The Near Horizon | March 2021

February wasn’t too bad.

I managed to wrap up Part Three of Episode Three of The DOOM Chronicles about halfway into the month, and I had intended to get to work on The Will To Live but, let’s just say that life got in the way. Kind of just a bunch of bland things, nothing major.

But the good news is that I have the final part of The Will To Live planned out, and I’m going to try and have the first chapter out today!

This last part isn’t going to be very long, compared to the others. At this point, I kind of just want this story to be wrapped up so I can move on, but I also feel like to make it much longer would be to just drag it out. So prepare for an action-packed finale.

I still intend to post Dark Places, my collection of older original fiction. I just haven’t yet because, well, it’s editing, and I hate editing. Plus, I’m not even sure how many people will actually care. So I’ll get around to it at some point.

That’s it really. I’ll try hard to have The Will To Live done before March is out, and then hop back on DOOM immediately after. I want to start making much more regular progress on my fan fictions.

The Near Horizon | February 2021

Well, not much to say this time around, thankfully. I had hoped to get one more chapter of DOOM in before this month rolled around and I damn near made it. Honestly, if I had buckled down I could’ve done it, but I was just so tired last night.

Regardless, new chapter of DOOM incoming very soon. My primary focus for February is to finish up Part Three of Episode Three. It may be within reach. We shall see. I wish I could be more certain, but goddamn if the past four months, or really the past year, haven’t kicked the shit out of me. At this point, I feel like I’m almost constantly living in dread of the other shoe dropping yet again.

From where I’m standing in this moment, things are finally calm and quiet. The most intimidating thing on the horizon is getting a double crown implanted in my mouth, and I doubt that will actually even be that bad. I already got the double root canal. Though knowing my luck I’ll probably have developed at least one new cavity, but after facing down almost a dozen of them in the past two years, they’re more irritating than unnerving.

That’s about it. Like I said, as soon as I finish up this next part of DOOM, I’m heading full force into finally finishing off The Will To Live. Then right back to DOOM.

Also, I managed to post all of that Dreary rewrite last month if you’re interested. It’s a quick read.

The Near & Far Horizon | January 2021

Holy goddamn did 2020 fucking blindside me.

And I feel like I got off easy, to be honest.

Anxiety was the biggest problem that year. It sent me to the emergency room with what I thought was a fucking heart attack. Continues to give me pain in my chest that makes me wonder, almost every day, “All those other times obviously weren’t heart attacks, but is this one? Is this the one that kills me?” Headaches that had me wondering for a month “So do I have a fucking brain tumor?” Still not sure about that one, as the headaches have come back just recently. Stomach problems. A lot of stomach problems.

I also had a brutal tooth infection that led to an abscess that ultimately culminated in two root canals.

Plus, had a scare with COVID at the very end of the year there that, thank fucking God, turned out okay. Although now some people close to me actually do have it, and I’m not sure how that’s going to turn out.

So it ain’t over yet.

But from where I’m standing right now, I feel pretty okay. Like a storm has passed, and now it’s the calm after the storm. That strange, quiet peace where you’re just happy to be alive and basically functional. It feels good.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s discuss writing.

FAN FICTION

So, readers, I’m sorry about the sorry state of fan fiction over the last year. My output was shit, and I’m honestly just depressed that I didn’t really finish a damn thing this year. I shockingly overestimated my abilities in the last Near & Far Horizon. Just looking back at that time, I set out a fairly meager set of goals, and couldn’t even accomplish a single one of them.

Like………damn.

2020 just fucking sucked.

But I’m really hoping to get things back on track this year. Simply because I enjoy indulging in talking about my ideas and plans, let’s go over stuff again. Not much has changed, but some has.

—CLASSIC HALO UNIVERSE—

  • NERVES OF STEELE: Hot damn did I drop the ball on this one! I’m going to try very hard to get back to it this year, I promise! I at least want to get Episode One wrapped up.

