Benjamin Weller's Blog

Lanternfly is my full focus now. The manuscript's risen to about 27k. Woo-hoo.

I still can't believe how much it took to finally get the ball rolling on this one. The last time I had three or four false starts. This time I had about six. Nonetheless, I've got it going, and a bunch of scenes I can reuse from my dabbling. I'm hoping for a manuscript around 90-100k, but knowing how I roll, it'll probably wind up 115-120 in the first draft. We'll see. :)

That's my short update for now.

This summer has been nothing short of insane on the work front, and I hate to say how little writing I've gotten done in the last couple months. It's been a whole slew of personal life stuff, mostly--switching hours at work, personal life drama, and financial issues (and flies attempting to have sex on my keyboard, which is happening right now). Luckily it looks to be settling down, and I can get back down to business.

As some of you may have gleaned, I'm back on the Lanternfly train yet again after oscillating for the past nine months. I have a start, finally, and although I'm not going to make any sort of committal statements, I'm finally fairly sure this is going to be the one I pursue. I can't really put it into words. I just feel like this version works. So here's an updated list of my projects as of now and the order I'll be doing things for the next year.

CLOUDNIGH & THE INVINCIBLE KINGDOM
This is currently on the backburner. I've been working on it for three years, and I need a break. All of my betas are back to me now, and it's clear that those evil 70 pages in my intro need a severe rewrite. This is mostly an issue of pacing and how I set things up, which just wasn't done very well. The story needs to take off faster. Unfortunately I don't have the energy to rewrite chapters I've written three times in the past year. So that's where I'm at.

Incidentally I've got new working titles for the trilogy. Right now the three book titles are supposed to be CLOUDNIGH, HAVEN, and LETHE. As always, subject to change. I've got outlines now, so that makes me feel a little better. The goal is to come back to the third draft of 'Nigh in early 2013, depending on what happens with--

LANTERNFLY & HELLION
Last week I played with a new first chapter that seems to finally have given the story the start I want. The problem has always been causality with Lanternfly--so much happens before the offset of the story that I need a way to get it off on the right foot without plaguing readers with infodumps (this happened with Cloudnigh). Originally I just covered it all in the first 8 chapters, but that doesn't work. This version throws the story off with a bang, and keeps the momentum up. By my outline, I think I'm looking at an MS between 90-110k--a lot shorter than my last two works. No titles for the other books in the series, although the title "SALAMANDER" will definitely be reused at some point.

DELIRIUM ANDROMEDA
My stand-alone about communications issues and political factions in a post-apocalyptic America. This has mostly been swallowed by my ditherings between Cloudnigh and Lanternfly, so I don't know when I'll be working on it. Hopefully once Lanternfly is done and I've done another draft of Cloudnigh. This could probably happen a year from now, in 2013.

GHOSTLINES
My old novel, Shadower, with a sci-fi twist. I got the idea fairly recently, but my worry is that some of the concepts run too parallel to what's in my Hellion work. I've always loved the Shadower story, so I want to get back to it at some point. If I do write this, I don't know if it'll be before late 2013-2014.

OTHER STUFF--
UNTITLED HIGH FANTASY EPIC--A recent idea of mine about the exiled son of a king who after going on a spiritual journey is called back home to claim the throne. It's still in the "kicking around in my head" phase. I had a title and I keep forgetting it. Probably around 300k.
ROMAN & KYRIE NOVELLA--A new idea I got after having to cut all their back story in draft 3. I had this idea that I could tell the story of their relationship in chat transcripts. I like it, and I may actually make an attempt before I finish the third draft. Who knows.
DANTE NOVELLA--Another one on the back burner. There's a chance I might be able to cover this in my reworked third draft, so I don't know.
AETHERIAD--The story of the villain from Hellion told from the perspective of a cat. This is still supposed to be a graphic novel, but I can never find time to do any development on it.

Work continues. Draft three of Cloudnigh is underway now. A couple queries have been sent out to test the waters. No expectations. No expectations... right.

That's the latest with Cloudnigh. Most of my betas have gotten back to me, save for two, and the replies have all been good. Everyone's given me very good notes. Tweaks, mostly, and a few fiddlings to make things make a little more sense. Most of it is in the first 70 pages. So my hope is that there isn't too much more work to be done.

