Michael G. Munz

The official website of Seattle sci-fi/fantasy author and geek Michael G. Munz

Working on A Dragon at the Gate

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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…]

Working on Book 3 (aka Book 5)

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It feels strange to be picking up with a series I’d more or less stopped writing years ago. I’m officially working on book 3 of the New Aeneid Cycle. There, I said it.

I hadn’t expected to be doing so, quite honestly. As you can see from the left column over there (to the left, as you can probably imagine), the series consists thus far of A Shadow in the Flames and A Memory in the Black. I first published ASITF in late 2007 in paperback, mostly just to be able to get it out of my mind so I could move on to writing other books. Yet in the time since, people would often ask, upon hearing I’d published a novel, “Can I get it on Kindle?” I’d gotten tired of telling them no, so last June saw the release of the revised version for Kindle.

It’s a different publishing world than it was in 2007. (Strange how only half a decade can bring so much change!) My experience with getting ASITF to Kindle went so smoothly that I decided to finally release A Memory in the Black. After all, it was mostly finished already. I’d simply not bothered to release it for logistical reasons which, these days, are moot. With a bit of final polishing and a cover design by Amalia Chitulescu, it came to Kindle on August 20th. To date, there have been over 2,000 downloads and the average Amazon review is 4.5 stars!

And so, with what appears to be a growing audience for the series (and some plans of mine to further widen that audience) coupled with some troubles at getting a different manuscript project past the outlining stage, I decided that, hey, I should write book #3! So far, it’s a bit of a challenge picking up where I left off. The act of getting AMITB ready for publication did help me re-acquaint myself with the characters, and I do know where I want things to end up by the end of book 3 (this is a trilogy, by the way), but I don’t yet know quite how to get there, each character’s part, or how to put it all together. I’m having to re-evaluate some long-held ideas for book 3, but I’m also finding new and more interesting options.

But it’s still in the early stages. For those of you who’ve finished book 2, however, I can tell you: I DO know what’s going to happen with the, um… Well, you’ve read it. You can probably guess to what I’m referring. The working title for book 3? Here Be Dragons.

So why do I call it book 5 in the title? After writing AMITB, I wrote two other manuscripts: a comedic contemporary fantasy titled Murdering Zeus for Fun and Prophet and a more serious contemporary fantasy titled A Memory of Dragons. (Okay, so I have a thing for memory and dragons.) I’ve not forgotten about these! But that’s all I’ll say about them in this entry…

Incidentally, watch this blog and my Twitter feed for more news about A Shadow in the Flames in a little while…

The Legacy of Legacy of Memory

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Last month (give or take), I mentioned my decision to, for now, abandon any attempts at getting Legacy of Memory published and instead move on to focus on a new book entirely unrelated to either it or its self-published predecessor, A Shadow in the Flames. I’ll write a little more here about the new novel (Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit, for which I just sent out the first agent query yesterday) in a future entry. For now I want to explain a little more about why Legacy of Memory will sit on the shelf, at least for the foreseeable future.

First, my thanks to those who have written asking when they could read a sequel to A Shadow in the Flames. It’s gratifying to know there are people out there who don’t otherwise know me from Adam’s housecat (whose name is Uriel, by the way) who have read the first book and are interested to know more about Michael, Felix, Gideon, and just what the heck is going to happen next.

The problem lies in A Shadow in the Flames being self-published. Yes, the publish-on-demand (POD) publisher I went through does screen books in order to elevate their offerings above other POD publishers, but self-publishing a fiction book still often carries about as much weight in the industry as a dead mule. I don’t necessarily think that’s unfair, either. (That said, I’ve received enough independent praise about ASITF to believe it’s a decent effort. I wish I’d known more when I made the decision to go POD with it and at least tried going directly to some small publishers who take unagented fiction rather than going for agents or nothing, but no matter.) The point is, I don’t want to self-publish again, and the chances of selling a second book in a series when the first book is so obscure are slim to none. My efforts are, unfortunately, better directed elsewhere.

