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Boarders Writing a Novel Thread 3


Gabriele

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So while my masterpiece is taken apart again by my trusty proof readers (really its just grammer at this point as i prepare for submission), i have begun my next little piece. It is, to be honest, a tougher book than my fantasy novel.

Writing first person i find is pretty difficult, given the nature of dealing with absolutely everything that the main character is thinking. Added to this is the diffuclty of writing a book set not in a fantastic world of my own devising, but rather our own.

The 7 Lives of Stanley Morgan is about a man in his forties. He has a wife, two kids, a house, and a middle management job. There is a vague sense of unease that Stanely cannot come to terms with, the feeling that things have not turned out the way he thought they would. He is, for all intents and purposes, unhappy with most every aspect of what his world has become. This feeling of unrest is only furthered by the sliver of jealousy he feels for his neighbor, Titus Hicks, who seemingly has everything that he wants. Then he starts getting blinding headaches, white lights dancing on the vision of his awareness. A few times he even thinks that he hears conversations that are not happening.

And that is when Stanley Morgan begins shifting realities. His mind jumps through six different versions of himself, his own being the seventh, as he tries to understand what is happening to him. In time he realizes that he is bouncing between realities, that those different versions of himself are doing the same. He sees the many different ways that his own life could have gone had he made different decisions.

But oddly enough there is one constant in each of his seven lives. Titus Hicks.

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Ebenstone, on 05 December 2009 - 12:11 PM, said:

Ladies and gentlemen, the next step in my life has begun...

I (and my novel Winter's Discord) have an agent!

It's a long story that I tell on my blog...

Now comes the hard part: another rewrite...

It's all very exciting!!!

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm as happy as the rest of the gals 'n' guys on this board - congratulations.

Good luck with the rewrite (I bet it's a bit easier to rewrite it this time than the previous).

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Well, I'm still plugging away at rewrites and have finished Part 2 (Revised, edited, and polished) and have just finished my first pass of Part 3. I have a few sections to revise, a shakey plot point to firm up (a character keeps wavering on what he believes... Decide, dammit!), and a new short chapter needs to be written. After doing a final polish pass on 3, I'll tackle the very short and final section of the book. The climax and resolution.

My next project is still perculating on the back burner. In fact, we're considering a trip to Italy this winter as part vacation (while we live near relaties to take the kids) and part research trip for this project. Yeah. That's a good excuse for going to Tuscany. :) The timing all depends on my next contract (ie my actual paying job).

I wish I had news as good as Ebenstone, who I can't seem to stop congradulating :), but I'm not going to start my agent queries until Part 4 is put to bed. I was hoping to start querying this calendar year, but quality of the manuscript comes before my arbitary timetable. :)

Back to revising Part 3's kick off!

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Thank you for all the kind words. It feels like the road got suddenly shorter, though it's still a pretty long road, but I'm starting to see the signs that give the number of miles I have to go.

As for the rewrite, I am completely swamped with papers and whatnot from school and haven't had much energy (there's been time!) to do anything with the rewrite. I have a clear vision of what needs to get done, I just need to focus on the task at hand.

It's an awesome feeling, that's for sure! And I appreciate the support I'm getting from the Brotherhood! It's been a while, so I'll at least give the "elevator pitch" that got my agent's (tee-hee) attention in the first place:

Winter's Discord

After an attempt on his life, Ben Grange and his friends are thrown headlong into a conflict that they don’t entirely understand, leaving them alone to deal with issues of loyalty, friendship and responsibility in this A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE meets THE HILLS young adult epic fantasy.

As for Myrddin's lament, let me say that is work is AWESOME! Highly enjoyable and remarkably well-written. I am envious of his ability to be so patient with his work because his meticulousness shows in the draft! It's got that "two-level" thing going on that I enjoy and try to write myself! It's epic military fantasy with a Roman flair to it with a mystical/magical/religious undercurrent to it! There is little I'm doing in my beta read of it b/c I like it so much and it's so well done! And I'm not just saying that.

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Thank you for all the kind words. It feels like the road got suddenly shorter, though it's still a pretty long road, but I'm starting to see the signs that give the number of miles I have to go.