The bigger news is that I'm finally underway with Lanternfly. I use the phrase "underway" loosely, as I'm in that usual phase I get in when I start a new project where I wind up tripping and reshuffling things to give the story as good a foundation as I can. Not that this is a "new" project. Technically this is the third version of the story with these characters. I've changed a lot as a writer since 2009, and it's important I let the story flow naturally. The first version had a lot of issues with structure and pacing that I can't fix, and frankly, some of the old version just feels way too flat to really work. So I'm starting again with new elements, and a new backbone.

I'm hoping for a manuscript no longer than 115k-120k. I have 18k now. Seems doable to me. The problem is I'm trying out this structure that involves  back story sections in each book. Book one is Danielle's, although its told from Lionel's perspective, mostly. Each book has a prologue to launch that plot. I'm not sure if I like it. But then again, it's a great offset for a story that at the moment is fairly slow to start out. I have a bit of shuffling to do, but I'm still sleeping on it.

That's all that's going on in Benland. Thanks for reading.

In my last post, I mentioned how draft 2 of Cloudnigh was done. It's out to my beta readers now, who over the course of the next few weeks to months, will give me comments on the manuscript and shed some light on what I need to work on. I already have a fairly healthy list going myself. The next draft is going to be a pretty big one, being it's where I'll fix the remainder of my plot problems and give the writing the attention I've been itching to give it. But that's some time away.

What about right now?

Technically I should be taking a break, but I'm feeling more energized than ever. There's a lot of stuff I want to write, among them the Invincible Kingdom sequels, but that won't be happening until (if) I can manage to sell the book. Right now I'm working on preliminary outlines, which will solidify where I'm going, and allow me to work a few more foreshadowing scenes into the first book. I only had rough notes to go from when I was working on Cloudnigh, and with the amount of times I went back and forth on "SERIES! NO SERIES!" I didn't do as good a job at foreshadowing as I'd have liked. That's fine, though. To me, the story evolves organically enough that I don't need to go too insane with it.

My next project is most likely going to be either Hellion or Delirium Andromeda, the former of which has been kicking around for the past eight years. There are pros and cons to writing both. DA would give me a stand alone novel to try to sell. The flip side is Hellion has been absolutely BURNING to get out for close to a year now, and I feel like it's the right time to at least get a draft of it out. My concept for DA needs a lot of work, still. And on top of that, I feel that if I don't write Hellion soon, some of my inspiration for that might leak into my other projects. It's already been in danger of doing that with Cloudnigh.

So most likely it looks like I'll be doing Lanternfly next. I'm hoping for a novel around 120k, tops. It'll be an exercise in outlining to make sure I make that goal. Hellion has a pretty expansive world, but like Cloudnigh, it's microcosmic in scope in the first book. The last version of Lanternfly came in at 170k, the first 60k of which was me finding the story. In the end, it wound up at 114k, which would be fine by me if I could do that again. I'm rambling now. Who knows.

So here's what I'm projecting right now--

- Lanternfly (draft 1) -- After outlining, I should start by June at the latest. I'm hoping to get the draft done in 8-10 months.
- Cloudnigh (draft 3) -- I might work on this before, if things with Lanternfly don't go as well. While LF simmers, I might do a fourth draft.
- Lanternfly (draft 2) -- Once I have Cloudnigh done and dusted, I'll most likely get the second draft of LF out.
- Delirium Andromeda (draft 1) -- If I'm still feeling it, then.

If I stick to this, this will take me through the rest of 2012 and into 2013. Summers lately have been slower on the writing front since I only get a couple days a week to do it the way I want.

As always, though, unexpected things happen. Thanks for reading :)

Well, there it is. Draft numero two.

In the end, it took five months, endless amounts of pain and elbow grease, and a lot of other dramatic tendencies I'd rather not mention to keep up the illusion that I'm actually a sane human being. Ah...

This version is about 16k shorter than the last one I finished. It still needs a lot of work. This one has about 97% of what I want in it. The last three percent are menial things. Name dropping for the next books. A few little tweaks to make the next volume make sense. I'm hoping in the next version it'll get even shorter.

Pretty stunned right now, so not much else to write.

I've edited the "Archeology" post a little if you guys are interested, adding in a few tidbits from before. I need to get used to this "editing crap" thing.

