Thursday, July 17, 2014


After I spent a few more days on revising my horror stories (and creating a new cover for Carcerus, which some might have already noticed) I've finally gotten back to A Decaying World. Only took me two more days to finish Chapter 11, although I'm still going to do another pass with the text-to-speech feature of yWriter, since it can be really helpful in determining if the text actually sounds good.

When I'm done with that, I'll have about 24k words left to go through. It might be fast, might be slow, depends on how much I get stuck on the combat. That's what I really hated about chapter 11. So wish me luck!

I really want to get the novel to betareaders, so that I can determine if there are any big flaws that still need to be taken care of, which is also why I might begin writting another novella while it's being looked at.

Saturday, July 12, 2014


Since I'm still short on cash I decided to take a free proofreading offer a few days ago. Madeleine Faye offered her services to gather experience and took on my entire horror collection, even though she didn't need to do more than a single story.

I'm mostly content with what she did, as she showed me a lot of mistakes, gave me suggestions on how to improve certain passages, and also mentioned when the tone didn't seem to fit the story, like in a scene where I talked about kids even though children might have been more appropriate.

There's just a single problem: she overlooked quite a bit of obvious mistakes.
One sentence talked about interruption even though it should have been interrupting, another used a instead of an, one passage repeated the same word in three consecutive sentences, one sentence talked about while week instead of whole week and I even misspelled the name of a character in a passage that was bold and much bigger than the rest of the text.

She's still human and allowed to make mistakes, of course, but I would have been a bit disappointed if I had to pay for a proofreader who didn't get rid of most mistakes. It should have been obvious, though, since she went through the entire collection (30k words) in a single day.

So there's only one thing left to say: Madeleine, your feedback is good, but please take your time to get rid of as much errors as possible.


Thursday, June 19, 2014


In case anyone was wondering: no, I'm not dead and I haven't dropped my writing projects. But I'm mostly posting my activites on twitter, sometimes on facebook. There's just not enough to write regular postings about.

So, what did I do since my last posting? Well, I've written four more short stories...or maybe it's three. I'm not entirely sure if one of those had already been written back then. I've also revised the entire horror collection—it contains 30k words now—and sent it to a couple of betareaders.

I've also finished a 10K romance novelette. Still need betareaders for that, though. Only have one person who might be interested in reading it and I have to wait until the weekend to get any feedback on that. So if anyone's interested: just send me a message.

These sideprojects did slow the editing of A Decaying World down, but half of the books is already done and I've now finished 5K of the 8th chapter.
And if you're interested in what my revision has entailed until now:

  • Improved a lot of sentences and cut unnecessary ones.
  • Added better descriptions.
  • Fixed continuity errors.
  • Added some additonal foreshadowing.
  • Wrote an entirely new scene in chapter 2.
  • Split chapter 4 into two - "Remnants of the Marble City" and "Towards A Different Future"
  • Renamed the old 5th chapter into "Shadow Of A Bygone Era"
  • Merged the old 6th and 7th chapter, renamed it into "Signs Of Decay" and rewrote parts of it.
There might have been more. I'm not entirely sure. But one thing that I can say is that the story has only gotten longer, by about 10k words to be exact. Editing normally seems to involve cutting a lot, but I just don't see the need to cut so much. I'd rather improve upon my often lackluster descriptions.

I still need the feedback of betareaders in the end, but it's too early to look for some, since I have no idea when I will be done. You can still send me a message, but I'd rather send you a completely revised version than an unpolished one.

So yeah, that's about it for now. Maybe I'll publish a new short story in the future. But it's better if I don't post all of my shorter work for free.

A Decaying World

Wednesday, May 14, 2014


Hello guys, girls and whoever else has found their way onto my blog. I've finished another short story today (although it's more of a ritual than a story) but I will not post here. The same applies to all remaining short stories that will be included in my horror anthology. And yes, I know that the actual term would be collection, but I think anthology sounds better.

Anyway, with that done I will start editing A Decaying World tomorrow. I'm sure other writers would have advised me to let it rest for a month or so, but I simply can't wait that long. And I'm such a perfectionist that I will go over it multiple times anyway. Just have to find some beta-readers before the editing is done.
I did find someone for my short stories, though, and I'll have to read some other stories in exchange. But that won't take much of my time.

