Writing Projects

I pulled the Monsterville posts because I think I'd like to actually make that into a novel. I've been filling in with Remant, who I mostly write as an episodic adventurer with really bad PTSD. I'm also in the process of proofing something I wrote back in 2003 -- the pulp Wuxia Cyberpunk Fantasy Adventure -- with the goal of at least getting it self-published. It was a fun project, and very much representative of where my mind was at the time. 

I also have the Gravedigger project, which I'll come back to at some point. I need to take a better look at its pacing. 

Finally, I just caught up with the most recent book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is the first thing in a long time that's actually got me writing fan-fiction. Not sure how far I'll take that, because if I stay true to the timeline of the source material it either becomes tragedy or it comes to an unsatisfying conclusion where the protagonists depart the battlefield before the battle is done. That's the ending I'm leaning towards, but it's... I don't know. Open to change. The teenage students might force it into becoming a tragedy. 

Anyway, I hope all my readers are doing well, and I'll likely pick back up with Remant next. He's a blog-project, not a book-project, so he gets some slack. 

Re-reading my own work

I mentioned my old Warrior's Legacy project a couple of days ago, and one of my friends asked to read it. Apparently describing it as the "Pulp Fantasy Wuxia Cyberpunk novel" made it sound appealing. I finished the first draft back around 2003, and always meant to work through a second draft for it, but I never could quite get that going and eventually tucked it away in the writing drawer. Having sent it over to my friend, however, I started re-reading it, and...

It's not bad. It's actually pretty good. It's fun. Could it use a bit more editing? Of course. Does it suffer from Kitchen Sink Syndrome? Oh, absolutely, but that's also kind of baked into the setting -- it was inspired by a number of the earlier Final Fantasy games. I think its big weakness is that I didn't really know how to wind it up when I was writing it, but I haven't gotten far enough along in my re-read to decide if that's actually true, or just a lingering but mistaken impression. 

...Am I going to give it a sequel? Um. Definitely not right now. I have at least two other projects that I want to get back into first, if I can ever get my head on straight again. But for the moment, I'm find the story itself enjoyable, and the fact that it is enjoyable deeply reassuring. 

 Heh. Also, I was using a different pseudonym at the time.

Zero Draft!

Well, it's done. I have finished the zero draft (i.e. essentially unedited opening version) of the Horny Superteens book. Is it publishable? Probably not at this stage. Is it coherent? Yes, it hangs together and I don't think there are any significant plot holes. Is the plot a satisfying arc? I really don't know, I was thinking about a lot of 90s-era comics when I was writing it, so it kind of moves from one conflict to another to a third related conflict, and finally resolves that one. Could it be a series? ...Yes, I could write at least a sequel to this one, and probably a third to round out a trilogy. Is it any good? Well, the sections I've gone back and re-read (either to double-check details or just because my brain was still kind of there brought me joy, so there's that. Do the Horny Superteens "get any"? Yes. Oh dear ye immortal gods, yes. 

Frankly, the whole project has basically been keeping me sane this year, which is the primary reason that I wrote it. Now it's time to set it aside for a bit, get some perspective, and then go back and make a second pass at it -- and clean it up enough to let my trusted advisors give it a read and send me feedback. 

Meanwhile, probably on Monday, I'll be starting on my next project: a young were-squirrel who's been sent to stop the local baron from taking over his village. I know what the opening looks like, and I know the tone I'm going for. This one is going to have more a fairy tale flavor to it, and it's definitely a coming-of-age story. 

We'll see how it goes. I have a couple of others lined up behind it, so if I run aground I still have other options. And shifting to a different story sometimes makes the first story jealous, so there's that. Like I said, we'll just have to see. 

Dark Armor: Writing Considerations

This isn't going quite as I'd envisioned it, either. 

I mean, I don't think it's horrible. I don't even think it's uninteresting. It's just... not going quite where I want it go. I'd have to force it to get back there, back to the beats I want to hit and the progression I want work through. 