Not much to really say aside from more and more bits are falling into place on Lanternfly. I'm trying to get the story to a point where I feel comfortable starting, where I won't get halfway through and go "GAH" like I did with Cloudnigh.

Cloudnigh, in the meantime, is getting a list of fixes made up for it. It's getting narrower and narrower by the day. Lets see where things stand when I finish Hellion plotting. I have a lot of notes I want to get out today.

Off to write.

I've edited the "Archeology" post a little if you guys are interested, adding in a few tidbits from before. I need to get used to this "editing crap" thing.

Not much to really say aside from more and more bits are falling into place on Lanternfly. I'm trying to get the story to a point where I feel comfortable starting, where I won't get halfway through and go "GAH" like I did with Cloudnigh.

Cloudnigh, in the meantime, is getting a list of fixes made up for it. It's getting narrower and narrower by the day. Lets see where things stand when I finish Hellion plotting. I have a lot of notes I want to get out today.

Off to write.

After finally deciding once and for all that Cloudnigh requires a nice, long simmering, I decided to use my week off to hop back into Hellion, my project of eight years. After going over notes and versions, including the mammoth 213k first draft that I wrote in 2004-2005, I've come to a bunch of conclusions about what I'm going to try this time around. Also, the little archeological experiment also provided a nice little window into who I am, and was, as a writer.

It's always fun to go back and read stuff you wrote a while ago, if not for inviting the cringing that usually comes with revisiting something when you wrote while reactionary, hormonal youth. Being someone who always learns lessons the hard way, though, I figured I'd go back and see just how much of my current abilities have always been there and where I've actually improved:

Here's some of the things I've found I've always had.
1. Storytelling came naturally, even if I had no idea where I was going.2. Visual description and dialogue have always been my forte.3. My pacing really isn't that bad--I really should trust myself to fly off the handle more.4. Plotting is a must. There are some things I need to understand BEFORE I write (which was a problem with Cloudnigh, too).5. My characters always have life in them, but they aren't always realistic. They've improved exponentially now.6. If it weren't for the flaws above, the intro of the old Hellion would have been pretty frickin' good for its time.
In the end, it really was a nice dose of perspective and gives me a bit more insight on why I tried some of the things I tried with my preceding two books and where I began to improve. I never wrote fantasy because I read fantasy. In fact, I grew up reading Greek myths and a few abridged/unabridged classics. Prior to writing Hellion, the only real fantasy I'd immersed myself in was the LoTR movies, having never read Narnia and The Hobbit growing up. I guess that makes my development as a writer kinda weird.

Just for fun I've put together a little timeline of my development over the last 11-12 years. Read at your own risk.

Who knows, maybe it'll be fun for you, too.

1999-2001 - Dragonrage, Soulmasters, Dragoncrystal 1 & 2
I got my start writing doing stories for a mailing list derived from a Pokemon TCG site I joined in July 1999. There was a lot of RPing, although none of us really called it that at the time. Because we all had so many diverse interests (Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Mortal Kombat, Evangelion) to name a few, our RPs snowballed into these multiverse battles with effectively its own mythology. Half-consciously, I tried to tie this into a weekly writing assignment for my 6th grade English class (they were called EPOWS) with a story called Dragonrage. My teacher didn't get it, but I wrote a sequel anyway, and this time, sent it to my friends on the mailing list. It was a hit, even though the writing was terrible (horrifying is a better word).

I plotted nine Dragonrage stories. Over the course of the next two years, I wrote nineteen. Episodes ranged between 6 and 25 MS pages. I got good enough that I could churn these out in a week or so. I tried a lot of things--aging our RP characters, even mutilating them (I think I gave one guy a third eye at one point, which I habitually forgot about). In episode 15, I recall departing the RP-character mold entirely and introduced an entirely new cast that I joined up with our characters again in 16. A lot of people got pissed about that, because everyone was more interested in seeing what I would do with their characters.

Feeling like my stuff was getting a little immature, I tried a few off shoots, including a "redo" of Dragonrage called Dragoncrystals. Everyone hated it, so I tried a sequel (you could see criticism wasn't high on my list of priorities at that time) that came in at about 90 pages and as of 2001 was the longest thing I'd written up until that point. Unfortunately I abandoned it 3/4ths of the way through--I couldn't sustain the story. There were a few others like Soulmasters, The Storm, and a bunch of Tom Clancy ripoffs I don't like talking about that got posted on Fanfic.net. To this day I still get hate mail from them.

