lot of emotion in the story for me.

Eric is a relative new character, but Taji’ra is together with Shimon (who has not appeared directly) one of the oldest characters of the story. The connection between Shimon and Taji’ra is one loaded with energy that I hope I can do justice to with my writing. I have sometimes found a certain solace in this fantasy of mine, a peace and happiness in thinking of this purely fictional pair. It’s hard to describe it more without giving away some story details that will come at a later point, but I hope I managed.

Toreas in it’s basic content has not changed for at least a decade. Some details have been tweaked but Taji’ra is the way she is just as I imagined her before the year 2000.

I enjoy this story a lot and my hope is that this is visible in the writing. And of course that someone out there will enjoy it as well.

This is not a euphemism. The little black book exists.

Yes I will go back a bit more to explain, hey I’m supposed to be a writer after all, right?

Ever since I started writing stories, I have been filling paper of all shapes and sizes. My earliest tries were pictographs (since I could not really write at that time) on paper 4 times the size of normal letter size. These embarrassing witnesses of my earliest tries are thankfully long gone up in smoke in a local garbage incinerator. I went on to other mostly loose leafed collections and the mess is indescribable this caused.

I came across notebooks (the paper kind) pretty quickly then and was fascinated with them. The ring as well as the bound kind, were interesting as they kept everything neatly together. Since then if I come across a nice notebook I buy it, if I can’t suppress the impulse first that is. There are probably twenty to thirty perfectly blank notebooks in my office at any given time.

Then there was my mothers first typewriter. We still have an ancient one I found fascinating simply because of it’s mechanical aspects, but my mother had a slightly more advanced version for her own work. It used a tape and you had to use a sort of white out paper if you wanted to delete a character. Hold it in place and type the character again in the correct location to get the wanted result. It was one of those with the small hammers that came up each time you hit a key.

The second one was significant better. It was electric and you could exchange a writing disk for different fonts. It had a deletion tape right in there and hitting backspace would remove the unwanted character.

Next up came the computer which meant I would no longer have to use the notebooks, since I could type it and edit it very simple and fast, while keeping all my stories on one disk. After losing two of these disks to the usual degradation of a flimsy magnetic data storage (3.5″ discs in case you wonder), paper won again. So back to writing with a pen.

I high school I bought components and built my first computer. On my own. I started writing again, this time storing it on hard disk. 1 GB of storage, that was huge back then, in times of winds 3.11 and 486DX4 100 Mhz. The cheapest mobile phones you can buy these days usually have more power than that. And more storage. Luck has it, my disk died on me. The motor gave in, so it just did not spin anymore. Once more my stories were lost.

I was fed up with writing at that point really. I had lost paper version to mishaps, and multiple digital versions as well. I kept only some that were in notebooks, but those were not very good nor long.

Fast forward to today.

I’m writing most of Toreas on a Toshiba Portégé M700 laptop. It’s a bit aged and has some damage so I’m looking to upgrade to an M750.

This is of course par for the course for losing all my data. Notebooks are exposed to more hazards than anything else in the computer world. And because they still have rotary disks for the most (like mine) those are prone to failure more often than others as well. Solid state disks are a better choice there and it’s already planed to use one of them soonish, but that’s not really much of a concern anyways.

Wifi at home and at the office allow me to connect remotely to a server on the internet where I run a backup of my data. Every time I took a trip and wrote something, I synchronize and voila, data is saved online. To add to the mayhem, I also keep a copy on my computer at work (I don’t think they mind that sub 1 MB space I use there) and my main workstation at home. So I have it in 4 locations at (almost) all times. It’s not going away any time soon.

But the laptop also has it’s draw backs. There is this short idea, that little note I wanted to remember. There always is something to write down but it does not really go into the main text just yet. Things like that are a pain to keep track of in any possible case. Having to grab your laptop and writing it somewhere halfway decent, just makes it a lot more time consuming.

And this is where (finally) the little black book comes into play. It’s a bit larger than my wallet, has thick covers, a rubber band integrated to keep it shut and a string to keep the place where the last note was written in. Very sturdy and enough space to write or draw in even if needed. In there I write down all those little things that come to mind. Be it at work, on the road, even at home, everything that’s small goes in there so I won’t forget. If I get around to it, I might take a picture of it.

The little black book is perfect tool to accompany my other available tools. Now I just need to find a way to manage those notes, once I might type them into the computer. Maybe I have to create a tool myself for that.

On one hand I am happy. I have created 6 more chapters (and could actually write the 7th as well right now). On the other hand, I’m not very happy with myself. There are 5 released chapters and 6 more that are written down but not released, but could be released if I stopped writing and actually take the time to edit them.

There are about 30 more chapters written besides that, but those come into play a long way down the road in multiple different locations. So I’m not even thinking about them for now. What I am thinking about are the 6 chapters that could be up on the page but are not.

So I stop writing on and now start editing the chapters. This will take some time too, but at least I should be releasing the next chapter some time soon and not in month or so. I don’t like doing this, as the muse is strong in me right this moment to write, but that is part of the trade off in my approach to release it in small pieces. Let’s hope this doesn’t bite me in the ass and writers block creeps up on me.