In the first version, Pallian would have slain his brother Ravaj, freed the Shadow of Edrias, and then returned to his father's citadel and tried to keep both betrayals a secret. I'm not sure quite where that would have led, but it wasn't where I was aiming for. (Might have been an interesting story in its own right, though.) 

In this version, Pallian gets captured and his father's response brings home to him that he can't continue to serve as his father's champion, and as a result likely can't remain in his father's court. Also a potentially interesting story, but again not building towards the things I want out of this particular bit of writing.

So now I'm wondering whether to continue this anyway, just for the sake of making progress and seeing where it goes, or stop here and start again with version three after making a couple of fundamental changes to the background and setup.

Version Three would have Pallian -- or rather, the Black Knight -- taking more of a command role: publicly advising his brother on strategy, leading troops rather than riding off on his own, and encountering the Champion of Edrias on the battlefield rather than in passing behind the lines. I think it would work better for what I want, but I may actually have to start writing it that way to find out. 

Thoughts?

Dark Armor V2 Ch01 SC01

I'm making another run at this story. Like the first time, it will just be a scene at a time until I either finish it, get lost or distracted, or write myself into a corner. This is one where I like the basic concept and the key characters, but I'm still feeling out the flow of events; I know where I want to go with it, but I'm not sure how best to get there. So, these first couple of scenes are going to be a repeat of the original setup, but I'm going to change things up as Pallian attacks the enemy camp and build from there. I don't want to push too hard on this -- that way lies burnout -- so it'll probably be a regular Friday feature until it isn't. 

Pallian stood at the crest of the hill, holding his mount by its reins, and watched as his older brother looked out over the likely battlefield below.

It wasn't a good spot for either side, just a low valley with a wide creek across its center. High grasses alternated with clumps of scattered trees, and the dozen or so farms that occupied the area were rapidly being abandoned. On the far side, uniformed men organized into neat units occupied a matching ridge, and didn't seem any more inclined to descend into the valley than Pallian was. Still, they were a foreign army on his father's lands, and didn't seem likely to turn back without a fight.

"What do you think, Brother?" Ravaj was pale-skinned and dark-haired, with a lean, handsome face. He wore heavy armor and carried his helm in one gloved hand.

From within his armor, Pallian inclined his head. Ravaj was the heir, and had been put in charge of this expedition to gain some experience in battle. There was no particular reason for him to seek the opinion of his youngest brother, but perhaps he was having a moment of uncertainty out here in the wilderness of the world, so very far away from the citadel and their father's protection.

"Starting with the obvious? This is no simple farmers' rebellion."

"No. And I do not like the look of that army." Ravaj glanced down. "Or this valley."

"It's a terrible battlefield," Pallian replied. "Advantage to the defender. Victory by attrition. Costly. I'd guess we have the advantage in sorceries, but they have the advantage in numbers."

"So we could win, and still be at a loss." Ravaj was nodding; he was pampered and sometimes cruel, but he wasn't a fool. "Perhaps that's what they want." Not when it came to matters of power.

Pallian frowned. "The best outcome for them is if we attack while they hold the far ridge. The same, in reverse, for us." He paused as an arrow slammed into his armor and shattered. It must have been ensorceled, to fly so far; but his armor was their father's work, an extension of his strength, and Pallian had yet to find anything that could pierce it.

A second arrow tangled itself in his brother's sorcerous defenses; Ravaj laid a hand on the shaft, whispered new instructions, and sent it back to the archer that had loosed it.

"Neither side will get that," said Ravaj, picking up the track of Pallian' thought. "So we'll either need to draw each other out, or keep each other distracted while we do something else."

Pallian nodded.

"We'll make camp here, set up defenses as best we can. We can send some skirmishers down to keep them occupied. Likely they'll do the same, and nothing much will come of it. You'll head south, cross the valley after dark, and hit them from behind. If you can get to their leaders, do it. If you can't, work through their stores and supply lines. If they don't have food, they'll have to move, and whichever way they go we can take advantage of it."

Pallian nodded again. "It will be done. Be careful while I'm gone, brother: they're likely thinking similar thoughts."

