Why I’ll never be a prolific writer

Since settling into proper “first draft” mode back in October, progress on The Videshi Dilemma remains on track at the moment. However I’m reminded again of something I’ve noticed from previous novels: I’m a slow writer.

This is not a reflection of raw writing speed. When I’m on a roll I can comfortably knock out a thousand words inside an hour. At that pace, if I was writing full time I’d complete a novel in well under a month.

Nor is it a reflection of time available. Yes, I have a full time job and family commitments so I aim to spend an hour a day on writing, as a reasonable and achievable commitment. But even when I have a whole day available to me, I struggle to spend much more than an hour or two actually writing.

My limitation is that I can only write as fast as my imagination works, producing ideas to feed into a scene. So, perhaps it’s better to say: I’m a slow thinker.

On the writer’s “plotter versus pantser” scale, I’m somewhere in the middle. I often start with a scene that caught my imagination but without any idea yet where it’s going. I write a bit, then step back and start plotting the outline. But it’s only a high level outline, with lots of gaps and unknowns. It gives me a sense of structure and direction, but much of the detail emerges over time as writing progresses. The outline plot feeds off the actual writing as much as the other way around. I think this style is better described as a “gardener”.

And this back-and-forth is a vital aspect of my writing process. Once I’m well into a project and have immersed myself in the story, things occur to me that would never have come to mind if I tried to figure everything out from the outset. Back to The Videshi Dilemma, right now I’m about 60% through. I know how things end, and roughly what happens to get there, but many of the details still need to be fleshed out. It’s only now my characters have reached this point in the story did I start to realize some of the pressures and conflicts that should crop up, things I suspect I couldn’t have envisaged before now. So even when I retire and have all the time in the world, I don’t see myself suddenly churning out novels any faster than I do today.

When did Sci-Fi get so boring?

Note – this isn’t referring to the actual stories, there are plenty of good stories out there, I’m talking about the visual appeal of the sci-fi shelf in bookstores.

When I was in my teens, if I had a few minutes to spare on my way to catch the bus home from school I’d often drop into one of the bookstores I passed. I wasn’t particularly looking for something to buy, I would simply feast my eyes on the cover art on display. These were the days of Asimov, Heinlein, Doc Smith, Herbert et. al.

The covers were bright, vibrant, thought-provoking, and above all – imaginative. They begged questions – what’s happening here? Who are these people? What would it be like to live there? These images, decades later, still serve as inspiration for my own art.

Recently, I had half an hour to kill waiting for a picture frame to be put together, so I wandered across the road to a bookstore. I walked out a little while later despairing for the future of my chosen genre, because there was nothing inspiring in sight.

Most of the traditionally-published covers on show seemed to fall into one of three common groups.

Stylized to death: Maybe I’m just out of touch, but I can’t forgive what Jim Tierney did to the Dune series. He isn’t alone, though. There were other covers consisting of plain geometric shapes that IMO do nothing to entice a potential reader. Boring and pretentious.

Wishy-washy: While keeping close in appearance to traditional covers, these have had the life sucked out of them as if the artist was afraid to commit to a clear picture. Distant ships and space stations obscured in an airbrushed pastel haze. A kind of Disneyfied view of space – no hard edges or nasty harsh vacuum here!

CGI perfection: Also close to traditional, these go to the other extreme. Ships and assorted space hardware rendered too perfectly to be true. And always against the obligatory backdrop of sun peeping over the horizon of a planet. Boring and sterile.

But my biggest complaint across the board was a lack of imagination. All three groups come across as generic and dull. After the first few in each group, they all blended into each other, nothing unique or distinctive about them.

Am I just imagining it? Am I being too harsh?

Weekend Writing Warriors - responsibilities

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

 

 

Continuing with a scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Commander Gregor Pavlenko is overseeing maintenance on a giant plasma cannon on board battleship Wrath of Empire. Last week ended with his lieutenant saying: “You always get that faraway look in your eyes.” She grinned. “It’s kinda cute, you know.”

=====

“There’s nothing cute about taking your responsibility seriously.” He glanced once more at the dancing lights of the dashboard. Progress was good, but they’d be at it for hours yet.