  • THE WILL TO LIVE: Same thing here. I lost a lot of motivation, found it, lost it again, pushed on regardless. It’s definitely getting done, and during the first quarter. As soon as I wrap up the current Part of The DOOM Chronicles, I’m working on this story until it is finished. Then I’m putting this series to sleep for awhile.

  • TRUE TERROR: I had genuinely hoped to get to this one last year, and I really want to this year, but between wrapping up the two previous entries, I think there just might not be time for more Halo in 2021. Not unless I manage to really get with the program. Hey, maybe I will. But I honestly need to write something that is not DOOM, nor Halo, in 2021.

  • OTHER: As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got a few other ideas that are pretty different than the ones above. Well, one is. One is so different from everything else I’ve written, I’m not sure if I’ll actually do it. But regardless, these are a long ways off, and not all that important to the overall universe. Just side projects.

—NOVELIZATIONS—

  • THE DOOM CHRONICLES: Man did I shit the bed on this one. Should’ve been WAY closer to done by now, but it’s not even half finished, and I had like 13 months to make this happen, considering I started back in December of 2019. At present, I’m trying to shotgun Part Three with Kyra right now. I managed to put together a few chapters last month, so I’d say I’m about halfway there or so. I’m really hoping to get this done in January, maybe February at the latest.

  • ROCK RAIDERS: Still want to do this. Someday. Not really a priority though, as much as I like the idea.

  • THE THING & STATE OF DECAY: As I said last year, maybe someday. Maybe. Honestly though, with just how much other material I have, might be a long, long, LONG while, if ever.

  • AREA 51: So I began doing a retrospective on my fan fiction career. (Check it out here, it’s still in progress, though.) And in doing so, I stumbled across a handful of ideas that are still kinda cool and appealing. One that won’t leave me alone is a novelization of the Area 51 franchise. I use that term loosely, considering it was a pair of light gun arcade games, one moderately cool Xbox title, and one godawful 360 title that ultimately killed it. So I don’t know. We shall see.

  • OTHER: So I might end up abandoning the Unreal II novelization. I still think it’s a cool game, but I think enough time has gone by that it doesn’t quite appeal to me anymore. But someday, I’ll fire the game up again one more time and see how it makes me feel. I’m pretty confident I’ll just do one Red Faction fan fiction and leave it at that. Still think Red Faction is cool, and a great series, but definitely I’ve lost most of the urge to novelize the whole series. The Suffering, on the other hand…I played through it again just recently, and realized yeah, I still really want to novelize it. That’s gonna be a cool-ass trilogy. I might still novelize F.E.A.R. as well, though after F.E.A.R. Files it would twist off into its own thing, as I didn’t really like 2 & especially 3. Other than that? Nothing else on the horizon right now.

—HλLF-LIFE—

  • BISHOP’S LAMENT: Definitely going to try and fit this in this year. It’s been too long since I came back to Half-Life. I actually got really close to starting this up during a time of, shall we say, creative desperation. Fired up Half-Life 2 and broke out the database and everything. So yeah, this is on the horizon.

—KOTOR—

  • AND THERE WAS ANOTHER II: Still plan to do this, probably make it a trilogy. This one has been bugging me off and on lately, but there’s just no time for it. Not yet.

  • KOTOR III: Same story as before. Like I said last year, this is gonna be a big one. A really big one. But later.

—OTHER—

  • OBSIDIAN CLASSICS: So I basically got rid of Obsidian Classics and just moved them to Other. From now on, Obsidian Classics will just refer to my Rookie Chronicles series.

  • RED FACTION - HUNTER’S WAR: Still plan to do this. Basically a rewrite of one of my very first fan fictions. Takes place during original Red Faction, follows a miner named Hunter with a brutal past seeking survival and maybe even redemption.

  • FROZEN FURY: Formerly The Sion Campaign. I fired up Quake 4 for the first time in probably a solid 2 years last month, and found that I still think it’s pretty cool, and I want to write about it. Even made a dope cover for it. So this one is still on the table.