Ravaj considered that, then nodded. "Then they may be expecting you. I'll take extra precautions; you do the same."

"As you command," said Pallian.

Writing Considerations: Another Approach

I mentioned last week that I would like to write a Dungeons and Dragons novel, one about a nameless half-orc, and that I'd had some considerable difficulties in establishing an opening scene. This was in part because I was trying to have him remain nameless, and limit his speech patterns fairly heavily - a tricky combination.

But it was also because the best opening scene I'd come up with for him so far involved a confrontation in a tavern. And it was... well, it wasn't horrible. It did get things moving. And it got my half-orc introduced to the group he'd be traveling with, and willing to work with them in a way that basically made sense, or at least didn't strain the suspension of disbelief.

But this isn't a story that starts with a young halfbreed in search of adventure. This isn't the story of someone who knows how to be part of a group, or thinks that such a thing is possible at all. This isn't the story of the sort of person who can sit in a tavern in the late afternoon, drinking human-brewed ale, paying for it with money that he earned doing work on some of the outlying farms -- someone who can be ignored, if not accepted, as long as his money is good.

This is the story of someone who has fled his family and his tribe, someone who knows they will kill him if they find him. This is the story of a young man who escaped into the spring storms to keep them from being able to track him, and hiked to the one place where his family couldn't follow. This story doesn't begin with a friendly meeting or an aborted confrontation in a tavern (though I'm sure there will be one, sooner or later).

This story begins with a desperate young halfbreed on the run.

Writing Considerations: A Character Without A Name

Among the many, many story ideas I would like to write, I would like to write a novel for Dungeons and Dragons. It wouldn't be for the Forgotten Realms, since I don't think I could fit the story I want to tell into that setting, but would take place in a somewhat similar setting of my own. The main character is a half-orc barbarian living along the border where the human settlements brush up against the wild hills where the orc tribes live.

I originally conceived of the character back in third edition; looking at him again through the lens of fifth edition brings some interesting changes -- some helpful (no penalties to ability scores) and some troublesome. (What do I do with Primal Paths for a character who didn't originally have one? And wait, orcs aren't troubled by sunlight now?) Moreover, orcs in fifth edition have a fairly specific set of physical, cultural, and theological qualities, and for the setting-and-story that I want to explore, I pretty much have to assume that everything said about them in Monster Manual and Volo's Guide To Monsters is, well, wildly racist human propaganda.

But none of that is really a problem. It's interesting to consider, but this is my story and my setting and if I decide that the orcs are territorial tribes who hold strength of arms in high regard and consider arcane magic to be cheating, well... so it is. Working with a somewhat different approach to barbarians as a class isn't so hard, especially if I assume that all the characters involved are low-level and just starting out on their journeys.

No, the real issue that I'm running into is the same issue that seem to run into fairly frequently: I can't seem to write an opening scene that works. And usually when that happens, it's because I'm trying to do too much.

Case in point: our halfbreed barbarian.

For starters, I'd intended to have him speak in very simple, broken sentences. "Orcs ahead. Go back." "No trouble. I leave." "You want me help you?" Which, y'know, can be done fairly easily for a supporting character, but it's a bit trickier for a POV character -- especially if he's going to be your primary, and only, point of view. (I think that's 3rd person singular, if you care about such things.) I could switch to a first person POV, but I don't want to create a disparity between complex, nuanced descriptions in the narration and simple speech patterns in the dialogue.

Secondarily, I'd like to have him be nameless. He's left his tribe; he's given up his name. Which is a damned difficult trick to pull off if he's going to be the primary POV character -- you have to call him something, and repeating "the nameless halfbreed" starts to feel really awkward fairly quickly. (I've actually tried this with my current DnD character in Duendewood, and it hasn't really worked the way I intended it to; his default pseudonym has become his de facto name.)

So, yeah: trying to do too much. Don't let it happen to you.

Also? Get sleep. Deep sleep, with lots of rapid eye movements. It's amazing how absolutely necessary that is.

Editing in motion...

