Archive for the Category »Kingdom of Raydin «
At this point it’s not so much editing but total rewriting. I’m at half the pages in the second draft than I was in the first and I’m deleting entire chapters instead of just adding bits and pieces or tweaking. This is what happens when you realize as you read back over your work that the timing of your story is all wrong and needs to be shifted. It’s a lot easier to shift, say, Legos, than it is to shift a storyline. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m bringing Sabina much more into the story than she was (and she’s the MC, yeah, I know), making more events current than passive, extending the timeline so the relationships can be substantiated and moving the entire story back six months so the ending coincides with a major holiday in the kingdom.
I’m realizing, though, that I’m having some trouble with the characters’ interactions, especially the relationship development. I’m finding it hard to build it up slowly (the romantic relationships) and have the nuances be subtle, or what I see as subtle, like it would be in real life. But Ketin, Mic, Cab, Talem and Pyle are coming into their own as characters. I’m struggling a little bit with Lania. She showed me an awesome part of herself at the beginning of the story but how she’s acting now doesn’t really fit that first part. She could be screwing with me or she could be saying I’m this and that. I have no idea. She’s a difficult one. Bettis isn’t really even in the picture yet but I’m thinking she will be, just not as her normal self.
I can’t remember if I mentioned these characters (other than Sabina and Cab) in prior posts but they’re all sort of central to the Diamond Crier plot. Sabina’s the MC, Mic’s her love interest (subtle love interest), Cab and Lania come in a pretty close second, Ketin is the catalyst and Pyle and Bettis are acting as sort of fillers but their changes in character will be needed for the plot. There’s also Fash, Barloh, Gorvish, Mein, Torle and Jaen (not to mention Jeviar and his wife, Lana) but I don’t need to get into them right now. They’re a lot easier for me to work with.
Holy crap weasels! Talk about a surge! I’ve doubled my hit count in the last 24 hours. I guess a fair number of people are just as shocked as I am about Meyer being author of the year. That was the most popular post by a long shot. So, yay for stats!
And yay for me! I think. It would appear I’ve won a copy of Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side from the IB Teen Blog but I’m not 100% sure. The comments section of Beth’s interview on that site was the entry ballot and there are two Donnas on there, including myself. If she’s going by handle, then it’s me but I wanted to confirm to her before I got all excited. How embarrassing would that be? So, it looks like I won but I’m not really celebrating yet until I know for sure. I haven’t been contacted yet or anything so we’ll see.
Now onto the editing oi. I knew DC would need some serious editing but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad. Well, not bad, really, just a lot more than what I imagined. My situational timing is off and I’m focusing on the wrong events, and on the wrong characters, in some parts so that needs to be fixed, on top of a total rewrite for the first four and a half chapters, not to mention I still don’t know where this story is actually going to start but the idea is becoming clearer the deeper into editing I get.
I’ve figured out that reading this particular manuscript is like reading (or feebly attempting) to read Old English through to Middle English. I’ve said about the tone before that it’s a drastic shift at the four and a half chapter point. With hindsight I thought the shift was much more drastic than what it actually is. It is drastic, but the language I was trying to get away from is more tapered.
I apologize in advance for any nonsense that doesn’t sound human in this post. I have some kind of chest/head cold thing that’s progressively getting worse despite the NyQuil I took this morning. Apparently all that stuff is good for is knocking you out. I’m still drowning in my own phlegm and don’t have a voice although I think I have a fever now and can’t tell whether this weird feeling is me getting sicker or the NyQuil wearing off. Fun!
So I started editing Diamond Crier on Monday, like I planned. Yay for keeping to my schedule! I’m finding that while some of the language, if I do say so myself, is quite nice, it’s nine different levels of stilted. What was I thinking? That’s supposed to be the voice of a ten year old? That’s some mighty vocab for a kid. I don’t know what I was reaching for but I think I had some misconception in my head on what fantasy should sound like and went for that. Oh thank god I consigned to the pull four and a half chapters in.
While the language is on ten foot stilts, I’m amazed that I wrote it all because it’s something that you’d find in one of those pretentious navel-gazing novels that could win awards. Most of it isn’t that good and is just one giant contrivance but some of it really took me by surprise. Of course, it has to die for the sake of the story but I’m keeping the parts I really like because I have this odd fear that I’ll never write so naval-gazingly eloquent again even though I know that’s not the case.
That’s not to say YA can’t be eloquent. It certainly can but this was not YA and wasn’t anything other than reaching way too far over my head in the writing department. Or rather reaching for something that just isn’t me.
