But at least it's closer!

I haven't had any free time to write, even on Altaia, this weekend. Between getting this website up, and my retool of http://www.logrus.com, and some work I'm doing on a shadowfist site that I want finished before Gencon (which we leave for in 1.5 weeks), it just hasn't floated to the top of my todo list.

On the other hand, I have given some pretty serious thought to a few ideas I've had floating around. Which is both helpful and not. I do need to have something ready when I finish Cracks, but by the same token, I still have 7 chapters of that to write, and I don't want to get distracted and pick up another project before I have a completed novel under my belt.

So what do I do? I write a blog entry, primarily for the sake of making sure that I keep this near the top of my consciousness.

Snippets of the idea list

• I have a pure sci-fi story half-conceived in my head. Mostly I have a lot of dressing -- little fiddly bits about how the universe should work -- but as of yet no main plot. This seems to be a common theme amongst my work.
• There's an old, old story I once wrote about an amnesiac who'd had half his brain removed and replaced with a neural computer that he could communicate with. That story seems to have been lost, but it wasn't actually all that good anyway; I've pondered rewriting it a little.
• I've given City Tale a little thought, but nothing in particular has formulated for it.
• There's an RP mini-campaign I want to run; this one actually has a plot (gasp) and I think could make a decent story. I will have to take copious notes while I put it together, with an eye for novelizing it. It's a cyberpunk-esque idea, but not really cyberpunk by the standards of where the genre has gone. As far as I can tell, that whole genre is a shitty genre to write in due to lack of audience.
• One of my ideas also involved a fairly classic story of a village boy with the mark of destiny. I find myself occasionally giving thought to the dichotomy between our society's deep interest in hereditary rights (notice how fantasy heroes are often entitled or empowered by birthright?) and our society's deep interested in equality and democracy. These two things conflict. I want to put that conflict into a story, somehow, and still make it good. I think I have a half-formed, possibly half-baked idea in there, too.

There! That makes me feel good about at least having stuff to write...when I have time to write!

Starting next month, I have a goal: If I cannot find time to write on Cracks, I want to write at least a 1,000 word short story per month. I've got to keep something flowing.