One of the pieces of writing advice I've heard bandied about is that you really shouldn't try to edit while you write. Write first; edit later. Save the edits for your second draft.

I, um, yeah. That doesn't work for me. I tend to write stories consecutively, from the beginning to the end. So if I go significantly astray during some point in the process, I basically can't keep writing until I find the problem and fix it. I'm not talking little things, like grammar or spelling or missing words, or even things like getting the wording just right for a particular line of dialogue; I'm talking about things like setting up a character dynamic that's going to trip me up later, or that I'm not entirely sure I find believable.

I'm talking, specifically, about section nine of Atop The Ramparts. I'm talking about Miledha managing to completely alienate Roberr by saying just exactly the wrong thing.

It's not that I don't think it could happen; I wouldn't have written it in the first place if I couldn't see that line sort of popping out of Miledha's mouth. Still, it seems kind of contrived -- inserting drama into a situation that really doesn't need any more of it. And it's so completely the wrong thing to say, that I'm having trouble seeing how Roberr would be able to move past it and be able to work with her at all, ever. At the very least, it will force me to spend a fair amount of time resolving a side-conflict, and in terms of pacing and flow I'm not at all sure I want to do that.

So... I'm going to go back and re-read the entire story up to that point, and then I'm going to look at that scene again.

And then I'm probably going to rewrite it.

If those of you who've been reading along have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

The Hunter Prince: Down In The Tunnel

So, I'm starting this episode over again. It's not that I didn't like the earlier bits, it's just that they were starting to A) get off-track, and B) become very long. Which meant they were delaying the interesting sections that I really wanted to get to writing. I'm fixing that by skipping over most what I've written already, like so:

"Explain to me again why you thought this would be a good idea," said Janiva, brushing a hand along the damp stone wall as she walked.

"It wasn't my fault," protested Morius, who was limping along with one arm on Cyjar's shoulder for support. "I just wanted to see what was behind the big metal door."

"So now we're stuck in this... cave. Tunnel. Whatever it is." Janiva sounded slightly disgusted. She was walking ahead of the two boys, and it was her spell that was providing the faint glow of light above their heads.

"Both, I think," put in Cyjar.

"Whatever," Janiva repeated. "Nobody knows we're down here, and we can't get back up."

"I didn't know the ramp would collapse," muttered Morius. "I didn't even know it was a ramp. I thought it was flooring. Who would build a wooden ramp to connect the wine cellar with a cave?"

"Somebody a long time ago," said Cyjar. "That wood was old, and I don't think that door has been opened in a long, long time."

"You're just lucky that the Armsmaster set me to study battlefield healing," said Janiva, then stopped.

Cyjar stopped behind her, but couldn't see what she might be looking at. The rough stone of the walls, floor, and ceiling faded into the darkness ahead of them.

Morius took advantage of the pause to bend down and massage his leg. "About that... Maybe you should study some healing healing. It would be kind of nice if you knew how to actually heal my leg, instead of just holding it together long enough to finish a battle..." Janiva turned back to say something, but Morius continued: "It's better than leaving it completely broken. It just hurts."

Janiva quirked her lips, then turned back to look down the tunnel. "It looks like it opens up ahead of us. You two stay here." She paused, then looked back at Morius. "...And quit whining."

Rethinking The Hunter Prince...

I have this thing I do when I'm writing. It's especially common when I'm just noodling my way through a story, with no particular goal in mind, but it happens even I have a pretty clear idea of where I want to go. Basically, my brain just throws a new story element into the mix, and then refuses to let go of it.

Case in point: the formal dinner in The Hunter Prince. It popped in at the end of "A Chest Full Of Grabby-Monster", because apparently my brain decided that writing an age-appropriate story for Firstborn about a prince trying to figure out what to do with the grabby-monster in his room... just wasn't complicated enough.

All right, I thought to myself. I can deal with this. I'll just work it in. So I bravely soldiered on, and set the scene with "Two Views of the Great Hall". So what was I setting the scene for...?