  • AVP TRILOGY: On the fence about this one. I used to be super into Aliens and Predator, but it’s kinda faded. This is more a ‘we’ll see how I feel about it when I step up to the plate to try and write it’ kind of situation.

  • DREARY: I intend to post the 2013 rewrite of my very first fan fiction this year, soon actually.

  • OBSIDIAN SUN RISING: Technically a rewrite of technically my first fan fiction, written five or so months before Dreary in 2003. Originally titled A SHADOW OVER LYLAT. I’ve reserved that title for another project further down the line. Still intend to do this, just need to find time for it. It’s gonna be a long one, an epic action-horror.

  • TECH-COMM OUTPOST #17: The Terminator fan fiction. Still plan to give this one a shot, especially after playing Terminator: Resistance. That’s a surprisingly cool game.

  • OTHER: So those are the big ones. The ones I’m fairly confident about. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve got ideas kicking around that I may get to someday.

    • GEARS OF WAR: Definitely wanna do a series set alongside the Gears of War games with original protagonists.

    • DEAD SPACE: Definitely want to do something in Dead Space. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve got a notion to write one story that introduces a new protagonist during Dead Space 2, and then that protagonist becomes the protagonist in a re-imagining of Dead Space 3, and beyond.

    • PERFECT DARK: I go back and forth on this one, but I just found out they’re bringing it back?! Crazy to think. I’m very curious to see how it turns out, but I don’t think they can recapture the magic. I still think this new game could be good, great even, but it won’t be Perfect Dark. I honestly feel like that game was lightning in a bottle, and what made it special simply can no longer be captured in the 2020s.

    • BUZZ LIGHTYEAR: As I mentioned last year, I rediscovered an old Buzz Lightyear fan fiction I started writing in like 2007. Still looked pretty cool, actually. Maybe someday.

    • KILLZONE: So this is a new one. I replayed Killzone last year, the HD version, and although I think it did not age well, it did give me a strong idea for a survival-horror fan fiction set in that universe. I even made a cover for it.

    • WOLFENSTEIN: Also new. I was going through Wolfenstein 2009 again, and I still love the shit out of that game. It made me strongly want to write a fan fiction for it, so much so I also made a cover for it. (You can find these on my Facebook.) Again, maybe someday.

    • HALO TRILOGY: As I mentioned last year, I got a cool idea for a sequel trilogy to the original Halo Trilogy that isn’t part of my Classic Universe. Maybe I’ll still do this someday.

That’s it, really. Those are the big ones. Ideas come and go. I briefly toyed around with writing a fan fic for Far Cry - Primal. I fucking love that game. But I’m not sure if it’s in the cards. Again, we’ll see. Someday, I want to get to the point where I’m so caught up, I can actually indulge and write something brand new for a brand new game if the urge so strikes me. Not sure if I’ll ever get there, though.

ORIGINAL FICTION

Unfortunately, I don’t have too much to say on this one. I suspected that starting Kane’s War last year was a pipe dream, and yep, it was. Almost is for this year, too.

Other ideas have been calling to me, though. But again, it’s a matter of time and energy.

That being said, I spent some time combing through my old databases one more time, as there was a lot of stuff in there I kind of just tossed aside to be sorted through later. I’ve got a handful of things that I wrote before The Shadow Wars that I still think are good enough to be seen by readers. So I’ve decided I’m going to slightly polish up and edit a handful of select titles and release them, either individually or as a collection, this year on WattPad. It’ll be going on in the background, and I also intend to create Kindle/PDF versions of them as Patreon bonuses, and also to revamp my Patreon at least a little, in case people want to do that.

I doubt I’ll honestly have time to get to something original this year, but who knows?

MACHINIMA

Boy I fucked this one up. Did not get even a SINGLE THING done for Not Alone 3 last year.

