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Field Notes Blog:
The Field Notes are the blog of the Retinue of House Walker. It is a place for updates, observations, and behind-the-scenes work as the project develops. Here you may find notes on original stories such as our novelette, "Three-Blade Will", along with historical fencing, HEMA and other martial arts discussions. As performers at heart, we also share work on handmade props, costumes, jewelry, sewing, and leatherwork, performance ideas, story adaptations, videos, audio releases and the slow process of building a fictional world.
What Epistolary Writing Taught Me About Storytelling
I recentlt finished a project where the challenge was to write an epistolary style story. The end result was the novelette Upstream, about a young man leaving home in search of gold in a local river, told through a recovered journal. This article discusses the lessons that I learned from the experience.
Matthew Walker
Sep 244 min read
I Wrote an Entire First Draft of a Novelette During Live YouTube Writing Sprints
Recently, I wrote the entire rough draft of the epistolary story Upstream live by hosting a series of YouTube writing sprints using the Live channel feature to share the process in real time. Each live stream lasted about an hour to an hour and a half and included at least two twenty-five minute sprints where we wrote as many words as possible on our works in progress. Over eleven streams and twenty-three sprints, I finished the 12,387 word first draft.
Matthew Walker
Sep 147 min read
Upstream
Told through a recovered journal, Upstream follows a young man pursuing the promise of gold deeper into the wilderness, where ambition, isolation, and survival begin to blur together. A free-to-read novelette from the Retinue of House Walker.
Matthew Walker
Sep 92 min read
Matthew's Archive is now Live!
One day, feeling nostalgic, Matthew searched Google for some of his older work. He was curious whether anyone had read it, rated it, or left comments behind. What he found instead was that some of those stories simply no longer existed online. Others, fortunately, had survived. A few stories were still available under different domains or through websites that had inherited older material. Finding those surviving pieces created a new goal. To recover what remained, reconstruc
Matthew Walker
Aug 164 min read
Seedless
Seedless, is a short fiction story about the domestic horror and consequences of even just a momentary lapse in supervision.
Matthew Walker
Aug 153 min read
Sophie's Necklace
Sophie's Necklace, is a short fiction story about the consequences of even just a momentary lapse in supervision.
Matthew Walker
Aug 155 min read
I Should Have Worn A Different Watch
I Should Have Worn A Different Watch, a short about a man who wakes to discover that time still matters, even when almost everything else has stopped. A 'creepypasta' about consciousness, isolation, and the one unbearably ordinary object that becomes the bane of his existence, until it does not.
Matthew Walker
Aug 134 min read
Writing Studio Hour Stream: Late-Night Writing Sprints, Story Development, and Building a Free Fiction Library
In an effort to consistently write more, and expand our free-to-read catalogue, I will be starting writing studio hour stream, or a late-night writing sprint. The concept is simple, over the course of an hour I will run two 20-25 minute writing sprints. That allows me to draft live and you can watch me write in real time.
Matthew Walker
Aug 55 min read
Why we Chose to Have our Stories be Free to Read
So why is it free-to-read? That is part of our commitment to accessibility and lowering barriers. Someday project support versions or physical copies may be for sale as a means to support the project, but for now we have removed the economic barrier for accessing our fiction works. You can simply read our written works without having to pay for it.
We have made other purposeful choices in our commitment as well. We self-published the free version using Lexend font
Matthew Walker
Jul 215 min read
Three-Blade Will
What begins as an accident and subsequent misunderstanding grows into a reputation larger than the man at the center of it.
Three-Blade Will began as an idea for a ren faire performance piece and grew into a comic novelette about about pride, misunderstanding and the way a story can morph and spread beyond the people directly involved.
Matthew Walker
Jul 62 min read
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