In other numerical-landmark news, my fantasy serial Legend of Hero just reached its 50th update! Yay! It's been a learning experience to transform "hasty NaNoWriMo novel" into "edited serial fiction", to have a single project occupy my mindset for such a sustained period of time, to meet self-imposed deadlines and push the story forward with new material and thrash into shape what was already there. I'm getting close to the end of the prewritten buffer, so in a lot of ways this is where the rubber hits the road (how long can I buckle down and start producing more new raw material at a sustainable pace?), but it also feels like an accomplishment to have gotten this far, another sign that I'm reaching the point of being able to write a saleable novel and/or other long-form fiction. It will happen.
Anyway ... 50. Wow! It feels like a birthday -- and where would a birthday be without gifts? Thanks to my readers who wrote reviews of LoH -- and to Web Fiction Guide's Drew Daniels, who just this weekend gave my serial a WFG editor's imprimatur with an official 4-star review and the praise "If you are an RPG Gamer you’ll have fun with this story."
The fun continues this week with a return to the main characters' explorations. Hurrah! David talks Kevin into visiting the Hall of Heroes again, shows off his new skills and equipment, and tries to teach Kevin how to unlock his own special attacks. And Trent? Don't think that he's out of the picture -- in fact, he has started his own investigation into the nature of the Shadowlands ...
The statistics-obsessed geeks among you (and you're in good company) should also visit LoH's Bonuses section, where several pages of David's Shadowlands game-system notes have now been unlocked. That way I can keep the elemental crystal stuff from becoming several thousand words of tedious exposition, while still peeling back the layers for those who care. :)