Oren Raynes Blog

   June 02 2026 I have been working on a novel for a couple of weeks now. Just doing what I can as I have time. Most of that has been working on characters and developing a story line. Yesterday I wrote a draft of the potential first scene. That alone feels like a pretty big step for my first serious work of fiction, but I wrote the scene from the point of view of three of my main characters. Why though? I don’t know if this is how other writers do it. I chose to do it this way so that I can see the progress of the characters and that I understand them the way I think that I do. I’m pretty sure that I will not do this for every single scene. I may limit it to just scenes where I have a bunch of new characters all at once. I’m not sure. I found the experience to be very successful. I feel like I do understand the characters well, and that they all three have very distinct voices and personalities. It was really enjoyable to think about the same scene from a...

        I am back, baby! Took some time away from writing, mostly not by choice but by choice. I relapsed into my World of Warcraft (wow) addiction and that had been consuming every available moment of free time and a lot of moments of not free time.      During this episode of wow addiction, I inherited a guild. That was a weird situation. I was in a guild doing my thing. The GM seemed like a cool dude with a great mindset about how the guild should work; being kind to each other, being helpful to each as main priority, and doing things as a guild. And then one day he disbanded the guild. So me and a few members remade the guild with a new name (The Disbanded) and gathered as many of the original people as we could. Now i am running the guild with the same values and have a tonne of really cool people that I really appreciate and we are getting near to raiding status.      From this wow relapse, I am trying to take some...