official website of Erin M. Klitzke, historian and author of Awakenings and Epsilon: Broken Stars
Work was okay ’til the end today. We’ll leave it at that. The end sucked.
On a brighter note, having gone to the mall at 8:30 this morning, I got to sit with my music and write, so I worked on Epsilon. We’re up to 3400 words even on the new draft.
Torg tomorrow night! Very excited. But I’m always excited for gaming.
Had a guild meeting last night for RoA, which went very well, mercifully. God only knows what I’d have done if it hadn’t gone well. It’s such a different animal than AF was, but at the same time it’s really the same.
Jude got threatened last night by a new “evil” guild. It’s nice to be told that someone inside of your own organization wants to kill you…and then even nicer to surprise them by being wholly unsurprised. But that’s the nature of the beast. Jude’s from a noble house of Lordaeron. She’s a member of the Kirin-Tor. She doesn’t always play by the rules of the game–of anyone’s game. Of course people would want to end her. It’s why Lyyn does what she does. But yeah…impressive show of RoA solidarity walking out of the guild meeting. Fun times for all!
So…apparently, Aaron wants to visit his darkest hour sooner than intended. I’ve been thinking, and maybe draft 3.5.1 is in the offing (which basically means another fast forward and 3.5, like 3.0, becomes background for everything that comes later). Anyhow, that’s what’s percolating in my brain, and has been since about 5:15 this evening. We’ll see what’s born of it after I sleep on it, but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea–the more it makes sense to me, more sense than starting it with the mission that breaks him and telling that story pretty much start to finish.
So I came up with what the consortium of non-human races that have positive relations with the Epsilon Alliance call themselves: The A’duuin. It fit better than something like “the League” or anything like that (the League just makes me think of the League of non-aligned worlds from Babylon 5). Colloquially, humans of the Alliance simply term their non-human trade partners and sometime allies as “the Races.” But these people wouldn’t call themselves that. Hence, A’duuin.
It’s not every session your character narrowly avoids getting her face blown off by crazy survivalists. It’s also not every day I throw down my entire hand of cards and manage to find a way out of the mess, either. But when a crazy survivalist in an armed camp in the middle of Nebraska puts a gun to your head and tells you to have the reject from a Trek convention to put down the crazy gun or he’ll blow your head off, and the reject fails to put the gun down…
SNAFU.
So the rough page count on the thesis stands at fifteen, including a page of figures (which is actually just a map from Caroline Shenton’s fantastic article from EHR 114). About…hm. Half of that is actual things written that I’ve thought through and mulled over in my brain. All single spaced. Still a ton of work to do, though — a huge, major ton of work to do, which may either commence tonight or tomorrow morning, I’ll decide after I’m done writing this (the sister brought me coffee from Starbucks, so I’m going to be up for a wihle longer, that’s for certain). As for Epsilon, the count stands at six and a half pages (a shade over 4,000 words) on draft 3.5 (waiting on feedback from a couple folks on the beginning; I’ve been scribbling notes in a notebook like crazy for a couple weeks, though). Not a bad start, considering I hadn’t really touched it in more than a year. Things are looking to become far darker and strangely more interesting the more I stew over concepts and ideas for the story.
First post of a new blog! Kind of exciting (what’s more exciting is the fact that I finally decided to get my act together and put up a new site to replace my incredibly ancient, incredibly bad one). I guess that’s the sort of thing you get up to when it’s maintenance day and you don’t feel like working on anything academic.
Stay tuned for updates!