I think I have unfortunately just hit a wall. Machinima seems surprisingly intimidating now. Every time I think to go work on it, it just feels too daunting, and I retreat. I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to get past this anytime soon. I guess we’ll see. 2020 just fucked everything up.

IN CONCLUSION

Let’s wrap it up.

Here’s a shortlist of things I really hope to do this year.

  • Finish Episode Three of The DOOM Chronicles, and then put it back to sleep for awhile. At least another year.

  • Finish The Will To Live. This is definitely within reach.

  • Finish Episode One of Nerves of Steele.

  • Start and finish Bishop’s Lament. It’s a big one, though, bigger than Bishop’s War, so at the very least we’ll start it, not sure about the finish.

  • Do SOMETHING for Machinima.

  • Post polished & edited versions of a handful of my older works, including the 2013 rewrite of Dreary.

  • Start and maybe finish SOMETHING that isn’t Halo, DOOM, or Half-Life related. Not sure what. We’ll see.

That’s it really. I hope 2021 is better for all of us. Honestly, it needs to be.

The Near Horizon | November 2020

So I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I also believe in telling people if it's important and not just going radio silent.

In short: October threw a few bricks at my head (metaphorically speaking) and it occurred to me over the past few days that I am just not in the right place for updating my stories for the moment. I need a break. I'm admittedly not sure how long it will last. Don't worry, I'm not walking away or anything, but I'd say I need at least a few weeks, possibly the rest of 2020 to get my head straight.

Given everything that's happened so far this year, and the fucking nightmare of a shitstorm was are potentially in for very soon, I imagine I'm not the only one who needs a break.

So, I'll be back at some point. Good luck and stay safe everyone.

The Near Horizon | October 2020

I feel like this is a ‘no news is good news’ type of situation, so I don’t have much to say.

The good news is that I did it! The Will To Live - Part 03 is DONE! I just barely managed to get it in under the wire before we hit October. It’s back on hiatus. Once I start in on Part 04, that will be the last part, and it will almost certainly be the shortest part of the story. Although given how my writing has a tendency to bloat, we shall see. In my head, ideally, I will finish The Will To Live before 2021.

For now, I am back to The DOOM Chronicles. Part III of Episode III sees a return of Kyra. We get to figure out what awful, dark, dangerous things are waiting for her in Antarctica, and discover a secret that could save mankind. This part will definitely be shorter than Part II, though longer than Part I. I hope to get it up and running soon.

The Near Horizon | September 2020

Not much news for now.

I managed to wrap up Part Two of Episode Three of The DOOM Chronicles, so it’s only hold for now. I’ve picked back up The Will To Live and I managed to at least get a couple of chapters out last month. Ideally I’ll be able to get Part Three of The Will To Live finished this month, but we’ve seen how ‘ideally’ goes.

That’s about it.

The Near Horizon | August 2020

July wasn’t much better than June.

A few irritating things happened that were basically just wrenches in my production.

The first was that I started Lexapro in June to help combat anxiety. Well, it did somewhat help combat anxiety, but it also had a side effect of making me just not give a fuck about anything. Seriously, I pissed entire days away just sitting around playing video games. Not even like new or exciting games, but games where I just felt like I was grinding. I wasn’t so much enjoying myself as I was just not having a problem with spending twelve hours largely doing the same thing. It also gave me kind of a flat affect, which in other words means emotional blunting. I found myself being sapped of empathy and just caring in general. I at least immediately recognized this as a problem and as a result, as soon as I was able, got off the Lexapro. I won’t indict Lexapro, as I don’t indict psych meds in general, just because it affected me poorly. It might be a miracle cure for other people. But now I know that it is not for me. Not giving a shit is way too high a price, and on top of that, it didn’t even help with my anxiety much. So I got off of that and pretty quickly started caring again.

