Strangely enough, I've never read The Book of Job or The Bhagavadgita, though I had intended to upon commencing writing my story. Things just didn't turn out that way...However, a book I was reading at the time helped shape a few more elements within the story, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, which concerns the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 (or, the Columbian Exposition, meant to commemorate the four-hundreth anniversary of o' Christopher Colmbus' stumbling into the New World, although they still believed at the time he did it intentionally, or maybe most people did, anyway...heck, they still do now...). The envisioning of the White City, or the grounds of the fair, helped to inform Tekamthi's efforts within Traverse, adding still more color to the world I so enjoyed exploring.
That being said, my efforts were sealed within a vacuum (there's a funny story about a family vacuum I will no get into here). This year I participated in NaNoWriMo in a community of writers from Digital Webbing. A few of these fellow participants were gracious enough to list my blog on their own efforts, and although I never got around to reciprocating the favor, I can make up for that, in some small way, here:
**Jason Rodriguez wrote Complex, and I believe that was the first to be completed within the group. It's a first-person narrative he describes as a satirical romance. Jason has an even more ambitious effort running this year, The Moose in the Closet.
**Joshua Hale Fialkov wrote The Miller, a sort of pulp thriller set in 1940's Pittsburgh, the first in a promised series of tales featuring the eponymous hero. Fialkov is also creator of the acclaimed Elk's Run comic book.
**Ron Phillips started writing Requiem for a Boxer, but alas, didn't finish. His wife succeeded, though.
**Paul Brian DeBerry, with whom I worked on a pitch called (variously) Shotgun Samurai and Masterless Samurai (his creation, my answered solicitation at DW), began The Perfectly Ugly Rug, but didn't finish.
**Ray Dillon, from Golden Goat Studios, also entered, and through a furious endgame succeeded, though there isn't an Internet version to link to. He was by far the most enthusiastic of the DWers, at least in his online commentaries through his progress reports.
I do have some regrets. One is that I didn't title the chapters this time around, as you might have noticed. Last year's were crafted to serve as pseudo-comic-inspired ("The Secret Origin of the Eidolon" being the most obvious) novelties. Part of the reason I didn't set out to do that this year was because there was less of a comic book feel this time around, though I still wish I had the titles, to serve as better touchstones (if I wanted to spend yet more time here on these stories, I would then produce brief synopses of each chapter, but I'm not yet that mad). I also wish that I could have made an effort to read some other participants' work, as I did last year (though the one I was most interested in was never completed, as far as I know). At least with the DW community, I have a few I can always go back to, because now that I've laid this blueprint out, I can't easily forget them.
Maybe I'll speak more of this later, and maybe I'll start redirecting this time to more productive matters, too...
Did I mention I actually did go mad last week? Yeah, I purchased the WrestleMania Anthology boxset at FYE, because they had a terrific price for it. I only overlap event ownership with the last four years, so that's not too bad. And my nearly-month-long search for Eddie Guerrero: Cheating Death, Stealing Life (the DVD, that is) in local stores finally came to fruition, and it happened at Newbury, my comic book savior, which makes it perfectly karmic in some ways. I've also picked up a DVD collection that features old A.J. Styles matches as well as a NWA reunion shows that will hopefully give me a bit of the flavor from independent scene I've only really read about in the pages of the PWI 500 each year, as well as other Pro Wrestling Illustrated publications.
Yeah, and I've been buying too many DVDs lately, or at least way more than I ever have in the past, but that's for my finances to grumble over.
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