As for the rewrite, I am completely swamped with papers and whatnot from school and haven't had much energy (there's been time!) to do anything with the rewrite. I have a clear vision of what needs to get done, I just need to focus on the task at hand.

Congrats! How many agents did you try, if you don't mind me asking?

I haven't written much of anything in the past few weeks (school, papers) and just started up again yesterday. I'm finally working on a chapter I've tossed around in the head for close on a year now. During the initial drafting of my second volume, I just skipped it; now, with hindsight of what comes after, I think it'll serve effectively as a bridge to the second act of the novel. It features a sorcerer taking on a messiah-like identity... all those hours studying the history of Christianity and the Islamic Mahdi in the last few months are starting to pay off. :bowdown:

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Congrats! How many agents did you try, if you don't mind me asking?

I'd queried about 30 agents in the Spring of 2008 with an earlier, and far inferior draft, and was rejected by all. I also entered as many agent contests I could...and it paid off for this one.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, congrats!

I myself am working on something. Without too much detail, it's about a world decending into madness as the greed and pride of kings and sorcerers alike release a long dormant "Dark" power, heralding an apocolypse. There is prophecy, but only of the return of the Dark power...no messiah-figures. So it's left up to the people to figure out what to do and "make their own" messiah(s). One of the main characters (who ends up one of the primary leaders of the free peoples) goes a bit crazy under all the pressure, and seeing his family die as well as his friends (which is nearly a day-by-day experience). He develops mild schitzo, becomes a bit paranoid, and continues to have dreams of the days when he was a slave in a camp riddled with unspeakable horrors.

But, I'm still working on the details.

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I have just finished rewriting the prologue of my novel: it is now 5600 words long.

It's possibile that I may modify some little detail in the future, but I think this is the definitive version. I'm really satisfied with it. =)

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Ebenstone:

It's probably strange to hear a stranger is excited for you, but I think your future success is fucking brilliant. It's great to be in a community where one can look back and say about a future GRRM or Baker, yeah, I knew that dude. We used to have conversations about writing and shit.

I've returned to the novel, and am just under 5000 words, myself.

The POV I'm writing now is about a soldier who attempts to desert the army mid-campaign. He fails, and is sentenced to hanging for cowardice. The story explores his life up to the hanging, and his reasons for desertion (which are by no means glorious or ideologically motivated).

I'm trying to write this in the spirit of All's Quiet on the Western Front and Red Badge of Courage, but instead of being an anti-war story, it's more of an anti-anti-war story. Not in the sense that it glorifies war, but there's no overall message to be gained from this scenario. It's just shit that happens, which suck, and then different shit happens, driven by a different idealogy, and that sucks pretty badly too.

It's fun because I'm still working by the rules I set for myself. One wonders: How to write about a war and hanging without on-screen violence? And the answer to that is, in most war novels, I find that the most potent drama comes not from described death (although All's Quiet is really fucking disturbing on that point), but from characters who die off-screen, or are casually given a sentence that this is how they died.

Violence is absolutely not necessary. I plan for the death of my main character of this POV to only be noted as an ancillary moment from another POV.

As for the game I'm writing:

Good times here as well. It's great fun to deconstruct God and the Christ figure. I suppose that's why everyone does it. In this game I'm positing the idea of what if Man truly was endowed with free will? What if there was no Judas? What if Christ's message died out and was forgotten? What if society became a bunch of secularists, intent not on the benefaction of the spiritual life, but of the temporal life? And yet God still requires that Man believe in Him or be damned, so essentially Man is damned because of the failure of his ancestors (a la Adam and Eve), and has no way to rectify it, because Man is unaware it needs to be rectified.

It's ripe story telling, because it not only allows one to delve into the arbitrary nature of good and evil under the power of a divine ruler, but allows that introspection to span modern notions of morality as well. Not that this game will be a theological tract - I'm aiming to make it simply an amoral vacuum, with choices and consequences. There are differing theories on what the consequences portend, but they'll be fallible and uncertain.

Fantasy is awesome.

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Fantasy is awesome.

Indeed.

I'm still plugging away during my break, editing mostly and struggling to complete my "fill in" chapters. After editing a little over half of my current draft, I've deleted around 2000 words... though a battle re-write this morning ended up adding a couple hundred at least to the total.

