Am I going to write a novel?

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Normally I’d say “I am going to write a novel” but having no real foundation for this claim I thought it might make a better question than a statement.

As you may know this is my year of creativity and so far I’ve done very little to live up to my theme. I need to create something and why not go with a classic! Besides, I have lots of writer friends these days so good advice and moral support should be easy to come by.

I’ve been mulling what to write about because in general this is my greatest writing weakness. I do not have stories inside me crying out to get written. My stories and characters more leak out on an as needed basis. I’ve got a file of various ideas I’ve collected in fevered moments, could be some winners in there, but I settled on expanding some stories I wrote a while back and get pleasure reading every so often. I figure if a story I wrote 10 years back can still make me chuckle more than once, its got some legs.

Mind you the idea is kind of terrible. These are stories written for a guild website about the MMO characters we played chronicling the adventures each week for those who couldn’t attend: Tales of the Two Fisted Monkeys. So this is MMO fanfic comedy about a generic fantasy game that plays up the tropes of MMOs and features frankly cartoonish characters. Hows that for an elevator pitch?

I’ve no idea if I can sustain cute funny stories for more than 50K words and dance that line between making readers care what happens to these goofballs and laughing at their antics. I have no real ambitions to make money on this, its more a personal mountain to climb.

I plan to approach this somewhat systematically. First off I need to cleanse the existing stories of their Everquest IP and substitute some generic fantasy trope of my own invention. I’ll need some kind of overall plot and/or ending for the piece. And I’ll need to come up with some interesting adventures beyond those in the existing stories. And then, a whole bunch of typing and making funny without sounding like a broken record.

I figure it’s going to take me like 2 years to do this including ironing the thing out once all the words exist. That is assuming the notion doesn’t just die of apathy, but that’s one of the reasons I’m telling everyone, to put a little potential shame in my game.

Next post:  One of the original stories in its EQ2 self referential glory.

Sigfried

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