2002-2004 - Aimlessness, Descent fanfics, EoA, Third Generation, Seventh
In 2002 the mailing list split up, so I didn't really have anything to do. Still, once I got the bug for writing, it didn't really go away. I wrote dozens of stories I never finished, but not before trying my only fanfic based on the Descent series of games. These were my last stories that featured RP characters. They were also my longest, each coming in at 42 and 56MS respectively.

In 2003, I tried another piece called Eyes of an Angel, which had nothing to do with angels at all. It had a cute love story, but never went anywhere. That same year I wrote Third Generation, which I posted online, about a bunch of dragons living in the modern world that had changeling abilities. No one really read it, so I took it down.

By this point in my growth, I was readily referring to myself as a writer (I was 16). I didn't show people my stuff offline all that often, because at the time, printing 50-70 pages would have destroyed our modest printer. I'd already tried writing a few novels--Dragoncrystals 2 in 2001 (90 pages), Third Generation in 2003 (75 pages), and Eyes of an Angel in 2003 (50 pages unfinished), but I couldn't sustain anything for much longer than 70 pages. I could, though, tell a pretty good story in that span, but I had no concept of twists or character.

The last item of note in this period is "Seventh," which I tried writing with a girl I was dating. We set the story up to run a few hundred pages and I was in charge of creating most of the characters and world. When the project stalled, I used the material to write something else: Hellion.

2004-2005 - Aura & becoming a writer
I started my first "novel" with a 3-page info dump in November 2004. From there, the novel grew completely accidentally. I wrote for a few weeks, then went away for Thanksgiving. Because I had no laptop at the time, I borrowed my dads and created a character named Danielle, who had been inspired by a conversation my dad and I had in a sushi restaurant earlier that year about a girl he'd known who could attach colors to things and thought everyone had the same ability. The problem was, Lionel, my protagonist, and Danielle were hundreds of miles apart, so I decided to chronicle what happened up until their meeting. By the time they met, I had 150MS pages and the story wasn't even close to done. After 8 months and 440MS and 215,000 words, I finished Hellion: Aura and decided I wanted to try to make a living at writing.

First, I had to get better.

2006-2007 - Editing Aura, Salamander, Shadower & Slump
There was one problem--Aura was terrible after page 200. I was rushing to get something--anything done. I spent the rest of 2005 trying to edit it, but I only wound up lengthening it by 100 pages. Regardless of the quality, I was writing constantly by this point, usually in the school library or in cafes, churning out chapters, notes, timelines--you name it. The habits were starting to form.

After a year of rewrites, I gave up and decided to write something else for a while. I'd done a couple short stories in the early months of 2006 (The Things They Say to You and Train 67), but nothing that I felt I could adapt into something longer. Spurred by a mental image of a light flickering in undersea grass, I started and wrote Salamander in 2006. The story eventually grew to 150k, although I abandoned it for a time between 2006-2007. I was very influenced by the high fantasy forums I was on at the time and tried to write something that could fall under the category of high fantasy. What I discovered in the end was that I not only was not cut to write stuff like that, I wasn't cut out to write high fantasy in general.

Around the end of the year, things were going a little rough. I adapted Train 67 into a novel called Shadower, which I finished in January 2007. After that point, circumstances in my personal life kept me from writing or finishing anything for nearly a year.

In retrospect, most of it was thinking too much and taking myself far too seriously. I tried rewriting Hellion again, abandoned that, and then spent a lot of time trying to salvage and rework Shadower, which I thought was my best work at the time, if not a little too melodramatic. Shadower is worthy of note because its written entirely in first person. Arguably this is the piece that taught me a few tricks about writing character. To this day its the only one of my five completed novels that people have read in its entirety.

2008-2009 - Avondalius and Lanternfly
Perhaps it was magic. Perhaps it was something snapping in my head, but on the stroke of midnight of 2008, I was writing again. This time I was back to writing vaguely fantasyesque pieces. I was toying with a project called Avondalius, an aimless mess that played with the concept of siva (formerly demon wraiths in Hellion). I got about 50 pages in, and then got distracted by an idea that I originally thought was going to be about a girl who is ostracized from her family and goes in search of her missing father, an inventor living in a snowy northern town. As I worked on it, the character began to seem more and more to me like Danielle from Hellion. So, I named her Danielle, and started writing a book called Lanternfly, about a girl who erased her own memories to protect herself from an ability she doesn't understand.

