Hello, Internet!
This week’s been pretty productive! In addition to wrapping up & publishing my review of Milo Yiannopolis’ Dangerous, I got some good work done on my maps & setting for The Rule of Iron.
Well, let’s get to it, shall we?
Reading
I completely blew through Percy Jackson & the Olympians. I think I read the last three volumes in under 24 hours. They were a lot of fun, and did a great job tickling my love of mythology.
I was really surprised that Percy Jackson didn’t whitewash over the very NSFW behavior of the Olympian gods as much as I had assumed. The stories are settled right in that Middle Grade/YA cozy spot and published by Disney, after all. Riordan did an excellent job toning down the nastier bits, but still letting the mercurial nature of the Olympians seep through into the main story.
Unfortunately, I enjoyed the books a bit too much. (Bear with me here.)
This is something I’ve noticed happens frequently to me. I’ll begin reading (or re-reading) a novel in order to study it, to see how it ticks and what works well – but before long, I’m just sucked away into the story. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but can be a source of frustration. Simply, I’m not sure exactly why Percy Jackson was as enjoyable as I found it, nor why it is as popular a series among youth as it is.
May have to return to that in the future.
I’ve also spent a little time beginning to re-read James Islington’s The Shadow of What Was Lost. The sequel, An Echo of Things to Come is coming out on August 22. Apart from Oathbringer (by Brandon Sanderson), it’s my most-anticipated book this year.
Writing
Well I published a review this week, so there’s that! It felt good to finish and put something up, even if I found Dangerous to be a bit of a struggle to comment on in a bite-sized package. I opted for (a semblance of) timeliness over trying to be as thorough as possible. I hope I chose well.
Apart from the review, this week was more worldbuilding than writing – and I feel like I got a lot done! I don’t have a large-scale region map for Terras finalized yet, but a lot of the sub-regions are more fleshed out and logic’d.
I’m thinking it should be fun to write up an article on here showing the maps, and the thought processes behind them as an example of worldbuilding. I’m hardly a master at it, but I’m egotistical enough to think that my process could be interesting.
I’m also getting the itch to go look at ‘How the Thrun Earned His Wings’ and brush it up.
Mainly, though, I ought to get to work on Rule this week. I figured out a shift which ought to make the story stronger, I just need to hammer the pieces together and rip some hair out trying to make it elegant. Elegant-ish.
In Review
Last Week: Read Percy Jackson & the Olympians, finish my map-making, and finish a first draft of a review. Predominantly accomplished! Maps aren’t totally finished (and it was probably optimistic to think they would be), but I did manage to complete, revise, and publish a review of Dangerous.
This Week: Chip away at The Shadow of What Was Lost (though I’ve got some time for this one), and get the battle scene moved to its new home (and reasonably spliced in, and all that). Rough edges are OK; but I ought to have something ready for line-editing.
Akhelas 
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