How do you do, Dear Reader?

My name is Aiden, and I am one half of the Dynamic Duo that makes up Something Brewing. This is my first ever blog post, so needless to say, I’ve been mulling it over quite a bit.

Some history is in order, methinks. As Katie mentioned in the last post, Something Brewing is the result of the two years’ worth of brainstorming. It was born out of several events. The first was a magnificent panel discussion on Magic Systems which involved two of our favorite authors; Patrick Rothfuss (Name of the Wind, Wise Man’s Fear) and Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files, Codex Alara). Here’s a link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9H7NSqJsnM

Go watch it if you have time.

Secondly, Katie had been talking about NaNoWriMo, which was something I had heard of, but not known much about. For those of you in a similar boat as I was, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, where people take up the absurd challenge of writing a fifty-thousand word novel in 30 days.

Truth be told, I’m not certain why I accepted that challenge, as I had never written anything near as substantial (my college professors were lucky to see 8 pages out of me on most assignments), and I wasn’t even that well read. I had no clue what I was doing, but words kept coming. I completed NaNoWriMo 2014.

It was garbage. Total trash. There were some good ideas, sure, but as a good friend once told me, even the best concept does not equal a story. That takes work.

So jump back ahead to the present. I’ve got plenty of stories and lessons from the two years since NaNoWriMo, which I look forward to telling you all. Its been both humbling and inspiring, and I hope you’ll stick around to see the fruit of our efforts. I think it’ll be worth it.

Thanks for reading,

Aiden