Results of Ruminations

I finished my tenth novel today. As I've been struggling to finish this latest book (struggling because I wrote all 88,000 words of it in the last four weeks, and that kind of focus is draining), I decided to do a rough approximation of how much writing I've done since I started college/came back from my mission. (During my time in Florida, I didn't really write anything, though I talked about ideas with roommates or companions. Writing--genuinely putting effort into my stories--started in July of 2004, after I had been home from my mission for about a month. I've been writing ever since.) Since I'm bad at math, I decided to make a spreadsheet that would do the calculations for me. This is what I have so far: All of these are finished novels, and some of them I even like. The numbers have decimal points, for some random reason. Ignore those extra zeroes. I'm only talking about finished  products, but assuming those numbers are right (I'm a little ...

One of the things I enjoy the most about fantasy writing is the chance to make new worlds. Maybe, if I'm feeling like cribbing from The Tempest  (which I almost always am), I could call them "brave new worlds". But I've bumped into a surprising experience over the last three or so years: I'm stuck in one world. Stuck is probably too strong of a term, because that implies that I'm not content being there. On the contrary: It's been quite a bit of fun. Originally, I wanted Taralys (this new planet) to be a particular way and I focused on fusing the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Then, I had an idea for how to make a Jacobean/Elizabethan fantasy world in my own version of late 16th century London. The fact that I could easily rationalize how this new city fit into Taralys was a new thing for me. I already had a bunch of rules from my sci-fi/fantasy romp that I could apply to this new Elizabethan wannabe section of the world. They could be on the sam...

Now that I'm over half-way through my edits--and, with Fall Break on the horizon, I'm hopeful to make additional strides--I need to spend time researching who would be interested in my "spaceships meet dragons" story. I wrote (under the tag of "story journal") about my lengthy process writing and revising Writ in Blood . I also talked about some of the failures of that book in terms of finding representation. I have continued writing in the face of that defeat, now well into my eighth book since I graduated high school (which isn't that many, when I put it that way). The one I'm working on now, however, was my sixth novel. That means I'm close to publishing, or halfway there, depending on whose success story you're reading. As I've put more time into my craft, trying to hone my feeble skills, I go through flashes of excitement and possibility, then crashes of dismay and defeat. It comes in part because I can't get consistent momen...

I haven't blogged about my book, Writ in Blood , since I proclaimed that I was done with it and wouldn't pick it up again until it was published. Embarrassingly, I'm now going to blog about it, even though I'm not any closer to my publishing goals now than I was in 2013. What happened was this: Twitter. While shopping around my manuscript, I followed some of the agents whom I'd queried. Not too much after sending off to one particular agent (I won't say who, mostly because I can't remember), I saw a mini Twitter-rant among two or three agents about the size of queried stories. Mine came in at 289,000+ words, and the tweet specifically raged about 290,000 word submissions. A little later--once the sting of knowing I'd ticked off some agents had faded--I mentioned to a different agent the size of my manuscript. She'd replied with a glance askance. (Looked like this, if I remember right: 0.o) She then recommended that I try splitting it up. For ...

I have exulted many times on this blog that I am finished with Writ in Blood . Every time I've kind of meant it. But it's stuck in me, like a hair that I've almost swallowed but haven't been able to get out of my mouth yet. No more. I am officially done with all that I have to do this side of being picked up and published. I can't really explain how I feel about this. I've commented a few times that this is the story that I felt had the best bet for publication (I no longer think that). I've also said that I wasn't as scared of/dreading as much the revisions of this book. Well, by the end, WiB  was feeling just like everything else I had done. I was finished with it right around chapter 20. But I pushed on, just like I'm supposed to. (If I can't act like a professional when I have very little time to write, then I can't really expect that I'll have the discipline to act like a pro when I do  have the time. At least, so the theory go...