No idea. Absolutely none. I've played with a few, but none of them really work for me. (Probably the best of them was the idea of visiting noble's daughter, who enticed Caijar's cousin into putting the beast in the prince's room as "a prank" - but that places her as part of a larger conspiracy, which means mapping out backstories and motivations for both factions and individuals, and honestly I have neither the time nor the interest for all that. This was meant to be a collection of interrelated short stories, not a full-length fantasy novel. Sheesh.)

My general attitude to writing is to let the story lead, and the writing follow. That means, basically, letting the story play out in my head, and then figuring out how it all fits together, and putting it all into words. There's nothing wrong with that approach in itself, but... well... over the years it's become increasingly obvious that my imagination, when left to its own devices, is ambitious. Hugely ambitious. Wildly ambitious. Ambitious far beyond the scope of the resources I have available to actually, you know, finish my writing projects.

So while I agree with the idea of Following Your Intuition in principle, in practice I really need to learn when (and how!) to rein it in.

In this particular case, the whole formal dinner element was a colossal mistake. I should never have tried to include it. Trying to include has effectively caused the entire story to grind to lurching, ugly halt.

So it's coming out. That's the plan. It means going back and editing "A Chest Full Of Grabby-Monster" and essentially deleting "Two Views of the Great Hall" (though I may add that back in at some later point, in some other story). It's a bit of a pain, but it will also allow me to continue the story, and - dare I hope!? - perhaps even finish it someday.

Healthier boys, better night

So, last night the Beautiful Wife decided that she wanted to work with Firstborn on his homework, and sent me off to get Secondborn to sleep. Admittedly, for the previous two nights she'd had to give Secondborn breathing treatments for this horrible cough of his, but apparently that wasn't why she wanted to trade bedtime duties. Apparently she really wanted to help Firstborn work on his homework. Which, you know, I don't understand at all, but whatever.

So, after a bit of negotiating, I got Secondborn to go to sleep. I managed this without using a breathing treatment, though that's more because he's getting better than it is any sort of tribute to my parenting skills. Unfortunately, part of the deal involved me stretching out on the bed with him.(Secondborn, despite his limited vocabulary, is a remarkably talented haggler.) This, to the great surprise of absolutely nobody, meant that I quickly passed out on my son's bed, and stayed there for... I don't know, maybe half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

Then he started coughing again, though not as badly as before. So I set up some pillows and arranged the boy so that he was sleeping upright (kind of like he was sitting in a car seat, but just leaning back against a pillow). That seemed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it also meant that I couldn't go back to sleep.

So I got up, played a little bit of Bulletstorm (which is exactly the kind of game it sounds like), then read for a while, and finally went back to bed. (Where I slept like a rock, though I was a little annoyed that Patrick Swayze didn't want me to play on his volleyball team. Apparently it was my night for dreaming about being left out of things by the Cool Kids?)

...Anyway, somewhere in there I came up with a solution for a problem I'd run into on the Afterworld project. The problem was, basically, that I'd ripped out my opening scene and replaced it with something different. The new scene is, I think, stronger than the original scene, but the change creates some logistical problems: I need the main character to do a certain sort of planning, and that sort of planning doesn't make sense as a direct response to the new scene.

But, as I was lying in bed waiting for Morpheus to drop by with his bag of sand, I came up with a solution. A good, solid, workable solution. And, even better, I still remembered it when I woke up this morning. So I have a plan, and the writing can continue.

So, all in all, I'm going to call this a victory.

Writing Projects

Long, busy weekend. Plus, I got a bit of sunburn - not too bad, but enough to kind of throw me off. Also, this week should be the last stretch of cleanup from the Big Local Music Festival (and by extension, my busy season in general). So, naturally, this morning has been a steady stream of random interruptions. So was most of last week.

I'm tired. I'm cranky. I'm unfocused. If there's an ideal mindset for working on a writing project, this is about as far in the other direction as it's possible to get.