Not much by the way of editing is getting done to the first four and a half chapters because I know they need to be completely rewritten to match the tone of the rest of the story but I’m seeing what needs to be hacked completely, what’s a massive info-dump and what might have potential in the rewrite. I’m still not sure where the story actually starts but hopefully rewrite will shine some light on that.
Ok, I’m going to quit while I’m ahead as I’m not too sure what it is I wrote and I think I just heard my dog yak on the stairs. Lovely. He’s sick too. Blah. Editing with a clogged head is not good.
It’s done. Arc 1 of Diamond Crier is officially written in its horrible first draft form. Kaputsnick. Finito. My hand is ready to fall off. I even broke my writing rules to finish this piece. I usually write Monday through Thursday in the evenings, giving myself a break from Friday through Sunday so I don’t overheat on writing. The “serious” stuff anyway. I just didn’t want this dangling around any longer. To be fair, my technical goal was to have it finished by the end of summer. End of summer, officially, being yesterday around 11 am. My broader goal was to have it finished by the end of this month. I did it with a week and a half to spare and only within about 28 hours of the original goal. I’m so proud of myself!
I actually finished reading Eclipse on Friday and Saturday morning/afternoon because it needed to be back at the library by 5 yesterday. Review to come. After that (and my tire rotation) I set to work to finish the final scenes for DC. They took longer than I thought. Much longer, actually, and my wrist was hurting last night. My right wrist alone has three cysts and tendinitis outside of constant writing. Owweee.
I actually semi-banned myself from the internet until it was finished. I checked my email on Saturday, watched Bones and once I finished writing Saturday, changed the colors and stuff on the blog (since I’ve only been meaning to do that for a month). Other than that, just writing.
I definitely came more into my own towards the end of this story, much more comfortable with what I was writing, character relationships and so on. I know what I need to rework once I start editing and I know I still have a lot of work ahead of me even though it is written. Still, at this point I think I’m ahead of schedule. Always a plus!
So between now and November, I’m farting off in the “serious” writing department. I have websites I need to work on, a vacation to take and some fanfiction to write. I can relax for a little while. November will be Earth Shatterer’s month and then once December rolls around, I’ll be picking DC back up again to start the edit. In the interim I’m going to obtain Self-Editing for Fiction Writers so I’m not completely blind going in for the edit since I’ve never edited an entire novel before. This is one of the few editing books that I constantly see being recommended so it’s destined to be in my possession soon.
I’m fidgety now, though. I’ve been planning my time around writing this novel since December and now that I can actually relax, I can’t! I need to get into a schedule of relaxing. I better do it sooner rather than later because November will be here in a blink and I’ll be back to freaking out about word count.
Speaking of word count, I don’t know what DC’s final number is yet. I still have to type that in. Since I can take my sweet time doing it, I should have it in say a week or so. Definitely before I go on vacation in October.
Holy freakin’ crap I’ve officially finished my first, full-length novel! Yay!
Let me know what you think of the new design for the blog. The colors and the graphics are a much closer match to the actual website than they were before. Also, I’ll be posting my review for Eclipse within the next day or so. Yeah, Jacob Black has joined my shit list that has Edward and Bella on it. Ugh.
I’ve convinced myself I’ve opened Pandora’s Box with Diamond Crier. I’ve given myself all the room in the world to work with this story. Personally, I prefer confines. It gives me set walls in which to work. Without them the inundation of ideas can be overwhelming and counterproductive to my writing since the influx keeps coming and the story keeps changing. It makes my wrist cry.
I am trying desperately to get this story written. Right now I don’t know if I’m going to stop after this arc finishes and wait to edit or write through to the original ending that’s been pushed back by the addition of this arc and edit then. On top of that, the land of South Fair is ever niggling at the back of my mind and I so want to explore that region, perhaps shove Sabina into it once this main Diamond Crier story ends.
The ability to keep my mind focused on this one story and not let it wander into other sections of the world is proving to be a little difficult but I’m soldiering on, taking notes so I don’t forget anything and will come back to it all. I’m starting to consign to the fact that Diamond Crier might not be my first novel per se, at least not on query considering all the changes it’s going through and all the different stories I’m pulling from it. The editing is going to be extensive and at this point, I don’t see it being the first on the query boat because of the complexity of the world. I really do believe I’ll finish other novels first before this one’s good to go.
I wanted Diamond Crier to be my first on submission but I also want it to be perfect and not rushed. It doesn’t deserve to get released until it’s rightly finished and since the other stories are much more confined in terms of the world they’re in, they’ll probably come before this one.
