31 Days to Manuscript Summer

I made a pact with my friend that we'd start writing our manuscripts on or before the Summer Solstice.  That means there is now one month remaining until this deadline is reached.

This means I will have my work cut out for me.

It is not that the novel and its plot and associated preparations are not progressing.  They are.  But they are progressing at the leisurely, cautious pace associated with General George McClellan.  I must adopt a pace more suited to the hard-driving, hammer-against-anvil style of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant.  It was said of Grant that he had the look of a man about to smash his head through a brick wall.  I have one month left to plan.  After that, I will be introducing my head to the wall.

Things that need work over the next month:  character names.  Oh gods, do I need to do this.  I am tired of using stand-in names without knowing what these characters are actually going to be called.  In fact, I think that will be the first thing I work on; I suspect that I'm the kind of person who develops a character more easily once he knows his name.  After all, our names are the first things we are given after we are born.

Other things:  the plot.  Well, obviously the plot needs to be hammered out.  I have a decent notion of how it begins, a much more vague notion of how it ends, but most of the middle third and third quarter of the plot remain so dim and foggy as to be nearly imperceptible.

I think it would be particularly beneficial, in my research for this month, to go back to the beginning.  I must turn my eyes to my inspirations, and thence to their inspirations, and their inspirations, and so on and so forth all the way down the line, until I have left Milton and Shakespeare far behind me, and find myself in the company of Sophocles and Homer.

The world map also needs to get done.  Strictly speaking it doesn't have to be done, but I'd like it to be done by the time I start writing.  All I really absolutely have to have finished is a small part of the world map, since unlike The Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, and A Song of Ice and Fire this is not a world-spanning epic.  All the same, it would be nice to have the whole thing.

That about sums it all up for now.  Look for updates.  They may very well start coming daily.

Set your sights, and aim for the top

It took a very long time of pretending to be a writer, and trying to be a writer, but now at long last I think I am actually ready to be a writer. Stephen King's prescription for aspiring writers is to read four hours a day and write four hours a day, and it's good advice. I'd take it a little bit further, and say that generally speaking, before one can really write a story worth telling, he has to have a certain "mileage" of stories he has read, and of stories he has written. My friend Ashlethas has a similar theory, that every writer has to get his junk stories out of the way before he can get to the quality. So it was for me. I don't know where precisely I am with all of that, but I do know that I have finally got an idea for a story that I want to see through to the end; and there are a few more of varying degrees of cool waiting in the wings. So between the one that I have high hopes for right now, and the others that are waiting, I should have more than enough quality material to keep me busy.

This will mostly be a blog of vague generalities and word counts, speaking of the planning, writing, and editing stages in the most general terms possible. I do this because I want to have the full pleasure of writing the story instead of just talking about it, and because I want to give you, dear reader, the pleasure of eventually reading it once I can persuade a publisher to print it, and because I do not want some unscrupulous villain snatching these stories as if they were the Sabine women. Posts unrelated to my works in progress will be rare, but they will probably happen once in a while anyway. However, I do want to keep this blog focused primarily on my works in progress -- on where I have been, on where I am, on where I am going, and on where I want to be.

My thanks to Ashlethas, who set this blog up for me, and without whom I probably would have dropped out of my creative pursuits and become an exceedingly boring individual. Read her blog if you aren't already.