So, naturally, I have a whole new writing project that I'd like to be working on. Because apparently I haven't learned anything from the other nine projects that are sitting around, unfinished. Some of them, I'll probably come back to, someday, if I can ever find the time. Others, I'm pretty sure I missed the window and they'll never get written (or, in one case, re-written). Still, you never know...

So, yeah. Writing for the blog can be done in bits and pieces. Writing for a longer project requires - or at least seems to require, for me - regular writing time in large enough blocks that I can get "into the zone". At this point in my life, that's shockingly hard to come by. Which brings me back, once again, to trying to figure out if there's any way to arrange things - either physically, or in terms of scheduling - that would give me regular blocks of uninterrupted writing time, without dumping my household responsibilities onto the Beautiful Woman. And, honestly, since this is something that comes up every year or so, I'm pretty sure I already know the answer: no. Everything that can be done to create writing time and writing space in our current house and under our current schedule... has been done.

Which brings me back to self-care. I'm absolutely certain that I'd be feeling a lot less mopey and unworthy about my writing if I was fully rested and not fighting off a sinus headache. So that's pretty much the plan: Get Rest. And in the meantime, write as much as can, whenever I can. Who knows? Maybe it'll even work.

Story of the Ruined City

I wish I had more time to write.

I few posts back, I wrote down what I remembered of a dream. The dream featured a multiplayer computer game, and while the "real world" elements of the dream (meeting people, setting up computers, logging in) were random and not that interesting, the game itself was. So, while we were in the hospital for the birth of Secondborn, I started writing about it.

If I were writing this chronologically, it would be a "white room" story: the protagonist wakes up with no idea where she is or what's going on, and the story proceeds from there. Of course, if I were writing it that way, it would be a book.

I'd like for it to be a book, eventually; but right now, it's taken me over two weeks to get to six pages. With the arrival of the newborn, the Beautiful Wife's allergic reaction (to the pain pills, we think), and Firstborn's tummy bug, it's amazing that I've captured even this much of the story.

And that's pretty much what I'm doing, here: capturing it. I'm basically writing a short story, alternating between action I remember from the dream and little bits of backstory to flesh out the situation. The idea is that later on (at this rate, possibly a few years later on), I can come back and rediscover not only the basics of the plot, but also the mood and feel of the story and setting. Hopefully this will help me remember not only what I wanted to write, but why I wanted to write it.

Whether I will then want to expand this piece to a full length book, or make it the first chapter of another book, remains to be seen. Both ideas are appealing, and I think I'll have to get some perspective on the piece before I know. (They aren't mutually exclusive, either; I could expand the piece into a book, then use the capsule version as a catch-me-up opening chapter for a sequel.)

Either way, it's nice to have a new world to play in.

Magic changes the world, part I

I've been thinking some more about the world of Gai, which is the setting for Warrior's Legacy. (Warrior's Legacy was the first full-length novel I actually finished in over a decade; unfortunately, I had a kid right after I wrote it, which has effectively prevented me from reworking Warrior's Legacy - or completing much of anything else, for that matter.) What the book needs is not so much a second draft as a complete rewrite*. In preparation for that, I put together a large file of world-building material, which you can look at here if you're interested.

However, there are at least two elements of the world that I think I need to look at more. Both of them are directly related to the way magic works, so let's take a moment to recap the relevant bits:

1. Magic ("Gai-Cha") is a sort of tangible energy field that surrounds and permeates the world.
2. Essentially everyone can sense magic, and most people can do at least one or two little things with it; some can do a variety of related things; and a very few can do almost anything.
3. There are two (arguably three) major limitations on the use of magic in this setting:

• You can't affect the flow of time; this is sacrosanct. (This includes any sort of long-term prophecies; those don't exist in this world.)
• You can only directly affect things within about twenty feet of you. (A lot of the flavor in the setting comes from how you get around this.)
• You can't raise the dead. (This is the arguable one; it's theoretically possible, but very difficult.)

4. Magic in this world lends itself especially well to shapechanging and other sorts of transformation. In addition, essentially any injury short of death can be healed: lost limbs can be regrown, nerve damage can be repaired, etc.

