Writing

Unveiling the big project!

So, today’s the day I let you all know what I’ve been squirreling away at over the past few months. First I told you about securing an investor to be able to write full time (which is proving to be even better than I thought it would be) and then I told you about the schedule involved to make the project happen.

Now it’s time to reveal…

The Split Worlds!

Attendees of Bristolcon and my lovely VIPs have already been given a sneaky peek, and I’ve been so thrilled by their response! I ran a little competition at the con involving a prop I’ve made for a character in the Split Worlds (that weird looking thing on the left) and a little scroll tied with black ribbon was put in the goody bags. I’ll be emailing the entrants with the answer this week.

The Split Worlds website is here by the way.

If the Split Worlds sounds familiar, it’s because it began life as a Friday Flash I wrote quite some time ago about a shopkeeper and a very strange shop. People liked it and I started to write more stories, growing a quirky world in which I started to spend a lot of my daydreaming time.

Then I got a publisher for 20 Years Later and realised that I really should finish that trilogy before getting too sucked into the Split Worlds. But it all bubbled away in the background until it started to come out in other stories here and there. One of those stories is in the new Eighty Nine anthology by the way.

When the 20 Years Later trilogy was safely out of my head and on the page, I knew the Split Worlds was going to be the next project and I knew I wanted to do it all differently. There’s a huge story there, so a trilogy was never going to be enough. Then I realised I wasn’t going to be satisfied with just writing a series of books. It had to be more.

A Year and Day of stories set in the Split Worlds

I always wanted to write a year and day of weekly flashes, it just seemed to fit. So the first one is published tomorrow, leading up to the launch of the first Split Worlds book on November 1st 2012, which makes a total of 54 stories, according to my spreadsheet anyway! They will be available in text and audio format, as I know that some of you like listening to me read you stories.

Every week a story will be hosted on a different blog / website – would you like to host one? Let me know in the comments if you do.

You can sign up to a newsletter that will let you know where to find the story every week, and you also get a free short story when you do that, one that won’t appear anywhere else.

And there’s more

Running alongside these stories will be live events, games, treasure hunts and all kinds of opportunities for you to get to know the characters and places in the Split Worlds.

I’m also running a “thank you for helping me promote the Split Worlds” points and prizes doohicky. This is an attempt to spread the word about the project without having to do that icky self-promotion thing, and offer presents to people who help me do that.

What this really is

Now, there’s a risk this might sound a bit silly, but I really do think that this project is the best way that I can combine all of my passions, hobbies and insatiable urge to write into the best sum of my parts.

No, it’s not just that. This is the closest I can come to immersing people into this quirky world that I’m creating. You see, that’s what I’ve always been aiming for, with all these years of GMing and roleplaying, of reading voraciously and writing books and stories – I want to go to other worlds and I want to take people with me.

I want to take you into the Split Worlds, be it by writing a series of stories and books that you fall into and never want to leave, be it by writing a letter from one of the characters and posting it to your house, be it by asking you to play games that will change the way you see the world around you.

Yeah, that’s what I want. Come with me. The Split Worlds are there to be discovered.