Let me go back and say that I don’t entirely regret self-publishing ASITF. I had a great need to get the story “out there” and read by at least some segment of the public. Part of that need translated into continuing the story into a second (and then planned third) book. There was a danger of my contracting “sequelitis” (see an explanation of that term in this blog by Nathan Bransford (an agent for Curtis Brown, Ltd. with a very helpful publishing blog) and continuing to write further books that had little to no chance of being published in a more traditional fashion. Self-publishing gave me at least some feeling of closure, allowing me to set the story and characters from ASITF and LOM so that I could move on and write my third manuscript.

This is not to say I relish abandoning those earlier books. (Nor is “abandoning” completely final in this case, either. Perhaps in the future I can return to the series, though my thoughts on that are probably another blog entry waiting to be written.) It pains me to think that LOM, by my estimation a much better book than ASITF, will remain read by only a few folks for a while. Yet of some comfort is the fact that I know that I learned quite a bit in writing those first two manuscripts. My craft has improved. I’m quite proud of my latest work (and I confess I cringe a bit when I go back and look at those first two novels) and I would not have been able to do the job on manuscript three without having written one and two. I only wish I didn’t have to lose Michael, Felix, Caitlin, Marc, Marette, and Diomedes to a learning experience. …Wow, my characters have names that start with M a lot, don’t they? What’s up with that?

So, for the moment, Legacy of Memory remains on the shelf. Three people have read the entire thing (besides myself), and it may continue to be so for a while. I may release it electronically somehow, someday. I may hang onto it and find some way to polish it up a little more. (I looked at it again a short while ago. The beginning needs more work than I recognized previously.) Time will tell.

They say a writer’s first novel is a learning experience only, unlikely to see the light of day. That’s not something one likes to hear when while spending so much effort to create it. Two manuscripts down the line, though, I think it’s something I can accept.

And Murdering Zeus for Fun and Profit is a damned good novel. Okay, so I’m slightly biased. I’m also quite proud of it. More about that soon…

Faster? Well, not yet…

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Another writing update for my as-yet-unnamed 3rd novel (which, again, is an entirely different animal than the first two)…

So far it seems that my attempt at writing this one a lot faster than the previous two is suffering a few setbacks. For the moment I’m choosing to blame this on a busy holiday season and the difficulty in starting a new book (establishing characters, not overdoing exposition, and so forth). I’ve rewritten the second chapter three or four times now, just trying to get it right, and it’s still not to my liking.

On the plus side, I THINK that once I get over this particular hurdle, I’ll have gotten over the initial creative energy hump. Then I can better continue forward with the proper momentum.

I realize I’m being terribly vague about all of this, but oh well. Right now Seattle’s being hit by a rather nasty blizzard (by our standards, anyway), and my brain is iced. Here’s hoping the power holds out…

Michael G. Munz
www.michaelgmunz.com

“Pre-production”

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So I’m back to blogging after having taken an even longer break from this place than my previous one. What have I been up to? I’m glad you asked, imaginary person! In my last blog I wrote a bit about coming up with ideas for a third novel; not the follow-up to Legacy of Memory (2014 note: this became A Memory in the Black), but rather an entirely unconnected stand-alone with something of a different tone than what I’ve written for novels before. As I said, working with an entirely blank slate is both freeing and frustrating. As I write this, I’m sitting in a Barnes & Noble café having just finished the step-sheet for what I hope to be a darned amusing book.

In case you’re wondering, the step-sheet is basically a rough outline of the scenes (or at least the general happenings) of the plot and character development. Before I did that, I had to come up with the whole freaking premise of the setting (which wasn’t TOO hard, as it’s actually set in the present day with one liiiiittle difference–and no, I’m not telling what that is yet), at least a general idea of what the major characters are like (I’m fairly sure about most of the details now on those, but they still need the breath of life that only actually writing the book will give, I think), and the whole darned premise of the story. The step-sheet helps me to make sure all the Chekhov’s guns are in place, the exposition is portioned out properly (without being overwhelming), and helps me to see where possible problems are–or at least realize what sort of details I still need to come up with.

