update

Checking in: London Edition

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Phew. I survived. As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel room in London, having just worked communications and speaker support for the big HPE Discover event this week. Today is Day 9 of the trip, and the event ended yesterday…which means I finally have some free time to get caught up on things.

First off, yeah, I know I haven’t posted at all, but quite honestly it’s been a bunch of 12-16 hour days for the past week, and there’s simply no energy left after that. I’ll be doing a more involved Book of the Week post for all of you, to go up tomorrow, as a way to make up for it.

Secondly, as noted above, I’m in London. It’s gorgeous here, and the entire time I’ve been itching to get writing. Open on my screen right now is Scrivener, with a freshly-minted file titled Of Genesis. This thing is in motion. Outlining is underway, checkpoints are being set, and I’ll probably start some preliminary work on the prologue tomorrow. I’m positively giddy at the idea.

Which brings me to tomorrow. I’ll be on a train through the British countryside, heading up to Glasgow to meet a friend (a fellow writer and Wheel of Time fan). Because of that, I doubt I’ll have much time for posting until I’m back in the States next week. The Book of the Week will go up, somehow, even if I have to use Starbucks free wifi or something, but that’s going to be the only post here for a while.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Writing Update: When Things Demand Attention

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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.

Mini State of Writing: All Flames Cast is done!

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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

I’m Still Alive…

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Dcafwriting has been pretty dead lately, I know. Blame the NHL and specifically the New York Rangers for still hanging around in the playoffs. My writing and reading time gets drastically reduced when all I can think about is hockey. But…

New content is coming to Dcafwriting very soon!

Keep an eye out this weekend for a new WoT reread post as I get going on The Shadow Rising; a new short story set in the world of Trayan and Mar, an indirect prequel to “Winters Past”, will also be finding its way onto the site. All this work is setup for my next project over the summer—a novella about Mar and Trayan! As I close in on finishing the first draft of All Flames Cast, I’ve been ramping up the worldbuilding for this novella.

The moral of the story is, yeah, I’ve been slow about posting lately, but it will be picking up in the near future as NHL saturation is decreasing. My life will return to some kind of normalcy, and that means new content for all of you!

Drew’s State of Writing – April 2015

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It’s that time again. Six months ago, I posted about Drew’s State of Writing, and talked a lot about the new things with Dcaf Copy, All Flames Cast, and updated writing schedules. Of course, for those who have been following along, you know that that schedule ended up being wildly optimistic.

As things stand right now, I’m closing in on the end of All Flames Cast. Harael’s chapters were finished in January; Eritan’s are nearly done right now, though I may need to add in another one, depending on how the timeline ends up working out with Tymun’s chapters. I’m still working on reconciling events across character arcs. Tymun has a start already, but will be getting the majority of work during the last half of April. It’s my goal to finish the first draft of this book by the end of April/early May, and get it through alpha reads by this summer so I can start revising. Continue reading