Gregor swiveled in his seat and gazed across the room to where a small army of intruders crawled behind and under his familiar battle consoles, wrestling a snake pit of wiring harnesses out from open floor panels and knitting them into the fabric of his world. In some sense, he felt violated, but he brushed off the feeling. This was the empire’s new toy. New levels of automation to bring a clinical calculation to battle decisions. Progress. He’d better get used to it.

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ... 

Following the line of his gaze, Una said, “The techs report they’re close to finished hooking their control lines in.”

“So,” Gregor whispered, “it’ll have its finger on the trigger for real this time.”

“With loads of safeties and aborts in between.” Una’s voice was light, but the set of her shoulders said otherwise.

=====

Weekend Writing Warriors – it’s kinda cute

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing with a scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Commander Gregor Pavlenko is overseeing maintenance on a giant plasma cannon on board battleship Wrath of Empire.

=====

Gregor settled into his seat and nodded thanks as an orderly placed a cup of unsweetened tea on the desk to one side. He sipped the bitter brew and cleared his mind, then turned his attention to the spread of consoles that surrounded his command post.

One by one, stations reported in. Maintenance crews cleaned pipes and nozzles, reattached wires the width of human hairs and jumper cables thicker than his forearm, replaced worn parts, closed hatches and tightened fastenings.

The plasma cannon was ancient technology, and so simple in concept—rip apart atoms of feedstock to create a star-hot plasma, and belch it out in magnetically-confined parcels of destruction—yet so complex to execute. It had been mastered by the navies of the six Families and used by many Freeworlds and brigand outworlds.

Even after all these millennia it remained the most powerful weapon in regular use. Technically, it ranked second place to the quark bomb, but nobody counted that. Attempts to assemble quark bombs had a ninety percent failure rate, along with lost lives and irradiated continents. They were not practical weapons of war.

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ...

The plasma cannon was meek in comparison, but controlling a high grade plasma and directing it in a tight beam was still tricky. It still needed a small industrial city’s worth of power generation, containment systems, cooling systems, and all the attendant controls and sensors.

As a technology, it was commonplace, but only the Skamensis navy had successfully scaled it up to this level.

“You’ve been to see Violet again, haven’t you?” Lieutenant Una Spelze, Gregor’s most senior weapons specialist, plonked herself down at the next station.

He gave a non-committal grunt.

“You always get that faraway look in your eyes.” She grinned. “It’s kinda cute, you know.”

 

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Just a reminder, I am looking for one or two people to act as alpha readers. This would be for a full read through the rough draft to give feedback on the big picture. Does the plot hang together, how do the characters come across, does the story flow and reach a satisfying conclusion ... that kind of thing.

I’m happy to reciprocate if you’ve got work that you’d like an independent read through.

If you’re interested, send me an email (if you have my email address) or reach me through the contact page on my website.

Weekend Writing Warriors – overkill

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing with a scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Commander Gregor Pavlenko is overseeing maintenance on a giant plasma cannon on board battleship Wrath of Empire.

 

=====

There was no practical need for Gregor to be here. In fact, he could watch progress on the overhaul far better from his station in the operations room, but from time to time he needed to see the weapon up close. Watching people crawling like ants over its surface brought home the true size of his responsibility. This was military overkill on an arrogant scale. No-one should hold such power without a generous dose of humility and fear. In his five years as Wrath of Empire’s senior weapons engineer, he’d never yet had to point it at anything other than military targets. He prayed, as he did every time he reported for duty, that he never would.

The moment of introspection passed. He steadied himself against the stanchion and pushed off towards the nearest airlock. Outside the weapon bay, and once more in the ship’s artificial gravity, he shrugged on a jacket against the relative chill and headed back to the twilight world of the combat operations room.

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Weekend Writing Warriors – bring out the big guns

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

Continuing with another scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. We hop ahead in the story to meet another key player ...

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In the weightlessness of the vast weapon bay, Commander Gregor Pavlenko hung from a guide stanchion and swiveled in a slow three-sixty. The skin on his forehead crinkled in the dry heat, and his eyes pricked. Where he gripped the stanchion, the skin on his palms reddened. He should have worn goggles and gloves for this environment, but he wouldn’t be here long enough to suffer more than discomfort.

