Tag: Mythulu

• Words written: 334
• Total words written: 29,090
• Stories written: 6
• Total words behind: 4,243

Not a good day today. I think I had a minor panic attack yesterday, due to an ongoing plumbing problem in the house, and the baby didn’t let us sleep much last night so I’ve basically been a zombie all day. Finished a flash fiction piece I started yesterday and started the new Mythulu story, and after struggling with the opening for about an hour, it’s starting to show some promise.

Regardless of whether I actually win nanowrimo this year (I still intend to push for that, though with how far I’m behind it’s looking rather iffy), I’m really happy with the fact that I’m producing a lot of new stories. They all probably need to be cleaned up substantially before I should submit them, but that’s not too hard, and I really need to build up my submissions queue again.

Even better, I’m developing a new method for generating these stories, and having a lot of fun doing it. One of my goals is to write at least one new short story every month, and these Mythulu cards are a great tool for both generating and refining my ideas.

• Words written: 971
• Total words written: 24,386
• Stories written: 4
• Total words behind: 3,947

So that story that I mentioned yesterday turned out to be a flash fiction piece, much to my surprise, and it took far longer to write than I thought it would, so by the end of the day it was the only thing I’d written. I don’t feel too bad about it, considering that I’ve got a baby to help take care of, dinner to make, and a publishing business to run, but it’s frustrating to still be behind.

I drew the Mythulu cards again in preparation for the next story, and this is what came up:

• Necro + Desert
• Dream
• Eroded
• Peacekeeper
• Beyonder
• Fool
• Fungus
• Yin and Yang

I’ve got a pretty good story in mind for this one, but I won’t be starting it until tomorrow.

• Words written: 3,498
• Total words written: 23,415
• Stories written: 3
• Total words behind: 3,252

Good progress today. Finally finished that space whale story. Needs to be trimmed down quite a bit, but I think there’s a good story in there, even if it’s still in the rough.

So now that I know I can come up with a good story using the Mythulu cards, I think I’ll try it again. After playing around with it a bit over the last couple of days, here are the cards I’ll be using:

• Clone
• Physical Dependency
• Caste
• Fire
• Addicted
• Healer
• Negligible Senescence

Should be fun!

• Words written: 2,820
• Total words written: 14,200
• Stories written: 2
• Total words behind: 2,467

I finished my second story today, and it’s pretty dang terrible. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s nanowrimo! On to the next one.

I was having a hard time coming up with a story idea that I actually wanted to write, so I decided to break out the Mythulu cards and give it a whirl. My wife got me the Mythulu starter deck for my birthday this year, and while I’ve played around with it a bit, I haven’t really used it yet to come up with a story.

So to start, I picked one card from each deck and came up with this:

• Salt
• Abandoned + Hive
• Monk
• Frenemy
• Klepto
• Scales

And at first, I thought “what the heck kind of story is that?” But then I started playing around with it a bit, and decided to throw some space whales into the mix, because I’ve been meaning to write a story about space whales for some time now. And it all started coming together, but I decided that I needed another character, so I drew a character card and a trait card, and came up with “wandering peacekeeper.” I also needed another card to modify “salt,” so I drew a texture card and got “rust.” And believe it or not, that’s exactly what I needed to come up with a pretty dang awesome story.

At least, I hope it turns out to be awesome. I’m about 500 words in, and I’m liking it so far. Will probably finish it tomorrow. But whether or not it does, I’m definitely going to try out this story generating method again, because it’s a lot of fun!