2022-04-01
Introduction?
This is the first time I ever trying serious writing for once and I never really considered myself any sort of writer despite the fact I’ve been creating my own world for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) since I was in high school and based it on the world I created while I was in elementary school before the internet was around. I never had the chance to do an extensive work on the world but worked on it whenever I wanted to run away from the real world and get myself lost in my fantasy world. That fantasy world opened up to a whole new vista when I shared the world with other people to play table top roleplaying games.
2020 presented an interesting proposal I could not refuse, I was stuck at home like many of us and I had too much time to ask myself the questions I haven’t been asking myself for years; How is my world doing? I also had an opportunity to run a lot of Dungeons and Dragons online with many groups and was able to reconstruct my world again and since I have more time I started to wonder whether I can write a short story about it…. But where do I start?
What initially started as my new knowledge management system (KMS) ended up being used as my personal knowledge base for D&D and all the lore I have created. Obsidian is the said system and I fell in love with and the discord community. There I learned about NaNoWriMo with their annual writing challenges and I decided to join the community to write something with a solid beginning and and end.
This website came to be to share some of my writings with my community, learn bit more about coding in my spare time and sharing some of my writing journey here.
First day of April FOOLS, I mean NaNoWriMO actually.
I joined the Virtual Write-in, thank you Katherine for the wonderful facilitation, to learn more about what is going on during the writing camp. It was a bit daunting at first but nonetheless exciting to participate in my first group writing sessions without feeling like this is some sort of essay I have to turn for an English exam. English is my second language and writing is my nemesis for my entire academic life, and still is today. Curse you articles why thou art exist? But the facilitation was smooth and the topics were refreshing for me to think about what I’m going to write - not entirely - to think from my potential character’s perspective with writing prompts. I clocked in 800+ words in on the story I wanted to develop on. Plus the side writing I did that was not part of the project scope it slowly rolled towards 2000 words today in total. I never tracked how many words I write a day on a daily basis other than just writing it for fun for my D&D so this was rather exciting to track it for once. As for my activity you can check out how I am doing from here.
Reading List
I am going rather slow since I am trying to read other books in the meantime to learn how to write and edit it going forward and the current books I’m reading are:
- Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel
- Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need
- Stein on Writing: A Master Editor Shares His Craft, Techniques, and Strategies
- The Elements of Style
I am re-reading the first two for the second time to share those notes in the future and the other two as well.