Well no IM gaming last night.  Work hours are extended this week, which isn't good for gaming or writing. 
  I did get a second look at chapter 14.  It needs help.  I re-wrote the first page entirely and will probably do it again, next pass.  I need to think more carefully what the chapter needs to be about.  My thought that it would be a more 'internal' chapter as Jael is dealing with the prolonged proximity and Jacob's growing love/attraction to her.  The more I think on it, the less I like that as an idea.  I may keep some of that, her noticing Jacob's attraction and noticing him trying to control himself.  I do also need to deal with Jael trying to control the emotions she's feeling.  However, I need to also start signaling some kind of attraction...or, more accurately, respect for him.  Jacob is still a boy but she should start seeing potential in him.
  As the chapter is currently written, it's too introspective and at the same time, too talky.  I can keep some of the world flavor, the wonder of this magical pocket in a larger, more mundane world.  I need to keep things going, keep things happening.  Some kind of threat or drama needs to happen to Jael in this chapter.  So far, she's started low and just steadily gained strength throughout the story.  I don't want to lose that progression but I need to make things personal, raise the stakes for her.
  Food for thought.
  I also need to start on a short 'baby story' for a friend from one of my writing groups.  She's going to be having a baby soon and as a 'wedding shower' present, we're going to write baby stories for her little one.  I need to ponder on that as well.  The theme is 'on the day you were born'.  I might do something about the world as it was in 2010.  A snapshot of the heights we've reached.  Hopefully, there are still more heights ahead of us.  I don't like this feeling of...teetering I get sometimes.  Ah well, forward momentum, it's not just for writers, it's for the world as well.  And I don't mean that as an endorsement for the 'Progressive movement' as it's currently understood. Sometimes forward momentum means the battle for what's worth keeping.  But all that is a bit much for a baby book.  :)

  I finished chapter 13 on Friday.  I'm more or less happy with it, after some snips that didn't read right when read aloud.  Again, we'll have to see what test readers think.  I tried to describe a unicorn without actually saying 'unicorn' but it confused the wife.  I made it a bit more clear, hopefully the new description will be good enough. 
  I actually toyed, very seriously, with the unicorn being one of Jael's parents.  There are a couple of flaws with that (and possibly some 'ick' depending on who you are) but the idea appeals.  I'll either made that more obvious or trim it in future drafts, depending on what I decide.  Right now there are some hints and I'll leave it at that.
  This chapter has Jacob really battling temptation.  He's seeing Jael through a hormonal, fourteen-year-old's haze when almost any woman can be a sex object, a beautiful woman you're alone with is just that much more intense.  (And that doesn't even count the Bond)  In the end, Jacob decides he's going to protect Jael from everyone, including himself.  I think that's a nice though, though of course, women don't typically want to be protected from being desired.   All the same, that's going to be a longer-term hangup for Jacob throughout the trilogy, especially in the second book when they're more or less forced...  Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

  A good, fairly productive night last night.  I finished the second, read-aloud draft of chapter 12.  I added a bit more detail as well as breaking up some of the longer monologues.  I also added something that needs to go in earlier: the downsides of the Bond.  Its not enough that Jael feels guilty about bonding Jacob, there needs to be additional limitations to it. I need to add those in earlier in the story as well.
  I made Jael a little less of a tease, since this is the first bathing scene.  Reading the scene aloud, Jael was a bit to flirtatious towards Jacob.  I don't think that works, yet.  She likes to tease him but in more of a sisterly fashion at this point in the narrative.  There's more detail about how the dragon rider lands came to be and about why Oskmey don't just kill people they find evil.  Hopefully that reads better, now.  It may need some more revisions later.  We get a bit more inside Jael's head.  Each time we have a chapter from each characters POV, I hope we get to know them better.
  On the whole, I'm happy with how chapter 12 came out. 

  No writing last night.  Instead my friends and I at ham and played a Cuthulu board game.  We didn't win.  The ham was good, though.
  I've been thinking about characterization in Angel Odyssey.  I mentioned characterization as one of my strengths, the characters in Smooth Running are a point of pride for me, but something isn't feeling right with Jacob and Jael, not to mention some of the other, minor characters.  I know the characters, that isn't the problem, but I'm wondering if I'm revealing them enough.  Or, more worrisome, I'm wondering if they're interesting enough.
  The purpose of Angel Odyssey is to write the kind of book I'd have wanted to read when I was 14.  Now I read more than a few grade levels above my age when I was that age but I wanted to capture some of the sweetness and melancholy of Taran's own movement to adulthood in Lloyd Alexander's novels.  I know I'm only in the second pass of this novel but I don't feel like I'm there yet.
  I'm wondering if I should go back to what I did in Smooth Running, more action, more drama, more cross-cutting POVs between the hero and the villain.  I honestly don't know.  I'd intended this to be a simpler story, well-told, I hope.  I almost want to re-write it that way and see how it reads but if I do that, there's no way this book will be ready for unfriendly eyes by October.  Nowhere near.  I hate this self-doubt.
  I guess I'll keep on as I am, just keep plugging away.  Momentum is so important, I don't to get stalled by my doubts.  I just wish I knew what the secret was to make this novel great. 

