For the journey I thought I would load up on some audiobooks and come back with about three new stories under my belt, but to my surprise and disappointment, those things are freaking expensive! I’m sorry, I rarely even spend $35+ on a hardback book these days, much less for a damn MP3. At least with a hardback I have a physical book to display somewhere. Now I don’t have a clue what goes in the audiobook business, so if you do, please enlighten me. I’m not trying to slight the effort that goes into reading an entire book aloud, and doing so with enough enthusiasm so bring the words to life, I was just taken aback.

Anyway, back to me. I’m still working on Traces. I would say it is going well, though not as quickly as I anticipated. I guess that shouldn’t really surprise me. While writing new material for that, I’ve also started taking a look back at my first novel and started gearing up for the epic revision it needs. Getting away from it for a while has really allowed me to look at it in a different light. The opinions of my test-readers has been really valuable as well.

Another exciting thing that is going on is the Kill Your Darlings ATL writing club that has popped up on the scene. I’ve been wanting for some time now to join a writing group. Previous scouting of what is around town never grabbed me, but honestly I didn’t look very hard. This group seems like a cool bunch of people with eclectic styles of writing. Many of them write online or maintain active blogs, so I’m also hoping the group motivates me to keep this site better maintained. I’m bringing a few of the first chapters of Traces, and will probably bring some of the chapters from the novel formerly known as As Above, So Below. (Yes, I am officially canning that title. I’ve never really thought it fit, but the kicker came while channel surfing a few weeks ago. That teenage witch movie The Craft was on, and boy did I groan when the witchy-bitches started chanting that phrase in one of their seance thingies).

So more on the title change later. The real point of me doing this post was to show everyone the awesome desk setup I have at the new place! It is huge, well lit, and surrounded by power outlets. Yay, outlets! The desk used to be my family’s kitchen table and was built by my dad and granddad. I’ve been waiting to use it for just this purpose for years. So here’s to having the space to spread out and be productive. As you can see, I’ve got the spreading out part down, now I just need to work on that productivity.

The trailer really is a tease. I don’t see how it can do much to peak the interests of anyone who hasn’t already read the book. If I didn’t hold the first book of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in such high regard I probably wouldn’t have bothered to post this at all. But I do –‘A Game of Thrones’ is one of my all time highest rated books ever, genres aside.

So here’s to hoping this show turns out to be HBO’s next Deadwood (a fitting comparison since the ending of both will seemingly never get made, and yes, I know GRRM is not my bitch.) and not a John From Cincinnati mindfuck or the equivalent of some crappy vampire bandwagon show.

Also, for anyone who is interested, some folks at Westeros did a dissection of the images in the teaser. It contains spoilers so unless you’ve read the book already you probably don’t want to read this. I thought it was cool!

Preview of Brandon Sanderson’s ‘The Way of Kings‘

I don’t usually read previews so I haven’t checked this out yet, but I am eager to get the real thing in my hands on August 31st. Brandon Sanderson has really impressed me with his original work and everyone agrees he’s done a fantastic job bringing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series back to — hmm, that might be a poor choice of words.

Sanderson has become one of my favorite authors over the last couple years, not just because of his really good stories, but also because of how open he is with his craft. Whether its giving writing lessons at Jordoncon, or his podcast for writers, Writing Excuses, or his Twitter account where he routinely posts, the dude has really embraced his fans and given me a lot of motivation.

The Way of Kings is to be the first book in The Stormlight Archive. For a book that Sanderson says he has spent ten years writing and world-building, and that will probably reach quadruple page numbers, I expect this series to be as epically awesome as the cover is.

So here is mine. I expounded a little by including the site I ultimately ended up at and by stretching it out to the last 7 days of my browser’s history. But the point remains the same: Writers learn a lot of random shit.

Civil War medicine

Types of brandy

Metal used in coins

Medieval architecture

Early use of anesthetics

Lotus symbolism

Ranks of the army

Last month I posted about a new story I was working on. That is pretty much what I have been doing since then. I had the first chapter already. It came from Traces‘ short-story origin. What I needed what the rest. There were all these elements swirling around that first chapter, and I’d been thinking about them for years. It was time to start capturing them.

