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

On days when I’m tired (like today), it seems like designing is a whole lot easier than writing. Drafting out the new stake leadership directory went smoothly, but even just the thought of writing was enough to make me want to take a nap. (Which is what I would do if I had time…) Not sure why that is.

Speaking of design, I just rediscovered f0nt.com, a site with Thai fonts. The SIPA collection is my favorite so far — not only do the fonts work in Photoshop and all, but they even have beautiful OpenType alternates. I’m in heaven. :)

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… :)

Back in May, I decided to start digitizing the Welsh Book of Mormon (Llyfr Mormon), dubbing the endeavor Project Cymru. It was going along pretty well for a while, but then I got bogged down over the summer and kind of forgot about the project. I did (and still do :)) have two volunteers helping me, so we made some headway, but overall the project’s been hibernating pretty tightly.

Not for much longer, though. I’m working on getting a spit-and-barbed-wire version of Unbindery up soon so we can do the OCR clean-up easily, and even get more people to help out. Once that happens, it won’t take long to finish the text. And then I’ll be typesetting it into three different versions: one similar to the original Welsh text, one versified (ala the Doubleday edition of the English Book of Mormon), and a parallel English-Welsh text.

Here’s a page from the versified 1 Nephi:

And here’s a page from the parallel edition:

This’ll be Unbindery’s maiden voyage. Humble beginnings, but she’ll go far. :)

I checked out some books on Hebrew and Arabic today, and as I was leafing through the Hebrew one at dinner (Hebrew for Biblical Interpretation by Arthur Walker-Jones), I realized something: I really want to publish language books. Both books about the languages and texts in the languages.

You see, as I browse through the books out there, a lot of them don’t feel like they do things the right way. I’m not saying I know what the “right way” is, but I think there’s often room for improvement — particularly among the less common languages (like Gothic) where most of the grammars were written in the 1800s and early 1900s. And so I want to write introductory grammar books for dead languages. And live ones, too, but there’s more available material for them, so it’s less pressing. (Seeing as there isn’t a whole lot of market for, say, Middle High German grammar texts, I’m not planning to get any money out of them. They’ll be freely available online, probably with print-on-demand hard copies through Lulu at cost.)

The other half of the coin is actual texts. I’ve done an edition of Beowulf, but that’s about it so far. Project Gutenberg has a nice list of foreign-language texts (like Don Quijote), but it’s not as long as I’d like. Getting texts that I’m sure are public domain will be the hard part. But not insurmountable. :) (Luckily my tastes run towards the older books, which are generally more likely to be public domain.)