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Boarders writing a novel


Derfel Cadarn
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15 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Not exactly on call.

But we never officially parted ways in the meantime, so I figure he will want to look at the manuscript when it's done.

Hopefully!

This is some legendary stuff.

I just came here to say I love everyone on here. Good luck with everything. No, I'm not high or drunk.

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1 minute ago, Kyoshi said:

This is some legendary stuff.

I just came here to say I love everyone on here. Good luck with everything. No, I'm not high or drunk.

Thank you! :)

Actually, this manuscript was only supposed to be the story that got me back into writing. That's why I never said anything about it. If it sucked or was just so-so, it wouldn't matter to me. It was more about the journey than the destination.

But since it's looking good, well a guy can dream, right!?! :P

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23 hours ago, Starkess said:

I'm about finished with the first draft of my latest novel. This was last year's NaNo project--50k in 1 month and then 10 months for the next 30k...oops. Problem is I think it kind of sucks and that's pretty demotivating. But my boyfriend is reading the draft now so I have to finish or he'll be upset at not getting an ending! I think there's only about 2-3 chapters left.

Out of curiosity, what made you persevere if you think it kind of sucks? Given how much of ourselves we put into a novel-length project, I can understand how demotivating it can be to keep going. Especially since you say that you have a million ideas that are better than what you're working on.

Hopefully you can complete those 2-3 chapters and be done with this manuscript. Just shelf it and then work on some of those cool ideas and concepts that will motivate you to write. :)

Your boyfriend will likely enjoy whatever you come up with more than this pile of crap, as you said. . . ;)

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Slowly getting there with the first draft of fantasy novel The Blood Hour, 71k words done. The published 'prelude' novel, Thorns of a Black Rose, is about 75k words, but this story is more ambitious with more characters. The desert crossing scenes were tough to write, so I'm going to condense the jungle scenes. Don't want to bore the reader with too much travelling. After that, I need to do the flashback chapters (about 5 or 6, set in the far north as opposed to the main story  being set in what's essentially north to west Africa. Then I need to write some 'flash forward' chapters set about 2000 years in the future with a tech level equivalent to ours. Will be interesting to write gunfights (with arcanists too) in the city of Mask in the same book featuring Conan-esq heists and gladiator fights.

One plotline that ties them together will be a temple heist in the main setting (swords & sorcery), with a follow-up break-in in the same temple 2000 years later. Some characters will cross over.

I see a few people worrying about their work not being good. Don't worry about the first draft, it's essentially just building the structure of the story. Descriptions and nuanced character interactions can be polished in later drafts, but you can't polish a blank page.

It too me about seven years to get Resurrection Men to a publishable state, with the first and final drafts bearing little resemblance. However I wrote sequel Lord of the Hunt in just under two years.

The Blood Hour's next draft will definitely need a lot of work to get the character interactions right. Shukara, Tamira and Jassasn return from the previous book, and had POV sections. However, I want to make Shukara a bit more distant in The Blood Hour, so will be reducing her POV time. Tamira's backstory was largely explored in the previous book and her carry-over storyline from that book is resolved quite early on. Jassan doesn;t have a massive story at this point; at this stage he's an accomplished desert ranger, but when they move into the jungle and beyond as the books develop, he'll be much more a fish out of water.

More focus will be given to the new characters: Garius is a sellsword, essentially an unwilling D&D Blackguard-type character. Roan is a bit of a Conan homage, a northerner enslaved in battle and transported south to become a gladiator. He just wants to return to his hard-pressed people, but is half a world away. He's completely a fish out of water and relies on his companions to navigate the foreign land he's in. As the books progress and move to 'Europe', the tables will be turned somewhat. 

