Hello all! Welcome back to my Writing Parking Lot. If I am remembering correctly, it has been roughly ten months since I’ve last posted on my blog or socialized this on social media. To put it in perspective, we were still going to bars and restaurants, traveling, and enjoying our life as we stood next to strangers in crowded concert halls… Talk about shit marketing skills on my end, right? That’s alright though, this website wasn’t my priority for the duration of these past ten months. As I’ve mentioned before, the primary purpose of this site is to store my writings and share them for the world to see. If I get one person or a thousand people to visit this site, then great! Either way, I’m fine.
Just because I haven’t been “active” on here, however, doesn’t mean that I’ve been dicking around with my writing. In fact, I’ve amped up my commitment to writing a lot. Like a lot, a lot. And then some once COVID came and the world was upended. For starters, I have finally typed up all of my hand-written travel essays from my time in Australia. I couldn’t help but cringe at every sentence as I transcribed them because of how poor the writing was; it really is remarkable how much your writing improves over the years. I’m currently working on getting all of my New Zealand essays on here, and luckily for me, the writing is a bit better than it was in the Australia essays (although still not ~great~). I’m about halfway through with those, and I am actually quite pleased with the progress I’ve been making. But as I mentioned, this website hasn’t been my main priority when it comes to writing. I have been working on something big, huge even; some might call it worldly.
Like any amateur writer, I am determined to write a book. Not just any book, however, I want to write a fantasy epic called The Tyrant of Marnes. I’ve spent countless hours of the last ten months outlining plot, developing characters, and creating the world of Ibara: a fantastical land hemmed in by the ocean to its east and a vast desert to its west. Ibara is a land of uncertainty as rival kingdoms, warring city-states, witches, monstrous beasts, and a sentient elf-like race known as the Nashadeen who are on the verge of extinction all vie and compete for both survival and dominance. And through it all, a ghost from the days long forgotten sees an opportunity to finally obtain what it has craved for centuries.
Do you know what the coolest thing about this is? This isn’t me just spewing shit and day-dreaming, I’m actually putting words on paper and making progress- half of the first draft is already complete. But here’s the thing: writing a fantasy epic full of intrigue, politics, strategy, and world-building when you are an amateur writer (with only one novella, some travel essays, and a handful of poems under your belt) is, well, ambitious to say the least… I find myself increasingly encountering roadblocks everywhere I turn and the task seems daunting. So I’ve shifted gears…slightly.
I’ve taken a critical pause from writing the Tyrant of Marnes and have instead shifted to a series of exercise-based stories and concepts to help flesh out the world of Ibara, as well as develop my skills as a plotter and story-teller. Currently, I am working on a novella that takes place in Ibara and occurs at the same time as my work in progress and I have a handful of others, all ranging from 1-100 pages in the queue after that as well. But to give you all a little tease of the world of Ibara, I am pleased to present to you one of my most recently written short-stories: Tigerfish.
Tigerfish was a story inspired directly from one of my writing exercises. The exercise prompt called on me to create a fictional meal, preparing step by step instructions, and then write a mini-story surrounding it that helps shed light on it’s cultural and social ties that underlie the said meal. I won’t give away too much, but the story is about a girl named Annastia who lives on the Antiban Islands in Ibara, and prepares her favorite meal of Tigerfish with citrus pepper-cream with her mother.
I hope you all enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing this. I can’t wait to share more stories that take place in the world of Ibara!