Tag: Godslayer (page 4 of 4)

Writer Report: The Inevitable Grind

Gears

As we recover from the recent stress of moving, the dayjob workload ramps up, and everything else competes for what attention I have left, it can be difficult to keep in mind that writing can and should be the foremost area of my interests. I don’t attend university for 4 years to design advertisements, after all. I did it, at first, to teach others about stories, and then decided I’d be happier telling stories myself. And some of the stories I’ve told since then have gone over pretty well.

Sales of Cold Iron have been very slow. I feel I need to do more promotional work, as nobody else is going to do it for me, and that means getting more people to review it, sending out more tweets, talking it up in person to people, and so on. I guess my reluctance to do so comes from the fact that I hate annoying people. I know how it feels to me when I get annoyed by someone talking at length about something of interest to them to the exclusion of all other subjects, and the last thing I want to do is inflict that on others. But I guess I need to suck it up and deal with it if I want to move copies of the book.

Progress on Cold Streets is, unfortunately, also slow. I’ve tried to unstick myself a couple of times in the last few weeks with moderate success. I’m not writing in the huge chunks I need to meet my end-of-year deadline, at least not yet. Time is running out for me and I really want to get another novella out there. I can’t get this thing to pick up if I don’t write, dammit!

Between some historical insights and inspiration from the likes of Martin and Kay, ideas keep rolling around in the back of my mind for attention regarding Godslayer. As much as good chunks of the plot are unlikely to change in their basic structure, so much of Acradea will be different in this new story that these ideas (which tend to crop up after I go to bed and the lights are out) will need to be laid out and sorted so I don’t get tripped up when I start writing the damn thing in earnest next year. Maybe it’s time to buy Scrivener and start cork-boarding things? The jury is out on that one.

More on this as things develop. And if you get annoyed when I start tweeting every day about Cold Iron and its sequels, I apologize.

Writer Report: Break On Through

Courtesy floating robes
Courtesy Floating Robes

There is something you may not know about the writing process.

The rules of writing have been discussed at length in various places around the Internet. But perhaps a semi-unwritten one is that you have to write as much as you can, as fast as you can, even when you don’t want to. Writing is, after all, a job, and none of us necessarily want to work every hour of every day. But if you want to finish your shit, you have to work at it, even when the notion is less than appealing.

That’s what I did yesterday. I felt a little stuck in Cold Streets. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to resolve a scene. But I sat down, picked an option, and ran with it. 2810 words later I stood up and stretched. The dam had broken, and words were flowing again. I feel back on track, because I made myself write when it wasn’t appealing to me. That’s what you have to do when you’re a writer.

I may do some groundwork this weekend for one of the other projects. I’m still trying to decide which one, though. A lot of the preliminary stuff for Godslayer is already done considering the previous drafts, but there will be a lot of changes to come in that. The other project, the untitled sci-fi thing, is very nascent, with only a couple of short stories to work off of for now, but I feel there’s a great deal of potential and I’m going to want to explore it. Maybe just jot down some notes? We’ll see.

Either way I hope to continue to be productive over the weekend. I don’t want to lose this momentum.

Writer Report: Moving Forward

Bard by BlueInkAlchemist, on Flickr

Cold Streets is a slow burner. By that, I mean it’s taking me a while to really get set on fire over it. I’m working on it, and I like what’s happening so far, I just haven’t carved out a great deal of time lately to put more words in sequence. I have a move coming up in the near future, and that’s going to eat in to my writing time. I have books and clothes to donate, old geegaws to bequeath to others, and the current place needs some sprucing.

My mind hasn’t been idle, though. What was once going to be a multi-novel fantasy series will, I believe, get compressed into one epic volume. After reading some other stories and watching a couple old favorite films, it occurs to me that not everything needs to be a serial. Not ever story needs a sequel. So Asherian and his world of Acradea will appear in a single novel. And, based on the timbre and themes of the rewrite, and how much more of the story I will be including from the very beginning, it’s getting yet another title change. For the time being, I’m calling it Godslayer.

Somewhere between the novellas of Morgan & Seth’s escapades and this fantasy epic, I want to work on a smaller novel, or perhaps novels, with a sci-fi bent. The arrival of the new version of Netrunner on my back step combined with classics like Blade Runner remind me that the future doesn’t necessarily have to be chrome-plated and shiny, or at least if it is, it need not necessarily be that way for everybody. What I like about futures with an even slightly dystopian bent is that super-advanced technologies, be they androids so life-like they act and feel like humans or faster-than-light travel or interstellar colonization, feel matter-of-fact, an aspect of everyday life that you don’t have to spend pages upon pages describing. And I’ve already written a couple of well-received short stories with this sort of bent, and I’m interested in seeing how I could expand the idea. Alien races, perhaps? Maybe a distant but superficially benevolent overlord whose dictates are at least partially responsible for the crapsack world our characters find themselves in? This bears further investigation.

More on these ideas to come. Also to come, more reviews of Cold Iron as well as some other surprises! Stay tuned.

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