malada

Finished the first draft of my novel "Demon Blood". Word count: 40K. Time for a re-write.

There was a theme running through the book that didn't crystalize until the Boss Fight: "Think. Act. Don't Feel". I'm going back to sprinkle that into the text. I need to clarify some relationships and fully flesh out some characters.

Synopsis: Demonologist is killed during a summoning but his assistant - a mind mage - is saved by an infusion of demon blood. Now part demonic, the surviving mage is tasked to take up the summoner's work: a task she has not the training or talent to take up. She finds unlikely allies in a degraded minstrel and a love-sick succubus.

Yeah, there's a lot of sexy time in the story but I shut the curtains after the first kiss. It's been fun.

At least my latest attempt is complicated.

A complicated character with unique talents in a complicated magical event must navigate a complicated political landscape while keeping complicated secrets.

Like all my better characters, Marsha is unique. But aren't we all? Still, the situation is messy and the more I get into the consequences of actions and the butterfly effects, I think if I plan this out properly I can pull this off. Things need to happen in a certain order chronologically for things to work out.

This is keeping me awake at night. I rarely need to work a lot out in advance when I write because most of the time the story just flows out of me from my brain to my fingertips and onto the screen. It doesn't always work out but it mostly works. Not this time. There's so many moving parts that need to mesh that my usual way of writing isn't working. Perhaps that's why I'm having so many difficulties getting the story rolling. I'll need to outline more with this story.

I tend to write stories without a direct antagonist - a villain that is plain to see and appears early. So many of my stories the protagonist is put up against a Situation, a Problem, The System. There is an antagonist that shows up much later, near the climax of the story but not sooner. It is the Situation and the System that my hero is up against. And I really like my hero: she's cursed. She's a mentalist that also knows - without having to read thoughts - when someone is lying. She also _cannot_ lie. She can obscure, delay, deflect or remain silent but she cannot _lie_.

And she's in deep shite. And it's about to get worse. I love it.

But it's keeping me from sleeping as I'm sorting out all the threads of the story.

I'm not really doing Nanowrimo but wanted to resurrect a story I started a while back and start working on it again.

And... it's gone.

I've looked in all my directories and all my backups, but the story I started can't be found. I still know the plot and the characters, just the previously assigned names and places are gone. It's frustrating.

I found a bunch of stuff I had completely forgot about... but now what I was looking for.

I abandoned the story when what I saw in my head failed to match what I was writing. I'm pretty sure I didn't erase it. Perhaps it's best that I start from scratch.

It's been quite awhile since I attempted a National Novel Writing Month marathon. I've done a bunch of them but the last one I didn't finish and I basically crashed and burned.

However, I have 3 candidates for this year - all three of which have been stewing in the back of my mind for a while:

"Alien Allen" (novel) - A young man wakes from a near death experience believing he's an alien soul being punished for some now mind wiped crime against the Galactic Empire. Now trapped in a human body, he has to navigate this strange world by relying on the memories still embedded in this body. But some of those memories seem to be missing or corrupted.

"I Need Not Go To The Edge" - (possible modern fantasy) Bullied and harassed teenager has something *bad* happen to him. Soon afterwards, those harassing him start to have *bad* things happen to them.

"Demon Blood" - (sword and sorcery) Life sucks for a young minor telepath and Truthseeker: she can read people's thoughts, knows when you're lying but the magic forces her to speak only the truth. Things don't get much better when she's paired with a demonologist: he summons the demons using her blood to open the Gate, then she interrogates the demons at the demonologist command. When a summoning goes haywire she nearly bleeds out - being saved by an infusion of succubus blood. She survives but now has strange and demanding appetites.

I started the last one as a non-Nano years ago but got stuck very quickly when the setting kept changing. The characters were fine but when the *geography* keeps shifting it's time to put it in the drawer for a while. It has the potential for being a trilogy although the third part is a bit shaky.

Thoughts?

I decided to get my Alouise books in order and try to finish them.

I have at present:

"To be a Mage" - in rewrites. Alouise as a teenager at the Imperial Mage College. This. Is. Not. Hogwarts.

"Necromancer at Play" - unfinished. And no it's not as grim as as sounds. Alouise is a fine musician and has relatives in the theater.

"Imperial Executioner" - planned. Still kicking around ideas

"Mountains in the Sky" - finished, needs a huge rewrite. Again. This is actually the first book I wrote with Alouise as the main character.

"untitled" - The empire is in crisis. The perfect time to have a mage revolt.

It feels good.

Housemate: "You're really typing away at something. Just remember to save often!"

Me: *pausing at mad writing* "Oh, good idea. I've been busy with an amputation."

Housemate: *pats me on the shoulder* "Writers."

-m

Why do story ideas, plot, dialog and character advancement come to me when I'm in tired, in bed and want to sleep?

And when I have time to write the urge to create just abandons me?

And why does the plot have to be so convoluted? Oh, right... because the way the story is set up, it's only reasonable for it be complex and convoluted.

And minor characters want their own stories. SHUT UP... oh, wait... that's kind of cool...

I shouldn't write about people around the centers of power: mages and nobles and merchants. It brings politics and money and complications into the whole thing. You can't write a single thread that isn't tangled in a weave of interconnected ideas and characters and it makes my head hurt.

Maybe I'll write about a nice peasant girl, a shepherd's daughter who... wait.... DON'T FOLLOW THAT DRAGON! Oh no....

IT'S NOT MY FAULT! I'M JUST WRITING WHAT THE CHARACTERS TELL ME TO WRITE!

*sighs*

I just had to trash several hours of painstaking dialog on a scene I realized was appropriate to the characters... if they were several years older and more mature. It also failed to advance the story. I cut it and pasted it into a new folder of 'deleted scenes'. Maybe I can use them in a later story.

And don't talk to me about editing. I'd rather be dusting the ceiling than editing.

-m