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First chapter is halfway done

5/12/2011

New book has begun! I got about ten pages done in an hour and a half of pure bliss. I’m going to try to watch my pacing this time and make sure each chapter stays to 20 pages or less. Which means balancing the world-building and the action in the first chapter.

There’s a good chance that I’ll end up rewriting the whole first chapter more than once, if Angel Odyssey is any indication. But I have a good flow going.

Odd things I’ve noticed so far, the ‘voice’ of the character feels older than 18. I’m trying to work that into the story naturally since I always felt I was born 30 and just had to grow into it. I’m sure there are other kids who feel older on the inside than they look on the outside. Another oddity, I seem to want to write this in present tense instead of past. For example, ‘the salesman looks up’ instead of ‘the salesman looked up’. I’m going to go with it, my subconscious is usually smarter than I am but I’ll share out the first few chapters once they’re done, to see if I’m on the right track.

Tonight is IM gaming night and tomorrow is editing night, so The Mageborn Mechanic is going to have to rest for a few days but I can’t wait to get back into it and tell this story.

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Finally, got some editing work done

5/11/2011

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Well it was messy but I got some editing done last night. In a sense, this was the hardest bit to do. I had to rearrange some chapters and rewrite one from scratch. I killed a couple of scenes I worked hard on and I’m going to need to reinsert somewhere the worldbuilding stuff that got cut. Bleh. But that should be the last major surgery.

My plan now is to do a read-aloud final draft, fix any errors that come from that and then send the puppy out. I had hoped to get a bit more feedback from my beta readers (only one has gotten back to men time) but in the end, I have to trust my own instincts. Not to mention that I owe a couple of people novel critiques of my own. Oy. I need to find a way to do that soon. Maybe I can borrow a netbook and read the docs as I ride. Worth a try.

Tonight I get to start my third novel, as a reward for actually doing some frelling editing work, finally. I’m looking forward to it.

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Just open the file and start

5/10/2011

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More mea culpa’s. I did send off a short story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on Friday but since then…not a lot got done. I wrote a bit but nothing publishable. I’m really not proud of that fact, but there you have it. Accountability.

It is only partly due to my dislike of editing, but that does factor into it. On Friday, I sat in my Throne of Writing (tm) at my appointed writing time and…I didn’t open up my doc file. Instead, I played video games. Then I felt guilty and stopped. I resolved to no longer play any video games in the Throne of Writing(tm) But the damage had been done.

There is a momentum to writing and that’s why a number of professional writers, like Walter Mosley, say to write every day. If you write every day, your creativity does get spurred. You don’t get writers block, you don’t run out of ideas. You train your brain to produce if you write every day.

I guess editing doesn’t feel like writing to me. Or maybe I’m just tired of Angel Odyssey. I just want it to be finished and send it out. This is not a strange emotion, I had the same issue with Smooth Running at the end of my final editing draft. I, you, any writer has to push through this feeling of ennui or laziness or what you want to call it. Resistance. We have to blast past it, blow the wall up and just do it.

So, tonight we will do the work. And learn from me: when it’s time to write, open your file and write. Just start.

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Overthinking things, like POV

5/6/2011

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Last night was IM gaming night, when the internet wanted to stay one. But I have gotten a smidge more editing done on Angel Odyssey. I’m shuffling chapters so to keep with my structure of alternating POV chapters (and I’m kicking myself for doing that to myself), I’m having to rewrite one of the pivotal scenes in the book. This time, we see it from Jael’s POV.

It’s annoying to have to do the work but it’s also interesting. If I had infinite time, I’d love to write the novel again, and flip the POVs in each chapter. Jael and Jacob look at the world so differently. When I wrote it from Jacob’s POV, it had a feel of determination and anger. From Jael’s POV, there’s a feeling of helplessness, frustration and the need to hide both from every outside view.