He was surrounded by sounds of machinery, voices, the clash of metal on metal, but it all seemed to come from a distance, as if heard through a long pipe. Beneath his feet, the barrel of Wrath of Empire's plasma cannon stretched into the distance, obscured by a bewildering multi-colored maze of machinery. Two thousand feet long, this cannon was the signature weapon of imperial Sword-class battleships. This one weapon was bulkier than the whole of most warships, and could level a city with a single blast.

 

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Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s hoping 2022 brings some relief from the turmoil of 20 and 21!

Weekend Writing Warriors – it’s not wrong

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

I’m sharing the opening scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Crown Prince Julian and his bodyguard, Chalwen, are talking about the late Empress Florence, who they’ve just interred. Chalwen is worried that with Florence gone, Julian would have to compete with his uncle Ivan for the throne if anything happened to his father.

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“I know Father's sad.” Julian screwed his face. “I honestly can't tell what Mother's thinking. Josie and Flossie can't stop bawling their eyes out, of course.”

Of course, Chalwen thought. Of all Paul's children they'd had the closest relationship with their sweetly tyrannical grandmother.

Empress Florence had continued a long line of brutal oppression with imaginative savagery, only softening in her later years with the births of twins Josephine and young Florence, two years Julian's junior. Something had changed her then, ending in her declaring Paul her successor rather than the elder Ivan.

Could a last minute change of heart really make up for decades of iron rule?

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ...

From the corners of her eyes, Chalwen noted the six members of Julian’s escort falling in around them as they entered the shadowed avenue leading back to the residence. Steel-grey clouds chased the last few rays of sun, and a damp chill seeped through the gardens from the ocean beyond the clifftop wall.

“To answer your question, no, it's not wrong.”

 

=====

That’s the end of the scene. Of course, the question Chalwen refers to is the opening line where Julian asks “Is it wrong of me not to feel sad?”

Happy Christmas folks!

Weekend Writing Warriors – line of succession

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

I’m sharing the opening scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Crown Prince Julian and his bodyguard, Chalwen, are talking about the late Empress Florence, who they’ve just interred. Julian just asked if the old Empress could have resumed the throne in the event of his fathers death.

 

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Chalwen pondered the question. “In theory, if your uncle Ivan didn't beat her to it. But that's no longer a consideration. You're right. As next in line, you do need to prepare yourself.” More than you can know. Chalwen shuddered again. If anything should happen to Emperor Paul, Ivan had little hope of wresting power from a still-formidable Florence. But young and inexperienced Julian? That was another matter.

 

 

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Weekend Writing Warriors

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image.

I’m sharing the opening scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Crown Prince Julian and his bodyguard, Chalwen, are talking about the late Empress Florence, who they’ve just interred. The last snippet ended with Chalwen saying, “Today, you are only a step away from the Skamensis throne.”

=====

“Why today? Father has been Emperor for a year now. Grandmother already passed the throne on to him, so surely her death changes nothing.”

It changes everything Chalwen wanted to scream. But it would take years for Julian to navigate the maze of conflicting powers that made up the Empire. “True enough, but while Florence lived, in many people's minds she was still an Empress. If anything happened to your father, she could have resumed the throne.”

“Could that really have happened?”

 

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Weekend Writing Warriors – Wrath of Empire

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

I’m sharing the opening scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence. Crown Prince Julian and his bodyguard, Chalwen, are talking about the late Empress Florence, who they’ve just interred. This snippet opens with Chalwen speaking: 

 

=====

 

“Your grandmother was ... a complicated person.” 

“I didn't really know her.” 

Was that sadness in his voice? Regret? Fear, even? 

“I was hoping she would teach me more about statecraft, and ruling the Empire.” 

Chalwen shuddered, then reminded herself that Julian was only nine years old. He was only aware of the last few years of Florence's rule, not the bloody century that preceded them. 

“I'll have to learn one day, and Father is too busy to bother with me.” 

