I'm getting my ass kicked! I was quite enthused when I left this morning. Eat some Jackie's, do some writing, go to the library and do some more writing. It was going to be a productive day. I had compiled Imsikwatash's chapters into two short story documents, "The End of Bliss" (from his introduction to the murder of his wife by the apothecary) and "The End of Nothing" (which includes Goyathlay's introduction and will track their journey across the Kimaya plains). Look, a short story that's already finished! Woo hoo! How is that not cool?

And now I have room to slow things down and really fill out Bear's story, build some character, show the world, and rock the house.

The problem with this is twofold. Originally the book was split between two main characters which meant I was essentially writing a book in half the expected space. That's not just fast pacing, that's incredibly fast pacing. In the original draft, Bear dealt with Bishop Tayfan Aster by chapter 25. Now he deals with him by chapter 8. Chapter 8? You can't have such a major character poisoned and thrown into a box by chapter 8! What the hell is up with that?!?! Where's the missing story? And how do I push it all in without making everything suck donkey balls? (I'm considering giving the Prologue to Aster and moving Pi Fu's chapter to chapter 1--or even later.)

Second, I figured an easy solution to slow things down would be to find those chapters where I accomplished a lot and split them in two, focusing on character and then dramatic action. So Bear's return to Woodbend would not immediately yield the revelation that Young Mahli was the daughter of Tayfan Aster. While this is still a good idea, in my opinion, I haven't edited those chapters. Some of them just suck. Some of them are wrong because I've changed things since then. And some of them suck and are wrong.

Today is proving incredibly difficult to write. I can't overcome my own crappy manuscript.

Oi!

I'm not too keen on renumbering my chapters now that Imsikwatash and Goyathlay have been cut from the book. I just lost at least 6 chapters and I'm going to add some to slow the pace a little. So this was chapter 32. Now I don't know where it is. I'll figure it out eventually and when I do, I'll let you know. :)

( Cause and Conviction, chapter ? )

Last week I printed out my manuscript to date. It was reinvigorating to see such a large stack of paper. Even though I'm only 1/3 of the way finished with the ms, the mountain of dead trees reminded me what I have accomplished so far. My intent was to use the printed chapters to separate out and reorder, kind of like note cards. Then I discovered the outline feature and reordered everything fairly quickly. I also determined the remaining chapters dedicated to Rian Inkwright, Skere Khane, and Pi Fu. I still need to hash out how many chapters I need for Bear, Imsikwatash, and Goyathlay. Since Bear and Imsi are the main characters, I'll just write until their stories are finished and see what the total is. Goya is perhaps the most insignificant secondary character, a little one dimensional, so that creates a whole different challenge to determining how many chapters I want to give him because I don't know what's necessary to make him a better character. We'll see after I'm done writing, eh?

So what I've been doing is using the hardcopy to edit. I know I said I wouldn't edit previous chapters until I was finished. It's an easy trap to fall into. I'm not sure if I've fallen into it. I have one foot in for sure, but I'm alternating between writing and editing and that is satisfying. I made moderate changes to the prologue (now available in the Inkwell) and significant changes to chapter 1. I chopped 3 pages at once in chapter 1. It's hard to go on when you realize you wrote for 3 pages and nothing from those pages is salvageable. But what I replaced it with (or am in the process of replacing it with) is so much better. I'm very pleased. In fact, that oppressive feeling I have when I'm writing, knowing what I've created previously is such crap is lessened a little bit because I know now that what I have is less crap than it was before. Yay for that!

...umm, okay, that is all. :)

I'm not sure what made me decide to do it, but rather than just bolding my chapter number and titles, I've actually been using the document styles and making them headers. This was an invaluable decision, I learned today, as I viewed my entire manuscript (nearly 300 pages) as an outline collapsed down just to the headers. I am able to move each of these sections (header 1 and subordinate body text) with the click of a button, rather than cutting and pasting a chapter that would otherwise be 12 pages long. This allowed me to reorganize the document in a fashion that was much more coherent than it had been previously (e.g., chapter 2 is now chapter 14).

