It’s February 14th, 2015. Valentine’s Day for those of you in a relationship! It is time for the Week Six update!

Days 39 through 45 have been successes, with a minimum of 1,000 words per day written. There were a couple of days where my motivation to do much more than sit around playing Dying Light were almost overwhelming, but I stuck it out!

Stats for Days 39 to 45:

Day 39 – 1699 words
Day 40 – 1024 words
Day 41 – 1098 words
Day 42 – 1164 words
Day 43 – 1064 words
Day 44 – 1168 words
Day 45 – 1213 words

Total count for the year thus far is 64,053 words. Average daily word count is 1,423 words. Gridfall is at 62,357 words. Based on my projections for the story, it is 31% finished.

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Last week I talked about the primary faction our characters are involved with, the Rebuilders. Let’s talk about a rival faction today, The World Above You, or WAY for short.

The WAY are a religious sect, which believes in a god and in the concept of an afterlife, where they will go if they devote themselves to the discipline of the religion.

In the world of Gridfall, there was a religious purging some eighty years prior to the events Nella and Kurt deal with. Purging sounds violent, but it was more just the world moving beyond the need for a belief in a higher power and a reward of an afterlife to drive their behavior. People still had religion, a belief in the afterlife, but they were few and far between, considered eccentric and archaic in the modern society.

The WAY are presented with something familiar of real-world Protestant faiths, and it draws a lot of parallels as a result. The actual religion differs in some key ways (no pun intended), for instance having no reliance on a belief in a son of God that they must accept into their hearts as a savior in order to go to their version of Heaven.

The WAY are also presented as clear antagonists from the moment they are introduced, and this is also intentional, so that I might play with the notion of religions as the main characters butt up against the WAY and their Crusades-like method of control and expansion in the  name of God. As the story goes on, the line blurs and I’m hoping that people see the WAY less as archaic and doing wrong, and in a more sympathetic light overall.

But let me be clear, I personally don’t believe in organized religion at all. I love faith, but I hate religion. You can see that reflected in my science fiction series beginning with Something More. Because science is just a belief, too. We believe in the logic we are presented with, in the truth we can verify, in the “laws” that govern the universe that we feel we understand. But that doesn’t make them true, any more than a belief in an otherworldly being who can create the universe and has our best interests at heart.

The WAY are villains, but their way of life is not. That’s a hard tightrope to balance upon.

Next week I’ll talk about the Mauders, the second antagonistic faction that springs up in the aftermath of Gridfall!

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And remember, writing is a skill. So write the hell on, writers.