Archive for the Category »Kingdom of Raydin «
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.
I had this plan for my MC in Diamond Crier–she has a serious crush on a guy that’s a little out of her age range (which, of course, he doesn’t return) but there’s a boy her age that’s keen on her. She partly knows it but is a bit too focused on Fash (the older guy) to really care.
I wrote his initial entrance scene I think it was last week. He just kind of made an appearance, noticed her fumbling with some food and that was it. Not a fantastically good-looking boy but he’s not something to sneer at either. So here I am, trudging along during my normal writing time last night, getting the scene ready for their actual introduction when splat! Another guy drops some food on her shoe.
Now I did want that to happen but it wasn’t something I was going to dwell on and he was going to be a guy that Sabina (the MC) didn’t pay much mind to other than he just dirtied her shoe. But noooooooooooo. He had to go and make his presence known and has completely foiled the meeting of the original boy and Sabina. Nope, she’s telling me. She doesn’t want the blonde no-name. She wants the overgrown teddy bear that’s just as clumsy with food as she is. WTF? Where did he come from?
Not that I’m upset or anything. Really, I’m not. I just follow the writing, wherever it may go but I didn’t expect this at all. Talk about a wrench in my spokes. Although I can’t help but feel excited when something like this happens because, to me anyway, it means it was meant to be there, in that moment. I’m kind of jonsing to know just where all of this goes. It could rightly change the course of my story, at least in that relationship respect.
