Archeology
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 :).
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 :).
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