It’s funny, I never had a problem with POV until I started studying it. I don’t think I broke or drifted POV once in the first two novels I wrote. But after studying it in “Character and Viewpoint” and other books on writing, I find myself hyper-aware of it. As a result, mistakes creep in. Sort of like how you never ask a centipede how it walks without tripping itself or make Warner Brothers toon look down when they’re running on air. I think sometimes you can over-think writing. If you read enough, I think osmosis will steer you better than planning and structure will. Planning and structure have their place but it’s before and after you write. When writing, you need to be pure. Just let things flow from your ID, your muse, your right side of the brain…whatever you want to call it.

Of course, that’s just me. Every writer needs to find their own way. My way, tonight, is to put my hinder in the Throne of Writing(tm) and edit. Some teeth grinding may be involved.

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Review: Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes

5/5/2011

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Disclaimers up front: I’ve met Sam Sykes and talked with him at a party where Pyr bought the drinks. I like him and we have similar tastes in fantasy.

Let’s get the ‘A-word’ out of the way first. There are going to be inevitable comparison’s between Mr. Sykes Aeon’s Gate series and Mr. Abercrombie’s First Law series. Both are published by Pyr, both have very flawed –to borderline unlikeable- characters and both have torture and a bit of the old ultraviolence. And, to be frank, if Abercrombie appeals to you, you’ll love this book. I don’t like Joe Abercrombie’s books (I gave away my First Law books) but I enjoyed Mr. Sykes work with some caveats.

First the good:

Sam Sykes has a good grasp of story, I find. He excels at raising the stakes, in fact ‘then it gets worse’ seems to be tattooed on every page in this book. His monsters are tremendously imaginative and suitably monstrous. The action is mostly well-described and the races are inventive twists on archetypes you’d read in Dragonlance books. I liked the schict, his riff on elves, the most. They’re cold-hearted racist bastards but that fits the world. The purple amazons are very cool. One of the characters, a semi-cowardly rogue grows on you the more you read about him.

The cultures and world-building are first-rate. Mr. Sykes excels at creating a cohesive world with competing cultures. In fact, wanting to see more of the world is something that’s going to keep me buying the sequels. The plot is straightforward and the characters mostly succeed due to their merits and skills as opposed to Deus Ex Machina.

There’s some interesting passages on violence and the use of violence that I found intriguing. It reminds me a bit of David Gemmell in that respect. It’s something I think about and write about myself.

I’m interested in reading more.

Now the bad:

The characters are all more or less unlikeable. The protagonist is either insane or is a host for a greater power that likes to/needs to take over his body. He also whines a lot. He’s depicted as the leader of his un-merry band of adventurers but he lacks the qualities of a good leader. He seems to just have the ‘main character’ stamp on his forehead that allows him to be in charge without earning it. There is a lot of bickering and backstabbing in the adventurers group but there never seems to be an resolution or consequences. That undercuts the character development the author is working very hard at. No one seems to like each other, they’re constantly threatening to kill each other but…no one ever does. No one ever takes the step of acting on their threats and as a result the tension gets diluted. They also don’t work together well and that should be their undoing but…it never quite is.

Several of the characters have ‘hidden powers’, which weakens any actual heroism they could show. If just one character was like that, I could maybe buy it but the main character has it, the priestess has it, the dragonman seems to be made out of it.

I could nit pick a bit more but I’ll end with this: the characters don’t seem to react realistically. Its implied that several characters have sex near the end of the book but nothing changes between them afterwards. They don’t act or talk any differently towards each other, that I could see. This may be something Mr. Sykes is planning to develop in his sequel but it was a mistake to leave it out of this volume.

Summary: It was an entertaining read. Since I enjoyed it, I’m bumping it up a notch, despite the flaws. It bears some of the same sins as Erickson (no more whiny heroes, please!) and Abercrombie (just give me a hero, damn it) but it also has the same merits. This is not Tolkien, it is dark but adventurous. If it sometimes sounds like someone’s home-made D&D module, it’s a pretty awesome D&D module.

Recommended to people who like dark fantasy.

