Finding the Path - Post NaNoWriMo

Well I ended the month with 55,400 words added to the *story* I started years past. Everything was for a new book, but really the more of this I write the more I realize it will really be one BIG story that I have to split up into smaller bits. Know who else had to do the same...? Tolkien. Yup, the God of Fantasy. I guess I am in good company.

One of the best things to come out of NaNo, besides my new idea to add in a real world aspect to my fantasy story, was the people I met. From that I managed to network and find a few other like minded individuals (as far as they are striving to work on the craft, not that we see the world the same) and formed my own writers group. Tolkien got me to thinking, what I really needed was a CS Lewis friend and my own "Inklings" group. A group of individuals that aren't interested in patting me on the back and cheering me on (although those people are most appreciated and important for motivation) but rather are more interested in content, form, grammar, broken ideas, and can point out things that I, as the author, am blind to. I am extremely thankful to them. They are exactly what I need and I hope we go far into the future together. Les, Sara, Emily, Silver, and Marge - Thank you!

I have started Tweeting more. I am still new to it, but I try to access it daily. I am still wondering what people really want to hear from me on, so I am posting stuff about the progress of my story, as well as personal activities as they come up. My twitter is r_e_james so if you don't follow, please do.

I have come across numerous interesting links form other authors and publishers on twitter that I may start to republish here, in my blog. If you don't like that idea - feel free to email me and let me know.

It was the day before the day before Thanksgiving...

Its Tuesday. Since I last posted I have moved my word count upwards of 25,000. I should be around 33,000 words by now, so I need to pick up the pace and make some real progress over the Thanksgiving Holiday. Luckily I will be riding the train for 4.5 hours on Turkeyday up to my family in Fort Worth, so I plan to sit in the observation car, plug in and tear up writing. The internet connectivity is typically non-existent on the train, so no distractions. I do wish that the Amtrak train that runs the San Marcos - Fort Worth route would get outfitted with it though. Makes doing research on the fly very difficult as cell coverage is also quite limited in the more remote points of the trip.

As I go back and look at my writing thus far, I find that almost all of my chapters, or sections are right around 8,300 words. Is that coincidence you think? Is that just my style, or where my mind thinks good breaks in the story should happen? I dunno, but it is kinda freaking me out.

I mentioned in my last post that I had come up with a way to merge the real world and my fantasy world together, so I have been juggling between just writing in the real world and moving back into my fantasy land to finish off the last chapter I was working on. I have developed my female main character in the real world, her name is Caitlyn. Caitlyn is finishing her studies in Linguistics at Harvard University and has stumbled upon a journal written in an unknown language that has led her to a very remote area where a scientific/archeolgoical dig will reveal findings that shatter everyone's paradigm!

NaNoWriMo Update

Today is the 13th day of NaNoWriMo (yea 13) and I am currently at around 15,000 words. Thats slightly behind where I should be, but I think I will have a chance to catch up to the pace in the next few days.

One of the benefits so far of the exercise in writing, is that I came up with this really cool idea about how to merge my fantasy world with the real world and still keep it all believable (I hope anyway).

So now I have essentially two stories running - one that occurs today in the real world, and one that occurs in the fantasy world in the past. I haven't quite designed how the two will collide, but I plan for them to, I've just got to keep chewing on it in my mind for a while and looking for opportunities.

NaNoWriMo is here!

Oh I am super excited. NaNoWriMo began Nov 1 (All Saints Day, right? Cool!) So I started cranking out new ideas to get the story popping. Plus I get to solicit feedback on what I am writing immediately from others who, lets face it, are only motivated to critique mine so someone else will critique theirs. I am totally ok with that.

I tend to write late in the day (evening). I write better in the dark, and better in the winter. Don't know why, but that is when my creative juices really flow.

Today is day 3 of the competition and I am at roughly 8,800 words. As I mentioned in my last post, the goal is to get to 50,000 by the end of the month.

My motivation is high, and I am eager to hear what others think of the story. Off to work I go!

Eenie Meenie Minie HOLY BACK FAT! I've got a LOT to keep up with

When I first sat down to start writing this story that has been brewing in my mind since, well since forever, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I mean I had written 35-50 page papers in college, 50 or so page short stories, and yeah, I could totally tackle a novel. No biggie right?

