Part two of Adventures Through the Window. In this episode James finds himself lost in a place like nothing he’s ever seen. Stuck having to decide between multiple paths, he finds himself listening to the advice of an unlikely companion.

With tonight’s episode, TNS now has more than 40,000 words of free fantasy stories! On top of that, April 14th will be TNS’s one-year anniversary! Episodes are longer now than they were in the beginning. When I started this a year ago I did about 500-700 words every week, now it’s closer to 1100-1500 words. It makes me wonder how many words we’ll have added up by next year!

As always, thanks for joining us!

Continuing with the classic books series is Don Quixote of La Mancha! Written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote is another book I’ve always wanted to read, one suggested to me by a good friend for many years! He was happy to hear that I finally read it.

Don Quixote is a fantastical story written early in the 17th century. As noted in the picture to the left, Don Quixote is a man obsessed with knights and chivalry. He pours through book after book on the subject to the point where he’s gone completely mad for it. He dusts off some old armor and sets about to have adventures and become a knight.

Of course, things don’t go all that well for him as the time of knights is quite over. Everywhere he travels people are confused and put off by his bold insanity. No matter what happens to him though, he always can justify the reasons in his own mind. When he is defeated it is because he failed in his faith, and if he wins he knows he has done right in the world. It’s a very amusing adventure in either case.

This one is not as easy to read as many modern books, but I didn’t have any problems with it. It just goes a bit slower due to the old fashioned writing style. It’s definitely worth that time though, some parts of this book had me laughing pretty hard. I just found out there is a sequel that came out 10 years later, I’ll have to check that one out too.

Today Samantha and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary. I am constantly feeling grateful that we have so much to share with each other: we both love to create things (like jewelry and stories and websites), we both love fantasy, history, reading, and so much more. Days like this always remind me of just how lucky I really am to have her. That goes double for her support of my crazy love of writing. Samantha is always willing to help me write the best stories possible, and she is never afraid to tell me what she doesn’t think works. I cannot imagine where I would be today if I didn’t have her in my life.

We start our sixth story this week, Adventures Through The Window. Spring break is over and I have quite a few posts to jump into later this week as well. In this story, young James feels like he is just another face in a large school until a mysterious substitute teacher takes an interest in him. Despite his cautious nature, James can’t help his curiosity when he happens to see the man walk straight through a large glass window on his way home from school one day! Unable to stop himself, James finds himself following his new teacher into a world unlike anything he’s ever experienced. To get back out again, James must not only find his way, but find himself as well.

As always, I hope you enjoy the story.

The main point of this post is to apologize for leaving everyone hanging on Tuesday. I had planned to write this then, but Samantha and I took a trip to Austin for the first half of the week. When we got home Tuesday night there was no power in our house! Because we didn’t get home until after 5PM, they wouldn’t come out to fix it the same day. It got quite cold in this house that night! Grr…

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Lewis Carroll and his creation of Wonderland. Well that has multiplied since I’ve been working on my own little “wonderland” story. You’d think a story about nonsense in a fantasy world would be easy, but it’s been far more challenging than anything I’ve done yet. That’s why I do this podcast though, to continually challenge myself as a writer. I really like this story, I think you guys will too.

So sit back and take a bit of a break with me, how about? I picked up extra hours and work this week because of spring break, and I’m trying to catch up writing, cleaning, and web design while I’m at it. That’s what breaks are for right, getting ahead on everything else? Rest is for the weak!

Regular postings will begin again shortly.

I’ve always wanted to read this book. The story of Peter Pan is one that every boy dreams about. The lad is a definition of perpetual youth, and he can fly on top of that! His youth comes across so much more in the book than in any version I’ve seen before. There was a movie version I saw a couple years ago that had an adaptation that was very close to the book. It’s my favorite of the film versions.

Peter Pan is the story of a boy, abandoned as a child, who lives in a place called Neverland. When he loses his shadow he knows he must find it, but he finds much more than he expected. Three children of various ages are in the house where he lost it. It’s apparent that he is instantly infatuated by Wendy in particular, her brothers are more a means to get her to do what he wants, which is to return to Neverland with him.

Peter Pan is very conniving in the book, it’s brilliant. The author, J. M. Barrie, writes him as a young boy to be sure, but with a great deal of experience above the other children simply because he’s been one for so long. He easily brings Wendy around to the idea with subtle manipulation. Because, of course, there is no story if she doesn’t.  The rest of the book is of their adventures in Neverland and the eventual trip home since all stories must come to an end. I liked the ending a great deal, it really gives you an understanding of Peter’s long life.

Peter Pan is a classic. A story most families should read aloud when their children are young. The chapters aren’t long, and it goes pretty quick. Barrie had such a great understanding of the mind of a child. There’s a great movie about Barrie writing the book called Finding Neverland if you’re interested, it’s one of my top 5 favorite movies, Johnny Depp plays Barrie. The book itself is free in text and audio on Project Gutenberg.

I wanted to stop by and let everyone know of some changes that are going on in the podcast. Considering that you’ve probably realized this isn’t a usual podcast post, I’ll talk about the most obvious change. We’re going to start taking two weeks between the stories we tell. We’re going to do this for a number of reasons, but mostly it’s for me to have time to plot and the like. It takes me a bit to come up with a new story after the last one ends, I spend a few days working out all the problems and kinks. I would love to be able to make writing my full time job, but sadly that is not the case, not yet anyway!

So, now for the first week following the end of a story, we’ll be posting the story in full as usual. Then, the week after that, I’m going to post about what the next story will be, and use that post as the link on the front page of the site where I track percentages. That way you guys have an idea of what will be coming! So without any further delay, let’s talk about next week’s story!

Because of Alice in Wonderland coming back into our lives, I’ve been thinking a lot about making a story in a fantastical world of nonsense. It’s had me thinking in nonsense a lot, which is quite fun, if I do say so myself (and I do). So next Tuesday we will begin part one of Adventures Through The Window,  a fun twist of Lewis Carroll’s titles.

About Adventures Through the Window

In this story, young James feels like he is just another face in a large school until a mysterious substitute teacher takes an interest in him. Despite his cautious nature, James can’t help his curiosity when he happens to see the man walk through a large glass window on his way home from school one day! Unable to stop himself, James finds himself following his new teacher into a world unlike anything he’s ever experienced. To get back out again, James must not only find his way, but find himself as well.

Samantha made this from scratch!

Well I attempted to write this yesterday, you know, on my birthday, but things kept coming up. It was a great day! For me, birthdays are what New Years is to others. It’s a time to look at what you’ve accomplished this year, and using what you’ve learned to make the next year better. This year, it was mostly about writing for me.

I realized that I haven’t done a writing update in awhile while I was thinking about what this coming year will mean to me as a writer. I’ve gotten behind on it. First of all, The Forest Awakens jumped up to 100% on my editing goal. It’s pretty good, grammatically speaking. The rejections I’ve gotten from agents have made me look at it under a new microscope though. They all like my writing, they all like the story idea, but they all also said they didn’t connect with the main character enough.

I’ve more or less come to the inevitable question that most writers probably go through. My assassin book has been sitting at about 20% completed on the backburner while I edited TFA, and now I have to decide if I want to work on the changes to my YA novel that agents have suggested, or if I want to put it aside for now and finish my new book?

Currently I’m leaning toward another draft of The Forest Awakens. It would be a big draft, basically rewriting many parts of it, although most of the current material doesn’t need to be cut, just have more added to it. We shall see over the next couple days, while I have a podcast to finish anyway.

Happy (now late) Birthday to meeeee!