The best way for me to begin is to write an outline of the storyline I have in my mind. Ten paragraphs representing ten chapters pretty much told all that. They were very basic, fragmented sentences: Man finds dog, takes it with him. Nothing about who the man is, what the dog looks like, or where he is taking it. That had to come next, and that is really what I have been working on.

Traces is becoming an alternate history dystopian ghost story. It didn’t start out that way. When it began I was only trying to draw a line from the past to the future using the time period between the American Civil War and now. The original short story was “poetic” (confusing),  “imaginative” (rambling),  and “abstract” (vague).  I remember years ago having to read it in class. I got three pages in, set it on fire and ran out the room.

This one is much better.

A little further than halfway, so far it has been a really interesting read. Since the 1200′s, the rock known as uranium has been at the center of a widening gyre of scientific breakthrough, technology inspired advancement in political power, and greed induced mining. Looking at this, it seems naturally allegorical to compare the way uranium wildly casts off particles in an effort to achieve rest (this instability being the source of radiation and the basic principle behind the atomic bomb) with the history of mankind attempting to harness uranium in order to achieve peace and wealth—yet invariably creating mostly destruction, corruption, and war.

Woah, sorry! I didn’t mean to get all back-cover book review on you. It is just a subject I really find interesting. How thematically rich is a story about an esoteric stone that contains the potential for life changing transmutations? That is modern day alchemy, folks.

Related is a book that I read within the past year, Tuxedo Park, by Jennet Conant. This book is about the private scientific labs of Alfred Loomis, where much of the research that went into creating the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were derived from. It covers much more than that, but what drew me to it was the advancements of technology that came during that time.

The history of science is a theme I’ve explored in many of my own stories. Another is the way war forces mankind to evolve. Most recently this occurs in As Above, So Below, and there are elements of duality in this next story, Traces, as well.

Some of my deepest inspiration comes from reading non-fiction like these two books. This passage in Uranium, where Zoellner quotes the wife of a scientist regarding the local Zuni Indians hired to do construction at Los Alamos, really gets my creative juices going:

“There they were, the oldest peoples of America, conservative, unchanged, barely touched by our industrial civilization, working on a project with an object so radical that it would be hailed as initiating a new age.”

To wrap it all up, there is just a ying and yang about this subject that really pushes my creative buttons. The connections between the past and the future contain an endless amount of possibilities; literary, scientifically, and politically. Even while I sit here finishing this blog post, I see Vice President Biden speaking about increasing spending to insure the U.S.’s aged nuclear arsenal remains ready and capable, with an ultimate goal of reducing these weapons around the world, and I am reminded of another quote contained in Zoellner’s work. This one is from Winston Churchill, whom the bomb detonated over Nagasaki and nicknamed Fat Man, was possibly named after:

“If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”

So have a good Friday, and remember, watch out for blinding flashes of light in the sky!

Traces is about an old man that comes back to a small town to finish something he began a long time ago. I’ve got a rough outline for the entire story written, but I’m going a bit slower with this than I did with AASB. That doesn’t mean I will take as long to write it, because I never want to spend that much time on one thing again. For one, it isn’t going to be as large; there just isn’t as much happening as in AASB. But the main reason is because I’m going to plan it better.

The best thing I learned writing AASB was to finish the story before you start editing it. I spent a lot of time rewriting a scene that, once I got further down the road, became obsolete anyway. So I’m going to take this outline, write a rough draft—finish it—and then evaluate what needs to be changed. This is obviously be more sensible, but if I had any sense in the first place, I might spend more time looking for a job, and not be sitting here writing stories all day.

I figure, if I’m going to die in snowpocalypse 2010, at least I’ll go out happy.

Since finishing the tentatively titled, As Above, So Below, I have mostly been working to identify and edit some of the things I know are flawed with it. The number one thing on that list is the magic system, which was a huge mess on my part. That happened because I didn’t know what I wanted it to be, so it wound up being a lot of different things. There were also a few scenes that needed to die, as well as some that I wanted to give life to. That stuff is done now. I’m awaiting some reader feedback and then I’ll probably do a thorough rewrite and evaluate again after that. I don’t think I will stop tweaking it until I figure out how to get published, but until then I want to give priority to a few other efforts.