“It's never a bad thing to think ahead. Today, you are only a step away from the Skamensis throne.”

=====

 

As I was preparing to post this, I reached an exciting milestone in this project. I tidied up the last scenes in the story – the first draft is officially done!

I will be reviewing the whole document carefully before putting it through the queue at Critique Circle for a detailed critique, but in the meantime I am also looking for one or two alpha readers. This would be for a full read through to give feedback on the big picture. Does the plot hang together, how do the characters come across, does the story flow and reach a satisfying conclusion ... that kind of thing.

I’m happy to reciprocate if you’ve also got work that you’d like an independent read through.

If you’re interested, send me an email (if you have my email address) or reach me through the contact page on my website.

Wrath of Empire

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

 

It’s been nearly a year since I last posted to WWW. Last time, I posted scenes from The Long Dark, which was published last Christmas. Since then, I’ve been busy drafting a new novel. Over the next few weeks, I’m sharing the opening scene from Wrath of Empire, a prequel to my first novel, Ghosts of Innocence.

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“Is it wrong of me not to feel sad?” 

The question startled Lieutenant Chalwen ap Gwynodd back to the here-and-now. She'd been scanning the tree line and peering into the shadows, alert for anything out of place, when her attention had wandered. A fine stand of thousand-year-old Veshi oaks spread their gnarled canopy over a walkway leading deeper into the Imperial family graveyard. The play of light and shade had distracted Chalwen, a fatal lapse in a bodyguard. 

But here, of anywhere on the planet, was surely safe, and the hectic few days of the official state funeral had been exhausting. All the same, Chalwen cursed under her breath and carried out a hurried situation check. 

Prince Julian was still gazing at the plain memorial where the family had just interred the ashes of Empress Florence. He tilted his head as if in thought, gazing at the simple inscription carved into the rough stone. Chalwen struggled to read his mood. 

 

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Nearing the finish line

It’s been a while, but I can finally say I’m nearing the end of the line with my first draft of Wrath of Empire.

This one has been much more of a slog than I expected. I’ve had false starts before, where I’ve begun drafting and then stalled and set the work aside for a while before resuming, but once I’m fully productive and on a roll I usually reckon on about seven months to reach the end. This time around it will be closer to eleven months.

There are two obvious factors here. Firstly, in a couple of earlier cases, those false starts gave me a sizable foundation to build on, so when I finally resumed in earnest and ran through to the end I was already maybe 15% of the way there. This time, I set out in January with only a handful of scenes sketched out. Secondly, this is a bigger book than I’ve written before so naturally it will take longer.

But setting that aside, it’s felt much more like I’m pushing uphill the whole way. I’ve managed to keep up a reasonable pace, so it’s not like I’ve ever really got stuck, but there have been times when it’s felt like a struggle.

I blogged about some of the challenges earlier on this year, and since I last posted in August I’ve had some tough spells where I really couldn’t see how to tie things up. But happily things have been clicking into place in the last month.

I’m now at the point of fleshing out the last few scenes, and I’m looking forward to settling down and reading the whole thing through from beginning to end for the first time, to see how well (or otherwise!) it hangs together as a complete story.

Things falling into place

I’ve talked about the difficulties of writing a prequel, where I have a few specific facts and events but otherwise no idea how the story is meant to unfold. But writing this story has been (still is, I’ve got some major sections still to go) a journey of discovery.

First, there is the act of fleshing out the main story itself. Delving behind the big sweeping events and making them personal. Getting down to the individual stories. This has, naturally, been the main focus of my efforts, because the glib statements of “X happens, and that led to Y” need to make sense at the micro level of individuals and their motivations and goals, actions and reactions.

This is the normal act of storytelling, except (as I’ve mentioned in previous posts) I’m generally bad at following a high-level outline. My stories have always – without exception so far – drifted miles away from where I first envisaged them going. But I can’t afford to do that this time, the outline is fixed, and so far I’ve managed to stay on course. And it’s been (mostly) fun filling in that almost blank canvas.

But added in to that process, I’ve found delight in taking opportunities for foreshadowing. In Wrath of Empire we meet people who show up in the later books, and it’s fun to show a bit more of their background.

