Deal breaker
The last few months have been some of the weirdest ever for my writing. It’s been about two years since I haven’t had a real “project” to work on, and the lull has felt kinda… I don’t know, empty.
Much of October was spent mulling over what I learned during the Lanternfly panel and what would become of the series. I’ve got a pretty good idea, but I’ve decided to set things aside for a bit to give it time to ferment. Creative energy is similar to brewing lagers, I’m finding–and let me tell you, October was fucking BRILLIANT for those–they just take a liiiiittle more time than you’d like to brew up properly. In that time, though, I’ve been further kicking around the idea of doing Cloudnigh as an online novel. Its been something I’ve wanted to try for years, but have always either been too nervous about the investment, or too busy with Lanternfly to give anything a solid bill. Until now.
What really kicked off this whole thing was seeing that Matt Page was open for commissions. I’ve been following Matt for years, and he’s a brilliant artist. There’s just something amazing about the rough, unpolished feel of his work. We fired back and forth a few notes on deviantArt, and after sending him the description, he set to work.
This was the result.
In the end, this piece was just the spur I needed to start taking Cloudnigh seriously. Over the past month, I’ve dedicated most of my time to editing what I have of the story, plotting out the rest, and creating promotional and web materials for a launch. I’ve got a pretty good idea of my resources at this point, and the story, my main focus, is growing more and more solid by the day. At the moment, I still don’t have a realistic time frame for when it’ll launch–I’ve just started working at the Champlain College Writing Lab and I’ve upped my hours at Starbucks for the holidays, because I’m broke as shit and I like being able to eat now and then–but I’ll let y’all know when I do.
Right now, I’m thinking late December to sometime in January, February.
In the meantime, I’ve set up a few pages for the story. For day-to-day updates, my sevenspinner twitter is a good bet. I’ve also created one specifically for Cloudnigh. Lastly, there’s a Facebook page for it you can find right here. Head over there if you’re interested.
Finally, after a year, I think I’m going to be moving yet again to a new domain. I registered sevenspinner.com over the summer, which has quickly become my web-identity for everything (e-mail, twitter–it’s pretty much open in everything). I’d be transferring my blog over to there obviously–probably sometime after I get Cloudnigh up and running. Its heavily dependent on my time to design something, so I’ll see.
And lastly, November 15th was Hellion’s fifth birthday. What the fuck.
Thanks for reading!