This April I will be entering my second Preptober using the writing blocks I developed from Heart Breathings’ Preptober video. Sarra is actually about to start another Rough Draft Challenge (she does them April, July and November). The way I’ve sorted my writing blocks means I’ll be doing Preptober in April and October, and then Writvember (the actual writing) in may and November. Writing this I realise, I haven’t yet published my post on my own writing blocks (ᵕ—ᴗ—). I will get around to that. Probably.

For this round of writing blocks, I will be working on Dual Wielding: Featherstorm, the first book in a series I started writing in 2010 or 2011, when I was in high school. Like with Rini & Butler, every so often I really feel the impact of my growth as a writer when I look back at the original manuscript of something I wrote long ago and find I’m easily able to improve the plot and structure. Dual Wielding has evolved so much since my high school days and with the excitement of finally getting Rini & Butler through what feels like the last structural edit, I’m eager to look back at my high school passion project.

I’m currently working on filling out my Preptober planner. I will also be on leave in the latter half of April and so am hoping to really nail the preparation. Dual Wielding is one of those projects where I got so carried away with the projection of the series that I never properly finished a first draft of the first book.

Dual Wielding is pure fantasy. That was almost all I was reading at the time. It has elements inspired from Game of Thrones as I’d started watching the first season when I first started drafting the initial story, but it was born of how misunderstood I felt as a teen. I yearned for another me who understood me and would enjoy the same things I did, how I did. I was considered a freak of a kid, a weird kid, a loner and often called “Nigel no Friends”. In hindsight, I can see why I grew up the way I did, but it did feel awfully lonely as a kid that was unable to fake interest and partake in “normal” activities. Unfortunately, I developed something of a selfish appetite for these same aspects of my life I didn’t want to do alone. Because other kids didn’t enjoy things the “same way” that I did, I became obsessed with the idea of a split me rather than just having a normal friend. Even when I developed close friendships, I didn’t like sharing hobbies on a personal level. 

There’s probably a psychological discussion to be had here but that’s the basic context to why I started writing Dual Wielding.

I haven’t spent nearly as much time drafting the actual story of Dual Wielding as I have Rini & Butler or The Boy from the North-Eastern Island, and so it will be interesting to see how this Preptober and Writvember goes. What I do have an abundance of for Dual Wielding, however, is lore. Sometimes I think about the joke regarding Tolkien creating a language and then creating the Lord of the Rings universe just to use it when I think about the work I’ve put into Dual Wielding.

Happy prep writing!