I've been 'finished' with Writ in Blood  for over a year now, but I'm not done with it yet. I spent the last year reading, revising, rereading, revising, and now going through a "final" edit of the book. This will be the last time that I touch the book until I get an agent, as I am ready to vomit with weariness every time I launch yWriter5 and work on the beast. But things are happening. The book--despite all of my earliest efforts--is actually shrinking . I'm losing a couple hundred words every time I sit down--which usually entails a chapter each time--which, if I keep this up, will put my total number at 280,000 words or so. Why is this good? Well, I'm glad I asked. I did submit (as I mentioned earlier) to an agent, but was rejected within a couple of weeks. Part of it has to come from the size of my book. Retailers (who still matter a great deal in this business) aren't eager to give an untested brand--which, in publishing, is one's n...

Thus ends the second draft of Writ in Blood . Oh yeah. Three years ago this month, I had an image come into my head of a man dressed all in black, standing in the middle of a Grecian street, like a stone in a river. He was a Poet, and a killer, and I had no idea who he was. I never found out. Instead, Nicomachus took a decidedly more introspective and (to me) interesting turn. With the idea of a fantasy story that mashes up a Mediterranean milieu, a Shakespearean speech pattern, and a Lost -inspired structure, I embarked on Writ in Blood, completely unsure of where I was going or what lay ahead. After three varied, interesting, and fantastic years, I can proudly announce that I have finished my third reading of the book and its first major revision. Of course, I have to wonder how "done" I really am. I don't feel like it's perfect yet, that it's ready for submission. But I also had a goal to get the manuscript into the hands of an agent by 2013. Well, it...

I DID IT! I finished my first redline pass through Writ In Blood . I don't know if I modified my official goal of having draft 3.0 in the computer and ready for printing by Monday, but I did. I realized that the inputting of the book into the computer is going to take forever. Like, a major, major undertaking. So I shifted my goal to be done by Labor Day with the hardcopy edits. And I did it...a whole two days early. Anyway, the reason that I changed the goal is that there's a lot of work to do; this isn't just fixing the occasional typo or mistaken homophone. There are entire chapters that need to be shifted, deleted, or expanded. I have to rewrite a major portion of the final 50 pages, tweaking it severely and losing entire swaths of text in the process. While there is one exception of a page without red on it (and that page contained a 7 word sentence, so...), I basically have to revise all 609 pages in some way or another. A lot of it is deletion of superfluous ph...

The boys went to a movie this morning with their mom. So I left the house and went down to UVU to try to do some writing. See, I'm over halfway done with version 1.5 (version 1 is the rough draft; 1.25 is the read through; 1.5 is the pen and writer's group edits; 2.0 is what I enter into the computer. I just made those up.) and I'm getting a little weary of not writing. It's not as bad as when I simply haven't the time or the ability to focus. Those are "writer's blocks" that I can't really control. They lead to a cranky me, that's for sure. But the edits keep me involved enough with the story that I've been okay not writing anything new. Obviously I don't want to start a new project--that would be killer for me, as I don't have the discipline to do two at once. I tried that before, and I still  haven't finished my 2.25 for Words of the Silenced  (I'm about 90% through the read through of 2.0, and it sits on my Kindle, pat...

I've been chipping away at Writ in Blood  pretty consistently for the last month or so, almost always hitting the two-chapters-a-day goal. I missed a weekend here or there, and the Fourth proved fruitless--though filled with explosions, which, y'know, makes up for it--but on the whole I've been pretty consistent. I'm getting pretty sick of this story, let me just say. Because I spent time watching the film version of Coriolanus  yesterday, I had to make up for it by working all the way up to midnight in order to hit the two-chapters-a-day minimum. Why does it take so long, you ask? And even if you didn't, I'll pretend that you did, since that's what I wanted to document today. Taking it in manageable chunks is one of the reasons that I'm set up the way that I have described. If I push through until I get bored, I would have a day or two of frantic work and then a week or two in between that would see no effort on it at all. Manic-depressive methods...