Of course I ran into about 800 problems. I still hadn't really worked out the art of plotting stuff, nor did I really understand that "things happening" and "action" aren't necessarily the same thing. That summer, the story stalled and I paused to write a piece of something called Endoflux Theory (that would eventually become Cloudnigh). When I came back in early 2009 for my independent study, I finally had a full plot and ending, as well as places for all the other characters I'd created in 2004. This time I was writing for college credit. In October 2008 I managed to secure an independent study with Erik Eskilsen, a professor at Champlain College, where the goal was to finish a 250MS book in four months.

I did it. Adding onto my 130MS pages, I finished Lanternfly at 330MS and 170k in April 2009 (and then learned, to my amusement that Erik had meant a 250MS DOUBLE-SPACED book--I gave him one that was 700MS by his estimates because I write everything single spaced). 

Lanternfly wasn't bad. As far as writing goes, it was actually pretty damn good. I didn't have as much time with some of the characters as I'd liked, and I wound up shaving off everything I wrote in 2008, cutting the draft down to 114k. The problem was I'd written it too quickly. My process requires a lot of sideways motion. Write first to get inspired, then plot, plot, plot. Write more. Diverge. Plot. Develop. And so on. I didn't do that with Lanternfly. Arguably the first real action doesn't happen until 2/3rds of the way through, and that wasn't okay. I wanted to write something tighter. So I figured I'd let the book simmer and write something else.

So, to cool off, I sat down and wrote a story about a 17 year old kid with three hearts.


2009-2012 - Cloudnigh, Invincible Kingdom and present
I wrote the first 75MS of Cloudnigh in the summer of 2009, posting all of it on Inheritance Forums. I hadn't really opted to take the story seriously. It had parts of Endoflux, which were in my scrap pile, and a lot of ideas I'd been kicking around over the years. To my surprise the story got RAVE reviews, even in its unfinished state, and quickly became the most popular original work in Inheritance Forums history. I quickly reevaluated my goals. I had something with that concept and I wanted to do it, and do it right. So, for the next three months I sat down and edited--mostly rewrote, but edited--what I had of Cloudnigh. To my shock, this took me right through 2010 (which had many, many escape attempts from Cloudnigh back to Lanternfly, all of which failed).

In January 2011, I had 46MS of Cloudnigh, and decided it was time to just do it. Over the course of 2011 I wrote incessantly, taking two extended vacations from work to write. It paid off, and in January 2012, a year later, I finished Cloudnigh at 210k. In the following months I trimmed and journal wrote until I had a plan for a trilogy.

2012 - present
At the moment, Cloudnigh is in its very necessary simmering state. It's good. It's very good. But it's not ready for my full attention--not after three years of kicking it around. Now, I'm back to work on Lanternfly again. I'm not really thinking about selling books right now, although I'm definitely going to try with Cloudnigh. We'll see what happens with Lanternfly. My hope is to get a first draft out by the end of the year, but who knows. Maybe it'll take me another two years. At least I've got Cloudnigh to go back to. :) 

That's where I'm at right now. Let's see where I'm at next year :).

After finally deciding once and for all that Cloudnigh requires a nice, long simmering, I decided to use my week off to hop back into Hellion, my project of eight years. After going over notes and versions, including the mammoth 213k first draft that I wrote in 2004-2005, I've come to a bunch of conclusions about what I'm going to try this time around. Also, the little archeological experiment also provided a nice little window into who I am, and was, as a writer.

