Week Four: 10343 words

I made my goal this week despite still being sick for most of the week. My flu last week has settled into a bad case of bronchitis that's just completely sapping my energy. I get little bursts of feeling pretty good, but then try to do some minor task like unloading the dishwasher, wind up coughing for ten minutes, then, boom, I need a nap. 

In contrast to my sickly physical state, my current draft of Dragonsgate is developing quite healthily. In every book, characters show up who I didn't originally include in my plans. This time, it was a "sister of the serpent" named Colobi. She's a minor character in the original Bitterwood trilogy, one of Blasphet's main sidekicks in the cult of human women who worship him as the Murder God and serve as his assassins. Colobi is the one who saves Blasphet in the tunnel after Bitterwood leaves him for dead, and in Dragonseed she defends Blasphet against Anza and winds up dead, only to be restored to life by Blasphet. 

When I started writing Dragonsgate, the character wasn't on my radar. But, following Dragonsgate: Preludes and Omens, Anza was pretty badly injured and I needed to get her back in action again quickly. I'd introduced the healing power of the dragonseed previously, but who would still have one around, and who would be willing to use it? Colobi sprang to mind, and after I brought her back into the novel to heal Anza, she's been hanging around and generally acting crazy, talking about how Blasphet's not really dead and that's she's still intent on serving him. But even I wasn't certain if she was just there to be a bit player, or if she actually had a role in the plot. This week, finally, she stepped up and explained exactly what her master plan was and it's perfect. Her agenda is the thread that ties together the three diverging plots of the book and will pull them back together. 

I can't tell you how much I envy people who can outline their novels in advance. Winging it and hoping it will out work out is stressful... even though, again and again, it does all work out. I'm reminded of the theory of the bicameral mind. The short and probably not precisely accurate summary of this theory is that human consciousness grew out of a more primal state where the left brain and right brain weren't really aware that they were part of the same mind. So primitive man would hear voices and obey these voices thinking they were gods or spirits, when in fact it was his own mind speaking to him. For me, writing fiction is something like this. I feel like there's a muse in my head who knows the whole story of what I will write, but can't be bothered to explain it to me in advance. She teases me along from plot twist to plot twist, and I'm always thinking it would be nice if she'd given me some advance warning. But, she knows that, if she did warn me in advance, I'd spill the beans. In this theory, I do have the whole novel planned out in advance, I'm just hiding it from myself. 

The counter theory is that my brain contains ten thousand monkeys pressing keys randomly, and instead of recreating Shakespeare, I get James Maxey novels. 

Next weekend:  Robotic Rodeo in Durham! I'll have a bit more space than normal, so my plan is, in addition to books, to also have a small selection of dragon art for sale. I did a test run last year with some dragon greeting cards I gave away free to people who signed up for my newsletter. I ran out of stock pretty quickly, but, of course, it's easy to give stuff away, a bit harder to sell it. Still, I figure it's worth a shot for those occasions when I have ten feet of table space to fill up. 

Week 3: 8344 Words

Missed my goal for the week. Every year, I get a flu shot and, every year, I still get the flu. It started as a scratchy throat Sunday and then three lost days where I pretty much stayed in bed around the clock. I pecked out a few words Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but even though I started feeling good enough by yesterday to get up and get out of the house, my head still feels full of cotton. I really hope I can shake it off and get back into the game soon. Fortunately, I'd beaten my goal a little the first two weeks, so I'm still on target for the year.

Read another 150 pages or so of Roots. Past the halfway mark in the book.

Next weekend I head to Charlotte for the Charlotte Minicon. I've only got a half table, so I'm only taking dragon books, at least to display. After that, I'll be doing three days at Durham's Robotic Rodeo. My situation there is flipped and I've got more space than I usually get, so I'm planning to expand with some art offerings. More on that next week!

Week Two: 11366 words

Worked a little on three different books this week, Dragonsgate, Squire, and Nobody Nowhere. I'm still a little nervous about not staying focused on one project alone until it's done, but so far I'm pretty happy with everything I'm doing and satisfied with my word count. 

