And today I finished the first draft of “Defender” (still a tentative title), the first book of the Defender books (less tentative), a sixish-part fantasy series. That’s assuming I get published, of course. I’m not going to spend my life writing stuff that can’t see the light of day. It topped out at 119,000 words. Excessively long, but I’m not that worried. It’s a first draft. Plus I’ve already targeted a lot of stuff that I can cut — characters and scenes. I’m hoping for 90,000, but it might be around 100,000. I dunno. I managed to cut 40,000 words out of Black Hole Son before it was finished. The…
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Defender A.K.A. White Mage Story Has Begun
Just a note to myself that on this day, I started the first draft of Defender/White Mage Story/Untitled fantasy project about a healing mage.
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Merm-8 Third Revision is Officially Complete
I finally got done with those arduous Macros on Sunday night. My last one is “overused words” which includes a lot of “look”s, “since”s, and “even”s. The problem is, most of the time, it’s either very hard to reword it, or it doesn’t matter. If a character looks at something, there’s not a lot of other ways to put it. So now that I’m done with this, I let it incubate for 3 weeks. Then I’ll use a program I found called “Natural Reader” that I’ll use to read the story out loud to me. This will help me find all those little things I miss, the little skippable words,…
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First Text of White Mage Story is Written
On Thursday, I wrote the first prose for my proposed White Mage fantasy series. It was part of a writing exercise, but it’s a snippet that could definitely appear in the finished book (and I’m not surprised if it does — I’m lazy). This isn’t really big news or anything, but I thought it’s important for me to mark my benchstones.
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400th Post
Yes, I’ve truly written or posted some snippet of interest that floats in my brain 400 times. I wanted to commemorate this occasion with some big list, or some picture, or taping bacon to a cat, but I couldn’t think of anything. Also, I have no cat, and bacon it too precious to fasten to domestic animals. I’m not made of money. So instead, here is a picture, not created by me. But let’s just say it’s a hint of the next novel I plan to write after Mermaid Story is done.
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The Realization
Well, the good news is White Mage Story is done. Finished last night and sent it off to its first candidate – Heroic Fantasy Quarterly – of which it’s totally not qualified to be in. Much thanks to all the critiquers who helped out. I’m glad I sent it in for a second round of critique, if for nothing else then to help me realize that this was a good piece of polished prose. The bad news (or good news, depending on how you think about it) is that now it’s time to return to Black Hole Son. I’ve all the RFDRs back, so I can start making the third…
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Finished with White Mage critiques
Finished going through White Mage Story critiques. All were pretty positive, nothing overwhelmingly breaking. Nothing needing a total rewrite, at least I don’t think. Most is stuff I can’t or won’t use, but this is good to me, because it means people are interested and, in a sense, writing their own fan fiction about it. Whether this makes me publishable is yet to be seen. A few people have their ideas of how the story should go (and faithfully provide). A few people feel the story lacks a sense of urgency, or something to react to. But I don’t listen to a few people. I listen to most people. But…
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I Predicted this post would be about Predictability
So critiques on White Mage Story are done for a while. Haven’t gotten through many of them, five or so, maybe a quarter of the total. So far, response has been positive. There have not been very many complaints about structure or boredom or confusing points (actually, there are some of that last one, but they usually contradict one another, so most of the time, unless it’s repeated, I chalk it up to “reader not paying enough attention”, which is legitimate because these people aren’t getting paid – I had one person call my novel New Moon Sun). But there’s been one that’s been stuck in my craw. One of…
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Healing Mage is On Critters (Again)
So Healing Mage story (which I’m now calling Classless) is in Critters, which means I can get back to profitable writing on Wednesday (when it makes it out of the queue). It’s getting a shitload of critiques, more than any story I’ve ever submitted. Most people would see that a bad thing, but I think it’s good. If I have so many, that means a lot of people are reading it because they enjoyed it. Otherwise they’d just say “fuck it, this thing sucks”, and move on to the next story. If people want to read it, that means publishers want to buy it. Anyone can find things to criticize,…
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Vampire Family Story Done
I’m done revising Vampire Family Story, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. Unfortunately, it also ballooned up to 6,000 words, which limits some of my publishing options. It’s no Hugo Winner, but it’s a good story, and I think I improved it to the point where many people will be pleased. I wondered, as I was revising, whether I was trying to please everyone. I tried to only fix problems that multiple people complained about. But even multiple people can be wrong (and make me pump the story to too many words. That’s the double-edged sword with getting a lot of critiques. Too many cooks can spoil the…