An interesting character I've written is Song, a gender-ambiguous 'Asian' monk (i.e healer and martial arts adept) on a quest of their own. Once the second draft is done, I hope to find a sensitivity reader to help me not be offensive where this character is concerned. One thing that is interesting is how the other characters react to Song's gender ambiguity; pan-sexual Garius, while a bit of a cad, respects Song's privacy and choices in this regard. Shukara's known fellow magi who've transitioned to some degree, able to use their magick to alter body chemistry where hormones are concerned. (To use magick, a mage must understand the 'rules' of the universe in order to bend them, i.e physics, biology, chemistry).

Some of the other characters are less understanding, some thinking Song is a woman making a bad job of pretending to be a man for self-protection, or perhaps a male eunach who no longer considers himself a man. Coming from different lands and cultures, it's interesting to write the differing perspectives.

 

I'd hoped to have The Blood Hour done and submitted to my publisher by end of the year for (hopeful!) publication next year, but that may be overly optimistic. I thought lockdown would help, but the whole Covid uncertainty has made it difficult to concentrate somewhat. Even if it was finished, the publishing industry is even more precarious now.

What I am hoping to do this year is finish Diabolic Immunity, a supernatural police procedural like the Rivers of London books. It's set in contemporary Glasgow and is in the same universe as my 19th century Sooty Feathers books (Resurrection Men and Lord of the Hunt). I've been working on it on and off since 2012 and think I've finally resolved how I want the plot to go and significant amendments I need to make to what was a finished first draft. All going well, I'll have it finished by year's end.

Other than that, my other goal is to finish plotting out Lucifer & Son, book 3 in the Sooty Feathers, as well as roughly plot out the last book in the quartet. My plan is to finish Lucifer & Son by the end of next year, and the last book by end of the following year. We'll see.

Edited by Derfel Cadarn
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18 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

Out of curiosity, what made you persevere if you think it kind of sucks? Given how much of ourselves we put into a novel-length project, I can understand how demotivating it can be to keep going. Especially since you say that you have a million ideas that are better than what you're working on.

Hopefully you can complete those 2-3 chapters and be done with this manuscript. Just shelf it and then work on some of those cool ideas and concepts that will motivate you to write. :)

Your boyfriend will likely enjoy whatever you come up with more than this pile of crap, as you said. . . ;)

Well I'm hoping that once I finish I'll be able to find parts of it to like and make the whole thing better. I've abandoned projects before, but usually once I get past a certain point I find it best to just go ahead and finish without judgment. This is the 8th full novel-length manuscript I've written so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the middle-of-the-book doldrums. Of course, none of those manuscripts have snagged me an agent, so I'm not exactly doing everything right...

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2 hours ago, Starkess said:

Well I'm hoping that once I finish I'll be able to find parts of it to like and make the whole thing better. I've abandoned projects before, but usually once I get past a certain point I find it best to just go ahead and finish without judgment. This is the 8th full novel-length manuscript I've written so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the middle-of-the-book doldrums. Of course, none of those manuscripts have snagged me an agent, so I'm not exactly doing everything right...

Well, I hope it will all work out for the best for you. :)

Then you can move on to the ideas that really excite you!

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Wrote 10 pages on Thursday, almost finished the core story of The Blood Hour :)

Introduced a time travel element to link the different ages.

Also decided to drop the main flashback stuff and instead expand and write as a novella to either release free or kindle unlimited to try and hook people into getting The Blood Hour if/when published. So I figure about 12 chapters left to write.

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At the beginning of the year I won a contest and was selected alongside other 52 writers to write for an online magazine. I hate promoting it, but here it seemed appropriate. It's in Spanish tho, so I assume most people won't be able to read it. Also, I have to write a short story every week, which means that some are not good, but some I think are. Anyhow, give it a read if you like/can.

 

https://los52golpes.com/2020/autor/cami

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On 9/28/2020 at 5:02 PM, CamiloRP said:

At the beginning of the year I won a contest and was selected alongside other 52 writers to write for an online magazine. I hate promoting it, but here it seemed appropriate. It's in Spanish tho, so I assume most people won't be able to read it. Also, I have to write a short story every week, which means that some are not good, but some I think are. Anyhow, give it a read if you like/can.

