Nose Off the Grindstone

My wife and children come back tomorrow from a week's holiday interstate (thank goodness, I've missed them horribly). While they've been gone, as per my previous post, I've been beavering away trying to get 20,000 words written of the latest draft of Book 3. I'm happy to report that I ended up writing 19236 words, just over 4200 of which I did today which brought me to the end of the draft with a day to spare. Loud cries of 'woot' all around, I say! And this afternoon I went to the local copy store and got them to print it out and put a nice little comb bounder around it, so it almost looks like a real book. It's very satisfying to hold it in my hand and feel like I have something tangible after so much hard graft.

Next I get to read through it and make lots of lines in green, and that's when I get some sort of idea of the quality of the many words I wrote. It's something that's hard to guess at the time. Sometimes I can write a thousand or so words and think it's flowing really well, only to look at it later and realise I'll have to completely bin the lot. Other times it's the other way around. Hopefully things will balance themselves out enough that I won't have to completely rewrite too much, because that November deadline is starting to look awfully close.

And now, let the editing begin, although tonight I'm taking time off to just chill, though I'm sure I won't be able to resist thumbing through the shiny new manuscript at some points in the evening. 

Drifting Right Along

I'm about 25K words through draft 1 of Tales of the Blue Jade (from hence abbreviated as TBJ) book 3. In some ways that's a bit of a worry, seeing as this time last year I had a complete first draft of the Mapmaker's Apprentice, and even then delivered it 2 months late of the June deadline. What makes me a bit less worried is the fact this story is much better planned out than MMA, so hopefully I won't have huge amounts of rewrite and rethink to bog me down in the coming months (touch wood).

I'm noticing a bit of a pattern in the way my drafts develop. Even if I'm happy with the story (which I *think* I am in this instance), a number of things always need substantial work on the second pass. One is geography. The characters of my first drafts usually inhabit bland, hilly lands, perhaps with a few trees or rivers thrown in for good measure. Only afterwards do I spend time thinking about how to make the landscape more exciting and diverse, as well as atmospheric.

In some ways that's not a bad thing. As events, characters and conversations tend to flow in ways I didn't initially expect, so landscapes often need to change to suit the new tone. I may have initially planned a conversation in a green field in broad daylight, for example, only to have the conversation take on more sinister overtones than I anticipated. Gone, then, is the green field, and in it's place is a mist shrouded valley in the dead of night. Landscapes, like every other part of a story, need to be flexible and free to adapt in any way that suits.

Secondary characters also need lots of work on the second draft. To me, my characters are always identical when they're first introduced, and only later do they take on their own personalities and histories. This is a deliberate strategy. I prefer not to spend time thinking too much about the personality of a secondary character when they're first introduced. I like to see how their character develops, how it begins to seep onto the page as they talk and act in the story. They usually end up much more interesting that way (at least to me, hopefully others feel the same way!)

I find now that this combination of planning the story (outlining) while allowing some aspects of the story to evolve on their own is the best combination for me.

Hold Your Breath and Dive In...

Tonight I started writing Tales of the Blue Jade Book 3, otherwise known as The Jeweller of Rassylon. I've spent the past 6 or 7 weeks nutting out an outline and filling my notebook with ideas and maps, and I've reached the point where I feel it's time to dive in (hence the very witty title of this post) and get started.

It's a funny bitter-sweet feeling when you start writing a new book. Part of me feels scared that I'll discover I've lost my ability to write, another part feels excited to be joining Dillen, Koto and Tajni on yet another adventure. However I feel, I have to push on and hopefully come up with something resembling a decent first draft by the end of the year.

As I mentioned, I've decided this time to completely scrap the "driving without headlights" approach and make a careful outline of what is going to happen in each chapter. I decided to do this when I realised that I wrote about 4 drafts of Mapmaker's Apprentice without any real idea where the story was going, and I could have reached draft 5 in a much shorter time if I had only taken the time to plot and plan and work it out as much as I could beforehand. That way I would have avoided the rather panicky last few months where the deadline started to loom and I ended up having to ask for an extra month to get it finished.

I'm happy with the outline I came up with for book 3, and to be truthful it poured off the pen much more easily than book 2 -- perhaps something to do with "book 2 syndrome", a malady that I am now firmly convinced exists. Let's hope it all works out in the end.

In other breaking news, I have a short story in the latest edition of Andromeda Spaceways.


It's called Zombie Dreams and it's about a zombie who decides all he wants in life (death?) is to become an architect. The idea first came to me when I was staring out the window of the bus on the way to work. That night I wrote a first draft, which I promptly decided was utter rubbish and confined to my hard-drive for all eternity. Then a few months later I happened to give it another read and thought it was actually quite good (amazing how time and distance can give you a new view of things) so I worked to get it up to scratch and sent it in. It's a comical story, obviously, but somehow it's quite special to me. No idea why, but I hope others are able to enjoy it too.

On a side note, my good writing buddy Liz has a story in the same edition, and she managed to have hers illustrated! (No jealousy there whatsover. Not even a hint). Congrats, Liz! It's a wonderful story indeed.