The second thing: my headaches. I got looked at and my doc ultimately determined that I must be having rebound headaches. What that is is when you take painkillers for too long. They can actually do the opposite of what they are supposed to do and give you more headaches. He injected me with steroids and a rebound-free painkiller and had me stay off any and all other painkillers for a week. Although I think this did help somewhat, as some of my problems were almost certainly rebound headaches (I’d been taking painkillers almost every day for a month at that point, which, you know, don’t do that), that didn’t solve the problem. However, I think the problem was accidentally solved by the third thing that happened.

A few weeks ago, I got hit with a fucking monster tooth infection. THAT. SHIT. HURT. I ended up grabbing some Orajel, the kind you squeeze onto your finger and rub all up on your gums. Basically, it’s a numbing agent meant to give you relief. Well, it gave relief all right. I used the shit out of it all that Saturday, and at about 5AM Sunday morning, it abruptly occurred to me that maybe there’s an upper limit on how much Orajel you can safely use. I looked at the tube, it said four times a day. I had probably used the fucking shit TWENTY times in the last fifteen hours. I am a dumbshit sometime. I looked up what the possible damage could be and it can FUCKING KILL YOU if you use too much! There’s something in Orajel that, if too much gets into your system, it can deplete your tissue of oxygen and you can die. Well I immediately stopped using it for all of Sunday, however, as Sunday went into Monday, I was woken up by pain and decided to use it one more time.

When I woke up Monday, I felt like shit and was pretty terrified that I’d taken that last step and poisoned myself. I went to an UrgentCare and got looked at. Thankfully, I hadn’t poisoned myself. It was just that the tooth infection had become an abscessed tooth, and it had finally broken into my overall system instead of being confined to the tooth area. They gave me some powerful antibiotics and sent me home. I think this was a blessing in disguise because a theory I had developed about my headaches were that they were actually some kind of sinus problem, because the headache I kept having was specifically in my forehead, around my sinus. Ever since I started taking the antibiotics, I noticed that the specific headache I’d been having had finally gone away!

So as of right now, I’m pretty good. I’m still recovering from the tooth thing, (cheek still hurts from where the abscess was), and I still have a headache here or there, but they’re just normal headaches either caused from sleeping too much or leftover tooth pain. And I give a shit about things again! I’ve also managed to finally get my sleep schedule back under control. I’m going to sleep at a reasonable time and actually falling asleep within half an hour of laying down, instead of just laying there for fucking hours, and I’m waking up at a reasonable time. Also getting a bit of consistent exercise in at the start of each day. So August is looking good!

Unfortunately, as a result of all this shit, I didn’t get much work done on The DOOM Chronicles. The good news is that there’s just one more chapter left to go in this Part. Once it’s done, I’m pausing The DOOM Chronicles and going back to The Will To Live. I ultimately decided that starting a new fan fic wasn’t the right move, and instead I’m just going to focus on finishing what I have started for now.

The Near Horizon | July 2020

So last month the outlook was rosy. Well, now it’s grim. Or, at the very least, less rosy.

Basically, I had a full-on panic attack last month. It really came out of nowhere, and it was so unexpected that I genuinely thought I was having a heart attack or something. I went to the ER for the first time in over a decade and they were pretty much like, “Yeah, it seems like it was a panic attack” after running a bunch of tests and finding nothing wrong with my heart. So now I’m on new meds and that’s kind of screwing with me. On top of that, I’ve been having headaches pretty regularly, which is deeply concerning and I need to investigate that, because I gotta admit, a brain tumor would really fuck things up for me.

As a result of all this, production stumbled, obviously. I’m in the home stretch of finishing up Part II of The DOOM Chronicles - Episode Three and I intend to at least push forward and wrap that up soon.

Once that’s done, I think I may need to reassess my immediate plans. The reason is twofold. The first being the stress of the new situation, the second is a bit more complicated.

So I’ve been working on what you might call my ‘memoirs’ since May, basically just recounting my own personal history, with a specific emphasis on fan fiction. I finally decided to launch it last month. I’ve been having fun with it, partially because I can make cool cover art for old ideas or ideas I never got around to and never will. But it’s caused me to remember a lot of stuff, and one of those things was the simple pleasure of just, you know, writing a story. Something that isn’t part of some massive series, something that won’t necessarily become some massive 100,000+ word project. Something written simply to recapture the magic I felt while playing a video game.

