I just hit the 30 000 word mark, and at just the point in the story I wanted to as well.
I’ve just ended the chapter at that point with our heroes jumping from the airship being chased by possessed security guards.
Now I am off for the weekend to stay with family in Blenheim. Although I will be doing some writing on the boat rides there and back (three hours each way), I am going to come back refreshed and ready to finish the last part of my goal – JK has promised me a present from New York if I reach the 35 000 word mark by the end of the month.
At about a week and a bit into this month I was fluffing about in a panic because I was so far behind schedule to make that goal. I thought there was no way I could reach 35k now that I had started off so poorly. But I knuckled down and started churning out 1000 words a day for several days. That’s the most I have ever written at once, and it feels good. 
So anyway, goodbye, I’ll see you on Monday, and by then I’ll be back and writing! W00t!
It’s Tuesday and that means it’s time for a teaser! Especially since I just reached the 28 000 word mark aka 35%.
Anyway here’s a fragment from Lionheart where the main character, Leander, tries to scry for the first time, under the guidances of a hedgewitch. Leander agrees to let Angelika help him as he is feeling really lost and confused on how to find his sister and rescue her.
The nothing of the mirror, and the everything that was not visible, became mist. And then out of the mist loomed shapes which stayed firm, not brief flashes like before. They were tall columns and towering buildings. Palatial homes and proud temples, both made from the same marble.
It was an entire city, and the original that Kingscove was an extremely poor copy of.
The kingdom grew taller, prouder. People scurried by, living out their day to day existence. What Angelika had said was true – he really could see everything if he wished, and was willing to work and go looking for it. He could, and did, watch the rise of the old kingdom, starting off as merely a small group and becoming something great.
And then he watched it all come tumbling down.
The enemy broke through the barriers, both magical and physical, with ease. The mages tried to fight back, but their magic simply rolled over and off them like water off a duck’s back. And when the enemy was finally close enough to attack, there was no mercy for those whose only defense was magical. Or non-existent.
There was no mercy at all. Not for the men. Not for the women. Not even for the children.
And then the city burned.
As Seanne said, “At least they didn’t throw any of the children off the city walls.”
My reply: “I decided not to show that part.”
When I woke up this morning, I found in my inbox an email from my beta, JK. Attached were the edited versions of the last three chapters of Blood Bound. That means the second major round of editing, and about the third or fourth round of editing altogether. This is not the rough-around-the-edges Blood Bound I had, but a much smoother, much better version of the novel.
It’s been an interesting journey for me, for the year and a half since I started seriously writing. To say I have learned a lot would be one heck of an understatement. I’ve learned about writing and publishing, discovered books and authors I otherwise would not have heard about. And most importantly of all, I’ve made friends.
It’s not all been sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, of course. I never expected it to be easy but I never appreciated how much effort it actually takes to get out the 60-80k worth of words that tells a complete story and that actually makes sense. And even then it’s not perfect first draft. I have had to learn how to deal with concrit, and while not always easy I can handle it far better than I once did. And I have had to deal with people reacting poorly to the “V word” when they ask what I am writing about. Without hearing anything beyond that word, let alone actually reading anything I have written, I have had people call me “a[nother] hack” who’s “jumping on the [vampire] bandwagon”.
The other thing I learned since starting writing Blood Bound back in April of last year and was so totally not a really interesting form of exam study procrastination is that I was not going to churn out Blood Bound, edit it quickly, find myself an agent and ta da. After a while I started pinching myself whenever I had that daydream as it was distracting me from my actual work. And somewhere along the line, in these past few months, once JK got through with this current edit of Blood Bound I was going to set it aside in its little folder next to the other novel .odt files and leave it there for the moment. In the meantime I am going to finish working on Lionheart and then, post NaNo, The Circled Green. I’ll keep working on Bones and The Superhero Diaries too, even as my brain keeps adding new levels of complexity, characters and world-building to Blood Bound.
And then I’ll come back to it with more experienced eyes. I’ll add news scenes, rewrite some old ones and maybe even cut some others out. Maybe by then I’ll have an agent or even a book published. And maybe by then vampires will have swung back into “fashion” again. Who knows? The only thing I do know is that I am not giving up on this story, or the stories that follow after it.
So until then, thanks to everyone who has been supporting me. Thanks to JK, Seanne and Rebekah – you in particular are the ones who put up with my ramblings on almost a daily basis. Thanks to all those people who have commented on my blogs regularly, or semi-regularly. And even thank you to those people who stop by randomly, read the snippets of BB and others and comment on how much you loved it and say how it has to be published so you can read the rest right now. You don’t know how much that brightens my day to find a comment like that in my inbox.
Thanks for the memories, guys. This ride’s been fun – but it’s nowhere near finished yet.
This was previously posted to On The Nightstand
So, I was looking at some posts on Absolute Write where members were discussing books that they had read, and their goal to read 100 books. It inspired me to have a look at all the books I have read this year.
According to my OpenOffice spreadsheet, at this point in time, I have read 43 books so far this year. That comes to about five books a month, which isn’t bad at all when I think about it compared to my life and timetable.
So here, sorted by the author’s first name, is my list.
And here we go »
It’s not just in real life that they are not my strength.
Sometimes it takes me forever to find that perfect name for a character, and I sometimes go through different variations and stages of names to find “the perfect one”. And until then I just have placeholders.
One example would be one who has yet to have a name, or make an appearance. I’m not really in such of a hurry to give him a name as, in the world of the Blood Bound universe, he does not appear until the third book (along with the rest of the Canadian vampire embassy… yes, BB gets into the vampire politics even more from book two onwards, and three is the big one). And so, in conversation, we simply refer to him as “Canadian Lover”, “Canadian Consort”, “Rivka’s Lover” and the like. While he is definitely not defined solely by his relationship to Rivka, the queen of vampires in Canada, (his maker, his lover, his queen and more), it’s just easiest to call him that. My beta sometimes calls him “Callum”, after the actor she insists would have to play him should there be a movie.
But the real character that inspired me to write this blog entry was one from The Circled Green, my upcoming NaNo project. When we meet her, in the prologue, she is young, beautiful, and dying. For the rest of the book she is just a presence, a memory, a tie to the past that keeps the husband she left behind from remarrying even though he should, and the one that follows her daughter about, for reasons both good or bad. While the names of other characters (such as Aurora, Ciar, Duncan, Emily) came pretty easily, her name was very elusive.
Eventually we started referring to her as “Dead Mother” and then “Dead Marni” and after a while I began wishing that Marni was actually a suitable name for her, except it didn’t make sense, given her background.
But finally, after weeks and weeks of looking and wishing and referring to her as Dead Marni/Dead Mother, I found something. It fit, it was pretty, and it was perfect. She now has a name.
Sorcha. ♥
