Monday, April 24, 2017

The End of Things, the Start of Things



In the last couple days, I have finished the major rewrite/edit of Raventower 2: War.  It will have one more read through/edit this week and I should be really done.  I also finished the first draft of Journey of a Thousand Truths.  I am within 2k of finishing the Saving Everywhere flash fiction set, which means I'll also be done with the larger collection which is Surviving Elsewhere, Going Somewhere Else, and Saving Everywhere.  The only major unfinished work I have right now is Amusing Grace.  I started that one on my birthday because I always start something new then, but I put it mostly aside so I could finish the other two major works first.

I will have the flash fiction set done tonight or tomorrow and it will be done and pretty much ready to post over the next two Fridays.

You know, for most of this year, I've felt as though everything was dragging and I was getting nowhere.  Then suddenly 'poof' and almost everything is done.  Now I'm scrambling to figure out what else I'm going to work on. What do I want for Wattpad?  Not Journey after all -- I just feel as though it is too soon to toss that story out for other people to see.  A Plague of Rats?  Circe's Gifts?  Maybe Circe's Gifts first, since that is a shorter one.  YA/MG fantasy with several shape-shifters.  That might be a good way to start to get a feel for what I should do.

Yes, maybe that one.  I even have a cover for it, though I might have to do some resizing and such.  Hmmm.  This looks like a real possibility!

As you have probably guessed by now, I am never without a few writing projects.  I have over 100 novels in at least the first draft format.  Actually, I have more than that, but those are the ones that are either already published or that I think have a chance of publication.  I keep writing more of them, too.


One completed for this year, another started, four more that are soon to go into note/outline phase for NaNo -- yeah, I have lots of manuscripts to work with still and except for having to decide 'what next' it's generally a lot of fun.  Oh, there are annoying moments during the writing, too, of course.  Journey of a Thousand Truths kept giving me problems.  I had not outlined it.  I do that every now and then, and while it was fun to just run with a story, it was horrible when I couldn't glance at a note and see what to do next.  The outline would have had the same sorts of problems while I created it, but they're easier to fix in outline when I can go back and tweak things without major rewrites of entire sections.  I suspect the rest of the novels this year will all have outlines.  I just don't have the patience I used to for wasting time.

So here is a piece from the little prologue to Circe's Gifts:

***

Few peasants from the village sitting at the forest's edge ever saw Circe, the Lady of the Woods.  Those who did chance to spot her when she walked the edge of her forest described the woman as an aged, gray-haired crone, with piercing eyes, and always followed by a horde of fearsome beasts.

They were wrong, of course, but they held to their myth even in the occasional face of reality.  No one ever looked for anything more than what they expected to see.  The Lady was ageless, not aged.  Her hair wasn't gray, but moonlight silver, and her eyes -- the color of the green forest leaves -- did not pierce; they simply saw the world in a way that humans could not.

As for the fearsome beasts -- well, her usual companions were a tailless mouse, a half-lame cat, and a one-eyed, soft-tempered she-wolf.

***

Injured wild animals come to Circe, but in this story, it is a wounded prince who wanders into her domain.  This really is an old-fashioned fantasy.  Yes, I think this might be the one to work on for Wattpad.

Let's see if this one sticks and I actually get so far as posting stuff.

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