With that being said, I’m seriously considering doing NaNo this year and I think I’m going to be pumping out the Earth Shatterer story for that one. It’s a fun story that I think I can crank out just to prove to myself that I can write 55,000 words in a month. I’ll put my head through a wall when it comes to typing in but the words will be written, won’t they?
I’m still aiming to finish Diamond Crier by the time I go on vacation in the first week of October. It’ll require some strict concentration on my part but I think I can do it. That would be the first arc only, though. I can do that but I don’t think I can crank out what would be a whole ‘nother novel on top of it in a couple weeks. I would like use of my hands and everything. Always a plus.
And completely unintentional, I should say.
A character appeared in my WIP whom I love to pieces. At this point he’s probably my favorite character. He just kind of appeared out of nowhere like the rest of them do but I’m glad he did. His presence gives the story a sense of mysticism, not to mention his homeland sounds really freakin’ cool. And I invented it!
He’s from a section of the kingdom called South Fair. It’s a port province so it acts as a cultural melting pot. Think New York City but nowhere near as hard and brutal. The thing is there’s a very large concentration of energy in that area, magic completely separated from what the Giver would dole out. This is magic of the earth as opposed to magic of the stars. The more native people to the area (those that have been there from the beginning or at least a few generations) are closer in respect to gypsies. Think Romani. But there’s also, for lack of any other reference, Native American mysticism there, worship of the earth and the water, voodoo cultures, types of jive from New Orleans. Pretty much it’s an amalgam of a bunch of different mystic people centrally located into one area (mind, they’re not all there).
Now because of that, because of all that earth-bound energy buzzing around the air, it creates a draw, a sense of lost to anyone that may visit if they so wish to succumb to it. It’s a raw energy, filtered through the people directly from the earth. The people in that area aren’t looked on as weird per se, just extraordinarily different since it’s not the norm in the “upper” kingdom. The rumor of the kingdom is that people go to South Fair to get lost. It’s not what you’d call a vacation destination and while people do emerge from it safe and sound, they usually go there with specific purposes in mind.
Now, lets not read too deep into the magical elements of this. In no way does the star/Giver magic reflect a kind of “heaven-sent” magic while the earth-bound magic of South Fair represent some kind of “hell-sent” magic. Not a chance. The earth in and of itself exudes it’s own magic and energy. The people of South Fair have learned through generations to harness it themselves. The star/Giver magic is doled out to the people of the kingdom at the Giver’s will as directed by the stars. The stars, physically, hold the magic. If you’re not bestowed with a gift from the Giver at birth and you’re not from a culture in South Fair, you’re just a normal person. But a person from South Fair can be given a gift since it’s a province of the kingdom of Raydin, as is the case with the character in question. He’s a Crier but also from a culture in South Fair so he’s much more superstitious than the rest and can harness a touch more energy than the others because of where he came from. Not much because he was young when he was taken so his experience is limited but it’s more than just being a Crier.
I briefly mentioned yesterday that I had a wrench thrown into my spokes in the shape of a rather large boy that I had no intention of being in the story. Well, because of that, the whole thing’s now reshaping in my head. It’s done this once already–started off pretty small, grew and then whittled itself down into something more manageable. Once it kind of tweaked and twacked itself into what I’m currently writing, I thought I was good to go. Boy am I wrong. Looks like it’s on the upswing again. It’s starting to remold itself like a handful of Silly Putty and what I once saw as only one story with some other works within the world is turning back into at least two stories with other works in the world. It won’t stop morphing!
Not like that’s a bad thing or anything but I thought I was blind-sided by that random-yet-soon-to-be-important character. Sitting at work today the story was reshaping of it’s own accord (actually it started last night before I went to bed but it continued today), giving me a subplot that could rightly be a main plot, thus pushing out the current main plot into another book. And I like this sub/main plot that’s emerging, especially as I write the other boys in this group.
This is not what I had in mind for them at all and while the tone is still pretty light-hearted, the underlying stuff is so freakin’ dark. Well, I did want a darker story and I’ve maintained that from the original inception of the work; just the way it’s told has changed. I’m now on the cusp of incorporating aspects of this world into the main story that I never thought I would because the personalities of these boys is shaping it so. They opened their mouths and I went, “No! What are you doing?! That’s not how you’re supposed to be!” Obviously it’s not about what I want.
The kicker is that I’m trying to punch out my website for the horror convention I’m going to the weekend before Labor Day. Why does it matter? Well my website is on my business card and I figured something should be there should people take a gander at it before I can put anything to it. So I’ve been trying to throw up pieces of the Raydin world just to have something more than a summary of the work but considering the rush and how changeable it all is, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.