So yeah, I hope that I can release the book in the near future. I don't want to start the second part before the first is released. If anything I will write more short stories or begin working on the adaptation of my scifi-"movie" Loop.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014


This version is horribly outdated.
Revision 2 is in progress.
 

 

Chapter 13: The Calamity


While Emily looked after Feyadal and the twins Maximilian and Drake returned to the battlefield, crossed the chasm and gathered the remaining soldiers in the forest. Then they cut apart a couple of trees and used them to built a temporary bridge into the village.
What happened hours later should have been a joyous occurrence, but Drake was slowly descending into a catatonic state and barely noticed the return of Arlin's inhabitants. Thanks to the timely arrival of the twins they had been able to evacuate the village right under Modera's nose. Erik and Rika took two villagers at once, carried them over the walls, evaded sparsely scattered enemy forces—Modera never expected Drake's group to strike from the back—and hid them in a nearby cave. Upon one of their return trips they were almost caught in the blaze that destroyed the mayor's building. They tried their best to save everyone, always hoping that Modera wouldn't notice the increasing amount of people scattered on the walls, but it turned out to be in vain. Some villagers were crushed by falling beams or caught fire right in front of their eyes, which is when they chose to abort the mission and escaped with everyone they had already evacuated.
More than 50 percent of Arlin's inhabitants survived the battle, but the twins never forgot the people they had left behind and trained even harder to make up for their incompetence—as they themselves put it. Together with the other villagers they erected a marvelous black marble tablet—sponsored by the king of Pagan himself—in front of Arlin to honor the dead. It also served as a gravestone to those that left no corpse behind to bury.
It should have been a nice gesture, but all that Drake could think about—at least during the few moments that he was actually lucid—was that his hasty attempt to save everyone had only led to more deaths.
It's not your fault! You did your best to save everyone and that is all that counts,” is how Emily tried to appease him, but it didn't help.
No. I got everyone killed. I should have accepted Modera's offer and defeated her together with Maximilian and my father. Why did I ever decide to play the hero?
Eventually Maximilian and his soldiers left the village. They promised to return with enough men to rebuilt Arlin as fast as possible. The twins remained behind to help clear the rubble while Feyadal had fallen into a coma that lasted two weeks. When he awoke at last he fled into the forest to hide his tears. He didn't care about the magic he had lost and even his longevity was barely worth a mention, but his connection to nature had also been severed, which made him no better than a mere human—a race that many elves despised.
About two months passed, a time span during which Drake barely felt alive. He awoke, ate breakfast with Emily, listened to her ramble on and gated at nothing at all until he went to sleep again. He had expected to be haunted by gruesome nightmares. Instead he was plunged into a dark abyss from which he resurfaced without dreaming even once. The only thing that disturbed his slumber was the sound of rolling thunder, which drew ever closer. But he forgot about it the moment he awoke. Only when a voice was trying to reach out to him did he slowly come to his senses. He could barely understand it at first and the most he got was: “Stop...wasting...ime. The....is approaching. You have to fulfill...destiny, or...will end!”
Drake tried to call out to the Alp in an attempt to understand his message, but the only reply he got was an image of a hand sticking out of a wriggling mass of flesh.
One day he stepped into the light and heard the chirping of birds, mixed in with the pounding of hammers and the grating concision of saws. He was greeted by a couple of villagers, albeit cautiously, and responded with a wide smile—a smile too wide to be entirely genuine. He tried to strike up a couple of conversations, but they trailed off very quickly. All he managed to learn was that the twins and Feyadal had returned to Pagan and that Maximilian had done the same after he failed to rouse Drake from his “slumber”.
Eventually Drake left the village to go for a walk. He felt a headache approaching and hoped that the fresh morning air would help clear his mind. Shortly afterwards he found himself atop the hill where he had confessed to Emily. He closed his eyes and envisioned the scene once more, but the memory wasn't strong enough to wipe away his regrets. He propped himself against a trunk, stared at Arlin and listened to the rustling of the treetops and the birds singing within. Warm salty tears trickled down his chin as his consciousness faded.