I just finished red lining up through Chapter 10 today. I've put in a bit of effort on the revision process, and--as I predicted--it has been extremely difficult. The first chapter I revised was last Saturday, when the fam and my in-laws and I all sat around the cabin and played Ticket to Ride on various iDevices via Bluetooth. While I waited for my turn, I would poke around the first chapter--which I've revised a couple of times in the past, but figured I ought to give it a real close look this time around--and then assign trains and draw cards. I lost both games. Anyway, I was kind of discouraged about that. It took me the better part of an hour to go through one measly chapter. I didn't really expect to do the revisions quickly, but I did expect it to be less irritating. I threw a picture of a shirt one of my group members made for me back around Christmas time. It has a Pac-Man kind of guy saying, "Revisions make me sad." That statement is still true. I ...

This is a reading summary. After my day-long blitz to finish the book, I thought about letting it cool, giving me some space between the drafting process and the revision process. That 'space' turned out to be about half a week. Using the brilliant yWriter5 as my way around irritating compilation issues, I imported my book into Word, changed the double dashes into em-dashes, deleted some superfluous asterisks, tweaked the formatting just a touch, paginated the thing, and then saved it to my USB drive. Despite some mild hiccups (or hiccoughs, if you will), I managed to get it printed out at a nearby UPS Store that was doing a promo of $.02 a page. That's a third the cost of the next cheapest place. So--splurging--I went ahead and purchased two  copies of the book--for less than the price of one elsewhere. Downside was that the printing screwed up certain letters: capitals P, Z, and K were weird, everything in italics looked screwy, and the lowercase k, g, and z were also...

I did it. I finished writing Writ in Blood  today at about 9:42 pm. I've been writing pretty much non-stop since 1:15. I'm tired. I'm euphoric. I'm doubtful. I'm ecstatic. I'm dizzy with disbelief (literally). And I'm indulging in (I think) some well earned pride at having accomplished so much. In greater detail: I started the day off later than I wanted because I had the quidditch team party that I mentioned last week. That went really well, weather not withstanding. It was a great end to a fun year, and I was really proud of the game we played, which was one of the best games we have ever been involved with. We had fun afterwards, but I bailed out as soon as I could: I wanted to write. Because of the party, my eating schedule was all screwy. As I mentioned above, I arrived at UVU about 1:15 and I got to work right away. After finishing one chapter (which put me over the 300,000 word mark), I went ahead and took a break, swinging by McDonald's for a...

I knew this would happen. You see? This is why I don't outline. I put in a lot of effort in the outlines and try to write it all out beforehand, but you know what happens? Days like this. See, I got an almost record number of words done today (8,177 to be exact), and while I'll keep most of them, they spin the story in a completely different direction. Part of that comes from the fact that I went ahead and put in the twist that I had thought about from last week. I decided to go ahead and do it for the simple reason that I wasn't thrilled by the ending that I had outlined. I thought that a little bit of a twist would spice things up and thrill me a bit more. It sure did that. Unfortunately for me, it also shot the rest of the outline to pieces. I'm not certain how to patch it up, so I think I'll probably throw it away and redraft the stupid thing. Ironically, I've been changing the document a lot on my word processor, and to keep track of the changes I...

Boy, I am tired. I've been mulling over the ending of this book so much, I just want it done with so I can start editing it. I am tired of writing this book, but in a different way than any of the others. It's mostly because the ending is there--it's just taking forever to get through it--that is wearisome. That's a nice change from wanting it to be over because I have something else in mind that I want to start. Of course, I'm still nervous about the ending. It's fitting, but I can't say that it's super cool , y'know? I want it to be really fulfilling, and I think I have some good parts, but that isn't really enough for me. If I've just taken the reader through a 300,000 word journey, I want the ending to feel like it was worth the trip--and that the trip was fun while there, too. I came to an interesting crossroads today, though. I could either make one of the major players in the book be a bad guy--sudden flip that you could kind of see ...

