Prologue

Today's word count: 7750.

First draft of book 2s prologue is now complete.

Wooo!

Of Sequels and Contests

First, the fire and the Fog is now on Goodreads and Smashwords. Check it out. On Smashwords, the book is free (you decide if you want to give me money). So go get it, and pay me either in money or a review.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/460691

Also, on Goodreads, there is a contest for a free copy of the book.

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/103483-the-fire-and-the-fog

Check that out too.

In other news, work on book 2 has begun, and I will start updating this page more frequently with word counts to keep track of my progress.

Today's word count: 277

Not much, but it's a start!

More Procrastination

Again, I procrastinate. 

Again, I find almost any excuse to avoid writing.  I continue to send my work to Agents / publishers as I can be bothered to, but the lack of replies takes its toll. 

I’m sure I will eventually find my way out of this rut.  I have a whole second, and third, book planned out in my head.  I just can't find the time to bring it out. 

Not that I’m doing nothing, of course.  I spend much of my spare time now doing woodwork; carving is inordinately fun. 

But I need to get back into writing again.  I love it when I do it, when I can lose myself for hours just writing.  But it can be hard to jump start the trend. 

Ah well.

As I try to focus myself on continuing to write the sequel to The Fire and the Fog, I still try to do something with it.  This week I will be submitting to a contest, the details of which can be found at

http://tinyurl.com/pwbds3q

The contest is for middle-grade fiction, which, as far as I can make out, my novel qualifies as.  I hope. 

Once again, as with everything, we shall see. 

Time off

I haven't written anything in...a while now.  Over a month.  That's not to say I haven't done anything though.

I solved, or at least I believe I solved, a conundrum I was having with character death.  I won't know till I get to writing the actual meat of the story, but my solution has made planning go more smoothly.

I have also submitted query letters to two agencies located in Canada.  Both have ~2 week turnarounds, and if I hear back negatively from them, well, I will send to more agencies. 

A query letter, from the research I've done, seems to be a short, one-page introduction to yourself, and y our novel.  I will post the query letters I sent, as well as any responses I receive, later.

I also applied to TOR to write a blog for them, essentially duplicating what I am writing on this blog, but hopefully making money off it.

Money makes the world go 'round, and all that jazz.

Growing Older

Yesterday, I turned 28.

To me, that sounds really old.  I think I'm still stuck with the mentality (and attention span) of a 12 year old. 

With my birthday came lots of slightly depressing thoughts.  I’m stuck in a job I hate (and I'll be stuck in it forever), I'll never get published, I'll never amount to anything, nice little thoughts like that.  All of which came about because, crikey, 28 sounds old to me.

But I guess it's really not.  I've been told several times in the past few days that life doesn't even really start till 30. 

And I want to believe.

So I will. 

I want things to get better; I want to mean something, and the only way that will happen is for me to do something about it. 

I've spent a lot of time procrastinating lately; not wanting to make decisions, not wanting to commit myself to doing things.  That's going to stop now.  Think of it as a New Years Resolution, only in April. 

I made a decision a long time ago to do my best to be happy all the time, to not let things get me down.  I'm not great at it, but I feel I've been doing pretty well.

Well, now I'm going to make the same decision in regards to what I do with my time. 

I have a lot of projects planned.  I have books and short stories to write, I have music to write / record, I have a house to fix, art and jewellery to create…

So, I’m going to do them.  I'm going to get the projects I have planned done, and more.

And I'm going to find a way to promote myself more, to try to get published. 

Because I’m not 30 yet.

But by the time I am? 

I want all those people who told me life starts at 30 to be right

Sex (and death)

Sex.

 

Blood violence sex.

 

So, Game of Thrones (the TV show) has started again.  I watched a few episodes of the first season way back, and stopped.  I've read the first four books, but I've pretty much given up on them.

 

Why, you might ask.  Why would I not like arguably the most popular fiction novels since Harry Potter?

 

Honestly?

 

Too much violence.  Too much sex.  Too much everything goes wrong.

 

I understand that lots of people seem to enjoy this.  The gritty, 'realistic' trend that's hit books, TV, and movies lately.  Mad Men, everyone's an ass, Breaking Bad, everyone's an ass, Game of Thrones, everyone's a murderous, incestuous ass.

 

I know this is just a very minority opinion.  I just don't enjoy it.

 

I enjoy reading the fantastical for the fantastical.  I enjoy David Eddings and Brandon Sanderson, because even if some bad things DO happen, they're generally tempered by all the good things that come later.

 

My favourite TV show is Dr. Who, where nothing bad ever happens and the Doctor always solves everything, or close enough to.

