I haven’t done a very good job of keeping up with this blog lately, have I. :) As it happens, I got a little, um, distracted, but I’m happy to report that the distraction has left as abruptly as it came, and life is now back to normal again.

It isn’t just blogging that I’ve been slacking off on these past two weeks — it’s pretty much everything. So I’ve written next to nothing, hardly even been myself. I’ve got to figure out how to prevent this in the future…

Anyway, today I decided that I need to consolidate my writing projects, because there are too many of them — twelve or so plays, seven or eight novels, a handful of stories that want to be novellas, etc. — and without focusing on one at a time, I’ll never get anywhere. So, I’ve decided to give myself a few blanket categories to work within, and inside each category I’ll only work on one thing at a time. Here are the categories (for now):

1. Short fiction. This’ll be short stories, basically. I thought about taking one of the stories I’ve started and finishing it, but I feel like I want to start afresh — particularly because most of my stories to date have been fantasy of one sort or another, and I’d like to write something realistic. And religious.

2. Long fiction. I’ll try to alternate projects between fantasy and realistic, but that may or may not work. Anyway, the novel I’ll be working on for the time being is Rupert’s Umbrella Adventures. (It’s YA fantasy.)

3. Short play. This is my New Play Project category. :) My first project is to finish revising Alchemy so I can get it out for more feedback and see if I’ve fixed the problems that cropped up in the current draft. Then I’ll start writing a play to submit to the next NPP show, “Long Ago and Far Away.” (I have till June 3, and I want to submit three or four different plays, but so far all of my ideas have been for the other sets this year. Grr.)

4. Long play. I started writing a play tentatively called The Color of Love for Script Frenzy at the beginning of the month, but it pretty much went nowhere. (I have two or three pages of dialogue and that’s it.) The milieu of the play — a BYU student ward — is one I know quite well, and it should be a fun play to write. (And no, it won’t be like Singles Ward. If I’m lucky I might even be able to redeem the genre. :P)

5. Nonfiction. This’ll be my book/essay category. For now, the book I think I want to write is one on how to write a grammar text, particularly for dead languages. In other words, how do you teach a language through a book, without being boring and monotonous? So I’ll be researching pedagogical methods of language instruction, particularly focused on doing it through a book and not through a class or audio or anything else. But I’m free to change the focus if my research shows that my current idea is too restrictive or something. :)

6. Music. The oddball category, I’ll admit. It’s pretty much here purely to get me writing music more often. I’m going to start out by trying to write an arrangement of “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go” for the violin and piano.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure that dividing things up this way will work, but it seems to be the way my brain organizes them, so we’ll see. I’m also going to set goals for these projects, both long-term and weekly, so that I don’t let lots of time slip by without getting anything done.

I reserve the right to change any and all of this. :P

Each week I send out the ward announcements, and for the past two years or so, I’ve included a “Storytime” segment with, well, stories. :) They’re first drafts, completely off the cuff (usually written in the half-hour before I send out the announcements), but they’re fun to do. For a while I was working on the Francis stories, but lately I’ve been serializing a story called “The Widow and the Wizard”. It grew out of something I wrote for the meeting minutes in one of the committees I’m on at work (in trying to get out of my job as scribe :P), and I liked it enough that I’ve kept working on it.

Today I sent out the fifth installment, and it’s funny to see how the story’s grown — originally it was just going to be three segments, short and sweet. But then at the end of the third part I realized there was no way I could finish the story that quickly, and with this bit I’ve just written, I’m realizing that the boy still has to figure out how to save the older wizard and figure out what’s happened to everyone in the city. And I have no idea what’s next. Sometimes it’s a little nerve-wracking, not knowing what’s coming (or how long it’ll take to get there), but most of the time it’s deliciously fun. At this point all I know is that they’re going underground. I guess I’ll have to wait till next week see what happens next… :P

Yesterday morning I was browsing through my copy of Tales Before Tolkien, and I happened to notice the Recommended Reading section at the back, which I’d never seen before.

Goosebumps.

You see, that section lists early fantasy writers and their works (William Morris, E. Nesbit, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, John Buchan, etc.), and almost all of the books and stories mentioned are pre-1923. Out of copyright. Fair game. Mmm. :)

So, I’ve decided that Riverglen Press will have one line focusing on early fantasy — a trend I’ve already started with Phantastes and the upcoming A Voyage to Arcturus. I’m very, very excited about this.

The other two main areas I see Riverglen Press publishing in, by the way, are classics (like A Christmas Carol and Jekyll & Hyde) and language-related books (both grammars, like the Old Icelandic Primer, and actual texts, like Beowulf).

I plan to work on at least one book in each of the three main categories at any given time. Right now I’m finishing up A Voyage to Arcturus in the fantasy line, and I’ve let Pride & Prejudice slip to the back burner in the classics line but I could easily bring it back. As for the language line, I’m feeling like either a Latin text (Augustine?), Grimm in German, or Afanasyev’s collection of Russian tales. (I do plan to publish lots of fairy tales in all sorts of languages, by the way. Lang, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, the Arabian Nights, etc.)

Now if only I had more time… :)

In my attempt (successful, so far) to avoid finishing Shadowpaint, I worked a little on The Girl in the Mirror (a Gothic narrative poem), and I realized something that I’d sort of noticed before but hadn’t paid much attention to: without external constraints, I naturally gravitate toward fantasy and the supernatural in my writing.

Why do I feel almost guilty about this?

Two reasons, I think. First, I’m a Mormon, and we believe in truth. Truth meaning what really is. And fantasy is, by definition almost, what is not. :) This argument doesn’t hold up very well, though, because Mormonism started in our day and age when a boy saw an angel. And as far as the world’s concerned, that’s fantasy. Our temples have an aura of mystery about them (to the outsider) that easily lends itself to imaginative speculations of the fantastical sort. And does writing stories about stuff that never happened — and never could happen — somehow distract us from the goal of becoming like God and getting back to heaven? The tiny little Puritan in me says yes, but to be honest, fairy tales and other fantasy stories actually bolster my belief in God — who is unseen. I don’t see any irony here. Even though I still feel that nagging sense of self-conscious guilt.

The second reason is our modern worship of science and the scientific method. What’s real is what matters, they say. And fantasy isn’t real. Again, tales of fancy stretch my imagination, fueling my creative drive, and that has real-world benefits all over the place (even financially).

The point is, I love fantasy — stories where things happen, in ways they don’t usually happen in our experience — and it’s time to stop being self-conscious about it. Because I sure as heck am not going to stop writing it. :) (Which isn’t to say that I don’t write realistic works — all of my plays so far have been solidly planted in reality, for example. But it’s ten times easier for me to get excited about a work that toes the line between reality and faërie.)