What I’ve Been Doing …
On Saturday I did a wrap up post on the F-SF Guest Author Series and I’ve kept you updated on interviews and reviews, as well as attending Armageddon but you may have been wondering what else I’ve been up to while all this was going on. The answer is easy—which is that finishing The Wall of Night Series Book Two (working title: The Gathering of the Lost, or just Gathering for short) is pretty much the only game in town right now.
In my It’s Friday update on 15 October I said that: “My goal for the month … [is] … to see if I can’t knock off 60,000 words, which should just about see the book done. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m going …”
How am I going? Well so far I’ve done 15,000 new words, plus a fair amount of revision, but given time and target I think it would be fair to say that I am not getting the words out as fast as I had hoped. But then I have also found in the past that just cranking out words for their own sake doesn’t necessarily advance the story—and what I can say is that the 15,000 new words I’ve written since the 15th definitely do advance the story.
So what drives me when I’m writing a book? Mostly, that I want the story to have integrity, which for me is mainly about continuity and consistency of both plot and characters—and you will recall that on October 22, I blogged on the importance for me of remaining true to character in my writing. I also think a lot about trying to write in an interesting way, not just repeating the words and phrases, or using the same adjectives or ideas to describe certain characters or environments.
And what encourages me to keep going and cranking those words out? Mainly, I’ve been carrying this story around with me for a long time—parts of it, as I’ve said in some of the online interviews I’ve done, from a very early age—so I really want to tell it: that always brings me back to the writing desk.
But a really big encouragement lately has been getting so much positive feedback for The Heir of Night, with people out there saying they have really loved it and “can’t wait” for Book Two. Having waited myself in the past, I don’t want my readers to have to do that, so am very keen to get Gathering done and out there to you.
A little bit about what Gathering is about? Well, it definitely continues the story of Malian and Kalan as begun in The Heir of Night, but the heralds, Tarathan of Ar and Jehane Mor, also get some serious point-of-view time. And I have just finished a sequence with Asantir and Haimyr which I really enjoyed writing—put simply, the story rocked along. There are also some new characters introduced in Gathering, in part because the unfolding story requires their presence and in part because the action has shifted away from the the Wall of Night to other regions of Haarth. One of these new locales is Ij, the home of Haimyr the Golden and one of the great cities of the River (which is a loose confederation of independent city states.) Another new locale is the duchy of Emer, the home of the heavily armoured Emerian knights …
But which point-of-view characters you will meet in each place, and what befalls them there, is something you will have to “wait and see …”
As for getting through the writing and reaching that final line and last word—as I said on October 15, please feel free to offer incentives (virtual chocolate cake et al) :-)—although in fact the biggest aid to writing is always uninterrupted time. So a week with a mostly clear diary, as I have ahead, is writer’s bliss.
Add me to the list of people who are keen to see what happens in the rest of book 2.
And 15,000 words is “none too shabby” when, knowing you, they will be the right words!
Thank you!
15,000 is pretty damn good for a release month. 😉 I think I barely managed that in August.
And September was no better, with two weeks gone to Aussiecon/chickenpox.
October may have been a clearer 20,000 but that’s as good as it gets for me… I’ll need to do better to finish my book three by mid-December and have time for revisions.
Dunno how these Nano folks manage 50,000 in a month…
I think for nano it’s just a matter of crunching words ‘without discrimination’, which potentially could result in a ‘body of work’ to then re-edit into shape. But that has never been how the process works for me—and in the end we all have to work with our own process! But I took heart from the Confucious quote in my fortune cookie t’other week: “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” I am not going too slowly in any case (I hope), but I am definitely “not stopping.”