This particular novel is going to be…somewhat less serious than my previous ones. I suppose, given the stakes involved, it may be considered “epic,” but it’s my plan to thumb my nose at such things and have little or no respect for my own work. …If that makes sense. Actually, it doesn’t, but oh well. A better way of putting it is that this novel is not going to be taking itself seriously–at least that’s the plan. It won’t be entirely comedy, either. If anyone’s read my short story “Playing With Hubris” or maybe even “Finding Victor,” that would be something akin to the mix of humor that I’m going for. But I suppose I’ll know more once I start the actual writing and find the right voice.

Choosing just HOW to start the book is giving me some trouble, though. I’ve got two different options, and while I think one might be a better hook plot-wise, it doesn’t involve any of the main characters. I need to talk over my ideas with some folks and see what they think, because right now I’m rather torn.

It’s my goal to write this one a LOT faster than the previous two, which will take a bit of discipline on my part. I suppose that’s part of why I’m really taking care to line up all of my ducks at the moment so once the actual writing starts, I know the characters, I know the details of the setting and everyone’s agenda…and I can just shove everyone into the arena and let them do their thing.

…And if anyone gets out of hand, I’ll zap ’em with a lightning bolt.

What I’m Currently (Back to) Writing…

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The 5,000 or so of you out there who read this blog without commenting (and I know you’re out there! Don’t try to deny me my fantasy, you imaginary people!) may have noticed I haven’t written in a little bit. It’s a side-effect of a week-long writing break I’ve been on until, well, today. (Bonus points if you can guess when I started.)

A quick writing update: While I wrote an ending to Legacy of Memory at the end of June, I’ve since been tweaking and rewriting, little by little. This is based both on my own general read-throughs as well as comments from a few people I’ve got reading. (Thanks again to you three, by the way. And Joe? Hurry up with those final chapters!) A couple of weeks ago, having gotten to a place where I didn’t want to tweak any more until I heard back from said readers, I decided to turn my attention toward writing something else.

This wound up presenting a problem as my momentum from trying to finish one book carried over into my trying to start another, and like a rollerblader who speeds down a hill off of smooth cement into mud, my creative feet got tripped up plowing through the thickness of an as yet undreamt-of plot and sent the rest of my creative body hurling head over heels into the writing miasma…or something. Clearly the metaphor’s buckling under it’s own weight here, but you get the idea. So I opted to take a week off, not think about ANYthing related to writing, publishing, or blogging, and just let my brain reboot itself a little.

So I’m back! Now for those of you wondering about what the new book is about, the short answer is I’m not sure. I’ve always said that Legacy of Memory was only the second in a three-book arc, so it would make sense that I’d now be working on the third and final book, right? Ha! Shows what you know. I’m the guy who came up with the battery-powered battery recharger and once folded an 10′ origami crane on the middle of the UW campus at 2am, so if you’re expecting me to make sense all the time, rabbit football doodlewhomp.

While it is possible that the next book I write will be a sequel to A Shadow in the Flames and Legacy of Memory (and I’ve always liked the title Here Be Dragons for that one, but who knows?), I may instead try to publish a single, stand-alone book that will hopefully get me further into the publishing world than I currently am and thus help get more attention to the three-book series. The up-side of writing something completely new is that the utterly blank slate gives me a chance to scratch some creative itches that I haven’t yet been able to explore in novel form. The down-side is that it’s an UTTERLY BLANK SLATE! So for the moment I’m mostly in what Terry Brooks would call the dreaming stage, which essentially involves a lot of walking into things while pondering my creative options (when I’m not in a café doing the same thing only sitting down and caffinated). It’s both fun and frustrating, which I suppose describes a lot of things in life.

I’ve got a few ideas that I’m working on exploring, but no one thing that I’ve decided on. I suppose I could tell you at least one: rabbit football doodlewhomp.

…I’m probably not going to go with that one.

Michael G. Munz
www.michaelgmunz.com

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