State of the Writer: Halfway through 2014

Is the year already half over?  It feels like it flew by.  And yet I'm also eager for it to be over, since Thorn of Dentonhill is scheduled to be released in February 2015.  Despite everything, there's still something dreamlike and unreal about all this. 

Because this year has been, in many ways, all about anticipation.  I mean, do not get me wrong, I have been working: edits for Thorn, edits for Murder of Mages, and the rough draft of Elements of Aventil, aka Thorn II. 

And it's rough, but as of today, it's done.  Five months and change, which is the fastest I've turned around a rough draft of a full length novel.  It took a little longer than I had hoped, as I had really wanted to get it done before the end of May.  I just missed end of June.  But still: rough draft done.  Now to let the beta readers suffer go over it.

Which means only one thing: Get started on the rough draft for Murder of Mages II! 

Because this year-- the year of anticipation-- is also a year of opportunity.  Strike while the iron is hot.

And right now, dear friends and readers, I'm feeling like it's scorching hot.

The rest of the year will involve more writing, and whatever the next steps that are involved between now and publication.  Galley proofs, ARCs, and... whatever else.  I'm beyond excited.

I'll also be at ArmadilloCon.  If you can come-- July 25th to 27th-- I recommend it.  Come say hello.  I don't know if I'll be doing any more cons this year, but I intend to go to several more in 2015.

Because 2015 is going to be a very big year.

Cover for THE THORN OF DENTONHILL

So, I received this in the mail today from my amazing editor:

This comes from Paul Young, of whom I am now a big fan.

You know, there's been plenty of "pinch me" moments where I wasn't sure this was really happening.  Despite contracts, first check, editorial meetings, etc., there's still this little voice in the back of your head whispering.  Telling you it's all some elaborate prank.

But seeing this, it really hit home.

This is really happening.

Banshee, and the Slow Cooker Process: 2013 in Review, Part Three

The other big milestone, in terms of what I've been writing, that I hit in 2013 was getting solidly underway on Banshee. 

Banshee is a project that's been stewing in the back of my mind for a long, long time, and has gone through several permutations in that slow cooking process.

Part of the reason I took such a long time to get around to this is the little promise I made to myself to finish the first books of my four "Maradaine" series before I really moved on to a new major writing project.  I'm not entirely sure why I felt I had to do them first, but that's how I felt, but on some level it was probably a good thing.

Because the Banshee I would have written several years ago is not the work I'm writing now.  Not even remotely.  Essentially everything except the central character (Lt. Samantha Kengle) and the name of the ship (and only tangentially) is different now.  And in the older versions, Lt. Kengle was more the nominal lead in an ensemble, and now she's in the central spotlight, the only POV character. 

Part of that had to do with the worldbuilding.  I started the Space Opera setting that Banshee lives in way back in 2002, but it's evolved and grown a lot in the past eleven years.  As have my writing skills.  My first attempts at Banshee, some of which reached nearly 50,000 words, were all wrong.  Essentially fanfic for a universe that only existed in my head.  It was only after I really started to interrogate what the story was, and who it was about, and why it was about them, that the pieces really came together.

When I shipped Way of the Shield off to the agent, Banshee was really ready to go like gangbusters.  And in about three months, it's about two-thirds to three-quarters done.  Not too shabby.

So that was 2013, which turned out to be a pretty good year for my writing. And I have a very good feeling that 2014 will turn out even better.

Way of the Shield, and the Geena Davis Rule: 2013 in Review, Part Two

The next big milestone of accomplishments in 2013 as finishing the draft of Way of the Shield, cleaning it up and sending it off to the agent.  He just recently sent it back to me, so now I've got a last round of tweaks and polishes to put on it before sending it back to him to put out into the world.

Long time readers will be aware that Way of the Shield was something of an albatross around my neck for much of 2012.  I was working on it and it simply wasn't coming together at all.  I had actually decided to put it to the side and focus on other things early this year, but it kept poking at me until I cracked the problem I had been having with the antagonists.  It actually came together when my beta reader/sounding board guy asked me a simple question regarding Way of the Shield, and that brought about a breakthrough in writing out a long and complicated response.  Doing that brought me from a manuscript languishing at around a third of the way done to complete in two months.

Breakthroughs can work like that.

The other thing I did with Shield, both in the original draft and again in the current clean-up, was confound the gender expectations of the old knightly orders that Dayne is a part of.  Druthal and Maradaine are hardly a paradise of gender equality, but I wanted the Orders to reflect the idea that anyone who gets through the training process is considered an equal.

But my first chapter had no female characters. 

Then I was thinking about this bit of advice Geena Davis recently gave regarding female characters in Hollywood movies, advice I think can easily apply to genre fiction as well:

Go through the projects you're already working on and change a bunch of the characters' first names to women's names. With one stroke you've created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they've had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it's not a big deal?

And it stuck me, if I've already established this idea that the Orders have more gender equality than the culture at large, then why not just have Dayne's chapterhouse master in Lacanja (the city Way of the Shield starts in before Dayne returns to Maradaine) be a woman?  I never gave Master Thall a given name, male or female, to begin with, so rewriting the scene involved little more than some pronoun switching.  But, I think, it will have a strong effect on the worldbuilding of the Orders, which will ripple through the rest of the book-- which already has many female characters in a variety of roles.

Regardless, as I mentioned back in May when I finally finished the draft, it felt very good to get this particular project out of its long, slow, "work-in-progress" state.

State of the Writer: Summer 2013

A writer is at a party where he meets a neurosurgeon.  "So you write books," the surgeon said.  "I've always thought about taking a summer off to write a book."  "That's funny," said the writer.  "I've thought about taking a summer off to do some brain surgery."

So, we're knee-deep in summer now, and for me it's always more of a challenge to maintain my writing discipline, but I've been pretty good so far.  The main thing I've been working on is editing, and that's a bit harder to put a metric on.  When you're writing, you can use daily word count to track your progress.  That doesn't quite work with editing.

Given that, here's where things stand, and where I plan things to go for the rest of 2013.

Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew and Maradaine Constabulary are, of course, out in the world shopping.  I try not to dwell too much on the details of this process.  That's what agents are for. 

Way of the Shield is finally finished as a rough draft.   Editing it to a fine, clean draft that is worth sending to my agent is my current "main" project.  Part of that is also outlining summaries for the planned Books Two and Three of Way of the Shield.  Knock on wood, that stuff should all be send to the Agent by the end of July.  Should. 

Secondary project is fine-tuning the outline for Banshee, which has gone through a lot of permutations over the years.  However, I've found a new angle that really excites me, and I look forward to tackling that once I send out Shield. 

Beyond that, I've got a handful of loose ideas that haven't quite coalesced into a plan.  Of course, with any luck, someone will be wanting the Book Two for Thorn, Holver Alley, Maradaine Constabulary or Way of the Shield.  I might even write a first chapter for each as a warm up.  I'm thinking of also trying my hand at novelette/novella length works.  We'll see.  I've had some Secret Projects that I've intentionally kept back-burnered until I finished the quartet.  So something may beat its way into the forefront of my brain.

Also: Rayguns Over Texas will be an actual, printed book that you can hold in your hands in two months.  Isn't that exciting?  I mostly consider it a small reward, a reminder that this hard work will be worth it.  And it will.  And as another reminder of that, here's Macklemore to play you out.