  A welcome return to the Throne of Writing (tm) last night.  I read aloud chapter 11 and made some cuts where dialog or description didn't fit.  I see some places for improvement.  I need to add a bit more detail and color but on the whole I'm happy with the chapter.   There is a very long* monologue by the Sorcerer but we'll see what my readers think.
  The next pass will have to be the characterization pass, I think.  I need to develop Jacob and Jael's relationship.  The wife also isn't happy with one of the climatic fight scenes.  I'll have to read over that section and see what she's disliking.
  I'm being a bit hard on myself and trying not to be.  I want this story to be great and it's not great, yet.  Maybe I'm too new to novels to be great.  I've heard you have to write a million words to be good.  That's not exaggeration, either.  People actually say a million words.  I've also heard 5-10 years of active writing in order to produce publishable work.  I dont' know if that's correct, lots of stuff out there sure didn't gestate for a million words or five years.  But then, I don't want to be putting crap out there with my name on it.  I don't know what the answer is, except to keep going and not let my doubts get in my way.


*I'm talking a big paragraph, most of a page. Not a Terry Goodkind multi-page tract.

  No writing last night, IM gaming night instead but something else popped into my head this morning. 
  This came up as a topic on David Farland's writer's group.  I understand why people love limited lists like this.  But to be honest, I've been influenced as a writer by everything I've read or watched.  Some are positive role models I want to emulate, such as the five I have listed.  Some are negative examples, people who's mistakes or awkwardness I want to avoid.  Naturally, being human and thus perverse, I the latter group makes me feel better while the former makes me doubt myself.  Of course, self doubt is just one more monster to be slain if I'm going to do this professionally. 
  Seriously, how can I limit it to five?  How do I leave off Robert Howard or Robert Heinlein, the twin Roberts of my boyhood that stood as the Ur-examples of what Fantasy and Science Fiction was.  Do I leave off The Wire with it's street-level authenticity?  How many writers contributed to that wonderful show?  I assume Gunsmoke won't make the cut either, though Jame's Arness's Marshall Dillon is as heroic an archtype as anyone would want.  The most painful cut might be to leave off Andre Norton and Lloyd Alexander.  They wrote some of the first novels I ever read and you never forget your first.  They still hold up today, too.  Those are my models for my own YA novels.  I hope they will forgive me.
  Then there are the writers that have influences me, career-wise.  Brandon Sanderson gave a talk while I was working at Google in Kirkland.  He gave more advice for new writers in an hour than anyone else had in my years at Iowa State.  Likewise Steven Barnes, the first 'real' writer I had the guts to talk to and shake his hand.  He spoke about the passion and sweaty necessity of writing.  I blame this severe writing bug on him, I think it was in that handshake.  David Farland's 'Write that Novel' seminar was the right class at the right time.  Dave shared more good stuff in his weekend than I can relate.  if anyone's serious about being a writer, you have to take his workshop.
  Space may be limitless but time, my time at least, isn't.  So we'll talk about five indespensible authors to me.

  First has to be J.R.R. Tolkien.  It wasn't the first fantasy novel I'd read, that fire was lit by Lloyd Alexander.  But the Hobbit and it's big brother, the Lord of the Rings, is the upper bar for epic fantasy.  Middle Earth felt real, lived in, plausible like Robert Howard's Hyborea but more so.  It spoke of huge conflict and little, fussy details.  The characters were heroic people, but real, flawed.  They failed at times; Boromir's death and Frodo's final failure still has the power to wrench at me.  So does the melancholy of the ending, the orcs may be defeated and the future belongs to Man but the light of the West is passing out of the world.  Lord of the Rings was action and emotion and none of it felt fake.

