Productivity Update

So here's the latest productivity update...

The writing group I'm a member of in Lawrenceville met last Sunday and we discussed the second chapter of "Escape from the Wastelands."

I've made some revisions to it based on their suggestions, mostly to make it clearer that our hero Andrew Sutter, though an inexperienced youth at this point, still has the inner backbone that foreshadows how he will eventually become something resembling Stephen King's Gunslinger (this analogy is from my Kennesaw writing group).

My Kennesaw writing group will also meet this coming Saturday. I have already received some critiques from them via e-mail and made revisions to make the overall situation (the defeat of the village militia by the Flesh-Eating Legion of N'Mur) more threatening to the hero. 

This required rewriting a scene where he and another young man flee up an arroyo to escape an enemy flanking manuever.  Now the other young man is wounded, Andrew loses part of an ear to gunfire, and an enemy catches up with them, necessitating another fight scene.  Hopefully it will meet the approval of the other board members, two of whom have served in the military and thus know what they're talking about.

Further revisions to both chapters will be made in the coming days. I've got a bunch of chores to get too first, though.  If only clothes could iron themselves...

Also, I have completed all the remaining chapters of my last Harry Potter fan-fiction story "Lord of the Werewolves" and e-mailed them to my co-writer Kyli Ann Rasco, who lives in California. I posted the most recent chapter last night.  Hopefully we'll have the entire story posted by early next week.

Here's the actual story:

Lord of the Werewolves

As part of my earlier HP project "The Wrath of the Half-Blood Prince," I joined the HP site FictionAlley to get ideas and discuss with like-minded people.

One thing I discovered is that a lot of HP fans really did not like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  One of their better arguments was the underuse of Lupin and Tonks.  All they did in the book was get married, have a baby, and die.  Die offscreen, no less.

There was a lot more potential to both characters than this.  Lupin was a werewolf but, unlike most of his fellows who swore allegiance to the werewolf terrorist Fenrir Greyback in revenge for poor treatment by wizarding society, still remained on the side of Good.  Tonks was an Auror (a fighter of evil wizards), a shape-shifter, and was kin to some of the ruling families on the side of Evil (her mother was the sister of Voldemort's lieutenant Bellatrix Lestrange and had been cast out of the family for marrying a wizard born to ordinary parents).

Plus the book made Lupin look like a complete weakling.  He bails on Tonks when she's pregnant, thinking their child would be better off without him, then goes back to her after being chewed out by Harry.  When you're 38 years old and your dead best friend's surly teenage son lectures you about morality and is right, you've got a problem.

So Kyli and I put our heads together and devised a story that would get more use out of the characters and avoid the excesses of canon (in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Tonks gets overcome with emotion after seeing a character refusing to abandon her fiancee after Greyback disfgures him and publically proclaims her love for Lupin, embarassing him, while I've already discussed DH).

When that is done, I'll finish up the "Revenge of the Fallen Reboot" and then no more fan-fiction.  All creative efforts will be devoted to "Escape from the Wastelands" and other original projects.