Progress Update: Firing the Forge

Hello, helpful humans! 

It's a new week, and I've got some news for all of you. Nothing earth-shattering this time, but exciting nonetheless.

Where are we?

The preparation for the short story is coming along swimmingly. I've done all the conceptual outlining, most of the character planning, and now i'm in the process of boiling things down to a sequence of events small enough for the span of a short story. 

Like most of the stories I write, this thing could easily fill out a novel. The trick will be isolating a moment and implying as much about the world as possible without doing much (or any) exposition. I think I can handle that fine, but it requires a heck of a lot of planning, so I'm spending more time on that process than usual this time. I'm not hating it, either. In the world of planners and pantsers, I lean far, faaaar into boxer-brief territory.

So that's where we are with the forthcoming worldbuilding story video. However, the astute among you who participate in our Patreon feed and our Discord server will know there's more going on than that.

Have a look at the schedule at the top of our Patreon page. If you do, you'll notice something amiss. Think Tanks have been replaced with something called Forge Sessions. This isn't a huge change for you overall—it's mostly a thematic change for what used to be our think tank sessions. Rather than having a livechat with y'all strictly about what part of the show we're working on at the moment, we're going to spend the time chatting about what research and reading we're doing for the show, even giving you brief synopsis of our reading materials. Kinda like sparknotes, but... Talenotes. Yeah.

I'm really looking forward to this. It'll be kinda work-shop-like for the show, and will give us all a real opportunity to analyze some fiction together. Hopefully this will be a bit more interactive than think tanks in the past, where we were mostly asking for opinions.

I am super looking forward to this new format for our bi-monthly livechats. I think it'll be a lovely, enlightening time for everybody. I definitely think there's insight y'all can offer that will absolutely inform the content of the show.

What's next?

I've been hacking away at this merchandise thing for a good long time now, and it looks like it's finally coming to fruition. I've sent out the final copy of the product to DFTBA, and they've sent it over to our printers. Now we're just waiting on a response and a final proof of the product before we can... do things... with it.

What are those things? Well, y'all helpful humans'll just have to wait and see. We're excited about it. It's not necessarily so much a surprise for you guys as will be a wonderful thing for the brand and the community. 

We've also got something really special planned for this week's sneak peek, so stay tuned. If you're interested in this particular piece of merch, you won't wanna miss it.

And that's all for this week! Always with the forward momentum, always with the creativity. Hopefully by this time next week I'll be telling you that the story is done and we're on to the recording process, but you never know with this creative nonsense. It's gotta happen in its own time.

I want to wrap things up here, like always, by asking: How was your week? Anything exciting happen? Any great opportunities to flex your creativity? Tell me about it! I live for this stuff.

—Benji