The other thing you need to know about this world is that it's post-post-apocalyptic; that is, a planet-wide civilization collapsed (almost completely) about sixty years ago; there are now two big nations, a handful of smaller nations, and scattered settlements in varying degrees of isolation. There are also a lot of ruins.

So, back the two bits that require extra work: these are medicine and the economy.

Medicine is probably the simpler of the two. For most of the world, all medicine is done with magic. (The exception is Loklaria, which has antibiotics, nanites, etc., mainly because they despise magic.) Magic is freely available - a little over 1 in 50 people have the potential for full-on wizardry, and healing (of some sort) is reasonably common among the 'small magical talents' that most people have. So, most injuries and diseases can probably be addressed, even in relatively small communities. As in the real world, major injuries and serious (or prolonged) diseases may require the services of a specialist. Unlike the real world, healing requires little equipment, so it's probably a lot more common to bring the healer to the patient than it is in our world. (There are likely to be situations where it makes sense to do it the other way around, too - some holy places are aspected towards healing magics.)

Isolation is still a problem, just as it is in the real world; if you can't heal yourself and you can't get help, you're in trouble. So, in this post-post-apocalyptic setting, there's probably a market for traveling healers, and local healers (even of minor or moderate skill) likely get a fair amount of respect for their work. There are also going to be some traveling scam artists, too; either outright frauds, or just not as skilled as they claim.

This is long enough already, so I'm going to cut it off here. I'll look at the economy - specifically, how you have a working economy when 2.6% of the population can theoretically create (or transform) more or less anything they need - in another post.

---

* In fairness, my brother and his wife - who were two of my three best proofreaders - think that the book in its current form is good enough for a first novel. I can't say (I don't trust my bias), but I think there are some fundamental problems with it, which could be corrected by a full rewrite if I can ever manage to do that. I've talked a little about that in my older blog entries.

Ideas In Abundance

I'm trying to get started on the second draft of Warrior's Legacy. Warrior's Legacy was the first book-length writing project that I'd finished in, I don't know, quite a number of years. It was written over the course of about two years, during what I thought was a very busy time in my life. Of course, I now have a three-year-old boy, so that seems pretty funny in retrospect.

The first draft was not awful - at least, I don't think so - but it was written as a serial. That is to say, I'd write a chapter, proof it and get feedback, clean it up, and write the next chapter. As a result, it has some problems with pacing - the story sort of wanders, and some of the setup pieces take too long, and some of the dramatic moments don't get as much time as they should. Also, and perhaps more important, I just tried to do too much with it. It's hard to keep the plot moving if you keep stopping to introduce some neat new element to the story. (This would have been fine if I'd been writing an open-ended comic book, where I could just keep coming back to things that interest me. For a novel, not so much.)

...But that's fine. That's basically what first drafts are for. Subsequent drafts are where you clean up those problems, tune up the pacing, and make sure everything fits the way it's supposed to. There's only one problem: I can't seem to finish the second draft.

Hell, I can't even seem to start the second draft. I have, at last count, at least seven versions of the first chapter rewrite. One of them made it all the way to chapter three. When it actually became frustrating, I moved on to other projects.

Now, as you've probably guessed, I'm trying again. This time, instead of just leaping in, I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with the book. Ideally, I'll actually create an outline to work from; but at this point I'd settle for a list of the six main scenes that I need to include.

To do that, I've started using Freemind. This is a rather nifty little piece of software that basically allows you to draw associations on the screen - they call it "mind-mapping" software. You can drop things into it, too: other files, images, links... You can also tag the various items on the map, for example to mark items of particular importance.

Anyway, I've been composing a map of all the cool stuff that went into the original story - just the major elements, because I'd like to be finished before the world ends in 2014. This has actually been very helpful in terms of looking at just how much I was trying to cram in to one book... and yes, it's waaaaaay too much.

The current plan is to flag the critical elements, think about how they fit together, and decide on the important scenes and (at least) a vague direction for the plot. A list of story arcs might not be a bad idea, either. Mainly, though, I just want to have a list which says, You will include this much and no more.