Who am I?
I'm a storyteller.
I live it, I breathe it, I butter my bread with it. Hyperbole aside, I do enjoy a good yarn, whether it's a book, a movie, or a videogame. Still - I enjoy spinning the yarn myself the most.
Is Arrhur Mcfinn my real name?
Arthur McFinn is a pen name that I chose for several reasons.
The primary reason is that my given name is a mouthful; the secondary reason is simply because I like how it sounds. I like Arthurian legends (hence Arthur), and McFinn is derived from MacGuffin. It's a reminder to myself of sorts to uphold my storytelling creed. Using MacGuffins in storytelling is often frowned upon.
I stand for the idea that there is no such thing as a bad trope or a narrative device. The intention and execution are what truly matter.
How I started my writing journey
It happened when I got my first library card. The kids' section didn't offer much excitement outside of comics and one book series: Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle. Think of the series what you will, but I absolutely loved it. I finished it and I wanted more, but our humble library didn't have any books that filled the same niche.
I craved to return to the fantastical land of dragons, high adventure, and epic battles, and so I picked up a pen and started writing my own tales. I haven't stopped since.
what kind of stories do I write?
I'm a fantasy writer first and foremost, but I don't limit myself to the classical Tolkien-esque conventions. All the stories are set in a single universe, but you will find a wide range of thematic settings and plots.
I like to think of it as a kind of multiverse with settings divided by space and time. This presents an interesting challenge; I have to think about the relations between the settings to preserve their integrity without turning them into a hodgepodge of ideas. This arrangement also allows for some interesting dinamics.
The collection of places you may visit on Ikram is rather humble as of writing this, but that will change with every story added. We will start our journey in Dragon Lands, fly a steampowered airship in a retro-futuristic City of Iron, or carve our destiny with a mighty axe into Barbaric Wastelands among old gods and monsters. The sky is the limit, and Ikram is our sandbox. You too may be a part of this fantastical journey if you so please.
Do I use ai to write?
The short answer is no. I don't use AI to generate ideas, or to write the text itself.
However you have certainly noticed that there are AI generated images on this website. I claim no ownership over them because they were created by a machine. Feel free to copy and distribute them at your own pleasure.
How does my writing process lOOk like?
Writing fiction is not as straightforward as it might seem. I generally divide my work into three stages: Preproduction, production, and postproduction.
Preproduction is the part where you plan ahead. You need to come up with a theme; what the story will be about, and how it connects to the real world (faith, love, death, rebirth, redemption, revenge, this list goes on and on). The theme is the north star, the compass that points the way. And then come the concepts. Whenever I have an idea for a cool character, plot point, or a piece of worldbuilding, I write it down, thus creating a bank of raw creative material which I can draw upon. These concepts then need to be further refined and knit together to create the three basic components of fiction: the who, the where, and the what (characters, setting, plot). And with that done, I can move on to the production stage.
This is what most people associate with fiction writing: the writer sits down, picks up a pen, and pulls the story, piece by piece, from the aether of abstract concepts into a tangible narrative, or what is commonly known as the first draft. I generally like to think that there are no second or third drafts. I approach my writing more like sculpting, chiseling, and refining the rough shape into its final form.
Once the production process is done I go straight to postproduction, which means editing. I do a developmental edit first, I read through the story, cutting and rewriting, checking for consistency. Then I do a line edit. I read through the story sentence by sentence to see if the flow and wording are right. Then there is the mechanical edit. That's when I check for grammar and spelling. Then I let the story sit for a while and put on my reader hat and do a final pass to see if everything fits together. And with all that the story is finaly done.