 

https://los52golpes.com/2020/autor/cami

Congratulations. And thanks for sharing. FYI, the link gave me an English option.

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4 minutes ago, Kyoshi said:

Congratulations. And thanks for sharing. FYI, the link gave me an English option.

Thanks a lot and... really? didn't know that! I hope they are well translated :/

If you want any recomendation I think "monstruo" is the best one if you are looking for a short story, bc most are really short stories haha

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On 9/22/2020 at 1:46 PM, Starkess said:

Of course, none of those manuscripts have snagged me an agent, so I'm not exactly doing everything right...

Not necessarily. Snagging an agent is actually as hard, or harder, than getting published.

Keep in mind that your submissions may never have been read. Every agent has assistants whose job it is to read the cover letter and see if they're intrigued by the material. If they are, these packages go into a pile. If not, you get the form response that every aspiring writer collects. I must have close to 75 of them, myself.

If you're lucky enough to get in the "good" pile, at some point those same assistants will read a sample of your submission (probably not the whole thing). If they like it, your package will go into a pile that the agent will maybe get to at some point. If not, you'll receive the damned form response.

Later, the agent will read the cover letter to see if his/her curiosity is piqued. If not, you get the form response. If so, he/she will read a sample. Maybe the whole thing this time. If they like it, they'll request more chapters or the entire manuscript. If not, you'll receive the form response.

As you can see, not snagging an agent often has nothing to do with the quality of your writing and the originality of your work. It also shows just how important the cover letter truly is.

Also, you may lose points when an agency is actively looking for something in particular. When that happens, basically everything that is written in another subgenre is rejected out of hand.

Oddly enough, my agent rejected me twice for the same manuscript before accepting to represent me. When I joked about it, he revealed that he never got to read a single line of my novel the previous times. So you see, though I did sign a contract with this agent, I never made it past the assistants in my past attempts.

In the end, it might the same with your previous manuscripts. Maybe there was something missing, sure. But maybe you're awesome and it just wasn't what they were looking for. Timing is also an issue. No one in publishing has gone back to the office at the moment. So anything sent via mail since March is just piling up in the mailroom somewhere. If or when it will ever be read, your guest is as good as mine.

Bottom line: Don't give up! If you don't believe in yourself, nobody will! :)

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On 9/29/2020 at 3:17 PM, Derfel Cadarn said:

I failed to get an agent, however applied direct to a few small presses (independent publishers), which is how I got published. 

The problem with small presses is that they have little to no distribution, which makes it extremely hard to get any exposure. Whatever you can get is what you put into it, and it can be very difficult to get the word out and raise awareness in your works and pique potential readers' curiosity.

You've written a few novels. If it's not too indiscreet, have you sold many copies of each?

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Yeah, I've looked into both small presses and self-pub, but neither seems to be a good fit for me at the moment. I may change my mind in the future, but the dream of trad pub dies hard, I suppose. In good news, I did finish that pesky draft and I I already hate the manuscript a little bit less. Going to let it sit for a month or so before revisions. In the meantime, wondering if it's worth revising my previous manuscript yet again. I paused querying on it due to a low request rate and the pandemic, and it might be worth shining up again. I only made it through ~half of my query list.

@The Grey Wolf, I prefer V2. Looks great!

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29 minutes ago, Starkess said:

Yeah, I've looked into both small presses and self-pub, but neither seems to be a good fit for me at the moment. I may change my mind in the future, but the dream of trad pub dies hard, I suppose. In good news, I did finish that pesky draft and I I already hate the manuscript a little bit less. Going to let it sit for a month or so before revisions. In the meantime, wondering if it's worth revising my previous manuscript yet again. I paused querying on it due to a low request rate and the pandemic, and it might be worth shining up again. I only made it through ~half of my query list.

@The Grey Wolf, I prefer V2. Looks great!

How about exploring all those exciting ideas you were talking about last week instead!?!

Might get the ball rolling for a new project that could get you into the grove for something you'll really enjoy writing. :)

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