Back and Forth

When I was finishing up 2025, I was doing a bit of loose planning for things to happen int he upcoming yea, and I set a sort of soft target to get two works out. Maybe not two novels, but at least one novel and my long-stalled third video game. (That’s probably a story for another time.)

As I was tracing out plans, though, I was seized somewhat by a particular desire. To write something shorter, punchier, and more overtly humorous. And my thoughts kept drifting back to a little novella I’d written over a decade ago, but had not done as much with in the intervening years.

Well…I like to think I’m better as a writer now than I was 10 years ago, so why not give it a redo? And here we are, with my fourth novel, he Sordid Tale of Sir Ginger, slated for release on March 13 on Amazon.

So, how did I get here, and what inspired me to redo the story?

The original versions of The Sordid Tale of Sir Ginger were both meant as shorter, punchier, “monster of the day”-type affairs that were a fun side thing. That said, there were actually two previous versions of the overall tale that I did:

• The first was a riff on samurai tales called Orenjii: The Untold Tale of the Ginger Samurai. That one was more of a joke between my brother and myself, if anything, since we have a friend with bright orange hair who spent time in Japan and is fluent in the language who we affectionately called “Orenjii-san”. It was not great, if we’re being honest, though some of the same DNA has stuck around.

• The second was the version that I would stick with, The Sordid Tale of Sir Ginger, which redrew the setting as medieval fantasy. Sir Ginger was characterized a bit more than Orenjii was (naive, well-meaning, but also not exactly the most accomplished knight). This version also had a lot of fourth wall bending and meta humor that seemed like the right call at the time.

The core of both stories was about the same: a princess was kidnapped by a dragon, and they embarked on a quest to save her. The princess, however, was a complete bitch, and the dragon was…an interplanetary pimp intent on getting himself a high-quality ho.

I wrote the novella that I ultimately sat on in 2014, and I did throw it onto Amazon as a bit of a lark in 2020, just to say that I published something. I didn’t advertise it, nobody read it, but it was still something I looked back on with some pride. That said, I did pull the novella this year when I made the call to rewrite it into something longer.

I’d dragged myself to finish a long, sort of tortured manuscript that still needs a lot of work before last year closed out, and I definitely needed something a bit lighter to get the spark back. For some reason, that manuscript just dragged in terms of getting across the finish line; there were a couple smaller things I worked on between then and now, but it definitely was a work that did not come out easily.

I needed something shorter to get that spark back, and I remembered my little novella. So…I figured we’d turn it into a novel, add some more spectacle, and give it more love. I aimed to keep a lot of the humor, but I wanted to pull it back to a more reasonable level, to where a gag a minute wasn’t the product.

The intention, which I hope came across, is a mostly light and breezy romp that has the reader what’s going to happen next, but one that makes plenty of sense. It’s probably my least gay work (and will be, if we’re being honest), but it was a book I quite enjoyed writing, and I definitely stand by it as a work I’m proud of.

The Sordid Tale of Sir Ginger is about 50k words; I wrote it in about five weeks, and I edited it over two weeks. I do still have four more weeks over which I can edit it, but I feel good about where it is, and I’m not planning to heavily retool or revise it further.

I’ll fully admit that I’m not the fastest writer, but when I’m in full-on “writing mode”, I have a minimum target of 1000 words for a day of writing that I get to pretty readily. About 30k words is a reasonable output for me in a given month if I’m somewhat locked in, so blowing past that to 50k in a month is definitely a lot faster than I was expecting.

I definitely find that having that somewhat rigid target is a good way to keep the wheels turning. Hit that word count, then take it easy, if that’s your inclination…writing is a marathon, and it’s one that’s rarely able to have all of our time devoted to it. How long it takes you matters less than just that you get there.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. It’s fun to think back on where a lot of my works came from, and how they came to be. I think I’ll turn to my video games next, which will certainly be a fun story.

If you want to subscribe and get more tales like this (as well as things that aren’t just about me all the time), I’d love to have you!