Bookshelf Updates: Welcome to Aorea

If you haven’t yet noticed, I’ve been slowly building another set of pages on my blog under the Bookshelf. One of the reasons I got into blogging was because of my love of writing, and recently I decided to take on a new blogular project dealing with the creative writing I do on the side (in addition to all the other things I do on the side, like draw and paint and sculpt and make jewelry and run and play Frisbee and make music and…and..and…too many hobbies). Thus, as an inspiration for me to actually finish the several novel-type projects I’ve been working on (for years), I decided to build a set of pages summarizing my stories and describing the world in which they all take place: Aorea.

I’ve been working on The Spinner’s Journey, which is the first book in the Circle series, since I was in 8th grade. Around 10th grade I discarded the original storyline and opted for a newer version, which I promptly began and have been slowly finishing since. I wrote about half of it by the time I graduated high school, finished up another five chapters throughout my incredibly busy college years, and I only have two chapters and an epilogue left to write before I begin the lengthy process of final editing and then attempting to publish. Because I cannot avoid having long delays in between finishing one chapter and starting another—often half a year or more—I edit the entire story prior to beginning a new chapter, so the editing of The Spinner’s Journey has been an ongoing thing. Nevertheless, the first few chapters need a lot of work, as you can definitely tell I was still in high school when I wrote them.

Currently I have two pages—Story Summaries and Aorean Geography—complete and posted under my Bookshelf. There is space for additional links (currently they don’t work, as I haven’t written those bits yet) that will be filled in as I finish them, to include some explanations of the weirder/more confusing terminology I use in my summaries as well as character profiles of my protagonists. Once I *finally* inspire myself sufficiently to get to work on the final two chapters and then the massive editing requirement, I may decide to post some excerpts here, but I recommend not holding your breath.

I remember writing in my college essays for Brown and Georgetown back when I was a senior that “I have thousands of years of history for a world that doesn’t exist cluttering up the interior of my skull,” and using that as an excuse for my inability to do mental math with any alacrity. All excuses aside, the statement is entirely true. I do have thousands of years of history for an entire world, full of creatures and cultures great and small, rich with magic and mystery and mundane acts of survival, all entwined with the rest of the knowledge in my head. I know every little thing that has ever happened and ever will happen within the context of three separate series of stories, each series occurring during a different time period in Aorean history: Circle, Haven, and Guard. Circle is the springboard, and the protagonists of Haven and Guard are descended the protagonists of the Circle series. I keep a giant three-ring binder of notes, sketches, summaries, bones of dialogue, and snippets of descriptions that I like to call my “Big Book of Aorea.” Honestly I don’t know how I manage to function in normal reality when I have an entire parallel reality I’ve created also filling my brain, but somehow I succeed. And, maybe, if I’m lucky (and if I stop being lazy with my writing), I’ll finish churning out those stories. Until then, sate yourself with the new and improved (and still improving) Bookshelf section of my blog. Enjoy!