Progress Update: Book Club, Streams, and Rough Drafts

Heyo, helpful humans!

Still in my deep cave-dwelling writing state, hard at work on this Terry Pratchett short story. Not all of them take this long to put together, but here I am trying to do the spirit of Pratchett's work justice, and boy is that a tall order.

It's coming together pretty well, I think, but it's a really ambitious story. We'll see how it all unfolds in the final final draft over the this + next week. 

I'll talk a little more about what the process has been like in this post. In addition there's some really cool stuff on the horizon for the show/Tale Foundry community, so make sure you read the "what's next" section below to get up to speed!

Where are we now?

Almost done with the story rough draft.

This one's been a long time coming, but I think the reason will be clear when this thing officially drops. In the spirit of Pratchett, and to honor his influence properly, there's a lot I wanted to try and include in this story. Tone, scope of the worldbuilding, satire, evocative characterization, lore, fun internal logic, some level of allegory, etc., etc.

I say that, but I wanna make clear that it's not mimicry. I'm writing it in my own style, but I'm taking queues from what Pratchett did with his voice and his disarming tone rather than trying to match his style 1:1. I think it'll come through when you compare this piece with others I've written, but it's also been a pretty intense exercise in versatility.

Overall, I'm really, really enjoying the experience. It's just new, and new things always take a bit longer.

What's next?

Obviously the SCP series is on the backburner right now, which I'm absurdly excited about.

That's gonna be a minute while I finish up this story + video, though. So what's going on until then?

Well, I've been teasing a Tale Foundry stream a lot lately, and really the only thing left to set up about that is my streaming environment. Doesn't have to be anything fancy, but I'm something of a transient these days. I have a place to sleep, but I spend so much time during the day driving around from place to place, it can be hard to feel like I have a consistent, secluded area to unfold my computer and relax in peace with you guys. So that's the final obstacle there. As soon as that's sorted, we can start playing games, chatting, and whatever else we wanna do together in our spare time!

In addition to that, as a part of differentiating patreon content from public content, we're going to have a patreon-exclusive book club in the near future! This'll be different from The Forge (which hasn't happened in a while, but will still totally be a thing) in that all patrons (not just $5+) will be able to access it, and it'll be on a regular schedule. Unlike Forge Sessions, this won't be about the show itself at all, but books, shows, movies, etc., that we're reading in our spare time, purely for fun! We might even use this as an opportunity to watch stuff together sometimes. Who knows!

This sounds like I'm adding a bunch of stuff, but really it's just an excuse to livechat/livestream more frequently. The only additional burden on me will be making posts ahead of time to remind you guys of upcoming book clubs, forge sessions, livechats, and streams. Sounds simple enough, hey? 

—

I've just been missing you guys, really. Writing can get pretty lonely at times. There isn't always much to talk about without spoiling the story, and you get so deep into the process, you forget to interact.

So let's see if we can't remedy that and spend some time together, hey?

—Benji