The problem there is that the last time I tried this we got And There Was Another, which swelled to over 150,000 words, took 15 months to write, and is now a planned trilogy that is part of a shared universe.

Despite this, I’ve been really stressed out, and I’ve been tossing around the idea of just writing something with a bit more spontaneity. Unfortunately I’m feeling rather indecisive at the moment, so I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve at least got an idea of what I want to write, and it’s very different from everything else I’ve written in terms of setting, and for a game that not a lot of people seemed to have liked, but I loved.

So…I don’t know. Wish me luck. I’ll get it figured out, and hopefully I’ll be okay.

The Near Horizon | June 2020

So May went well. A month went well for once!

After getting back on the meds that I tried to stop taking again, I have determined that yep, if I want to be productive at all, I’m stuck with them. Which hey, it’s nice to have the option at least.

I managed to get SIX chapters of The DOOM Chronicles out in May. I can’t even remember the last time I wrote and released that many chapters in the span of a single month. I’m hoping that’s the new normal, and I can finally start making some REAL progress on my stories.

I also want to say that a significant part of the reason I began making progress was because I made an executive decision. How I’ve been writing goes like this: Plan out the chapters of the story, write the chapters. The problem with this is that I’ve been getting long-winded as I get older. Whereas before I struggled to break 2,000 words, now I struggle to keep it under 5,000, based off the same amount of intended material. So I finally decided to change it. Now, all my chapters are going to aim for 3,000 words. Once I start approaching the 3,000 word mark, I begin looking for the first natural scene break to end the chapter. Obviously it’s working, because that’s what helped allow me to get out half a dozen chapters in a month.

As for the plan for June? It’s largely the same. I am intending to wrap up Part Two of Episode Three of DOOM this month. It should be doable. And once it’s done, I’m diving right back into The Will To Live. That’s about it.

The Near Horizon | May 2020

April was a nightmare.

Short reason: I was coming down off of meds.

Longer reason: I’ve been on a medication called Bupropion for like 5 years now. Besides being an antidepressant, it boosts energy. I tried getting off of it in 2017 because I thought it might not be doing anything for me any longer. I was wrong and got back on. This time around, I’ve since had a genetic test and learned I’m severely deficient in…something. I can’t remember now. But basically being deficient in it makes you sad, and the supplement I started taking gave me the proper amount, which helped with the depression.

I talked with my doctor about it (to be clear, both times, I didn’t just up and decide to do this either time), and decided to come down off the Bupropion. That began near the beginning of the month. The LAST time I tried this, all I had to deal with was a bottoming out of motivation. THIS fucking time however, I got SLAMMED with bouts of dizziness, which were annoying, and severe mood-swings, which were awful. Like, it was pretty bad.

What I’ve learned is that I’m stuck with the drug because my motivation bottomed out again. So I’m going to get back on it very soon. Hopefully this will perk me up for this month.

I at least managed to get a few DOOM chapters out the door in April.

For May, I am just putting The Will To Live back on hold until I wrap up the current Part of Episode Three in The DOOM Chronicles. Once Part 2 is wrapped up, I’ll go wrap up Part 3 of The Will To Live, then put it back on hold, write out Part 3 of Episode 3, then switch back over to The Will To Live and get Part 4, and the story as a whole, wrapped up. After that I’ll probably try and hammer away on Episode 3 of The DOOM Chronicles until it’s done. And THEN I can FINALLY return my attention to Nerves of Steele, for God’s sake. What a mistake starting that was.

I’m really hoping May will be a more productive month, but we’ll see how it turns out. Everything is just so crazy right now, and that’s making my anxiety go crazy on top of just regular anxiety. Either way, I hope everyone’s doing okay out there.