While I haven't done a lot of writing this weekend, only half a chapter, I did reorganize the flow of the entire ms as well as revise the prologue. I'm pleased with this progress.

Also, as a bit of a revelation, after seeing the success of the Twilight series (a horribly blatant rip off of Angel), I could care less if Stephen King has a character called the Hanged Man. I'll be using him in Jehovah's Hitlist without the slightest concern. The character is entirely original and only the name is the same. If Twilight can be a best seller, I can reuse a name.

It occurred to me the other day that my writing has actually gotten poorer working on The End of Bliss than it was on A Circle of Crimson Stone. I suffer from the "show don't tell" flaw to a greater degree than I did on that manuscript. What the hell is that about? When you write and read more, you're supposed to get better, not worse. I had gotten so bad, in fact, that I was tempted to restart my manuscript for Bliss. Extremely tempted, but that is a wholly separate trap. It's easy to never finish a manuscript, claiming you're revising and then you'll finish it when things are better. What actually happens is you just perpetually revise and never finish. So I compromised. I went off-script for the last chapter I wrote and revised heavily. Remember just a couple months ago when I said I would plow forward and write whatever was written to keep up the pace? Well, I didn't quite do that with this last chapter. There was just WAY too much telling and not enough showing. The revised chapter may still be crap, but in comparison to what it was, it's at least a start. We'll push on and once the book is done, we'll gut the entire thing and make it not suck. I am frustrated with how much better my writing was when I started Crimson Stone. I didn't have to think about it; I just did it. What the hell happened?


( The End of Bliss, Chapter ? )

So, The PodgeCast took a lot of my time last week, but once Independence Day holiday came around, I started writing again. Reading so much has been both invigorating and distracting. I worried that it might have a negative impact on my writing (like when I was reading The Name of the Wind and found my writing went to shit while I was reading it). Thankfully, it has proven invigorating. I've written two and a half chapters this weekend and I'll be finishing that third one this evening.

I don't know if I'm going to post them, though. It's not that they're bad. In fact, I'm quite pleased with one of them in particular. I don't know. We'll have to ponder this. (These new chapters do not include the final outcome of Bear and Tayfan Aster at the church. I skipped over that and will return to it later.)

Boy has it been difficult to start writing again. I tried Thursday with little success. What I wrote was pretty shitty. So I thought maybe I should go back and start revising some chapters until I felt like I was on a roll. But looking back at those chapters, they seemed shitty. Everything just felt bad, amateurish, as if I had never done this before (which technically speaking I haven't, if you want to get as specific as a novel, but writing stories is something I've been doing since first grade and I expect more of my first drafts). So I decided to go to a chapter that I was already have trouble with, one that I hadn't been able to finish before.

So I went to chapter 13, deleted about half of it, and then wrote another 1800 words. What you see here is the result of that effort. Still not amazing, but good enough that I can confidently move on to the next chapter.

( The End of Bliss, chapter 13 )

This chapter was a little rushed. I was trying to keep the word count in a similar range of my other chapters and maintain an adequate pacing, but it may grow during revision. In fact, they may all grow during revision. We'll see once we get there. I took a break from writing about Imsikwatash now that I've gotten his story caught up and about the same length as Bear's current storyline. I wrote instead about Rian Inkwright, a character that was originally only going to appear in one or two chapters who has now become an integral element of Jhon Prester's storyline. This is also the first of two times we meet Jhon in this novel, even though he is the main character of the trilogy. Originally, I wasn't going to have him speak at all in this chapter only exact punishment, but to do so would have made him too evil, I believe. So you get to hear him and see that he's not a sadistic zealot. Hopefully I can pull that off, otherwise I'll have a lot of work in the next two books to make him look like a good guy.

