Robert Priest's Blog: Blogging not logging - Posts Tagged "second-kiss"

I Try to do at least an hour of work a day on my fantasy novel, second kiss, book 2 of my paper sword series but yesterday because I want to enter a song of mine into the John Lennon song contest I had to head out to Georgetown to do a new vocal. More than 2 Hours Each Way on the various buses involved so I didn't get my minimal in on the book. Sometimes though a little lag is good for brewing. Meanwhile I got a decent vocal on the song. The lyric is from my new book Rosa Rose so I'll probably post the new mix of the song here when it's done. Meanwhile a little over two weeks before I go to the UK. And tonight I get my copy edits on the paper sword, book one of the spell cross series. Where nexus meets nexus.

My trip to Paris, the UK and Ireland was a great success. Both personally and professionally. It rests in my memory as various kinds of touchstone shimmers that my heart shimmers along with whenever I remember. I met wonderful people was received generously and took in the landscapes with great delight and unfortunately brevity. I am usually glad to leave London but this time I only wanted more and more. Upon returning winter came fairly quickly and hard and hasn't let up ever since so I definitely had a difficult adjustment. Which continues. But winter is also the time of getting down to work. And that's what I'm doing. I am working on Second Kiss, book 2 of my Spell Crossed fantasy series. I have in the hand an advance copy of The Paper Sword book 1 of the series and it looks great. After almost a decade of work it's good to see this long time dream get reified. There's been some very good reviews on net galley of the PDF version of the novel and I'll have copies of the real thing on July 7 3 days before my birthday. The official release date is the end of July. The work is going well—which is to say consistently. I'm trying to keep to a reasonable word count on the novel and that was a good enough reason to cut two puffy diversionary chapters near the beginning all full of exposition and new character nuances. Instead I've replaced them with some pertinent dialogue that gets over all the same plot points in a much speedier fashion and with the friendly addition of some dramatic conflict. Meanwhile I'm trying to earn my living. The grant I thought I'd get I didn't get. I thought I was much thicker skinned than this but I confess that it smacked me down for a few days. Oh well, those are the hazards of a Canadian author's life. In the long view I'm glad to get any grants at all of course. I'm pleased with the excitement about the book so far and I am excited with the energy and imagination of the sequel. And perhaps particularly with my full sense of the characters and of how much that is what determines the action of the story. I'd like to get in here and blog a little more often than I have been. So if you get a chance—do encourage me. And maybe I'll post a few juicy sections for brief online hits of what's to come.—oh, and I almost forgot my collection of children's poems, Rosa Rose, got a Silver Moonbeam award in the US. And I did an interview recently with Shelagh Rogers. on the CBC. I'll let you know when they're going to play it. Also Jaymz Bee who works at the Jazz FM station in Toronto recited the poem Rosa Rose on Rosa Parks's birthday and a number of people called in to say they liked it and the station boss was also very pleased.

Just finished the final edits for book 2 of the spell cross series, second kiss. Typically I love the editing process. It's easy for an author to get attached to particularly flowery formulations even when they are slightly over-the-top. A good editor can point these out and clear the way for a straight narrative line. There were one or 2 very musical phrases that were hard to let go like “still finding their places in the ancient algorithms of the thaumaturgy." but it's done now and the book is better for it. I particularly like the second book. I love the ending. Now having taken a few days off I'm back at book 3. I've got about 40,000 words of first draft and now I have to put the pieces together and see what else needs to be written. Plus do a lot of tidying up and editing and melding of text. But so far I am continuing to enjoy this, though those procrastinated hours that lead up to finally doing some writing are no fun at all. Well, except when my chosen means of diverting myself is to write a poem. It has also led to tidying my room, my house, exercising. You can find an entry about book 2, second kiss in the new Dundurn catalog https://bnccatalist.ca/ViewTitle.aspx...

I got my authors copies of book 2 of Spell Crossed, Second Kiss, yesterday. The book looks great and feels good. Even a tiny bit hefty. Three hundred some odd pages. Putting the first and the second book together side-by-side I'm enjoying the aesthetic of the two covers. Meanwhile I am busy writing Missing Piece, book 3. And I'm off for two weeks of teaching in Banff. It's so intricate writing fantasy. Knowing what to tell about what's going on with the magic and what to leave unstated but hopefully able to be ferreted out as the narrative proceeds. More of the latter is good I believe. Enjoying working with the character Tharfen who takes the lead in book 3. Right now there are snowflakes the size of tea cozies flopping down into the water filled use troughs outside my window. Kamikazes.

had a great book launch for Second Kiss at the Dora Keogh in Toronto. Sold a goodly number of books through Ben McNally books. Meanwhile toiling daily on the follow-up Missing Piece and I'm really enjoying it. First draft is almost complete including formatting of text etc. It being a book about pieces I have a number of fairly small fractured chapters but a large cast of characters.

Monday I'm off to Salerno Italy for a poetry Festival. Back on June 10. That's my fourth travel this season, more than usual for sure, especially when I've got a book to finish but the same thing happened when I went to Japan and had to finish Second Kiss and look how good that turned out (I tell myself).

In between times I'm gigging with my band, (just did a great gig at say what in Toronto), writing songs, writing poems for my new book of children's poems called People like you and Me. And about halfway through a book about old poems which includes quite a number of sonnets I'm slightly embarrassed to say.

I have an idea for a new young adult novel after I finished missing piece. But this one will take place in our world and not be a fantasy. But the main character will be a kind of rude brilliant revolutionary chatty person. That will be about April Fools' Day.

I've also changed my workstation again. I now have a wireless keyboard and I sit about 4 feet back from a large iMac screen with the resolution up large so I have no problem seeing it. Mostly I dictate but when necessary I have the little keyboard with the touchpad on my lap. I probably write three times as much like this is I ever did or could physically in my years of plunking at a typewriter. That's good because there's a lot of ancillary writing tasks that go with being a writer and it's easy to get up in the morning and wind up doing two or three hours of feeling forms and writing emails so that by the time you're finished the energy for creative writing has been severely dipped into by mundane but necessary tasks. Now I can do that work which isn't psychologically taxing and have it not be physically taxing either so that late in the day if I get inspired and need to spill out some whole episode or chapter or delineate an idea I can do it without hurting myself.
And that's good. Plus I'm learning a bit of Italian

Book 1 in my Spell Crossed fantasy series, The Paper Sword, is an iBooks summer reads selection! you can get an eCopy for a mere $3.99. Just go to the iTunes store, go to books, go to summer reads and it's in the young adult category. So economical and perfect reading for fantasy lovers. and then you won't have to wait very long for second kiss because it's right there for $8.99.