Writing of a very different kind

I like to think of myself as a relatively well-rounded writer.

For my day job, I write product copy for a charity-based e-com site — scarves, jewelry, picture frames, you name it. I’ve been doing it for close to five years now and it’s just a thing I do.

For my personal writing, I’ve done children story books, poetry, screenplays, comic books, RPG source-books, short stories, and novels. For genres, I’ve likewise been all over the map in terms of genre. Though I’m very comfortable with super-heroes, horror, and dark fantasy, I’ve also done quite well writing sci-fi, mystery, thriller, even a straight-up drama. I know…the “Long Summer of Painted Horses” screenplay is a real dark horse in my efforts.

After a bunch of time with short fiction and novels, I’m back in the RPG Source-book mode now. I have a project due in a few weeks, and it’s time to finish it up. A traveler’s guide, if you will, to a variety of alien ports, it is something kind of new for me. On one level, it’s world building on a massive scale — twenty alien worlds, many with native sentient species, their own customs, their own environmental conditions, and the character of the port including a handful of support characters and story hooks at each. But at the same time, each port is little more than a sketch. I’m not going into huge depth.

It’s a fascinating process, and it looks like I might do a few more of these down the road. I just need to apply my edits, fill in some gaps, and write an essay about travel in that region of space. Not a bad workload for the next two weeks. Heck, it’s shaping up to be a quiet weekend, especially if the weather continues to be damp. I might have most of the final draft ready by Monday evening.

Then when the book comes out this fall, I’ll bring the dice, and we’ll go dutch on pizza.