2000 isn't much (not in a manuscript that will be 300k), but it is a nice feeling to slash the flab off some of those sentances.

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As for Myrddin's lament, let me say that is work is AWESOME! Highly enjoyable and remarkably well-written. I am envious of his ability to be so patient with his work because his meticulousness shows in the draft! It's got that "two-level" thing going on that I enjoy and try to write myself! It's epic military fantasy with a Roman flair to it with a mystical/magical/religious undercurrent to it! There is little I'm doing in my beta read of it b/c I like it so much and it's so well done! And I'm not just saying that.

/blush

Thanks, Stoney. I'm glad my... um anal approach to revision shows in the manuscript. :)

Still plugging away at parts 3 and 4. Incorporating comments from my crit group that I've collected over the years (who were reading it a chapter at a time). Right now, I'm tackling an area that I should've tackled before since it involves some questionable motivations that a few characters made to service the story (as in I made them do it to further the plot). Giving them real reasons to act now. heh Still need to be more vicious in my chopping words out. I've completed about 70% of the chapters but only 35% of the word cut goal (currently, it's 186,000 words, down from 198,000).

Must cut more!

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I admire your persistence, Myrddin. I can't seem to stay on track with revising my pocket-sized 70k urban fantasy - I can't imagine how hard it would be to revise a novel that huge.

Still working on the third draft based on beta reader feedback. Still want to shoot myself.

Much more excited about my Nanowrimo novel, my epic fantasy IRONBANE - I posted a couple of teasers on my blog. I'll be enormously relieved when I can finally kick the urban fantasy out of the door and start ripping up IRONBANE.

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So while my masterpiece is taken apart again by my trusty proof readers (really its just grammer at this point as i prepare for submission), i have begun my next little piece. It is, to be honest, a tougher book than my fantasy novel.

Writing first person i find is pretty difficult, given the nature of dealing with absolutely everything that the main character is thinking. Added to this is the diffuclty of writing a book set not in a fantastic world of my own devising, but rather our own.

The 7 Lives of Stanley Morgan is about a man in his forties. He has a wife, two kids, a house, and a middle management job. There is a vague sense of unease that Stanely cannot come to terms with, the feeling that things have not turned out the way he thought they would. He is, for all intents and purposes, unhappy with most every aspect of what his world has become. This feeling of unrest is only furthered by the sliver of jealousy he feels for his neighbor, Titus Hicks, who seemingly has everything that he wants. Then he starts getting blinding headaches, white lights dancing on the vision of his awareness. A few times he even thinks that he hears conversations that are not happening.

And that is when Stanley Morgan begins shifting realities. His mind jumps through six different versions of himself, his own being the seventh, as he tries to understand what is happening to him. In time he realizes that he is bouncing between realities, that those different versions of himself are doing the same. He sees the many different ways that his own life could have gone had he made different decisions.

But oddly enough there is one constant in each of his seven lives. Titus Hicks.

Sounds quite amazing :thumbsup:

But damn you, now I'm soooooo intrigued to find out how it will unfold <_<

Hopefully we will hear more on this bright idea mate :cheers:

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Two weeks into the new year...where's everyone stand?

Anyone new?

Me? I'm up to my ears in day job stuff, so I haven't been able to commit as much time as I'd like to my rewrite. I'm about a third of the way through this run and we'll see how it goes. I'm aiming towards a Jan 31st finish on this so we can start moving on it.

I'm also rebooting my summer project and making some progress on that.

What's up with everyone else?????

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I picked up a short-term contract, so I haven't done any writing (well, editing) this year. I had to do it for some silly reason that my kids need to eat and stuff... But I finished it yesterday, so I'm back in the writing game.

The damndest thing happened yesterday, though. I was editing a chapter and went to insert the updated word count into my spread sheet (after feeling good about how many words I had cut) and couldn't figure out how I had added 3000 words. It turns out that the number there was way too low. So the massive word count is even higher that I thought and now I have more to cut... The first draft did break the 200,000 mark, 201,581 to be exact. Damn, damn, and double-dog damn.

So, my book is back up to 189,000. And here I thought I was on my way into the 170's.

Stoney, feel free to mark entire pages that can be cut as you're reading.

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