As of today, Tales From Aquis is available for pay-what-you-want (or free) over on Smashwords.
Aquis started out life as a tabletop role-playing campaign that I wrote and ran back in the spring of 2012 with several of my friends while studying at Falmouth University. It’s a book that evolved out of scrawled notes on dining room tables back then, which I periodically revisited over a period of eight years, polishing and adjusting each time- until the coronavirus lockdown finally pushed me to finish it. The stories, characters and names were rejigged massively in the intervening years, but the world at its core holds true.
As of today, Tales From Aquis is available for pay-what-you-want (or free) over on Smashwords.
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The Tales from Aquis cover! I put this together in the Unreal Engine, which is the main engine I work with at the university. Had some fun sorting out lighting on all those structures. The book is mostly done at this point, it needs that final editing pass still. We're safe here at home, with the pandemic raging outside- and I have enjoyed the opportunity to go over personal projects that had been collecting too much dust.
Amazing what having a significant amount of downtime can do. This morning I finished the first manuscript of Tales from Aquis. There are still some changes I would like to make in here of course- a scene that needs changing, and another I'd like to add somewhere else- but for the first time it is possible to read the book from start to finish in some form. I'll be getting on with editing quite soon.
We're all healthy here for the time being, been keeping ourselves isolated since the 11th of March. Taking the opportunity to get some D&D in, online of course, and relax. Hi all. Like many of you out there we are under lockdown in the UK as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. We're fine; I've been spending the last few weeks catching up with a myriad of personal projects, and of course, Doom Eternal. Leah and I are both quite introverted, so we have ample stock of video games and online D&D games to keep us sane. I'm well into writing my next academic paper, and we've been making good progress developing our game, The Missing Few.
It does also mean that there is some good news on the Aquis front; the book is now only two chapters away from being fully written. I definitely want to get the whole thing done before the lock-down ends, whenever that is. It'll need some editing too, but hey I've got a lot of time on my hands! Hoping you all are well out there. Progress is going well on the Aquis book. I've more or less finished writing the second act, and recently did a proofread of the full text as well as some tonal changes here and there. From here on it's the third and final act with its climax, and editing.
Going back through my notes, it looks like I started writing said second act in April 2016. Of course there ended up being a huge gap as I wrote the entirety of Civilization Battle Royale: The Novel in that interim. Hopefully I'll get that third act in far faster! Tales from Aquis has been going well this last week or so. I started writing it in 2012, though the vast majority of the current manuscript was written from 2015-17; mostly during the gap between finishing Escalion and when the weekly Civilization Battle Royale chapters began to consume all my time, despite best intentions. With that project complete, I've had a little bit more time to revisit this.
Most of the work over the last few weeks has been going back over the 2017 manuscript, editing and reworking it, and now of course getting down to write the last third of the book. Of late I've been focusing on writing, somewhere in the region of 500 to 1000 words a day. Considering I have a full time job at the university, an academic paper and a video game project on the go, that's more than respectable. With luck, I want to try and get the first complete draft in place before the end of the year, but we will see how it goes. Hey all.
Whew. With Civilization Battle Royale complete, my focus once again turns to existing long terms projects, notably Tales from Aquis. I'm doing another proofread of the manuscript at the moment, and will be starting to write new material for it before long. I'm aware that I've been working on it on-and-off since about 2012, with it falling by the wayside whenever a new shiny project comes along- but in the grand scheme of things it's not all that far off being done. My aim going forwards is to complete the remainder of Aquis, along with the other remaining long term projects I have in various stages of completion: a VR paper, Dutch and Japanese language work, ArrowJump and of course the final completion of the Dragon Creek series. In terms of long projects, Dragon Creek takes the cake, seeing as Children of the Crater first started appearing on the page in about 2009. I do eventually finish these things, but they take time- and here's to cleaning the slate as we move into the 2020s! Seeya! The title says it all. Sixty chapters now- covering the first 4700 years of the great game. In that time, countless nations have risen and fallen, technologies developed and made obsolete, and religions have spread and faded. The world now broils in the atomic age, and boy are some things going to be changing. As always, the page for the project has the entire book up for grabs, totally free.
My next main book, Tales from Aquis just went through its third major proofreading. I’m currently working on structuring the second act of the book, which is shaping up quite nicely. For those who have been following this blog for a few years, you may be aware that Tales from Aquis started out its life as a tabletop role-playing scenario I wrote and ran back in 2013. I still have the materials for the original scenario, and over this week at the college I’ve been running it again for my students. It’s been quite entertaining to see how differently they react to my friends from University who played the original- and how some of them have made the same mistakes. I have modified it from the 2013 version, it incorporates a lot of the stuff that was added for the novelisation in later years, and it’s really been an excellent way to test my knowledge of the world and push at the boundaries of what I have built. The core of the book is down on paper at this point; its a case of editing what I have and further embellishing on certain aspects of it for the most part.
This last month has also seen the release of five more chapters of the Civilization Battle Royale Novel, as always, go check the page for the project. The new chapters are entitled Eyes to the South, One Night in Jerusalem, Another Returns, New Toys and Breath Before the Storm. Ah, I love the Lojban community. For those who are unaware, my next major title Tales from Aquis will involve an element of Lojban, an open source logical language. The community has been very helpful in translating text for me. Last night I came to them with a book title that needed translating, and sparked an hour-long debate with seven translators coming in to offer their suggestions and support.
Tales from Aquis has become a labour of love for me. I first put pen to paper on this creature almost five years ago, and in that time it has dramatically expanded in scope and depth beyond anything I had originally envisaged. It may take it’s time, but damn is it going to be good when it’s done. |
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