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A week of editing

5/4/2011

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Ugh. Editing. I spent a total of three hours yesterday and today updating and rephrasing terms in Angel Odyssey. But I also got to write a new chapter as well, which took the curse of a bit.

It’s no secret that I hate editing. It’s just something I have to get good at. Damn good at, if I’m going to sell my work. So we slog on but there’s no joy in it for me, no getting lost in the pages. Tonight I need to smooth over and delete some chapters to make room for the new chapter I wrote. I will get to do a little writing as I rework the chapter prior to this new one of Jacob’s but on the whole it’ll be hard work.

A good thing about the time off from the book is that I can see the story more impartially. I’m easily able to pick and prune sentences to make them shorter and more concise. So that advice, from Kay Kenyon and others, stands up well.

I also finished Sam Syke’s debut novel, Tome of the Undergates. I’ll get a review up tomorrow. Meanwhile, back into the editing morass. I’m spending the first week of May doing nothing but editing. Next week I plan to ease into my new novel, alternating writing days with editing days. Wish me luck.

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30 short stories in 30 days challenge: a summary

5/3/2011

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I have been gently reminded via email that I haven’t done my April, ‘30-in-30’ challenge update. So here it is:

I ended up writing 28 short stories in 30 days. If it hadn’t been for Norwescon, I’m sure I could have hit my goal. But I’m not too upset. Going from not writing any short fiction since…1995 or so to pounding out a story a day, I’m pretty happy. It was fun. I honestly don’t know where all the story ideas came from. Sometimes I’d sit down in the Throne of Writing(tm) in front of a blank MS Word doc and just start typing. Sometimes I’d have the first line in my head or a scene and more often than not, a story came out.

I wrote second person stories, sci fi stories, mystery stories (well, just 1 really), fantasy stories, (sex stories which will never see the light of day) and stories that were a mix of all of the above (yes, really). As a writing exercise, it was awesome. Clarion West holds no terrors for me now. (which is easy to say since I didn’t make it in this year.)

Anyway, out of the 28, I’ve mailed off three so far. I’ve had one rejected so far (yea me) and I fully expect more to be rejected as the months go by. All of the stories were written in 2-3 hours, after work. Polishing will be needed for most of them but a good chunk of them should be marketable, or at least we’ll find out if they are.

It was nice to write something and finish it. Angel Odyssey has been a WIP for just over a year now. Short stories are small, self-contained accomplishments. That can be a nice ego boost as is discovering that I can tell a story in less than 300 pages.

Speaking of AO, I started my final edit pass last night. God, how editing drags on. A sharp, painful contrast to the joy of writing. Still, it has to be done. I renamed a character, putting in a little Hebrew linguistic joke, I hope. I renamed the marriage-bond and that is taking forever, rephrasing all the scenes in the book where it is reference or talked about. I’m tightening things up as I go, cutting words and sentences, one snippet at a time. I need to, I added a whole prologue. Oy.

Once all that is done, I’ll read the whole book aloud. I wonder if I could do a reading or something at the local Barnes and Noble? Hmm. Might be worth looking into.

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Happy May

5/2/2011

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Welcome to May. This is going to be an exciting month for me, writing-wise. My goals for this month is to finish the last draft of Angel Odyssey and mail it out. Next, I plan to begin novel #3 which I am tentatively titling The Mageblood Mechanic, a YA supernatural thriller. I intend to alternate editing work on Angel Odyssey with writing the new novel. With a bit of luck, I’ll have the first draft done by the end of June. I think I can do that even with the revisions I have planned.

The weekend critique group went well. The group is growing and we had six stories up for review but we got through all of them in 2 and a half hour. Our newest members are sharp as a tack and good writers. I’m very excited with how the group is going.

All this and Spring is finally here in Seattle-land. Life is good.

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Forward>>

First chapter is halfway done

Finally, got some editing work done

Just open the file and start

Overthinking things, like POV

Review: Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes

A week of editing

30 short stories in 30 days challenge: a summary

Happy May

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