  Next we come to the heir, George R. R. Martin.  Even the names seems similar, which might be synchronicity and might be something else.  Either way, the Song of Ice and Fire cycle is as epic as Tolkien and as tragic as Shakespeare at his darkest.  It's as much MacBeth as it is Middle Earth.  Multiple plot lines, multiple POVs, multiple, multiple, multiples of characters.  Another world that feels real even if there are fantastic elements that can't be real.  He's a storyteller better than 99% of the fantasy writers out there, a fact that keeps more than one writer awake at night, professional and aspiring author alike.  Who'd have guessed it from the guy who edited Wild Cards and created a telekinetic turtle-hero?  GRRM also writes horror and that shows up in ASOIAF as well, no one is safe.  Heroes don't just fail here, they get betrayed by their daughters and decapitated by tyrannical products on incest.  Best way to end up dead in A Game of Thrones is to try to be a good guy.

  On the opposite pole of that axis of heroism is David Gemmell, one of my favorite writers.  He may get repetitive, I won't argue that.  I own all his books and he has a myth arc of his own that he follows.  But the late, great Gemmell made Heroes.   Men who might kill and might even do it with a wantonness unfamiliar to us sheltered 21st century types, but who at their core served something greater than themselves, even if it was a personal code of honor.  You might die for being honorable and stubborn, but by The Source, that death won't be in vain.  David Gemmell understood violence and the morality of it, how sometimes you have to kill, not just to survive but so others, weaker, can survive.  That's what heroes do.  I'd walk the mountains with Druss any day and sleep soundly at night.  You're safe if you're with him, no matter who you are.  Just don't face him on a battlefield. 

  Another UK bloke who might have been under most people's radar is Dan Abnett. Forget that he's writing books for Games Workshop's Black Library imprint.  He's writing pure military Sci Fi and doing it better than just about anyone else.  He takes the most nihilistic, and frankly silly, setting imaginable and makes it seem real.  Plausible, even.  Frank Herbert famously set Dune in the year 10,191.  Is the 41st century that impossible.  He writes soldiers and he writes them so well you'd think he's spent twenty years as the official historian of the Coldstream Guards.  But he's never served, so far as I know, instead he serves us, his readers and his characters by making them real, consistent and, against all odds, heroic.  If you know anything about the Warhammer 40k universe, you know what an accomplishment that is.

  Finally, I have to go to the man who's novel 'Hardwired' represents cyberpunk to me.  William Gibson may have made the bigger splash but believe me, Walter Williams did it better.  Sex and violence with high technology.  A world debauched with heroes made into smugglers to survive.  But the world keeps turning and there are wonders wrought by the hand of man.  They're available online and they have free shipping for orders over 250 credits.  You can be a prostitute and still end up as lethal as a 1943 Marine, just don't kiss her on the mouth.  Too risky.  Despite the attempts to cloak Hardwired's world  in dystopia, the wonder is still there.  You can jack into a vectored-thrust armored tank and go zipping across the Dakotas.  Technology may save us and it may not but it remains cool even in the future.  Pure Science Fiction and with character with three dimensions and then some.

  Sorry for the late post.  Work is fairly intense this morning and not my writing work.
  I got back my first round of feedback on chapter 3.  This is a chapter I knew needed work but the feedback was still more negative than I expected.  Still, some suggestions were good, such as telegraphing the threats to come in later chapters.  (I'm leaning towards Luther making an early cameo but I may also use Abrax)  This is the first time we see Jacob at home and see his home from his POV, so I don't know if it needs to be slam-bang action but I think it can show some more drama: Jacob being basically 'leashed' might be his first hint that his impulsive offer to save Jael may have consequences.  More layers.  Every chapter needs to have layers and be about more than just one thing. 
  My intention was to have a couple slower, chapters after the first.  That may be a mistake.  Or not, reviewing something one chapter at a time doesn't always work. Sometimes a chapter needs to be considered in the context of the greater work.  Still, it can and should be more interesting than it is. 
  On the one hand, I want to defend myself and say 'it's only a rough draft' but on the other, this is why I'm submitting rough drafts and not polished pages.  I want to spot problems early so the later revisions can do double duty of fixing plot and language/detail. 
  One thing everyone like was Jael explaining where Oskmey and Elephant babies come from.  So, that'll stay, the rest may be pretty radically rewritten.

