Mid September (precisely, Monday the 20th), I decided that I will switch from weekly blog updates to monthly instead – specifically, on the last day of the month, I’ll post an update for the elapsed month. Mainly because my writings have often taken me at least a week to complete (between writing and editing), and I sometimes felt somewhat rushed to get it done.
As a result of that decision, each of the blog updates will be more substantial. In order to organize them better, I’ll be break the content down in various subsections for easier navigation.
For the month of September, these are the different topics. If you’re only interested in some of them, click on the titles to get to the relevant section, or, just keep reading!
- YarRPG (short story)
- Reviews
- A Princess in Distress (short story)
- Another webpage redesign
- A Land Beyond (short story)
- Space, Time, and the People in Between (collection of short stories)
YarRPG
The first entirely new short story of September! I also did a blog post talking a little bit of history behind its inception if you want to know more.
Reviews
Still fun to keep up with these, mostly for myself and I did a blog post about it. Not much more to add to them, except that they now look different again (see below, another webpage redesign). Have a look at the 30 Second Reviews if you’d like:
A Princess in Distress
This is the second entirely new short story for the month of September. Based on the stupid notion of a princess that needs saving. Personally, I always found those boring and insulting. I’ve always been fascinated instead, by the female badasses of history. The Cleopatra-s, the Joan of Arc-s, and the fictional Athenas, Valkyries and whatnot. In other words, I found the notion of women being defenseless objects of desire demeaning and downright idiotic.
A really good example to showcase just how much more interesting the story can be with a well developed character is the comparison between the original Prince of Persia game (1989) and the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) reboot.
To be fair, the original was developed by a single person and it was over 30 years ago, but the point stands – there have been plenty of newer games / movies where the women have been just an afterthought instead of actual people.
In the original game, the princess, the daughter of the maharajah, whatever her official title was, was just essentially waiting in front of a sand clock, for the hero to come and save her. All of the action she does is to send a freaking mouse to help. She is entirely forgettable, a prize to be won.
In contrast, the remake offers quite a different take. The love interest of the prince is anything but a helpless damsel. Sure their kingdom gets defeated and as a result she gets imprisoned, but in the course of the game she showcases to be a strong developed character, equal if not better in certain aspects than the protagonist, the prince. When he hesitates and slips up, she doesn’t think twice to double cross him and do what’s right.
What happens in my story?
Another webpage redesign
*Sigh* so yeah, I did it again. And again. And again. As I keep writing and updating, I see some shortcomings and as a result, update / change stuff as I go. This one update was prompted due to there being increasingly more reviews. That made it difficult to keep scrolling down a page, as well as for me to add more. I had to change that.
And then I thought to myself to simplify the website even further. At the end of the day, besides the blog posts, I will have two types of content on here: fiction and nonfiction. So all of my novels and short stories will now fall under the “fiction” umbrella, while the 30 second reviews (and potentially reflections and whatnot), will be covered under “nonfiction”.
With those seemingly innocent changes there were a bunch of links that I had to fix. Hopefully I tested and checked enough, but if anyone points out to a broken link, or I find it, I’ll mend that too.
A Land Beyond
This third short story of September is a rewrite of a story from my old blog. Contrary to some other stories that I’ve redone, I was pretty happy with the overall arc of this one. So the actual plot is only slightly altered, the rest is just hopefully better writing (than it was in 2014).
Space, Time, and the People in Between
And here it is! After much thinking and consideration, I finally settled on the title for the upcoming book that’s going to be a collection of short stories: Space, Time, and the People in Between.
It includes the thirteen short stories that I’ve published so far on this webpage. I plan on writing at least another 2 short stories (rewrites from my old blog), before having a complete collection. After that, onto editing. Stay tuned next month for more updates on it!
Any feedback is more than welcome!
Tomo Umer 
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