I sat down and worked on On the Strings of Oblivion last night. I’m still trying to let that settle in. It’s been over a month since I last did anything at all with it. My writing muscles feel weak and out of place. Creative gears are rusty and don’t like turning. Being bitten by the writing bug tends to leave me sore.
And it feels great. Continue reading
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
So it’s been barely a month since my last State of Writing update, where I talked about my plans for the coming year and the beginning of work on Magisterium. I was very excited (still am) to get started on that book, since it was one of my favorite ideas.
However, it’s been quickly dawning on me that Magisterium needs to take a back seat for now. I did a bunch of worldbuilding this fall, and started writing the first draft. As of right now, Magisterium sits at just over 6000 words—and the spark just isn’t there. I’m going to be revisiting this book in the future, but it’s clear that I need to do some more work on this outline and get things together better.
Where that spark is is back with Chronicle of the Sons. I’m underway on revisions for All Flames Cast, which remains top priority, but my thoughts have been increasingly bent toward the sequels. It has become obvious to me that I need to go with what feels right, and at this time that means Book 2, Of Genesis. Even just considering writing this book has me excited, which is how it should be. I just can’t get away from these characters and this world. The tale must go on.
As many of you know, especially if you follow the Dcafwriting Facebook page, I finished the first* completed draft of All Flames Cast last Thursday. I spent Saturday evening meeting with my alpha readers and having a little discussion, but on the whole I’m taking a big step back from AFC and Chronicle of the Sons in general. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first is obvious: I need to give the manuscript some breathing room before I go into revisions. I want to have a fresher perspective on the story and the characters, and come in with some distance from the text. I just spent about ten months breathing, bleeding, and writing this book—it’s tough to separate myself from it at this point in time.
On top of that, these past couple of weeks have been draining. Now, I’m not the fastest writer in the world. I’m not one of those people who can sit down and write 20,000 words in a day. A solid week for me is somewhere around 2500-3000 words a day, for maybe three days out of the week. Continue reading
It’s a scary thing. All Flames Cast is nearing completion. Technically, I suppose, this is the first draft. In a day or two, I will have checked off every plot point and checkpoint on my outline. I’ll have a word count and a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
On the other hand, this really isn’t a first draft. All Flames Cast is in its third incarnation. It started out, as some of you may remember, as Seeds of Doubt back in 2012. I got pretty far into the first draft of that book, working off the same outline document that I’ve had open on my computer for the past month straight. But, as first drafts tend to go, it was really, really flawed. I had to throw out about 40,000 words and basically start over. And then, this spring, I took two months off to revisit the outline and a bunch of the chapters I’d already written, giving it a once (or twice)-over and working out some of the kinks.
And now, with three short chapters left to finish, I’m working with my alpha readers.
dcafwriting 