 

I don't feel I should go on about this for too long, as it's a pretty unpopular opinion these days I feel.  But to me, TV, movies, books, when they're fiction, they're about escaping.  History shows, self-help books, sure, they should be more 'real', but when I'm trying to escape from the death and sex, the blood and guts and reality that exist every day around us, well, I'd rather escape into something that isn't as dark (if not darker).

 

Again, this is just me.  And I'm not sure my writing really reflects my personal opinion either.

My first novel, the Fire and the Fog, was originally much darker.  After a few re-writes, it came out lighter, with only a few instances of death, but the theme of depression still measures heavily throughout.

 

So why am I saying all this?  Why am I complaining about all the blood and sex and violence in media, when I myself am, at least slightly, a perpetrator of it?

 

Honestly?

 

I don't know.  It's what was on my mind when I decided to write.  I probably read too many articles about Game of Thrones' season opener today.

 

In other, more writing-related, news...

 

I've made pretty much no progress on writing.

 

I've hit a roadblock.  I have three main characters from my first novel that I want to continue with into the second.  I know where they're going to start (the ending of the first book), and I know where I want them to go (the beginning of a third book).  For two of the characters, I have an entire books sequence of events mapped out.

 

The third character, however, I'm having trouble with.  He's in a state of flux.  Based on his character and what I know of him, half of me wants to find a way to continue writing him in, to find a way to save him.  But the other half of me feels, knows, that he should die.

 

This break, this character in flux, is holding a lot up.  Not because I couldn't write without knowing what happens to him, I could.  I could do a lot of writing with his status undetermined.  But it feels wrong.  It feels like the writing I'm doing without knowing what happens to him is just a stopgap, that it isn't important.

 

So I've been spending more and more time lately arguing with myself over what will happen to this character, and I'm no closer to a decision.

 

It makes it hard to write.

 

It's a sad excuse, I know.  But I like him.  I like the character.  And not knowing whether to keep him or kill him off; not knowing which works better for the story, for the world, for the character himself.  It's hard.  It's almost draining, in a way.

 

Which brings me back to the first topic, way up at the top.  The sex, and violence, and death.  How can I disagree with what other authors are doing, when I'm considering killing off one of my own characters?

 

I don't know.  Answers aren't really something I've ever been terribly good at.

 

But I guess I'll keep trying to ask myself the question.

Lore

I've started building lore.  In my first novel, I mention some religion, some historical and religious texts.  I'm not sure if passages from them will ever be used later, but I"ve decided it's time to write them out.  I know what they contain, in general, but I feel like sitting down and putting them to paper might be a good idea, a good place to start from.

I have a history of the world, and of the universe, in mind.  Telling the story of the world, and making it interesting, is the difficult part. 

I have three sort of starting points for what I'm trying to do with my novels, and I guess this is as good a place as any to explain them.

My first inspiration is David Eddings.  I've already mentioned here somewhere how much his Belgariad series meant to me when I was young; how much they shaped who I am and what I’m interested in.  He's the first starting point for what I’m trying to do.  My first goal.

My second starting point comes from Isaac Asimov.  One of the best, and most prolific, writers of all time, Asimov was my introduction to Science Fiction, just as David Eddings was my first introduction to Fantasy (Okay, really my first introduction to Fantasy was Tolkien, but isn't he everyone's?).  What Asimov did was to me, at the time at least, astounding.  He took all his various novels and short stories, from the Robot series to the Foundation novels, even to his R. Daneel Olivaw Detective novels and, in the end, tied them all together.  One giant, persistent, mostly coherent universe, spanning thousands of years; hundreds of characters.  Yes, some inconsistencies were created (You can look them up if you're not familiar with them.  Or even better, go read all of Asimov's books and find them yourselves.  I can wait), but the revelation that everything was tied together was, for a late-teenaged me, astounding. 

My third starting point is Robert Jordan, and here's where it gets tricky.  Robert Jordan created both one of the most detailed and expansive worlds I've yet read (I'm sure there are others out there, I just haven't gotten to them yet), and one of the most secretive.  There are hints throughout of a giant, expansive timeline; one that extends from today to the far far future and back.  But they're never really acted upon.  I very much enjoyed the world Jordan created; I just wish it were more open, more revealed.  I also wish the series were about three books shorter (9, 10, 11), but that's beside the point.

The point is, I have a starting point.  Or, I have three starting points.  Three examples of what I want to do with my world building.  I've tried to start with characters; with creating people to fill the world.  But I feel like they come to me when I write; that I pull them to me when I need them, and that they're best left alone until they're needed.

So now, I'm going to try another approach.  I'm going to build the history of the world, starting with its ancient legends, its religion.  Hopefully from that I will be able to extract the lands and the people that inhabit the world.  They already exist somewhere in my head, and I’m hoping that this new approach can help me drag them, kicking and screaming, onto paper.