I have failed in my goal of posting here every week. Or every two weeks. Or every month. Or every two months. Or three. This is a failure I could have predicted from the start, and one reason I never started a blog before last spring.
So, where have I been?
Since August, The Kalis Experiments has been released by Next Chapter Pub (you can buy it here: http://mybook.to/kalis ), and I’ve prepped my novella Within a Name (you can pre-order the eBook here: http://mybook.to/withinaname ), due out at the end of this month. I’ve begun brainstorming on what comes after Tides, and I finished outlining and began work on the third and final book in the Tides Trilogy, The Grace’s War. And yes, I know Steven King poopoos outlines, but whatever, I poopoo Steven King’s stance on outlines (but I’ll get into that more in my next post, which won’t be four months away. Probably.)
I’ve also done a healthy amount of fucking around, traveling to Okinawa, and playing video games, which will turn my brain to mush, or so they say.
Fine. So what’s this post supposed to be about?
Good question. It was supposed to be about where I’ve been, but since that’s wrapped up early, I’ll extrapolate on a few things.
Since I sent off The Black Wall to a handful of beta readers (a term I despise as much as “influencer” or “blog” for some reason I can’t account for, but that’s what they’re called, apparently), I’ve tried to dive back into The Grace’s War, and it occurred to me that it’s the first full length novel I’ve started from scratch in a very long time.
The Black Wall was the first book I wrote—a 200K word travesty I’ve had some concept of since high school (back then the two characters protagonists, Anna and Pasha were werewolves who could be controlled by people who couldn’t pronounce “sh,” and Syrina was a secondary antagonist. That might give you some indication of how much the story evolved if you’ve read The Kalis Experiments. Spoilers incoming: There’s no werewolves anywhere on Eris (that I know of). There may or may not be people with a speech impediment that prevents them from saying “sh,” but if there are, they play no role in the story).
So scrapped it, but I liked the concept, and I liked Syrina, but I wanted to make her more than the two dimensional corporate slave that she was in the original version. So I wrote a prequel. That became The Kalis Experiments, changed the entire trajectory of the story, and turned Syrina from a vaguely interesting antagonist with almost no role in the story to the main protagonist.
After that, I pulled the bloody bones out of the original Black Wall manuscript and rewrote the rest.
But it had a framework. The Grace’s War is the first book since The Kalis Experiments that I’ve started working on from scratch, and I wrote that rough draft over eight months in (around) 2012.
Starting the process again reminded me of a lot of things I learned by trial and error over the 8-10 years it took me to fail to write the original version of The Black Wall.
Those things will be the topic of my next post because they don’t fit into “Where Have I Been?”
And to be honest, if I’m going to post more than every four months, I’ve got to learn how to space this shit out better.