Finally, there is the joy of things unexpectedly falling into place, seemingly by accident.

Shayla’s nemesis in Ghosts is the rather brutal commander in chief of Imperial Security. There, Chalwen is obese and unfit, and that’s simply presented as a matter of fact. When we see her, years earlier, in Wrath of Empire, she’s a bodyguard, extremely fit and active. I knew I had a contradiction to reconcile but I didn’t fret too much about how to explain this. I figured it was something that happened in the years in between. Then out of the blue, story events naturally led to the answer and we see the start of Chalwen’s physical decline. I hadn’t set out specifically to solve this problem, the solution simply materialized.

Staying on course

In writing Wrath of Empire, I’ve mentioned the need to stay on course and not let the story drift away from the key events already set in stone. That bare-bones outline was mentioned briefly in Ghosts of Innocence, which I first drafted thirteen years ago. At that time I had no idea I would consider backtracking and writing about those times, so they were just convenient backstory. I’d given no thought to how events progressed from A to B to C.

Now, of course, it matters greatly.

To help me, I’ve drawn heavily on a number of tools and techniques I’ve accumulated over the years. Most of them are tools I keep handy to help avoid writer’s block, and which I describe more thoroughly in Breaking the Block.

What

First, naturally, there’s the good old standard outline. In terms of what an outline looks like, I reckon there are as many varieties as there are writers, but to me an outline is a top-down expansion of the story. It focuses on what happens, and starts with the main highlights then expands each into greater and greater detail.

Avid and practiced outliners will map out the entire story in this way so they know exactly what will happen in each chapter and scene before they write a word of actual story. I don’t go that far. My outlines are a combination of bullet-form statements laid out as an indented list, and sometimes more fully fleshed-out paragraphs as if I was trying to describe to someone what is happening in this part of the story.

In the case of Wrath of Empire, the top of my outline consists of the three headings: Empress Florence’s funeral, Imperial family assassinated, and destruction of Eloon (Shayla’s home world). These form the outline's skeleton and are the key events that I have to land on. From there, it’s a matter of fleshing out details to make a story.

Of course, as these events take place over the span of four years, that leaves a lot of empty space to fill. Expanding the outline directly only takes me so far, and I don’t do well with simply laying out things that happen. I need other tools to help figure out what goes into that space.

Why

I find it helps to think not just about what happens, but why. A couple of vital tools for me are Motivations/Goals/Methods, and Stakeholder Stories.

The first tool looks at the key players in the story and asks what motivates them, what are they striving for, and how do they set about achieving their goals. The idea is to write just a few sentence to capture the main drivers for the story. You can’t get too deep into this, because the whole point of a story is for people’s goals to be thwarted, so these notes just form the starting point. After that, characters’ actions will intersect and conflict, throwing them off course.

Stakeholder stories takes this method further and examine what happens when things go awry. They generally start with what a character is trying to achieve and how, but they go further and look at how they react when things get in the way. These stories start off with the overarching motivation and goal, but move into a lot of sentences along the lines of “When X happens, it affects Y this way, and Y decides to do Z”. This tool is also a form of outline, but it exposes how the different story threads weave together in a network of cause and effect. I find this a great tool for brainstorming the “what” because it allows me to delve deep into each character and think from their point of view.

Another tool is the character interview. I’ve used this in the past to ferret out some of their underlying motivations. I’ve not used this technique yet for this project, but I have drawn on interviews I happened to do with my main character when I was writing Ghosts.

When

No matter what form my outlines take, I always lay out the main events on a timeline. This helps keep track of multiple threads, making sure they align and cross at the right points. This is especially important when things need to take time to happen, such as traveling from A to B, or things taking time to prepare.

In all my novels, the story timeline eventually becomes the primary outline, and becomes what I regard as my go-to source of truth, a single reference to which everything else aligns.

My timeline usually takes the form of a spreadsheet, with each row representing a day, and columns for each of the main players in the story. This has worked well for my previous novels, where the stories have all taken place over a few weeks of time.

Here is a part of the timeline for Ghosts of Innocence.

