There are quite a few things coming up! Woot! Woot already! By the end of this week, I should have another vintage fashion spotlight. Remember those? We also have one more Taos interview ready to go, and at least three writers and their process interviews in the wings. Next week, I’ll be up on someone else’s site in an interview myself. At some point I want to post some pictures of my new vintage dresses and talk about them. Gotta find some time to do some hair and make up. 🙂 I hope to get to this in February. And, starting a new book means RESEARCH! So you’ll be getting some research on a variety of what will seem like disparate topics.
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Let’s talk about starting a new book. I’m as done with Abigail Rath as I can be for now. I am waiting until February to finish up the revisions on The Were-Humans (thank you, my wonderful beta readers!). So, the logical thing to do is to begin the new book. Which I have.
To prepare for writing a five book series, almost all of them stand alone books, I have done some plotting. Before I wrote Abby, I spent a few months plotting about 90 years of Klarion soap opera. I did research on the houses and the clothes, some on the period in general, and I started the third book. What I discovered was that it wasn’t working the way I wanted to because I am still too married to its previous incarnation. So, I stopped that, did a mad NaNoWriMo, and generated a middle grade novel from the primordial goo that came from it .
I took Klarion book 3 to Taos. It got some good crit. But I did this VERY IMPORTANT thing at Taos, which might have been the most important nugget of writing I took from the workshop. At the beginning of the second week, I asked several kind Taosians to come to my room and help me figure out NOT the human part of the book, which I know very well, but the cosmological part of the book, which was a mystery to me. What we came up with is very exciting stuff to me, with lots of double crosses and intrigues, twists and turns, that span across the Egyptian pantheon and the changes that occurred religiously in Egypt to create the situations that Erasmus’ Klarions ancestors have to deal with. This is the WHY of the book, and it means that many of my human characters are puppets (awww!!!) until about book 3, when one of them is too smart for the celestials’ own good. Anyway, thanks to the Taosians who helped me plot. And thanks to my husband Bryon, who recently told me that the Klarion scroll was made by Solomon. Check out Solomon, by the way, and see his traffic with demons.
So, this is all very exciting, heady stuff. It means that I need to write Book One first. Also, in a private conference, Walter Jon Williams said, “So why aren’t you writing book one first?” And I’d already had this plot session at Taos, and I let my mouth gape open like a fish. I had no really compelling reason to write book 3 first, and I now had compelling reasons to write book 1.
I am writing book one.
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Now, for those of you who craft, paint, build, whatever, you know how cool it is to finish a project, right? And you know how, at the end of that project, everything is so cool and you’re just putting on little touches, or shoring things up, or adding that final sequin.
Then, you start something new, and you find yourself on the brink, staring into the abyss, with all those ideas and notes and hopes and the story playing so well in your head, but you know you are an imperfect translation machine, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah? It is *such* a contrast to that finishing stage, during which you have conveniently forgotten that there was a time when you were staring int the abyss with that project. Right? Tell me I’m right!
So, right now, I’m slapping down a lot of stuff on the page, and it’s, well, you know it’s not there. The overall narrator of the series is not in the first book, so there will be that layer to play with, and there’s a lot of white box syndrome, because in order to fill in the houses and cities and so forth, much, much more reading has to take place.
But the characters are there, and the action is there, and a stack of books are there. And while you are staring into the abyss, what you could make is infinite in possibility at this point. So every day, I try to write a bit and read a bit, try to get that synthesis, build around that core, and most importantly of all, KEEP THE STORY MOVING FORWARD.
All this will take time. At least the research that I am doing will play out over several books, although each one will have some tweaking of its own. And the challenge isn’t the starting of the thing. It’s the finishing of the thing. I’ve been dinking around with this universe in one way or another since 2002. I’m hoping that during that time my subconscious has been building something cool.
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One more note before I get down to some day job envelope stuffing: there is a great deal of joy in starting a new project. I am intimidated by the scope of the thing. But I am also excited and enthusiastic, and I also know that the way you run a marathon is to put one foot in front of the other foot. I hope to convey some of that enthusiasm to you as I tell you about the interesting things I am learning for this book.