With Dragonsgate, I'm finally hammering down exactly why each character is in the novel. You think that's something I'd figure out before I started writing the book, but sometimes when I write characters just show up and stick around, volunteering to do more work. On the flip side, I also have legacy characters who wind up in the book just because they were in the previous books and I feel like I should do something with them. These are frequently more challenging because, if I did my job right in the previous book, they've already had a character arc that resolved their emotional conflict and brought them to whatever goal they were pursuing in the last book. Finding a new challenge and motivation that grows out of their previously stated goals can be tricky. 

Two of my characters, Anza and Zeeky, have really just been along for the ride in this book. I'd given them surface reasons to be present, but hadn't really dug deeply into their emotions, and why the mission they are on is important to them. This week, I finally got my handle on Zeeky. Anza, though, is still shrugging off most to the emotional conflicts I keep offering her. I feel like if I can find her grand goal, the book is really going to come to life. But, who knows? It might be the second draft before she decides to play along. I might just have to write a draft where she does what she needs to do to advance the plot and figure out why she's doing it later. Step one of writing a good novel is to first write a bad novel. There are a hundred balls you have to keep in the air while you juggle all the elements of a book. Sometimes you just need to let a ball drop if you want to keep the other 99 in the air. 

Squire is turning into an interesting project. I've made a decision to keep the chapters short, under 1500 words. This isn't completely arbitrary. I'm hoping to target some younger readers with this series, and writing short is forcing me to keep things simple and direct. I think my ordinary style is pretty readable, but I'm also aware that I can be somewhat wordy. A lot of my epic fantasy chapters get close to 6000 words. Part of this is because of the "epic" modifier. A have large casts and lots of plot threads and take time to describe exotic creatures and settings. Squire is going to have a single POV character and a much smaller cast than my previous fantasies. It will still be recognizably epic fantasy, but streamlined. 

My last project, Nobody Nowhere, has been the most fun to write so far. It's still in the early stages of character introduction and plot initiation. My challenge with it will be deciding how many POV characters I want to use. I've already introduced three. I feel certain I need at least one more. But the book has so many interesting characters the temptation is to give them all a little POV time. There are artistic reasons to restrict the POV characters, but another part of me is wondering just how big a mess I'd create if I just went for it and crammed in a dozen POVs. Oh well. Well see. The best way to find out is just to keep writing! 

Reading update: Didn't get to listen to more of Master and Margarita because I had a bunch of chapters of the audio version of Dragonseed to listen to this week. But, I'm close to a quarter of the way through Roots now. It's definitely a great book, but the pacing lags in parts. I can only assume there are some really big time jumps later in the book if this story is supposed to follow the family through to the present day. 

Week 1: 10,400

10,400 words for the first week of January. I've downloaded a tracking calendar that tracks Sunday through Saturday, so I'm cheating a bit on this first week by including writing numbers from last Sunday and Monday, Moving forward my weekly word counts should be cleaner.

This week I wrote two chapters of Nobody Nowhere and finished a chapter of Dragonsgate. The Dragonsgate chapter was pure infodump for the last 3000 words or so, and this informatuion will almost certainly will be chopped up and spread around in later drafts. But, it's a relief to have it behind me. "Show, don't tell," is on most people's list of good writing tips, but it's also probably the number one source of writer's block. You have something big and important to convey and you tie yourself into knots thinking of how to convey it without just having a character deliver a long monologue. But, sometimes, you just need to write the monologue. And at least my monologue is vital to the plot. It's not like Victor Hugo in Les Misérables veering off into a dozen extraneous chapters describing the sewers of Paris.

Goals for the next week: 10,000 words, duh. Very likely in a similar configuration of one Dragonsgate chapter and two Nobody chapters.

Also, along with my writing goals, I'll start posting reading goals. Right now, I'm reading Roots. It's about 900 pages and I'm only 30 pages in, but it's got a good, clean style and engaging characters. I'll try to read at least 200 pages this week. In audio, I'm listening to The Master and Margarita. I listen to audio less frequently since I don't have a commute any more, but hope to listen to at least two more chapters this week.