It's always fun to go back and read stuff you wrote a while ago, if not for inviting the cringing that usually comes with revisiting something when you wrote while reactionary, hormonal youth. Being someone who always learns lessons the hard way, though, I figured I'd go back and see just how much of my current abilities have always been there and where I've actually improved:

Here's some of the things I've found I've always had.
1. Storytelling came naturally, even if I had no idea where I was going.2. Visual description and dialogue have always been my forte.3. My pacing really isn't that bad--I really should trust myself to fly off the handle more.4. Plotting is a must. There are some things I need to understand BEFORE I write (which was a problem with Cloudnigh, too).5. My characters always have life in them, but they aren't always realistic. They've improved exponentially now.6. If it weren't for the flaws above, the intro of the old Hellion would have been pretty frickin' good for its time.
In the end, it really was a nice dose of perspective and gives me a bit more insight on why I tried some of the things I tried with my preceding two books and where I began to improve. I never wrote fantasy because I read fantasy. In fact, I grew up reading Greek myths and a few abridged/unabridged classics. Prior to writing Hellion, the only real fantasy I'd immersed myself in was the LoTR movies, having never read Narnia and The Hobbit growing up. I guess that makes my development as a writer kinda weird.

Just for fun--but mostly out of boredom--I've put together a little timeline of my history as a writer.

1999-2001 - Dragonrage, Soulmasters, Dragoncrystal 1 & 2
I got my start writing doing stories for a mailing list derived from a Pokemon TCG site I joined in July 1999. There was a lot of RPing, although none of us really called it that at the time. Because we all had so many diverse interests (Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Mortal Kombat, Evangelion) to name a few, our RPs snowballed into these multiverse battles with effectively its own mythology. Half-consciously, I tried to tie this into a weekly writing assignment for my 6th grade English class (they were called EPOWS) with a story called Dragonrage. My teacher didn't get it, but I wrote a sequel anyway, and this time, sent it to my friends on the mailing list. It was a hit, even though the writing was terrible (horrifying is a better word).

I plotted nine Dragonrage stories. Over the course of the next two years, I wrote over nineteen. Episodes ranged between 6 and 25 MS pages. I got good enough that I could churn these out in a week or so. I tried a lot of things--aging our RP characters, even mutilating them (I think I gave one guy a third eye at one point, which I habitually forgot about). In episode 15, I recall departing the RP-character mold entirely and introduced an entirely new cast that I joined up with our characters again in 16. A lot of people got pissed about that, because everyone was more interested in seeing what I would do with their characters.

Feeling like my stuff was getting a little immature, I tried a few off shoots, including a "redo" of Dragonrage called Dragoncrystals. Everyone hated it, so I tried a sequel (you could see criticism wasn't high on my list of priorities at that time) that came in at about 90 pages and as of 2001 was the longest thing I'd written up until that point. Unfortunately I abandoned it 3/4ths of the way through--I couldn't sustain the story. There were a few others like Soulmasters, The Storm, and a bunch of Tom Clancy ripoffs I don't like talking about that got posted on Fanfic.net. To this day I still get hate mail from them.

2002-2004 - Aimlessness, Descent fanfics, EoA, Third Generation, Seventh
In 2002 the mailing list split up. But now that I had the bug for writing, I couldn't stop. I wrote dozens of stories I never finished, but not before trying my only fanfic based on the Descent series of games. These were my last stories that featured RP characters. They were also my longest, each coming in at 42 and 56MS respectively.

In 2003, I tried another piece called Eyes of an Angel, which had nothing to do with angels at all. It had a cute love story, but never went anywhere. That same year I wrote Third Generation, which I posted online, about a bunch of dragons living in the modern world that had changeling abilities. No one really read it, so I took it down.

By this point in my growth, I was readily referring to myself as a writer (I was 16). I didn't show people my stuff offline all that often, because at the time, printing 50-70 pages would have destroyed our modest printer. I'd already tried writing a few novels--Dragoncrystals 2 in 2001 (90 pages), Third Generation in 2003 (75 pages), and Eyes of an Angel in 2003 (50 pages unfinished), but I couldn't sustain anything for much longer than 70 pages. I could, though, tell a pretty good story in that span, but I had no concept of twists or character.

The last item of note in this period is "Seventh," which I tried writing with a girl I was dating. We set the story up to run a few hundred pages and I was in charge of creating most of the characters and world. When the project stalled, I used the material to write something else: Hellion.

2004-2005 - Aura
I started my first "novel" with a 3-page info dump in November 2004. From there, the novel grew completely accidentally. I wrote for a few weeks, then went away for Thanksgiving. Because I had no laptop at the time, I borrowed my dads and created a character named Danielle, who had been inspired by a conversation my dad and I had in a sushi restaurant earlier that year about a girl he'd known who could attach colors to things and thought everyone had the same ability. The problem was, Lionel, my protagonist, and Danielle were hundreds of miles apart, so I decided to chronicle what happened up until their meeting. By the time they met, I had 150MS pages and the story wasn't even close to done. After 8 months and 440MS and 215,000 words, I finished Hellion: Aura and decided I wanted to work towards doing it for a living.