Bad news, everyone! I've decided that I'll have to make a sequel to this. It's either that or there's going to be the loss of one of the coolest monsters I've come up with since the breathrobbers*. So I guess it's only kinda bad news, as I may be able to modify it in such a way that I can keep the Weeping Men and  close things up the way that I need to. Another option is that I can include all of my Weeping Men parts as a short story compilation that would be adjacent to the actual novel, much like the piece that I started writing on the plane to Orlando . My idea is that I could have the book itself be published the traditional way (ideal, for me, as that's my actual dream), but do my part to generate interest by having two or three different short stories that I would distribute for free. I've got a few thousand words in the abovelinked short, and I could, if I wanted, take the monsters out of this and have them be doing all the same things, but in ...

I threw down 7,380 words today, with the specific understanding that I need to get used to this amount of output if I plan on finishing this book on time. It's great that I had such a productive day--nearly twice as much as I normally do, with two full chapters and two brief interludes/flashbacks--and I'm really encouraged that I was able to get done fairly difficult scenes with a small measure of adroitness, but I fear it's just not going to be enough. Peter and I will be celebrating our 5th and 29th respective birthdays next Saturday by going to Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur museum. That is, of course, awesome. What is less awesome is that there's no way that I'll be justified in getting any writing done. So while I may have kicked some royal pagination here today, it actually simply balances out next week. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm quite happy to have a day with my boys and the rest of my family. That's great. I'm always sad when I miss a...

I figured out an ending. I'm not happy with it, but it'll do for the nonce. I went ahead and tried something rather rare for me: I outlined the end of the story. It's just a single page with a chapter number (starting at 73, which I wrote today, and ending at 85) and a brief description on it. I have some problems with it. 1) There are only three Saldrae chapters left, which isn't cool. I really like her as a character, and though she's been fluctuating between passive and active, on the whole I think that she's a really important, solid addition to the story. Unfortunately, her role is pretty much done, now. She has emotional closure to the story that will be really fun to write, but there isn't a lot in terms of the action that she'll be able to do. Part of it is because she's not the kind of person who kicks butt literally--she has other ways in which she is strong and resourceful. If I can, I'd really like to let her come through with tha...

With Spring Break here--and a mother who wanted to see her grandsons--I was able to go back to one of the earliest places that I ever wrote a book: the downstairs bedroom in my parents' house. Here, in the house I grew up in, I put together an interlude chapter with my highly enjoyable--and always running, it seems--Arik the Spy. I'm pretty pleased with what I put together, though there's a slight possibility that I'll split this interlude in half and put the set up in one chapter and the chase scene in another. Then again, that might be too  many cliffhangers, so I might leave it. Anyway, it was interesting to be in this room to work. I didn't want to worry about a parking ticket at UVU, so I decided to dedicate the time toward writing instead of driving to, say, Orem Public Library. I think it was a good choice. With the three hours or so that I was given, I managed about 3,400 words, which is a lot more than I was expecting to get in a single block of time. It ...

With today's work done, I feel pretty good about what I've accomplished. I still wanted to write more, but I figured that if I did, I would probably end up regretting it. Not because I wouldn't enjoy myself, but the day is beautiful, I want to see my kids, and it's getting later than I prefer. It takes me a good three or four hours to crank out my 3-5,000 words (I'd say that I get between 900 and 1,100 words per hour, so, with that rough estimate, I have poured at least 240 hours into this book, to say nothing of the work I've put in away from the keyboard, or in wasted chapters), and it seems like sometimes, even though I have an idea of what to say next--and I'm really eager to see it--I can't convince myself to actually give it a shot. Part of it is the fact that I'm wanting to get home. Part of it is that I'm not wanting to overkill a chapter by too much cherishing, if you catch my allusion...and drift. See, I have sometimes been on such a ...