Happy Halloween! + NEW STORY: "Star Crash" + Story Collection Thread + Next Up... + This Friday...

Happy Halloween, all! I know I stayed in and got irritated every time the doorbell rang...even though my mom was doing all of the candy stuff! What did you do? Most of you probably did some form of trick-or-treating, a tradition I upheld myself for a time, going as Harry Potter for the last 6 or 7 years of my trick-or-treating life. This was my third year not going out. It was also the year I officially decided that trick-or-treaters annoy me. I'm sorry. But I don't like little children ringing my doorbell every three minutes. Especially not when I'm talking to my mother about serious matters during dinner. Argh!

Today marked the first anniversary of "The First Hour." In its honor, tomorrow, I'll put it up as the Featured Story for a month or so. If you haven't read it yet, it's the perfect Halloween story, especially when read immediately following "Twelve Chimes!"

This past week, Tuesday night (late) specifically, marked the launch of my latest story. Again, sadly, it was not "The Shadow Loop," my planned Halloween story for this year. For more details on that, please see my post immediately preceding this one. Instead, it was a short story written as part of a school assignment, titled "Star Crash." It's an adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, but...in space! It takes the overall/main plot of the play and puts it in the context of the first scene of the play...but all in space! It's an interesting read! "Star Crash" launched late Tuesday night (my time) on the Zelda Universe Forums as my final story to be released as an individual thread (I'll get to that shortly), it launched Wednesday afternoon on Figment, and finally, it launched on Thursday afternoon on deviantART.

This next point is more directed at my readers on the ZU Forums or anybody who ever reads my stuff there. On Wednesday, I began compiling all of the short stories I'd ever posted anywhere on ZU into a single thread. Friday morning marked the completion (for now!) of this thread, when I posted "Star Crash" into it. The thread is a place where readers can view in their full texts all of my short stories (minus "Chosen Ones" and "The Blind Man Who Could See") and where ZU members can post feedback for any or all of my stories, from my newest to my oldest, without necroposting, which goes against ZU forum rules. From now on, all of the short stories that I post to ZU will be posted exclusively in this thread. No longer will they have their own threads for each one. You can find the collection here.

Well, I've written a couple sentences of The Current since June. However, I plan on getting back into now that I'm mostly caught up with schoolwork for now. I hope to have chapter 3 online (Figment and ZU) by Thanksgiving at latest.

Because I've decided to start another project! It's ironic because with all of the disapproval I throw at fan fiction and writers of exclusively fan fiction, I've made two attempts thus far to write fan fiction. One of them I have not even completely thrown out the window! But I've decided to start a new one. This one, however, I am more comfortable doing because it's a fan fiction based on an online Flash game that is, except in the Flash community, otherwise not very well-known. And I'm not sure if anybody's ever written any Armed with Wings fan fiction before! That's right! I'm going to be novelizing the first (well, in in-universe chronology, it's the second) game in Sun-Studios' Armed with Wings series, which is titled the same. The project will be called The Blackmist Chronicles: Episode II: Armed with Wings, and it will tell the first adventure of a resurrected commander of a rebel army as he, along with his highly intelligent eagle, takes on the tyrant ruler of the kingdom, Vandheer Lorde. Because the game itself lacks significant plot points besides the opening and ending, I will be taking the original game's plot's unused potential and adding multiple flashbacks which flesh out the main characters ("Armed with Wings" and Vandheer Lorde) and tell the story of how the rebellion army fell five years before the main plot takes place. I believe that this will take a beautiful game to new heights, and I hope that Daniel Sun, creator of the original series, will take notice of the project while it's in progress and approves! If you haven't yet played the game, it's great (a bit difficult, though)! I will begin work on Armed with Wings when I finish chapter 3 of The Current. I think.

Finally, I wanted to announce that, this Friday, November 4, 2011, at 7 PM EDT, I will be holding a live Q&A session here (and on Vokle) in a new, temporary blog page that I will be setting up soon. The session will be primarily focused on my short stories, The Current, Armed with Wings, and any other writing I've ever published (or not), as well as writing in general; however, when I'm present, conversations tend to drift to Nintendo and Doctor Who, so I expect that, too! If you're interested in asking questions, you'll need to sign up for Vokle (vokle.com); if you just want to watch the session, that's okay, too (and sign-up is not necessary)! Please join me, if you can! I look forward to chatting with you or even seeing you (if you come "on-air" to ask a video question)!

That's all for now! I expect some "Star Crash" reception to be coming in within the next week or so--I did request some more feedback from Anju_Amnell, who takes requests for reads and feedback over on ZU and who provided me with excellent constructive criticism for "The Open Gate" and "Freeing Truth" (see my last post)--so I'll post that in the near future! As for the next chapter of The Current...ASAP! I hope to see you Friday!