Well what started out as a simple concept has ballooned into a true epic. At last count I had over 100 named characters. That is not counting the generic ones with names like "Helmsman" or "Corporal" or "Fairy".

I named groups of military units, classes at the Mage Academy, books, swamps, trees, and my oh my how it grew unmanageable. I mean its no big deal in a short story to handle all of these moving "named" parts, but in an epic it becomes critical. You can't call the group of soldier carrying the shields "Shieldbarers" in chapter 3 and then later in Chapter 11 after you have forgotten all about naming them 8 chapters ago start calling them Shieldguard. This nuance may not seem like a big deal, but trust me it is a big deal, and it is ravaging my story!

I am a pretty well organized person. I've written down all of my brilliant ideas as I have had them. I have written down notes, and developed ideas into workable plot lines. I collected art, and began to draft sketches of my main characters, but by god did I say that Henrik had Blue eyes, Grey Eyes, Silver eyes or brown? Now I got to go back through and search for his description, and PRAY I only described it once.

Once you add in descriptions, names, titles, places, buildings, groups, organizations, you can see that these little details quickly go from being a support for the plot, to crippling it because I can't think with all of the clutter in my brain. Now consider that often I sit down to write and do so from beginning to end of chapter...but it may be weeks or longer before that happens. Wanna guess how many of those details I can retain in my mind after I haven't thought about the story for 3 weeks or longer? Let me help you - NONE - lol.

*sigh*

So shifting gears (I'll tie back in momentarily) National Novel Writing Month, lovingly known as NaNoWriMo begins in November. I participated last year, but didn't participate much or get much accomplished, despite having so much ground work prepared. The concept is it is a voluntary competition to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. If you do it, you win. If you don't then you still win, just not "officially" because after all, you may not have written 50,000 words but you got motivated and actually wrote something.

So in my prep work for NaNoWriMo this year I stumbled upon a tool developed by another NaNoWriMo participant who is also a computer programmer who had the same problem I described at the beginning of this blogpost. He couldn't keep up with who was who, who was where, who was where when and what they had with them so he developed yWriter, a FREE software that OMG has blown my mind and totally saved me from drowning under detail. Its not sexy, after all it was written by a programmer, so it looks very LOGICAL, and not very APPLE if you know what I mean - but luckily there was a video tutorial explaining how to get started. It lets you do all kinds of cool things that a novelist needs, such as create characters where you can input all of their bio's, details, looks, notes, organizational membership and the like. You can create scenes, and locations, and tie them to chapters. You can rearrange the chapters to put them in different order. You can say WHEN a scene begins, how long it takes, and which characters you created are in it. Whoa! What a great tool. My problem now is I pretty much have to stop, and retrofit what I have already written to be in the program. However, I really can't get much further ahead until I do. Sure when I get those surges of inspiration I can still crank out a chapter real fast in the mean time. It just may mean that Henrik has green eyes.

Brain Drain

Well, I sure didn't intend for real life to interject itself in such a way as to drain away my creative juices, but it did. I couldn't draw up the ability to wisk myself away to my world for well over two months. Ouch - I am sorry for those that were excited to read my blog. I'll do better to not disappear so long again.

So to catch you up - after going through total brain drain and not being able to muster any creativity, last week I sat down and wrote an entire chapter, and the creative drive is back. My ideas have started firing off again, and my list of things to incorporate is once again growing! It is nice to have my mojo back.

So new chapter - its currently titled "To Be King", and introduces an antagonist. He is young, brooding, and plays with dark magics that he doesn't completely understand. He's in love, in as much as his twisted worldview can understand that emotion to be. It was fun writing the chapter. I honestly don't know how much of it I will keep - as its not the best thing I have ever written, but it was pure and raw, which I very much needed.

Illustration Round Up

Writing is great fun, but it lacks a certain visual stimulus. I enjoy scanning the internet for fantasy artwork that I think is cool to feed my need for color and awe factor. Usually it winds up being the artwork for Magic The Gathering cards, and sometimes its D&D art. I dislike World of Warcraft artwork, its too cartoony. Obviously, I don't mind high fantasy art, but it still needs a sense of realism. So I wonder, for those that are watching this blog, have you ran across a piece of art that you feel represents a fantasy character that you could see yourself as? If so post it here! Maybe I will be inclined to find inspiration from it and write you into the story! =)

Need help finding artwork? Google Images is a great place, as well as www.deviantart.com

Once you find an artist that you like, check out their portfolios. Most all artists have one on deviant art, and if not there then on their blogspot!

