So over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, with a little extra time off from the job that actually pays the bills (Lord knows writing doesn’t), I finally wrapped up the last pass of editing on the conclusion of Shards — or, as I am now calling it, The “Strings” Duology:
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So this week I reached into my big folder full of rejections (and the occasional acceptance) and pulled out something new: A contract! Arriving as it did in November of 1997, this was, if I remember correctly, my first-ever contract, for a story called “The Short Route” (AKA “My Cousin Susan’s Favorite Story Of Mine Ever”), in which a tenderfoot from Back East discovers that there’s more than just cattle on his first cattle drive. The story appeared in “Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium” a tiny regional magazine published in Syracuse that ran from 1997 to 2001.
Continue reading “Random Contract: Vampire Dan’s Story Emporium, “The Short Route””
It’s been a while since I did a Random Rejection, so this week I thought I would reach into my giant file folder of writing correspondence and pull something out of it. But instead of either a rejection or an acceptance letter, I drew this instead:
Continue reading “Do You Have A Partially Completed Manuscript?”
The first one or two times I make editing passes on a book, scenes tend to get longer. This is because I’ve found that if I keep going back and fleshing out earlier scenes as I think of more stuff, the book never gets finished. Here is an example, from a scene that introduces a character new to the story in part two of Shards: Brennendah, a scientifically-minded Rittandic whose job is to study the Æther, also known as the void, which is gradually consuming the region where the Rittandics live. (This loss of territory, known as the Unraveling, is what gives the territory—the Ravels—its name.) Here is the original paragraph, followed by the revised version:
Despite some recent challenges with the dogs, I finally finished up the first draft of the heavily-rewritten The War of the Ravels, which concludes the story begun in Shards. At almost 50% longer than part one, The War of the Ravels wraps up the contest between Mercy, Kihantroh, and a few new players in the quest to reassemble Tyndallëau’s Heart and put it to use saving the world, or something.
Well, for the one or two readers (both of whom are most likely in the UK) who are still waiting for the follow-up to Dragon Stones (which was once upon a time the #1 best seller on the Kindle fantasy lists in the UK), it is finally finished! The new book, Shards, is part one of a two-part fantasy series, and clocks in at about 111,000 words. For those who are keeping track, that’s somewhat shorter than A Flock of Crows is Called a Murder or Dragon Stones, but longer than Night Watchman or Long Before Dawn. Why release it as two books instead of one? Well …
So I realize I’ve been saying this for a while now, but book one of “Shards” really is, finally, entering its final development phase. At this point I’m not only editing, I’m also doing some layout work. I haven’t started looking for cover art yet, but I did pull a bit of dialog to serve as the blurb on the inside front cover:
“So what kind of character do you want?” Mercy asked.
“I don’t know.” Bernard inspected the options. “What’s a rogue?”
“A rogue is like a thief.”
“What, you mean they go around robbing people?”
“Well, sort of, but not like a mugger. More like, you know, Robin Hood or Ali Baba.”
“Mmm. What are you?”
“I’m an elf sorceress.”
“Of course you are. I’ll be a human rogue. Male. Good.”
“Good? You can’t be good.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a rogue.”
“So?”
“So you’re a thief. You burglarize castles. You waylay people and take their stuff. Does that sound like good behavior to you?”
“You just said rogues weren’t muggers.”
“It doesn’t take any skill to be a mugger. All it takes is a weapon. Rogues are like, like, like gymnasts. Acrobats who steal. Cat burglars. They jump around, they run along tightropes, they climb up walls.” She had no idea if this particular game actually presented rogues that way, but she was getting a little impatient. “Trust me, you’ll love being a rogue.”
“Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe I should be a scout. What would a scout do?”
“Help old ladies across the street. Oh, come on. Live dangerously.” Before he could protest further, she had made him a neutral male rogue. The computer then prompted her for the character’s name.
She gave Bernard a sidelong glance.
“Can’t I just call him Bernard?” he said. “Maybe humans in that world just have regular names.”
“Regular names are boring. Ambrosia the Sorceress is not going to pal around with someone named Bernard.”
“Well, I can’t think of a name,” he said, sounding cross.
“Fine, I’ll make one up for you.” She typed Brannoc and accepted the character; the screen went black for a moment, then returned to Ambrosia standing alone and motionless in the forest, as if she’d started down the path and then forgotten where she wanted to go.
“Where’s my character?” Bernard asked.
“He’s probably sitting around somewhere complaining about his name and wondering if he should have become a scout,” Mercy said.
None of my other books has used just dialog as a blurb, but I thought this was a good paragraph for establishing the personalities of and dynamic between my two main characters. Will it make anyone want to read the book? We’ll see …
And yes, Shards (AKA “Big Book”) is still on its way. I recently switched from Pages to Scrivener to help manage it. As Peter O’Toole said in “Creator”:
Yes, I’m still here! I’ve been reworking my fantasy novel Shards, AKA “The Big Book”, since mid-December. At this point I should have Part One available within a few months, to be followed (in another ten or twelve months, based on how long it has taken me to rework Part One and on the fact that Part Two is longer).
Why is it taking me so long to finish editing Shards Part One, you ask? Well, I finished Shards quite a while ago (“quite a while” being at least a decade) and when I finally went back to edit it … well, when you go back and read something that you wrote that long ago, what immediately strikes you is that it’s terrible. That’s what happens to me, anyway.
So last week I got a message from Amazon.co.uk that they were going to be depositing a royalty payment into my account. I wasn’t really aware that I had been making any sales in the UK, so I went to take a look at my Kindle e-book reports and was startled to find that I had sold hundreds of copies of Dragon Stones the week before. Then I visited the Dragon Stones product page, and was even more startled to see this:
Viscosity 