( The End of Bliss, Chapter 22 )

Yesterday at both breakfast and dinner I could do nothing but writing. It's nice to have my brain working steadily again, but I have found one thing is consistent. When I'm writing, I eat out A LOT. I don't think I'm able to cook and write in the same evening. :) My blood pressure weeps. :(

But I'm thrilled with the work I've done with Angelique and in fact, I'm making hers a half-chapter. 1000 words, maybe 1500 and then I'll switch back to bear for a similarly short chapter. It will be as if I'm having a conversation between the two but at a chapter level rather than a paragraph level.

The catch is now that I'm so enthused about Bear and Angelique's story, Bear is becoming the only main character, which isn't true. He's supposed to be sharing the spotlight with Imsikwatash. The problem is, Imsi is a little bitch. I guess I just don't have as much for him now as I do for Bear. I think once I've run through Bear's story and I only have half a book, Imsi will get his due. For the moment, though, I think I'm going to focus on the story in Aman'Brin and forget about the story on the Kimaya Plains.

This weekend I need to turn my attention back to the interactive. I already have some ideas for event rules (moving tables and such) that should make it a good time, but until this weekend I'm all about working on my novel! Woo hoo!

I'm officially done with my adventure. Now to work on the interactive and then I can get back to my novel! I went down to Jackie's for a late breakfast this morning. I find that by the time I'm done, the library is open and I can just go down the street and get a few hours of writing in. It works fantastically. I had to do treasure division and the epilogue paperwork such as AR content (with a fun little item I came up with the other day that just tickles me).

I couldn't do any of that at Jackie's, though, and I write while I'm at the counter. What to work on? That's right, novel baby! It was time to answer the one question that I kept avoiding. Why does Bear take Angelique south? I know why Skere Khane follows them, but why did Bear take her to begin with? Certainly playing on the death of his mother that early in the book would be cheap. You can't just introduce it and then immediately use it. That's what television is for. This is literature!

And that's when it came to me. I do each chapter from one POV, so a chapter name will be "Bear in Watertown." Well, the chapter where he rescues Angelique was so named. And that was a mistake! It is now "Angelique in Watertown" and is written from her perspective. Not only does this allow me to come up with a way for her to convince Bear to take her south (she is Haen, and thus innately magical), but it also allows me to add a dimension to her character I would not have otherwise added. Take that false accusations of sexism!

So here are the ~180 words I wrote tonight. I hope you enjoy.

( Chapter 15: Angelique in Watertown )

I've been doing a lot of writing lately. A lot. So, I thought I would share. I haven't been posting as frequently as I did on my short stories because the ideas, up to this point at least, have been coming pretty steadily. I have three chapters finished and two nearly finished. They are shorter than anything I wrote for A Circle of Crimson Stone. Those chapters ranged from 8k to 10k words. These are running 2k to 4k. I have one chapter that's only 1500 words! I already have the first 17 chapters plotted out, so that's pretty amazing.  I had to write five chapters in the other book before I could get to 13 and I got to 17 this time after writing 1. That's a good sign, I hope. So here you go, the first draft of chapter 1:

( THE END OF BLISS, Chapter 1 )

Ideas while I drive! That's where I have them. I used to have ideas in the shower, but not so much any more. Sharing a shower can be distracting that way. Anyway, back to the idea. I started writing the beginning to The End of Bliss awhile ago and it really sucked. It sucked all kinds of ways. I might have even posted here about the magnitude of suck. And that's disappointing because I had a great image in my head. I just couldn't get the pacing right.

Well today, I realized it just didn't fit the book and that's why it didn't work. Who could love a character that massacres all those people no matter how bad they are? I want the readers to know him first. Or at least know of him so they might give him the benefit of the doubt. So, I'm moving that scene to the second book (which I've retitled Paragon Cause and Conviction instead of The Lion and the Unicorn). In fact, I'm moving the entire character to the second book. His sidekick, who I love the idea of (and hope I can do him justice) will be one of the two foci of the first book.

His role within the Brinnish Friars is essentially the same as Satan within the Jewish faith (which is different than Satan in the Christian faith), but I can't figure out a name for the job. I keep getting stuck on satan, which just won't work.