Whew, it’s been a busy few weeks here. I’ve been a bit slow in updating the blog, but I assure you it’s all for a good cause. There’s a lot happening on the Zeus is Dead front, which is what’s filling up most of my time, and most of that is due to the final edit on the manuscript itself. My Booktrope editor is giving me a lot of great comments and notes. It’s making the novel even better than it was, but it does mean that much of my time is taken up in reviewing and incorporating those notes into revisions. It’s fun (and it’s fantastic to work with someone as excited about the book as I am), but time consuming. Our deadline is April 15th, so I’m working hard to meet that. [Read more…]
Excerpt: A Dragon at the Gate
Happy New Year! New Year’s Day finds me working on A Dragon at the Gate (Book Three of the New Aeneid Cycle, if you’re new around here). Unfortunately, it finds me just a little sluggish with the whole stringing words together part, so while I wait to regain my writer’s perspicacity, I’ve decided to give a little glimpse into some of what’s written so far.
Obviously this is still a rough draft, but I figure it’s a good teaser. Obviously again, this has some spoilers. There’s nothing major, but it does at least tell you some of whom has survived the first two books, and a hint of something that’s going on in the early parts of book three. Continue at your own discretion… [Read more…]
December 20th Writing Update + Tip
So I haven’t done any sort of post on writing lately. The good news is that this is mainly due to the fact that I’ve been too busy with actual writing. I’m seven chapters in to the rough draft of A Dragon at the Gate (possibly eight, depending on how I break it up). Things were moving along pretty well there for a while, but then I hit a snag. [Read more…]
Working on A Dragon at the Gate
So I’m continuing to chip away at the pre-writing phase of book 3 of the New Aeneid Cycle (working title, A Dragon at the Gate). At this point, I’ve managed to lay down the skeleton of the book in the sense that I now have a rough outline of how I expect things to go. (Granted, once I actually start writing, this is likely to change, but it’s a good road map to start with.) It’s a good feeling; the difference between trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with or without the box top to tell you what it’s going to look like, really.
Some things I’m still not sure of. There are characters who don’t really have much to do yet. One I’ve already decided to kill off for that reason. Other characters I know exactly what I want to do with, but not quite how to plug them in. I suppose one solution is going to be simply tossing them into the mix and seeing what they do. I bet at least one of them is going to mess up my whole plan… [Read more…]