So, status report on writing number two. Everything is going
extremely well and I'm not just getting better at writing, but faster too, especially now that winter has come round again; I work faster in the cold, for whatever reason :p
I'm practicing my worldbuilding, and my greatest weakness in that is where I'm putting most of my attention - map making. I'm definitely going for a global approach, so I'll be mapping out the entire world in detail, though the books themselves will be set in only a small section of it. This will ensure that the entire world is geographically plausible, with realistic weather patterns and climate. This might seem like excessive worldbuilding detail, a waste of time even, but this has enormous ramifications on the function of agriculture, the flow of trade and thus the development of cultures great and small. Having realistic geography, with ocean currents, rainfall patterns and humidity is thus the bedrock of good worldbuilding, and though I'm pretty good at this stuff already, there is always room to improve
Meanwhile, on the publishing front, the editors have gotten back to me and have said there will be a delay in getting the story out because, and I honestly didn't expect this, one of the editors is having a baby. Still, all reports come back good so far, so there shouldn't be any issues with publishing the final version of the short story soon, and if all goes well it'll be out for a Christmas release.
Finally, my fanfics are growing more popular by the day, as is the praise, and I'm learning an enormous amount just from them. I've got people hammering out maps using the information I have written and applying it to the existing maps of the setting without so much as a single problem, a good sign, and work on a
TVTropes page for my flagship series is well underway; still, there'll be a lot more work to be done before it covers the story proper, and it'll swell quickly once my writing schedule loops back round to that story. Then, if that was not enough, there's talks of creating a module for the CK2 Game of Thrones mod to bring it in line with what I have written - the only obstacle there is editing the province maps, a long and nightmarish task indeed. The rest is easy to do, if time consuming, since it would mostly be about taking the lineages I have built and converting them into in game characters, fortunately, there are plenty of tools out there that make this part a lot quicker than it would otherwise be...but it'd still take a pretty long time to code events, traits and to alter various religions to make everything slot together properly.
Another thing I'm going to do is publish all the family trees I've done on AO3 with the rest of the story, since they add quite a bit to the worldbuilding and they're already readable on AH. Putting them there gives one centralized location for the lot of them, and lets me go into much more detail on the various characters...and there are a lot of characters, since this is built off of ASOIAF and one family tree has some forty plus individuals in it, and that's...what, four generations?
Now I best get to bed, I've got to be up in three hours to get back to writing
I've gone for a full triphasic sleeping routine, and I can get an enormous amount of work done - on a good day, I can hammer out some five thousand words, sometimes more if my prose hits and the part starts building itself.