Happy hunting!

Daily Update - Wrath of the Watcher

Today I spent most of my time writing a scene with one of the main characters that is also a strong female role. Meet Serah. She is a member of the Black Guard, a group of highly trained counter-assassins and for today's chapter, she is pissed off. Serah is smart. She is fiesty and she is deadly. She is sarcastic and has problems playing well with others. She prefers steel over handsome men. Daggers, throwing knives, or her special curved blades, you name it: if it is metal, easily concealed and holds a keen edge then it excites her. Serah's young, approximately 19 to early 20's, has long dark hair that she holds in place with two brow braids that are clasped together behind the nape of her neck. She likes to wear her full black leather armor which clings to her form with special articulations that give her freedom of movement, allowing the armor function more like a second skin. She is acrobatic, flexible and pretty much an all around bad@$$.

Serah has a secret, well several actually, and we learn at least one early in the story. Is she simply a bad@$$ biatch that can chew threw soldiers like she's fighting school children, or is there more to her? Inquiring minds, and patient readers will find out!

God Rested on the 7th Day

So what took God 6 days to do for real, has taken me years to do in make believe, and I am still not done. Originally I just started writing, sitting down for long marathon sessions where I would crank out 10,000 words. I got about nine chapters in when I realized I had a real problem - consistency. Its funny how the details sneak up on you but ultimately they are what make the forms that hold up the plot and character interaction. In some places, I noted, it took three months to travel a certain place, and in others three weeks. Then there were the moments of, "What was the name of that city again?" Or my most egregious mistake, having scenes occur on the same night with the same players thousands of miles away from each other. EEEK! Stop it now. I had to put the writing on hold and begin to do the dreaded "w" word - World Build.

Now, I know enough about writing to know that authors can get bogged down in world building to the point that they can develop their world to have nations with great histories, geography, and any number of neat little details only to have the narrative suffer. I didn't want to go down that path, but I quickly figured out that for me, I couldn't do any more writing until I mapped the world. Thankfully, years and years of playing role playing games with my friends had kept my creative juices flowing and prepared me for the task at hand.

At first, I was working off a map I had drawn in high school, but much of the direction and scope of the story had changed since then. So I moved to a simple hand drawn "this goes over there, this goes over here" map in a journal that I kept for ideas. I quickly learned that I needed something more robust.

If you know me, you know that I can't draw to save my life. So drawing a map just wasn't going to work. Luckily I found a software program that would allow me to "draw" the map on my computer, which I was much more suited for. The program already had predrawn cities and points of interest, all I had to do was draw lines, figure out a rather complex layering system, and paste in predrawn mountains, cities, towers, runes, relics, and the like.

Today I have a map of Terrene, the name of my world, that is getting fleshed out as the narrative continues. As I run across a need for a named forest, or a new city/village I place it on the map and no more inconsistencies! Most fantasy books come with a map, that I assume was drawn by a map artist after the book was written. I may have the first map that was drawn by the author as he wrote! Of course I'll probably hire someone to make it look nicer than it does now, but all the same, the World of Terrene is being built and I have yet to rest...

The Beginnings of All Things are Small...~Cicero

So today I have finally launched my very first blog. I intend for this blog to be focused on the happenings of the series of novels I am working on titled, Crowns of the Vanquished. Pieces of this story have lived with me since I was nine years old. When I was a 10th grader I wrote the first of it down for an English class assignment. It was over 45 single spaced pages long, and earned me a "D" for not following instructions! Haha. The assignment was to write a short story, but there was so much demanding to be told that I couldn't possibly have fit it into 10 or fewer pages. To make up for the poor grade on the assignment, the teacher then spent the next week teaching class about my story, and gave a test over the same. Obviously, being somewhat of an expert on the subject matter, I made a 100 on that assignment, and on all the accompanying daily grades. He was enthralled with my concept, and amazed by my writing. Now granted, I am far removed from 10th grade, but I decided then that the 45 page "short story" would one day be told the way I had always planned. Thus the series, Crowns of the Vanquished, was born. I am well into the first novel, currently over 90,000 words and honestly think that to tell the story right will take 5-7 full length novels. I am excited to begin this journey and really hope that you will come along with me.