I spent all of summer 2005 editing Aura. In the end, I wound up making it even longer, adding in scenes and chapters so the story burgeoned to 550MS. Going back now, Aura was probably the best thing I'd written up until that point. The problem was, I was eternally dissatisfied. I was learning, and learning very quickly. It was shortly after finishing Auras that I started writing in cafes (mostly, because my mom kept barging in on me complaining about my horrible grades at school), and writing every day. The problem was I was learning too quickly. No sooner had I figured one thing out, I'd improved in something else, rendering everything else obsolete. So while I did *finish* Aura, I never really *finished* it.


2006-2007 - Editing Aura, early IF/SE era & slump
After a year of rewrites, I decided to temporarily give up on Aura and decided to write something else for a while. I'd done a couple short stories in the early months of 2006 (The Things They Say to You and Train 67), but nothing that I felt I could adapt into something longer. Early in 2006, I joined a community called RUGE, and later, IF (Inheritance Forums). My writing (Train 67 in particular) was well received, and I became a regular of sorts, and even started my own site for writers. I experimented for a while with online serials. I toyed briefly with a story called Covenant in 2006, but abandoned it when the plotting/characters didn't work out. My writing was still good, however, my plotting still wasn't where I wanted it.

Being around high fantasy writers, however, was starting to inspire me. Spurred by a mental image of a light flickering in undersea grass, I started and wrote Salamander in July 2006. The story eventually grew to 150k, although I abandoned it for a time between 2006-2007. The experience was valuable in that I learned that I simply cannot write pure high fantasy. Salamander, while interesting in parts, suffered from "nothing happening for pages" and ultimately ended a million miles away from where I wanted it.

During my break from Salamander, things started getting a little rough. I adapted Train 67 into a novel called Shadower, which I finished in January 2007. After that point, circumstances in my personal life kept me from writing or finishing anything for nearly a year.

In retrospect, most of it was thinking too much and taking myself far too seriously. I tried rewriting Hellion again, abandoned that, and then spent a lot of time trying to salvage and rework Shadower, which I thought was my best work at the time, if not a little too melodramatic. Shadower is worthy of note because its written entirely in first person. Arguably this is the piece that taught me a few tricks about writing character. To this day its the only one of my five completed novels that people have read in its entirety.

2008-2009 - Avondalius and Lanternfly v1.0.
During my slump, I decided to take the time I wasn't writing to see what I had learned. I started waking up early and going to a cafe near my work at a day camp (this was summer 2007) and read over my first three novels, noting what I liked and what I didn't. I also began generating notes for a new take on Hellion. The concept went through several titles and settings, but still maintained the same characters I had from the original. I got few scenes out, but none really took. Aside from a 30 page unfinished piece called The Madonna Lily, which set the tone for Lanternfly, I did very little writing in 2007.

Pretty much at the stroke of midnight of 2008, I got my gusto back and started writing a project called Avondalius, an aimless mess that played with the concept of siva (formerly demon wraiths in Hellion). I got about 50 pages in, and then got distracted by an idea that I originally thought was going to be about a girl who is ostracized from her family and goes in search of her missing father, an inventor living in a snowy northern town. As I worked on it, the character began to seem more and more to me like Danielle from Hellion. So, I named her Danielle, and started writing a book called Lanternfly, about a girl who erased her own memories to protect herself from an ability she doesn't understand.

Of course I ran into about 800 problems. I still hadn't really worked out the art of plotting stuff, nor did I really understand that "things happening" and "action" aren't necessarily the same thing. That summer, the story stalled and I paused to write a piece of something called Endoflux Theory (that would eventually become Cloudnigh). When I came back in early 2009 for my independent study, I finally had a full plot and ending, as well as places for all the other characters I'd created in 2004. This time I was writing for college credit. In October 2008 I managed to secure an independent study with Erik Eskilsen, a professor at Champlain College, where the goal was to finish a 250MS book in four months.

