Wednesday, January 27, 2010

... COT3?

Progress has been slow, as I said it would in the previous post. Proofreading is proceeding. I found a layperson (essentially a stranger who knows nothing of Thief) to read COT and write up impressions. So far they claim that they have read the whole thing, liked it, but are dragging their feet about actually writing down any impressions.

I was still not content with the title "Circle of Tales" since I don't like double words in titles, and I intended to name one of the stories within it "The First Circle." The title Compendium of Thieves sprung to mind, which prompted me to find the exact definition of a word which I would have probably taken for granted.

com⋅pen⋅di⋅um 
–noun, plural -di⋅ums, -di⋅a
1. a brief treatment or account of a subject, esp. an extensive subject; concise treatise: a compendium of medicine.
2. a summary, epitome, or abridgment.
3. a full list or inventory: a compendium of their complaints.

So, I think it fits. But if I am going to use that format of a title, then I'll pretty much have to consider it COT2 and Contravention of Thieves to be COT3! It's a meaningless distinction in the end, since no books will have any form of "COTn" anywhere on them.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

... leaning towards quiet

I've been writing recently, but not COT related. I have two storybooks in the works, The Adventures of Clifton Thrift and All There is to See. The later is a story I have been mulling over for possibly five years, but ended up being written in a single day on New Year's Eve. The former is something I wrote back in November, but today I took one of the chapters, divided them in two, and fleshed both out. I'm fairly confident that both are "done" pending tweaks and proofreading.

But now I will probably take a break from writing to work on game design again. The only news I have about COT novels is that I've continued to develop the formatting for the short story collection, which I still think will be called Circle of Tales, but am not totally sure. The only thing I have to report there is that I've thrown out the "six books" idea and the list of stories it will contain has grown to eighteen. I've also thrown out the idea of making the order arbitrary. It will be for the most part, but some stories will definitely require reading previous ones to understand. I hate extensive recapping, especially within the same project! I'm going to let ideas for this project stew for a little before attempting anything, as sort of a quality control process. Ideas that I become less fond of over time will be thrown out, and new ideas added in. We'll see what happens.