The Rudy novel has been off to its appointed rounds for about four weeks now, and I figure I'll drop a note to my contact sometime around Halloween if I haven't heard from them yet.  The Goblin Girl book has largely been run over by the current milestone, as while I've finished up notes and architecture for the first Act, I haven't taken the time to visualize how the second Act is going to start.  

Usually, I kind of brainstorm on the bus back and forth from work, but the bus these days involves a great deal more napping and  contemplating work milestones than novel-based creativity.   That should end soon, after we get through a particularly sticky wicket on the MMO project at work, and then I can should be able to get back to the business of writing again.  While I've been doing a bit of gaming recently, as long as I don't have Halo 3 in my clutches, I don't see the occasional burst of console play or Eve Online affecting my writing schedule.

In the Goblin Girl book, it's really neat having a female lead I'm entranced with again.  While Rudy is pretty much, a guy, and the cast of the characters in the Raven novel are all kind of epic and archetypical in their own odd ways, the Goblin Girl is just compelling to me because she hasn't seen the breadth of the world around her yet, and she's really an excellent vessel for revealing the deeper secrets of the setting step by step.  Again, this is a YA project, so I'm targeting for 50k wordcount max, so I don't have a lot of room to play around.  But I think I can take the time to let my unlikely heroine breathe and grow, and make her a character suitable for novel incarnations to come.

I've also been working with my quite-literal friend who is chasing down some scriptwriting opportunities out in New York.  We've made a few informal pitches, made a few contacts, and as a team are starting to gather a little bit of speed for the long climb to come.  It's interesting just how different (but how the same) screenplay writing is as an art, and how some stories should work beautifully within the framework, and others just really should just stay in print.  At the end of this run, I'm wondering if this is going to lead to some potential agent connections, and whether my broad background as a content / design / game / continuity / novel person is going to have more weight in the film industry than in publishing and games combined.

In terms of inspiration, I recently read a forward in one of Raymond Feist's books.  Raymond Feist incidentally wrote one of my favorite novels - Faerie Tale -  which stands as another source to blame for my love of paranormal fantasy.  I was interested to see that he was recently able to release a kind of "director's cut" of one of his early novels some ten or fifteen years after the original was published, where he updated it a bit but still kept the original vision intact.  That option was actually kind of inspiring to me, and gave me some ideas on how I might want to address the Raven novel in the future.  Chiefly, if I could publish a slightly cut-down version now, with the goal of publishing the more complex version down the line, that just might be an acceptable solution.  There is one section in particular that I've been wondering if I should rethink, and after reading the forward, I just might take a running stab at it and see if I like the revision better at the end of the day.

And, on a sad note, the Writer's Weekend convention has suffered an ill blow, and the show this next June has been cancelled.  I'm hoping it will pick up again in the future, as I really have gained a lot from attending these events. 

  -Scott Hungerford

I started work over this weekend on one of the more ambitious projects in my YA Anthology.

With a low-end target length of around 50,000 words, it already feels like every scene, sentence, and word is going to matter more than with a standard 80,000 word length project.  But, in the hopes of not letting that hurdle daunt me, I'm starting to assemble my notes, put together scenes and scenery in my head, and am hoping to start generating word count by the end of September. 

The short pitch is that the story involves a young goblin girl getting tangled up in her own dark destiny, and the choices she makes as she figures out who she is amongst the oppressive nature of goblin society.  A little magic, a little bullying, and a whole lot of havoc are in the plans for this beast, and it should be a lot of fun to write.

At this point, I've bought a new blank book to start the note-taking process, and am starting to knit scenes and environments that might work down the road.  Putting together a kind of goblin society is going to be pretty easy, based on my background in paper games, but finding those key points of elegance that make the society believable - those key nouns and verbs that give the story its own identifiable flavor - that takes time and iterations in order to get them just right.  But after writing Ferry Folk a few years back, weighing in at 130,000 words, a 50,000 word ceiling feels like a haiku by comparison.

  -Scott Hungerford