What This Is and Why I'm Doing It

I confess to having had literary ambitions in my youth.
However, I'm now at the age where I have a much clearer idea of the limits of my abilities.
I know I'm not a great writer, and I know I'll never be successful doing it.

I'm now doing this purely as a hobby.

Some people find escape from the real world in fantasy.
And some people find that writing fantasy stories can help with this escapism just as much as reading fantasy stories.
In fact in some ways writing is better.  You can create exactly the kind of world you want to escape to.

This is a public blog, but I won't be attempting to write for a public audience.  This is going to be entirely a self-indulgent exercise, in which I will be writing just to please myself.

As someone who has been blogging for years, I'm well aware of just how little traffic most blogs get.  Public or not.  (According to the website statistics, my main blog manages to get a handful of visits per day, but my other - story blogs haven't had visitors in years.)
So I'll consider this little venture essentially almost like a private blog.
But, on the off chance someone is reading this: Hello.  Feel free to say hi in the comments.
You can read the story if you find it interesting.  And ignore it if you don't.

As part of my own self-indulgence, I've chosen a mystical forest setting for this story in order to help alleviate my depression from living in a big city.  There will probably be a lot of gratuitous descriptions of how beautiful the forest is popping up frequently in the story.

The "world" of this story is your standard fantasy genre.
All the standard creatures from the fantasy genre are assumed to exist in this world (dwarves, elves, goblins, fairies, giants, unicorns, gnomes.)
All the animals are intelligent and can talk.

Other people before me have observed that the fantasy genre is actually a very conservative genre.  Instead of being completely open to imagination, the settings and characters are usually remarkably consistent from story to story.
But that's fine with me.  I'm not attempting to break new ground with this.  I'm just trying to immerse myself in the fantasy world that is familiar to me from childhood.

The obvious influences are C.S. Lewis, and Tolkien.
Tolkien was careful to keep his Middle-Earth mythology consistent by only borrowing from one source (Norse Mythology).  Whereas C.S. Lewis felt free to mix and match many different mythologies in Narnia.
My own world is somewhat of a middle-ground between the two.  Characters from many different mythologies exist somewhere in this world.  But the ones that will predominate in this particular forest are the ones from Northern Europe.

I've already created a world like this once before when I was in high school.  Since it seems redundant to create a second fantasy world (and since this is my self-indulgent project, and I like the idea of connecting back to my earlier work), I'm going to place this in the same world.  The world of Fabulae.

But I don't want this new story to be burdened down with any of the ridiculous plots or characters from my high school days.  So while this technically exists in the Fabulae world, it will exist in a previously unexplored corner of the Fabulae world, where I can do something completely new and different.

In my old map of Fabulae, there's one country left unlabeled.  (In the bottom right-hand corner, just above Rammes.)  This will be the region where the new story takes place.

Housekeeping Notes
Blogger typically posts new posts at the top of the blog.
I'd prefer, however, for the top of this blog to start with the first chapter, and then for the subsequent chapters to follow after.
So, I'll be altering the calendar dates on each chapter so that they appear below each other.
This post here (the one you're reading right now) should have the correct date on it--i.e. I really did write this post on May 23, 2018.  But every other post below this one will have a false date.

I'll be writing the story in Google Docs, and then transferring the chapters to blogger. You can read it at either place.
Google Drive Folder HERE
Prologue here: docs, pub
Chapter 1: docs, pub
Chapter 2: docs, pub
Chapter 3: docs, pub
Chapter 4: docs, pub
Chapter 5: docs, pub

Oh Wow! This is Turning out Worse than I thought

Written on May 28, 2018.  After about 5 days of struggling with this.

Okay, so I'm about 5 days into this, and I'm both enjoying it and finding it incredibly frustrating.
I'm enjoying being able to retreat into a world of Fantasy for 15 minutes every day.
(I've been making a point to work on this for about 15 minutes every day, even on days when I'm really busy.  The reason is that I know from past experiences that the momentum of these things will dry up pretty quick if you don't keep working on it.  I have a large file full of unfinished stories that I just lost enthusiasm for because I didn't keep my momentum up.)

But, I'm also finding that my writing is terrible.  The dialogue, the character descriptions... all terrible.
In the past, I've let this frustration stop me from writing.  This time, I want to keep forging on ahead.  (I believe this is somewhat therapeutic for me.)

But... just in case anyone else is reading this, let me just say:
I know it's bad.  I'm sorry.  I know I'm not talented.  I didn't make it bad on purpose, I'm just a person of limited talent.  Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

PS:
After struggling with this for a few days, and turning out awful, awful prose, I'm beginning to feel that it's unfair to criticize writers too strongly.  Sure, going after unreadable prose is low-hanging fruit.  But everyone is just trying their best.  No one is writing bad prose on purpose.
I'm beginning to regret writing all those harsh book reviews  in which I complained about bad story-telling.  Who am I to complain?
(...although, on the other hand, these were all published books that were being sold in stores.  So if the authors are making money off of selling their books, and people are handing over their hard-earned money to buy it, maybe this does place them in a higher position for criticism.)

PSS:
Actually, come to think of it, part of the reason this is turning out so terrible is probably precisely because I'm doing most of my writing in 15 minute increments after I'm tired from a long day.
I've learned in the past (from my other writing - projects) that I tend to do my best writing after I've been at it for about an hour.  The first hour you're just getting warmed up, really.  The second hour is when you begin to find your rhythm, and become comfortable.
But unfortunately I'm older now, and have more responsibilities, and most days I can't dedicate a whole hour to this project.  So I'll just slowly chip away at it when I can.  (I've already resigned myself to the fact that this isn't going to be a great work of literature, just a little something so that I don't feel like I've completely lost my soul to work.)

PSSS:
I mentioned in my initial post that I had no illusions about being a great writer.  I was, however, hoping to write something that would at least be readable.  You know, not publishing level readable, maybe, but definitely blogging level readable.  I'm finding, however, that as the story is coming out, it's pretty much unreadable. 
I think I could make it more readable if I had the time to sit down for a couple hours every day in order to immerse myself into the prose, and re-work it.  However the model I'm currently doing is just 15 minutes a day.  I want to be able to do this in small doses without it taking a big chunk out of my life.  (I'm busy with a lot of other things, at the moment).
It was probably a mistake to think I could write something readable in just short 15 minute segments.  If 15 minutes a day was all it took to write a novel, everyone would be doing it.   The reason so few people write novels is because it takes hours out of your day, not just 15 minutes at a time.