Old roots, new growths

It's been about four years since my story world took off in book form, and about two years from when it stalled out about 75% of the way through.  I've since started and stopped numerous projects, from artwork to game designs to more writing.

I stopped writing in February, 2012, but never stopped generating ideas.  They kept building up, and wouldn't leave me alone.  I thought I had been re-purposed for something else, and gave up writing.  But in the last month or two, it's really been leaking out onto whiteboards at work and recently whiteboards at home.

Yesterday marks the beginning of November, and for writers November at least brings up NaNoWriMo for them one way or another.  For me, it made me look back on writing, and the plethora of new ideas I have stored up since the beginning of the year.

When Steve, my co-writer for the majority of my progress had left the project "Ruin" at around 50k words for other endeavors, I tried to pick up where the pen was put down.  It didn't work.  I started my own new project in the same world to try and get a better feel for my own narrative voice, and had a lot of fun with "Holder the Initiate".  Still, no finished product, and I stalled out at around 12k words, once again unsure of how to proceed.

The final piece that I wrote, and actually finished, was a submission for Machine of Death, a compilation competition recommended by my previous writing partner.  I had a lot of fun with "Killed by the Crown", ~4200 words, and used some of the scrapped mythos from the world we worked on together.

All alongside these projects, I worked with close friends to come up with a game design in the same story world.  We had a lot of fun doing this, but when it came time to actually start coding, it fell apart pretty quickly.  My older brother Josh and I are both in the process of learning programming in our own ways.  For me, my job has me around code a lot, but takes up a lot of my time and brain, so progress is slow.  My brother is learning Python on his own, and is also making progress.  While I would love for us to develop a small, simple old-school rpg sooner than later so that we might apply what we learn, it will likely be later than I want it to be for this project to take off (I wanted to start this years ago).

And now, I have this urge to get back into writing.  I kept fighting it, attempting to stay on one project, unsuccessfully.  I'm not sure what will happen, and I'm afraid to start a new project and not finish something (again).  But I'm compelled to try.

The new project will be called "The Second Hour".  It's named this for a number of reasons, but it will take the majority of my projects (finished and unfinished) and roll them all into something new.

My self-proclaimed deadline is to have a minimum of 12k words of this project by 12/12/12.  I wrote the 12k words of Holder the Initiate in under a month in 2010, and while circumstances have changed, I think it's a pretty comfy goal.

Here's to a new start.  If you'd like to be part of the mailings of prose progression, feel free to request it in the comments or email me at my northblade gmail.com account.