See the new Darkstar site here!

I’m happy to announce that the newly-designed Coming of the Darkstar site has been launched. Similar to the re-make for Nefol, I’ve chosen to move Darkstar to a new host at Neocities.

This isn’t as old-skool as the Fan Site remake, but it still involved moving content out of a CMS to a static website format. I was happy to discover how to move WordPress comments to a Disqus commenting system. This means that moving the story did not lose the reader comments (which was important to me)!

Feel free to let me know if you stumble on something that’s not working correctly, though I hope you will enjoy the new site!

Back when I launched the original Sygnus.org (known as Sygnus Star in those days), it was a hand-coded static HTML website of my own making. Over the years, I moved to WordPress for the ease of use, ability to host comments, and because everyone else made the same kind of move.

However, last year, I rediscovered the fun I used to have designing and coding my own sites when I worked on the restoration of the old Sygnus site on Neocities. That’s inspired me to start moving my content to a static format – especially now that I’ve learned how to export WordPress comments to a Disqus account.

All this to say, I’ve quietly begun to move content over the past couple weeks. I’m in the middle of Darkstar at the moment, but then I ran across something that made me decide to tackle Nefol today. Not only was it a smaller chunk of content, but I realized I had placeholder posts for the blog portion on my main gaming blog already.

So, I’ve designed a little site and moved Nefol to it’s new home. The blog post archive is, as I noted, hosted on my main blog – I felt that since it was talking about software and game design, it fit there. The rest of the page is hosted on Neocities as part of the Sygnus Star recreation.

Eventually, I hope to transfer my domain so that it can all be under the banner of Sygnus.org again. But I want to wait until I’ve transferred everything first.

I’m seriously considering moving over Wayrift, too. But that’s going to be one HUGE project if I do. For now, I’m focusing on smaller pieces of Sygnus.org and will keep you updated as I move them!

For many years, I’ve been looking for a light-weight webcomic plugin that would allow me to mesh Shimmer into a WordPress blog without overtaking the whole blog and turning it into a comic. That would allow me to archive it with my other projects here on Sygnus.org rather than hosting it on a separate WordPress.org blog.

Well, the time has come, and I have found the plugin that allows me to bring Shimmer home and host it here on Sygnus.org! I was able to import all of the comic pages and the comments. However, my own author comments are currently missing due to the plugin’s design – I’ll see what I can do for that later.

The art gallery, cast page, fan gallery and an archive are also up. Everything should be working, but if you see anything wonky, please let me know!

I’m pleased to announce that all of the writing for Shadows of Zot is now transferred to its new home here on this site. This was a smaller project as it included just a short set of chapters and one image gallery. All of the chapters should be navigating to each other, but let me know if you see any wonkiness.

I’m not quite sure what project I’ll tackle next as Runne is a pretty huge project, as are some of the other projects I’m considering moving here. I’ll see what I have time for, but I do hope to continue to consolidate more content here!

I know it’s been a while since I started working on cleaning up the archive for the Nefol Game Project blog, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve finished archiving all of those posts! Sadly, I don’t see us coming back to this project, but we obviously had a lot of fun and learning when we worked on it. You can see our misadventures in noob game making , along with all the progress we did (and didn’t make).

I’m not sure which project I’m going to work on moving over to Sygnus next. I am considering moving some of my fan writing for Guild Wars 2 and FFXIV here as well. But all in good time!

The archive for Flames of Bedlam has been completely moved to this domain, including all the extra pages (Glossary, Art, Theme, etc). I’ve closed down the site at the WordPress.org site and redirected all traffic to this page now.

There’s only one book available currently as I didn’t get a lot of feedback about the start of this story, so I didn’t continue writing it. But I still love the characters and had fun creating a Sci-Fantasy setting and the origin story of my Dragons. Maybe one day I will revisit this tale from the Time Before.

I also went through and fixed a few layout issues for pages, converting them to the new WordPress box system. So everything should be working correctly. If not, please let me know!

My next project is to move all the content of Flames of Bedlam to Sygnus.org. I’ve already imported the existing story and begun this project. Seeing this is one of my shorter pieces, it will hopefully not take too long!

I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally finished the archiving of the story portion of Coming of the Darkstar here on the Sygnus site. This included reuploading all of the chapter images and creating a navigation between every chapter in the story. Please let me know if you see anything not working like it should.

