It’s time for another Book of the Week, this time going back quite a few years to the first book in one of my favorite series: The Black Company. We’ve already had one book from this series feature in as a Book of the Week (book 5 or 6, depending on how you read the series), but the first book is more than deserving of its own space here.
It’s about time I did another one of these. It’s only been, what, three months? Yikes. I hope I don’t drop the ball this badly again.
Anyway, the Book of the Week is Mystic, the debut title from dragonmount.com founder Jason Denzel.
Well, more like a two-and-a-half-month coma. Between hockey, work, and preparing for JordanCon (more on this later), I’ve had zero motivation to do much writing beyond some more preliminary work on Strings. I’ve really let this site fall by the wayside especially, but I’m going to change that starting this weekend.
There will be a new Book of the Week post, probably either tonight or tomorrow, and a big blog post about JordanCon this past weekend. It was crazy, and a wonderful time. I think it deserves more than a mention on here.
Beyond that, I’m going to try to pick up my WoT reread once again, especially with the news from Team Jordan about the TV show. It’ll probably be slow going, though, because I’m reading about a half dozen other things right now, in addition to diving back into revisions on All Flames Cast. It’ll be busy, but I’m determined to keep this place up, going forward.
Big things have been afoot in the Chronicle of the Sons plan, lately.
As I mentioned in various earlier State of Writing posts, the plan for CotS has been for four books, with Of Genesis coming second and going over the same timeline as All Flames Cast, but from the POVs of some of the antagonists. As I set out to outline this, things started pretty smoothly. I got through an almost complete checkpoint list, and wrote a couple of character sketch scenes to help get a feel for the new POVs.
And that’s where I hit a wall. With one notable exception (we’ll revisit this in a bit), none of the characters excited me. I didn’t want to write them. Their stories didn’t feel right. On top of that, I realized that doing this as a second book would completely derail the narrative momentum built up at the end of AFC. Continue reading
I know for a fact that I’m far from unique among writers as a big music fan. Almost every writer I know has some sort of writing playlist; many have the same habit I do of making a new playlist to fit the tones of new books or stories.
But just because I’m not unique doesn’t mean that music isn’t worth talking about in the context of writing. It’s indispensable for me. I simply cannot sit down and be productive on a manuscript without music.
On top of that, I get a lot of inspiration just listening to music. Often, it will be the tone of a song that gets me; others, it’s a line that I particularly enjoy or a really cool song title. In this vein, I thought I’d talk about some of the songs and the stories (that you can read right here on Dcafwriting!) that they inspired.
dcafwriting 