Projects for June 2014

I haven’t blogged in a while, so here’s a little update of what I’m working on.

Writing fiction

I’m still working on co-authoring two short stories. We’re almost done with one. It’s taken us a lot longer than expected, but I always find interesting the seemingly random issues we find we have different perspectives on and end up discussing for hours. Maybe that’s not very productive writing-wise, but I actually really enjoy it; even if I don’t necessarily change my mind all the time, it forces me to think about things differently.

I’m still querying agents for my novel, Son of a Dark Wizard. I have yet to start another solo writing project, though I have a few stories in various phases of plotting. What I’m hoping to do with my next novel, whenever I start writing it, is to put it online for free, a bit like I did with The Game of Gynwig years ago, and then self-publish it. I even spent a week creating a custom WordPress theme and website to host the project at Morrowgrand, which will hopefully host other future projects as well so they’ll all cross-advertise each other. (Speaking of WordPress themes, the theme for this blog really needs to be updated at some point, doesn’t it?) In addition to posting the blog online, I actually think it would be interesting to record (with screen-capture software) my entire writing process of the novel. I know I’m not the first to try that, but it seems like a fun idea. (Although I guess if I do that, I won’t be able to write long-hand, as I do roughly half the time.)

On top of writing and releasing the novel, I also hope to write a musical soundtrack for it.

That said, any solo-writing projects may take a back seat to my other projects:

Melody project stuff

I’m finally returning to my book on composing melodies that I’ve been trying to write on and off for years. I think I’ve finally found an interesting angle to take with the book. I was struggling because my attempts were coming off as really academic and bland. Finally I thought: why not treat it like Johann Fux’s Study of Counterpoint? His book features two characters, a teacher and a student, talking about the subject. So, rather than a straight-forward non-fiction here’s-a-bunch-of-information sort of book, I can wrap the instructional material in a sort of two-character story arc. At the very least, it would be much more interesting for me to write. So that’s one project.

The other project is the real Parnassus: the symphony generator. A piece of software that uses the algorithms of my melody generators to help automate the entire composition process. The idea is that the symphony generator would be able to compose entire symphonies on its own, automatically, with the composer providing as much or as little creative input as he wishes. My two main goals for it, that I’ve been daydreaming about for over a decade: 1) I want it to be able to compose a Mozartean symphony at the touch of a button (or maybe a few buttons, if I must compromise), and 2) I want to be able to give it only a melody, and have it flesh it out into a full piece with little or no input from me. Obviously I want it to be able to do more than that, but those are my main two objectives.

I’d like to get them both out by December, in time for the holiday season (and before I go completely bankrupt), but almost everything I do takes me longer than I expect (except for going bankrupt).

Updates

I never did write that screenplay last month. I just found I was more interested in whatever else I was working on at the time. Maybe next year.

And that Nickelodeon cartoon pitch a few months back never went anywhere, unfortunately. That is, Nickelodeon wasn’t interested. I still want to do something with my pitch material at some point (though probably no time soon), but I’m not sure what.