*Does a happy dance*

I’ve been doing the P90X for almost 3 weeks, and I can already see some change.

I’m not trying to lose weight and I’m not measuring myself, so I don’t have any numbers to throw at you. However, I average around 150 lbs throughout the year, at six feet tall. I’m looking to take that up to roughly 170.

This is mostly an attempt to recapture the body I used to have. I miss those inhumanly disproportionate shoulders…

A New Fantasy

As some of you may know, I’ve been on a long hiatus from writing. I work thirty hours a week, have EMT training about 4-6 hours a week, my friends take up most of my Friday and Saturday nights, and I have a girlfriend… which means I have chores.

Whenever I get some time to myself, I usually end up playing video games for several hours, and then nothing productive gets done.

On top of that, I’ve been working on editing a 150 page manuscript which is eventually going to go through a huge makeover, changing plot, antagonists, adding conflict, and just about everything else I can do to make it better.

Meanwhile in the real world, I’m trying to find a way out of the world of Seilice for a bit. But, at the same time, I still want to write.

So I found the simplest solution: write a new fantasy novel.

However, I had no idea what to write. No ideas swimming around in my head for weeks or months, no magical world I’ve been preoccupied with, and no characters trying to influence my psyche. I was starting from scratch.

So, I looked up the snowflake method, which I’ve never used before, and I started to follow its directions. I had to modify a few things for my own tastes, but otherwise it’s a very sound method of story planning.

In short, you start out by writing a one sentence summary of the story. Mine is:

“A blacksmith’s apprentice travels across the land to restore magical balance to the world.”

I know, it doesn’t sound like much yet, right? Well that’s because it’s just one line. It gives a very general overview of the story, without going into too much detail. But after this step, you turn the summary into a paragraph, and then turn each sentence of the paragraph into a paragraph, and then turn each paragraph into a page, until you have four to six pages of synopsis for your story.

And the greatest thing about it is that it gets much of the logical fallacies out of the way before you ever have to worry about it. Not to mention the fact that you don’t have to worry about “what comes next?”

Somewhere in there, you start to do this same process for your characters, building out from something small into something that actually seems real. It’s pretty nice.

I’ll give more details on the story once I have everything planned out in a way I’m happy with, but for now I’ll just leave you with what I gave up ^there^. Oh, and I’m planning to make it a trilogy.

So that’s it. I’m going to try to update this more often. For now, I shall return to planning out my new unnamed story.