Wrath of Empire posed a new challenge for me, because the story takes place over years rather than weeks. I found the spreadsheet format hard to manage, because I needed more flexibility to handle approximations and to move things around as the outline evolved. For this project I settled on using a drawing tool to capture main events in a more free-form picture.

Taken in combination, these techniques have (so far) kept me on track.

Round numbers

Just a very quick update today.

Every evening, when I wrap up for the day, I tally my word count in a tracking spreadsheet. That may sound a bit nerdy, but I've blogged about this before as one of my motivational techniques. My spreadsheet graphs my progress week by week, and I like to see my "actual" line staying above the "target" line on the graph.

Today, I finished the week on exactly 90,000 words.

Talk about a round number.

Also a significant number, as that is often the starting target I pencil in to say I've reached a decent novel size. 

In this case, I know I've still got a long way to go. I think this novel is going to be closer to 150,000 by the time I finish. Noticeably fatter than my last two books, but not out of this world.

Fluid outlines

After six months of steady progress, I’m probably about 60% of the way through the first draft of Wrath of Empire. And this project is posing some challenges that I’ve not had to deal with before.

As this is a prequel, the bare bones – essentially three major events – were already laid out for me in the backstory to Ghosts of Innocence. The novel mentioned them to varying degrees, and gave some sense of the political climate at that time, but I had given no real thought to what happened in any great detail. It was on the level of saying that someone assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, and a few months later the whole of Europe was at war. OK, but what actually happened to lead from one event to the other?

The task, therefore, has been to add flesh to those bones.

I started off with a straightforward outline. Take those pivotal events and try to fill in the gaps. This added a layer, but it was still couched in very general terms, such as “Thwart Ivan’s attempt to claim the throne” and “Huge public turmoil”. Great. I could probably write a history text off those notes, but it would read like a history text with none of the specifics and personal connections that turn it into a story.

I needed to dig into the “who” and “why” and “how” in specific terms that can then be written out as a scene, and brought to life by the actors on the page.

The challenge for me has been this: In the novels I’ve written so far, I’ve had some kind of an outline, but as the story evolves it has always taken off in directions I didn’t anticipate. In each case, there are whole branches of the outline that ended up never being written, because the story took on a life of its own and the early outlines changed dramatically.

Always!

But that is a luxury I can’t afford this time. The story has to arrive at those pivotal events, and it has to arrive on time. Something I’ve never managed to do before!

Hello 2021

Okay, half the year has passed, and I’ve been largely absent from blogging. It’s been a tough spell. 

Nothing singly too bad, not even all bad in fact, but a lot going on that gets overwhelming at times. We’ve all had brushes with varying levels of health irregularities at times, and we’ve had to support each other through various workplace dramas. 

I largely try to ignore, or at least not get too distressed by, world events. Politics south of the border is still a shitshow, and the pandemic is under control in some countries but still wreaking havoc in others. Closer to home we are reeling from the unmarked graves coming to light at old residential schools. Nobody with a shred of human compassion can fail to be moved by the horrors inflicted on thousands of children over the course of many decades. 

All this has left me disinclined to engage with the world at large this year. 

On the upside, there are rays of sunshine at home and at work, and things are largely stable and happy in our little circle. We’ve all had our first vaccine jab and will soon have our second. Restrictions are relaxing and we might get to go out for a meal in the near future. 

On the writing front, I managed to get the paperback of The Long Dark published back in January, and since then I’ve been wrestling with the first draft of Wrath of Empire. But more of that (hopefully) in future posts.

Predetermination

My new book project, Wrath of Empire, is throwing up some writing challenges that are entirely new to me.

People tend to work somewhere on the spectrum between plotting and pantsing – writing by the seat of your pants. At one extreme, some writers will map absolutely everything out – what goes into each chapter and scene – into a detailed outline before they write a word. At the other extreme, some writers literally start writing and see where the story leads them, and plough their way through until they reach a conclusion.

Most writers sit somewhere in between, and I believe that how you go about writing a novel is not a neat linear spectrum between plotting and pantsing, but a whole landscape of possible methods.

In my case, I often start with no clear idea of where the story is headed (classic pantsing) but very soon I need to start adding some structure and direction (a high level plot outline). I then flip between manuscript and outline, and the two feed off each other.