I did it. Adding onto my 130MS pages, I finished Lanternfly at 330MS and 170k in April 2009 (and then learned, to my amusement that Erik had meant a 250MS DOUBLE-SPACED book--I gave him one that was 700MS by his estimates because I write everything single spaced). 

Lanternfly wasn't bad. As far as writing goes, it was actually pretty damn good. I didn't have as much time with some of the characters as I'd liked, and I wound up shaving off everything I wrote in 2008, cutting the draft down to 114k. The problem was I'd written it too quickly. My process requires a lot of sideways motion. Write first to get inspired, then plot, plot, plot. Write more. Diverge. Plot. Develop. And so on. I didn't do that with Lanternfly. Arguably the first real action doesn't happen until 2/3rds of the way through, and that wasn't okay. I wanted to write something tighter. So I figured I'd let the book simmer and write something else.

So, to cool off, I sat down and wrote a story about a 17 year old kid with three hearts.


2009-2012 - Cloudnigh, Invincible Kingdom and present
I wrote the first 75MS of Cloudnigh in the summer of 2009, posting all of it on Inheritance Forums. I hadn't really opted to take the story seriously. It had parts of Endoflux, which were in my scrap pile, and a lot of ideas I'd been kicking around over the years. To my surprise the story got RAVE reviews, even in its unfinished state, and quickly became the most popular original work in Inheritance Forums history. I quickly reevaluated my goals. I had something with that concept and I wanted to do it, and do it right. So, for the next three months I sat down and edited--mostly rewrote, but edited--what I had of Cloudnigh. To my shock, this took me right through 2010 (which had many, many escape attempts from Cloudnigh back to Lanternfly, all of which failed).

In January 2011, I had 46MS of Cloudnigh, and decided it was time to just do it. Over the course of 2011 I wrote incessantly, taking two extended vacations from work to write. It paid off, and in January 2012, a year later, I finished Cloudnigh at 210k. In the following months I trimmed and journal wrote until I had a plan for a trilogy.

At the moment, Cloudnigh is in its very necessary simmering state. It's good. It's very good. But it's not ready for my full attention--not after three years of kicking it around. Now, I'm back to work on Lanternfly again. I'm not really thinking about selling books right now, although I'm definitely going to try with Cloudnigh. We'll see what happens with Lanternfly. My hope is to get a first draft out by the end of the year, but who knows. Maybe it'll take me another two years. At least I've got Cloudnigh to go back to. :) 

That's where I'm at right now. Let's see where I'm at next year :).

Horrible blog titles aside, February 20th just passed and I'm NOT working on Delirium Andromeda OR Lanternfly.

Ah, deadlines.

Why? Because I've decided, for better or for worse, come hell or high water, that finishing a workable draft of Cloudnigh is more important. Granted this is probably a horrible idea for my sanity. I've got a week off now where I will be doing nothing more for ten hours a day than pound my head against the keyboard in hopes I can fix at least some of the vast quantities of issues I'm finding with this blasted book. How many issues are there? Too many to count. How close am I to finishing this draft? I don't even know any more.

I'm starting to get the sense that I'm going to fix a lot in this version, but I'm also creating problems for myself. There's been one problem in the last draft and this one too that I'm not too happy with regarding a major decision made by a main character that HAS to happen. It didn't work in the last draft, and I'm not feeling too keen about it in this one--to the point where I'm ready to just leave the plot thread hanging until I get everything else done, and then come back to it. Everything's in place, but I have this sense the scenes are just a little too eh... melodramatic. And I get really annoyed by melodrama.

There's another issue I'm running into, and that's a fear of making the book longer. This is one I just can't let get to me. I finished draft 1 at 210k. That's INSANE and unpublishable unless I'm somehow secretly awesome and a publisher decides to take a risk on a bat-shit-insane-long first book. Right now I've got something like 187k, including a lot of major edits to the beginning and early-middle. I took a lot out, but I put a lot back in, too. I just need to get it through my head that regardless of length, I just need to get this damn thing done and do justice to it. Now that I know I'm setting up a series, there are some things I simply NEED to do, and choices that I need to reexamine.

Then there's that whole "when will I be able to show this to my friends" question and I've decided I can't even think about that right now.

So I'm going to forsake that melodrama issue and dive back into the book and see where I wind up. And try not to make myself any more stupid promises.