  No writing last night, date night with the wife instead.  The good news is that I'll have all night tonight to work.  I'm looking forward to it.  I intend to do two chapters tonight, three if I can.
  I want to play off something Dave Wolverton/David Farland (http://www.davidfarland.net/) talked about in one of his 'daily kick' emails.  He talked about stories needing to work on an internal as well as external level.  He explains it much better than I do but basically there needs to be more going on that just the external plot.  He uses a made-up example (unless Nerd Wars is real...gosh I hope not) but let me use Lord of the Rings. 
  The external plot of Lord of the Rings is the attempt to destroy the One Ring of Power.  The internal plot is (and there are several) is Frodo's attempt to stave off the temptation of the ring.  So when the climax of the novel comes, when Frodo, Sam and Gollum stand at the Crack of Doom, there are two climaxes here.  One for the external plot and one for the internal plot for Frodo.  (The fascinating thing about LOTR's climax is the way the internal plot DOESN'T meet our expectation but the external plot does.)
  That's something I was trying to do, apparently subconsciously, with Angel Odyssey.  On the one hand, it's a standard quest from home into the wider, wilder world and back again, to return Jael home and see her healed.  But that's only the external plot.  The internal plot for Jacob is the transition from boyhood to manhood and all the rites of passage boys go through.  The internal plot for Jael is become human, to recognize her loneliness and the feelings she develops for Jacob.  Ideally, Jael gets home, gets healed and gets love.  Jacob becomes a man worth of loving and who's love is returned.
  That's the plan anyway.  The climaxes for those plots dont' take place at the same moment though.  Maybe I'm not a good enough writer for that but I felt I had to stagger those a little over the course of three chapters instead at one, trancendant moment.  Probably because real change and real relationships take time.  If Jacob and Jael were to passionately declare their love and consummate their relationship at the Great Eyrie after Jael's wings are restored, it might be an exhilaration scene but to me, it wouldn't feel real.  My goal is always to make things feel as real as possible, especially in an unreal setting like in Fantasy or Science Fiction.
  But, I do want to be aware of both the internal and external plots.  And I need to make sure both sides work.

  I finished chapter 9 last night in about an hour.  Yeah, it's definitely two chapters, not one.  The second half has some good character stuff, though Isaac is coming off as an ass.  That wasn't my original intent, so I need to do more work there on his character.  Isaac was supposed to be the hero-who-could-have-been.  If he'd chosen differently, if Jacob had not risen to the occasion, it might be Jael and Isaac on the road to the Great Eyrie.  As it is, Isaac is coming off as childish, which is appropriate on the one hand.  Part of what this story is about is choosing to take that step from childhood to manhood.  Isaac wants to stay a child.
  So on the one hand, Isaac's annoying but on the other, he's realistic, I think.  There are plenty of 14 year old boys who run around, make noise and have no respect for other people.  I used to know boys like Isaac, maybe used to be one.  But what I'm not getting across is Isaac's potential, his good qualities.  On my next writing pass, I want to work on him more, really dig deep and improve his, and other people's, characterization.
  Otherwise, there are some rough spots but it feels better now after reading it aloud and correcting grammar and dialog.  The dwarves the boys and Jael meet speak in archaic, 17th century English.  I didn't want to do real dialect or accents, that always feels false and forced but the archaic speech works.  I particularly like the dwarven leader, but I'll need to change his name tonight.  I modeled him a bit on Brian Blessed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Blessed), who is the world's tallest, loudest dwarf as it is.
  Tonight I'm going to a movie but I'll try to get chapter 10 done anyway.

  I'm not sure when I wrote chapter 9 but I'm guessing I had a lot of time on my hands.  Whew, it's a long one, by my standards.  I need to break this one in half as well, I'm thinking.  The good news is, there's a natural breaking point at the end of the first day's travel.  The bad news is the same as with my other chapter breaks: if I start a new chapter, I need to change POV.  That's the pattern I've established in the novel, one chapter from Jacob's POV and the one from Jael's and I'm loathe to alter that simple rotation without very good reason.  So, I can either cut chapter 9 in half and then add a filler chapter from Jael's POV or I have to accept that this chapter (and one or two others) is going to be long.
  I've thought about mapping out a list of all the chapters in the book and making a note of which ones are too long.  Maybe if there will be some pattern that I can find that will let me break the chapters up without destroying the POV flow.  I'll plan on rereading my own blog here to see which chapters I was bellyaching about. 
  Chapter nine otherwise read pretty well.  Reading the chapter aloud really helps to catch typos and passages that don't sound right.  My intention with this revision pass was just to correct typos and copy edit problems but I found myself doing some re-writing; cutting some sentences and adding new one.  I decided to go with it.  It'll have to get done anyway and if it's a bit more polished before my critique readers get to it, that's all for the best.
  I plan on finish up chapter nine tonight (I finished 14, double-spaced pages and the chapter still wasn't done) and see if I can find a way to break it in half and maybe add something new between nine and ten.
  Finally, I was listening to some of George R. R. Martin's Dreamsongs during my morning commute.  Some of the stories are very good, GRRM does horror well for one, but others are...well, they invoked my inner editor.  I'm not sure I like that.  I've read for pleasure my whole life and in the past year, I've started reading critically.  To the detriment of my enjoyment, I fear.  I may have a longer blog post about this soon.  Hmm.