Some Trips To Gomorra and a Semi-Announcement

Wow! A lot has gone on these last couple months. Been plugging away at the Doomtown: Reloaded stories, which you’ve seen if you follow my facebook feed at all. If not, here’s a bunch of them for you to catch up on with some brief commentary which you may find interesting if you’re a Doomtown fan, or a fan of my writing in general:

http://www.alderac.com/doomtown/2015/02/18/fiction-trouble-ahead-trouble-behind/   This was my first “big” story for Doomtown, which really spelled out the entire arc of saddlebags with the events of the Election Day Slaughter. This story was really unique for me because I had such a limited space to utilize more than a dozen perspectives and still tell a story. It was interesting trying to work out who each character was, give them each a distinct flavor and motivation for being there to drive their actions. Believe it or not, I didn’t find the writing of so many perspectives difficult. To me, it really felt like I was playing the card game to some extent. I always imagine the characters moving about town, starting their shootouts and the like in their own ways, and I actually tried to incorporate their mechanics into their personalities as much as I possibly could, which was very fun. With so much action, the story flowed very nicely.

http://www.alderac.com/doomtown/2015/03/18/faith-fear-preview-lay-hands/ This was a fun little vignette. As many of you are aware, I’m a Christian, so it made me happy to see the coming of the Blessed in Doomtown and write Christians from a positive perspective (as is rarely done in media). Though Deadlands has its own workings for Blessed magic that don’t exactly jive with the Word or reality, found it very nice to dive into the character of Sister Lois and present a nice outcome for her laying on hands.

http://www.alderac.com/doomtown/2015/04/15/fiction-friendship-is-magic/ – And then I was tasked with the very next “big” story for Doomtown for the Faith and Fear Pine Box expansion. This one was equally as challenging as Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind, but for different reasons. I stuck to two perspectives, showing a yin and yang dichotomy of the fallout from F&F’s events, but this had no action to it. With that I had to really dig in deep for the characterizations, and with such iconic Doomtown Characters, Nicodemus being such a huge face from Classic and Wendy literally being the face of the reloaded franchise, I had to hammer home a lot of subtleties to the characters themselves. This I found a LOT more challenging to write than the prior piece, and it actually took me over the span of a month to complete these mere 3,000 words (give or take). But the reward was there, I’m happy to say this had the most and best fan reaction with over 200 comments on the story.

http://www.alderac.com/doomtown/2015/04/22/frontier-justice-preview-gomorra-jail/ Though I had overwhelmingly positive reaction to the piece above, and this didn’t quite get so many comments story wise, I believe this is my strongest piece I’ve done for Doomtown: Reloaded. This drips with characterization and hits such an emotional point in 500 words that it even surprised me while writing it. I liked the concept a lot of creating sympathy for the outlaw murderer, when it’d be so easy to present him as just another scum. Was fun to write a little song in there too, which for those of you who don’t know, songwriting was my first venture into writing at all!

And that catches us up on the Weird West world of Doomtown.

Announcement time:

I have a book deal.

I can’t give more information right now until there’s something announced but I’ve turned in a basic concept pitch, had it approved, and then written a 6,000 word outline of the story. I can tell you it’s going to be VERY cool.  Stay tuned. I’ll be doing a writing diary process on here as it progresses.