Most of the basic pages have been combed through and fixed, but the art gallery and cast pages are still a work in progress. I’ll get to restoring these as soon as I can!

The story itself, along with all the captured comments, is now secure in its new home. smile

Wattpad has profiles made specifically to encompass a theme or genre, which I think is a cool idea. I’m not sure if it’s an “official” profile, or what one has to do to make one, but the profile owner(s) gather together books under that theme and place them on the list.

There’s often an application process, and I’m going to guess that books are reviewed and not every book submitted is chosen. I put in an application for Book 1 of Dreigiau to the Magic profile some time ago. In fact, it was so long ago, I’d forgotten I’d done it until I saw this message pop up today:

Oh gosh! This is exciting! It’s the first time one of my Wattpad books has really been added to anything outside of my own profile and a few reader lists (which I always appreciate). Granted, I’ve been slowly building the book, posting a chapter a week, so I don’t have anything complete on my profile yet (despite having finished writing and posting these years ago).

As I noted in a previous post, the idea of getting things up on Wattpad is to put my stuff in front of a new audience who would have never seen it otherwise. Hopefully this will help expand the reach of Dreigiau!

There’s also some other awesome books there — as you can see by the number of votes and reads — so if you’re looking for some online reading, check out the Magic profile at Wattpad and see what’s up!

I’ve been writing a lot of heavy personal posts here lately, so I decided to break that up with a somewhat silly post about writing. Last year, I started posting up my newest story, Flames of Bedlam, on Wattpad. This is a new experience for me, so it’s always interesting to see how these things play out.

I wrote about why I chose to start posting my story on a site that’s not my own — namely, to reach out to readers who wouldn’t normally find a story that’s tucked away on a little WordPress site in the corner of the net.

I’m quite proud that I’ve reached more than 100 followers since December — something I’ve been actively working to increase. No, it’s not been easy going, nor has it been overnight success, no matter how much I feel my story might have to offer a lover of fantasy and dragon stories.

This is because Wattpad has a lot of writers who wish to be read, just like myself. Finding the actual readers is sometimes still quite the struggle. It’s just so hard to get your work out in front of people who will enjoy it and give it a chance now days. But that’s not the story I’m here to tell. 

How Wattpad Comments Work

Wattpad likes to cater to the mobile reader. The app is actually quite nice — I used it to read when I was away on my cruise and had some down time.

It also allows the reader to drop random, rolling commentary on the story as they read. Each paragraph break you make in your story is a block of text that the reader can highlight and leave a comment on. I think this was in part to allow for editing and notes, but it’s often used as a way to indicate a particular spot of the story you really enjoy.

It seems some readers use it as a way to voice their reactions as they read. It’s not odd to have someone drop 10-20 random comments along the side of the story… like this:

It’s also not unusual for these comments to take the form of a single (or string of single) emoji… since the reader is often responding via a mobile device.

Flipping Bahamut Off

Flames of Bedlam is my experiment with writing a story from a first-person point of view. The main character, Bahamut, is a narcissist butt-munch in the first few chapters. He’s meant to start out that way — this is a story that revolves around his development into a slightly less narcissist butt-munch. wink

I’ve had a reader who has commented quite a bit on the first few chapters, leaving their thoughts along the side, responding to things as they read. It’s usually a lot of fun to see my phone light up as the app informs me that this reader has returned to read the next chapter… even if it’s only short comments, sprinkled with emoji. The reader often talks directly to the characters in my story in these comments, which is even better — this means they’re invested.

This reader has taken a liking to Bahamut’s foil character, Levi, and appears to think Bahamut needs to be taken down a few notches. This is great because that’s exactly the response I was trying to get from the reader… and here it is, working as intended!

In one particular scene, Bahamut was starting up his nonsense — you get to hear his running internal dialogue as he thinks he’s so much clever and more manipulative than anyone else around him. Apparently, this line triggered a strong reaction, because for the first time in all my many years of posting writing online, the reader flipped my character off.

For a moment, I was taken aback. Then, I decided this was downright hilarious and absolutely warranted. In fact, this was marvelous — this was exactly what I wanted my reader to feel about this character.

I had succeeded in writing… and it’s not every day you can feel like you’ve done that.