The Family Line

Hello Family Line readers,

This is timhedden, or just Tim. Yes, two weeks ago, I ended The Family Line. My tale of Theomin and his personal journey started over three years ago in mid-July of 2014. All during that time, it has been an absolute pleasure telling this tale through Lotro Players. Thank all of you who read my story and kept up with Theomin’s adventures each week. All who gave feedback, no matter how grateful or technical it was, I took it with pleasure. This is because I have never shared any of my work. It took a lot of nerve for me to send my story to Andang in the first place. When he greenlit my tale, I was over the moon with excitement. Since then, it has been such an honor to tell my story to all who wanted to read it.

From Rohan to Eriador and then back again, I knew I had three “books” in mind and knew I would end at three books. It has taken me all those three years and four computers to tell my tale. I asked for good friends from my former kin members of “The Exiles of Valinor” and current kin members of “Rangers of the West” to help in my endeavor. This is including the former member of LPN, Arathaert. But it was not only Arathaert who helped. The excellent writer Leandir played a role in the telling of my tale. I thank both of you and my two kins for helping me tell my tale.

But when it was too difficult to schedule for help, I admit I used cut and paste to help me tell my tale visually. Near the end of my first book, I needed too many players than I could find. So since then, I took multiple screen shots and spent a long time pasting them using two different computers to get the shots as perfect as possible. At the beginning, I was quite the novice at doing something like that and many of my pictures were far from perfect. The further I got and the more practice I had at the whole cut and paste practice, the more convincing the pictures became. After part 53, I strictly used my own characters and cut and pasted them. It took quite a long time getting the perfect pictures, but in the end, I was usually happy with my product.

So, since the beginning of the tale, I knew where Theomin was going and what was going to happen. The journey for me was getting there. So that means I always knew who was going to live and who was going to die. I knew who was going to fall in love and who was going to betray who. What I just threw in the mix was Eleswith’s pregnancy. It just seemed like a worthwhile conclusion for her trials.

I also added Lily’s in there as just a necessity to help one part of the story finish. But the more I thought of it, the more I was intrigued with her story. Why was she there? What was her part? So, I sat and thought for a long while what her story was. This was during the gap between my second and third books. I was happy with her story and felt like she really redeemed herself and helped the flow of the story.

Next, I hope to soon get on top of the PDF for Amazon. Maybe it can be released by book. Currently, I have another book I’m writing and hope to find the time between that, teaching, and having a family. Regarding Netflix, IF ONLY! I’d totally be into pitching it to Netflix if I knew I had a lot of support and a stanch base to back me up. As it is, part of the problem for putting the book up on this kind of platform is that I have no idea if there really is a support base. That means right now, there’s no real pitch other than the idea, which is a great idea. Again, I would be for it if the support is there.

Now here I am at the end of the road. Thank you so much for reading my story. At the end of this, I will give you some stats that I found interesting throughout my story. But before I get to that, thank you again, Lotro Players for allowing my story to be shared publicly. Thank you Andang for believing in me and my story. Thank you LPN podcasters for always having positive things to say about the story. Of course, the one criticism I had was not being able to spell well. No excuse for that. I’m just a sucky speller. I hope I can come back to writing another story for Lotro Players. I have other ideas but nothing written yet. They are all in my head. We’ll see what happens. Until then, I appreciate the time you all gave to my story. I loved every minute of it!

Sincerely,

Tim Hedden

Stats:

Server: Gladden

Number of Kins who helped: 3

Pages: 915 pages

Parts: 151, 2 side stories

Average number of pages per episode: 5.5

Number of screen shots taken: 3718

Characters used: 16 characters

Characters created for the sake of the book: 5

Outside Character help: 8

Number of family members who cared I was writing a story: 0

Number of times Andang said, “It’s getting better and better”: 103 times. (j/k I don’t know).

Number of Comments: 125

Years given to the story: 3 years 2 months

Number of Computers used: 4

If there are any other stats you would like, let me know.