Planning A Book I've been doing a lot to plan the sequel to my book while waiting for people to read my first one for impressions. I always think of it in scenes and organize them in an outline. That way I can come up with interesting ideas, locations and scenarios and add them where they best fit. When I'm walking or hiking, which I try to do 2 miles a day, I'll think about my book. Signature Rainbows Wane's outline was over 15 pages long. I figured out a lot of what works or not through writing and did 2 rewrites before the final product. With the sequel, Signature Ghate, I hope to have learned from the first and plan better. Many of the ideas that couldn't fit in RW can be applied to Ghate. So far I have five pages of planning. Ghate btw, is sort of like purgatory; it's the place souls go when transitioning from one life to the next. The story will revolve around the villain spinning a web through it in attempt to find hi...
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Fixing Rough Drafts At the time of writing this I am on page 202 of 250 in editing my story. I'd like to share a paragraph and how I improve it. Rough drafts are by nature clunky, repetitious and poor quality but serve the important purpose of laying the bones. Now it's time to flesh them out. " Azalyske unveiled them in the desert bramble but now of withered brown, dry, dead vines. The sun entered the final leg of its daily toil, illuminating the sky in pink and orange. Not a cloud was to be seen. Long shadows began to creep across the thorny vines in eerily shifting nets. The air still burned from the midday sun." Several changes need to be made. "withered brown, dry, dead vines" is redundant and causes the sentence to run on. "illuminating the sky in pink and orange" is well and good but it could be better. A clever metaphor or simile would improve it. "The air still burned from the midday sun" echos the word "sun...
Building a Blog (update) Now that my blog is setup and I've added some content I'm ready to make it grow. It's important to use "evergreen" content or posts that won't become obsolete with old references. Make the blog stay fresh for new readers. The next step is getting the word out on social media; something I am notoriously bad at. I don't expect the blog to grow fast. Most people wait over eight months before making a single cent. But hopefully in time it will snowball. I'll of course continue to add posts and am ever drawing closer to having my book published. That will allow a lot of content about my world I'm not able to publish yet. If you like my work please help it grow. Thanks.
Science Fantasy Some sci-fi books, shows etc. are strictly creating a scientific fictional environment. Think Ringworld by Larry Niven or Star Trek and I must give kudos to the Trek writers for doing their homework. The show is as close to real science as the concepts can be. But sci-fi and fantasy needn't be separate genres walled off from each other. I prefer some whimsy in my sci-fi. The best examples of this type of hybrid are The Chronicles of Amber book series by Roger Zelazny and Final Fantasy video game series. They combine things like machines with monsters and sword fighting. To make these settings plausible you need some sort of explanation as to how magic works. There's often a scientific one like FFVII's materia. In the future I plan to have my own Signature series. One pet peeve of mine though is why use swords when guns are superior on so many levels? Guns exert more force with less effort, greater range...
The Journey of Personal Growth Remember that rough draft sketch (March 16, 2021)? Here it is filled out: This is Spiral, another guardian dragon. By posting these images I hope to track my growth as an artist. I've come a long way but still feel there is much that can be improved. I'm always growing as a writer too. My book went through two rewrites; each with significant changes. Originally Sayth was not the main character but I found him to be the focus of all the action and changed that. In the second draft he and Spiral had a son but that character did nothing but muddy the water by getting in the way while serving no plot purpose. He was removed but the entire book had to be rewritten. Now Sayth and Spiral are sharing an early romance. It's just as well. My writing has improved significantly since I began in my high school days. I don't know how people can write a novel in a month; mine took ye...
Creating Characters I have a very visual imagination. Often times when I'm walking I'll be thinking up cool characters. You want them to be interesting and larger than life, especially for fantasy. Character design should say a lot about their personality just from looking at them. Here's my main character, Sayth, as an example: He's a guardian dragon and someone who can freely transform into a dragon. As such, he often uses his tail blade to fight. In human form he wears a scale armor trench coat engineered from his dragon scales. After coming up with a cool concept and design, I'll create scenes involving the character to see how they react. Often these will go into my story outline to later be ordered and added upon. Characters are living organisms that grow and evolve with your writing. You need to get to know them. Sometimes when reading or watching another work of fiction I'll insert my own character(s) in to see how they'll react to the...
Hopes and Homonyms Through this blog I'm hoping to reach out and connect with other writers, artists, nerds and gamers. Please comment if you are interested. I'm ever growing as an artist, writer and intellectual. As a writer I have many enemies. Distraction, malaise, writer's block, writer's cramp, writer's urges to revamp. But today I want to talk about one particularly perturbing one: homonyms, specifically words with the same spelling. I am no stranger to metaphor and similes but in fantasy and fictitious genres you have to be careful not to confuse the reader. I invent all manors of otherworldly creatures, concepts and environments; metaphors could easily be taken literally if utilized improperly. "The ravenous wildcat man" could mean an anthropomorphic feline race in fiction if taken literally. Homonyms further confuse the issue. Although context helps alleviate such problems I'd ha...