One is this blog. I’ve added a portal page that is dedicated to As Above, So Below and put a bunch of cool stuff there. There are maps, excerpts, and encyclopedic pages for places and characters– all stuff that deals with the first book.

Second is the novella I’ve been puttering around with. Similarly to the way I did with AASB, I’m going to start posting my thoughts on finishing that up. Third and furthest out is the second book in the AASB trilogy, and another full length, unrelated novel that I am going to start brainstorming for. I am not sure which of these I am going to begin writing first, but I will be talking about them both here.

I hope that by expanding this blog to include other things, that I won’t hit the lulls that I did trying to make it focus solely on a single project.

I finished writing my first draft about a couple of weeks ago. Looking back at it, I would have to say I don’t completely agree with my favorite author up there–I don’t think it is all shit, but I do believe there is a lot cluttering the real story. Reading back over it can be painful at points. About 10 pages will probably disappear by just deleting unnecessary adverbs, another 20 will go when I edit out all the overly descriptive, leisurely construed, exercising-the-typing-fingers sentences with confusing structures that contain little information, and lots of commas.

Thanks go to my proofreaders for putting up with that.

The hardest part was definitely keeping up with the information that I created. Not just plot, but each character’s history, what is happening, what needs to be said, what has been said, and what needs to be hinted at but saved for later. It is hard keeping up with all of them. The easiest part for me was the dialogue. I think I successfully found each character’s voice and did a good job with conversations between them. I should write a story that is nothing but dialogue.

That makes me think of a Hemingway story right there. If you never have, you should read Hills Like White Elephants.

Another thing I think I did well was world-building. This is certainly a result of working on this project for a number of years, giving me plenty of time to create a rich history. This book only delves into a small part of the overall history and culture of the Taros/Eskra world. I do have a short outline for a second and third book that continues to reveal the rest of the world’s story, but that will come much later.

What I don’t think I did well was create a clear, interesting magic system. The magic system I have in mind is not what I communicated on the page. I tried, but it came out funky and clunky. That will be the most major source of revamping when I write the second draft of this book.

Now I need to let some people read what I have and give me some feedback. My mind has been in the Taros/Eskra world too long for me to see things clearly anymore. So I’m going to put it down. I have two other stories I want to work on. While my readers go over my first draft I am going to work on these other ideas. I’ll probably post some stuff here about those as well, shaping this blog into more of a complete writer’s blog instead of centering around one single idea.

There is still a lot of work to be done (I have no ideas for a title, I’m terrible at titles) but I feel a huge weight taken off my shoulders for finally getting the first draft written. It’s taken years, but I feel like they were years well spent. A lot of people say they want to write a book, but they never finish–if they ever start. I’m really proud of what I have done, even if it does still need a good bit of polish and shine.

Well, I set myself a deadline of finishing by the end of June and today I missed it. I still have about 50k words to write. Some of those don’t have to be done from scratch, some are just incomplete chapters that just need polishing. I blame my real job, it takes up way too much time. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog entirely.

So today I kind of groaned when I looked back at something I wrote about 8 months ago.

I am getting close to putting together the end…I still believe I can reach my goal of having the first rough draft completed by the end of the year. – Me. October 9th, 2008.

Ha ha. On one hand, I’m not sure what I was thinking there. On the other, it can be hard for me to foresee  how much writing it will take to properly tell the story. I’m sure I thought of it as, “oh, let me just get these guys to Efegen’s so they can cruise into Taris, hook up with the right people, and execute the final scenarios,” and assumed that wouldn’t take long. Not that easy. Hell, I’ve known how the story would end for a few months, but now that I’m writing the final chapters I find it covers many more pages than I anticipated it would.

Tonight I tried to work on a building chapter that sets the tone for the end, but I wasn’t feeling it. So rather than fighting that and pressing on, I started putting down some bones for the last chapter. It’s been in my head and I need to start seeing what it looks like on paper.

And by paper, I mean on the monitor screen.