Once I have an outline, my writing isn’t linear. Whenever I get bogged down in one part, I’ll leap ahead to an interesting scene further on, then come back and fill in the gaps. At the same time, the outline itself isn’t solid. All my novels so far have ended up taking very different paths from how I initially envisioned them.

And that’s where I’m finding things challenging this time around.

Wrath of Empire is a prequel. It tells the story of events that are mentioned in Ghosts of Innocence, so the broadest outline of the story has already been determined. And those landmark events can’t be changed.

I still have to flesh out a lot of details and bring them to life with a whole cast of characters and scenes that I haven’t begun to map out, but this time I can’t let the story take me any old where. It has to hit those landmarks on schedule.

Baby steps

As I mentioned last week, The Long Dark is available in all the most popular e-book formats.

I see a couple of you out there were very quick off the mark in downloading copies, and have already posted reviews to Amazon. Heartfelt thanks to you!

The paperback is a step closer. Since my post last weekend, KDP customer service advised me that there have been technical issues shipping to Canadian addresses which they were resolving. I was relieved to hear at least that it wasn’t a policy decision – “due to COVID we’re not shipping to Canada.”

They asked me to wait a few days and try again. I went through the process this morning of ordering a proof copy, not overly confident, but this time the order went through. If things go smoothly, I might have a proof copy in my hands by Christmas.

With things winding down on The Long Dark, I’m now turning my attention more fully to the next project.

This time I’m returning to Shayla’s world, but turning the clock back to where Shayla’s murderous journey began. Wrath of Empire follows Shayla’s original opponent, Chalwen ap Gwynodd, as she shields the young Julian through his uncle’s deadly plots to seize the throne.

Trapped in the lengthening nights of Elysium.

Abandoned by the last convoy south.

Alone with her teenage son.

Anna never thought she would die this way.

It won’t come to that. She won't let it. She scours the darkened town for anything to help them make the long trek to rejoin their clan. But on a world starved of engineering resources it will take all her ingenuity to cobble together a usable vehicle.

A chance of escape is almost in reach when Anna finds they are not as alone as she thought. But the unexpected visitors are on a mission that they will kill to keep secret. Whatever these off-world intruders want, it can't be good for Anna's world, and a fight to save herself and her son becomes a battle for the future of the entire colony.

Available on Kindle, Apple, Nook, Kobo, US $3.99

The Long Dark is published!

Weekend Writing Warriors is a weekly blog hop where participants post eight to ten sentences of their writing. You can find out more about it by clicking on the image. 

 

 

Concluding a scene from The Long Dark in Mikey’s point of view. Mikey is trying to make sense of the adults’ conversation over dinner after the loss of a crawler and one of its crew. They are discussing the difficulty getting replacements, and here Nick responds to Anna’s question about shipping spares instead of whole units:

=====

 

“And yet, their shipping rates always seem to rise for anything useful. Or, as they put it, they give us a special discount”--those words were spat like a curse--“for something as vital as a replacement car. But that’s another purpose for the paperwork. To avoid us abusing their generosity, as they put it.” 

“Rather than letting things fail, isn’t it in their interests to give that special rate for the occasional crate of spares instead? Surely it must make more sense for them?” 

Georgina sighed. “You should have paid more attention to your social and politics lessons, Anna. The shipping doesn’t cost the Company anything.” 

That’s nine sentences. The scene continues ... 

“It’s all part of our colonial agreement.” The animal had vanished from Nick’s face. He just looked like a tired old man again. “Everything they ship us gets charged against our colonial debt.” 

“So if we’re paying the cost anyway, why is everything so difficult?” 

Connections clicked. It’s not easier to replace a whole unit. It’s more beneficial to the Company to keep things run down! Why?

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And, yes, The Long Dark is finally out there. 

Currently available in popular e-book formats (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple). 

I have also uploaded the paperback files but right now I can’t get hold of a proof copy. Amazon says they won’t ship to my location in Canada and their “customer service” is giving me the run-around. But until I am able to review a physical copy I am not prepared to hit “publish”.