Editing The Horned Scarab

The Horned Scarab is a fantasy novella set in a prolonged bronze age. It follows two self-titled Investigative Privateers in the river city Ghorad-Gha.  

There are a few different types of magic, but the main one is Channelling. Channellers can call on the power of the Nvir, a mysterious cosmic force, and create powerful blasts of white-hot energy. If they try to channel too much at once, then the Nvir will essentially overload them and they’ll turn to a crispy pile of not-alive. This is the power that the main character, Arn, has. Note: Names, terms, and details are all subject to change throughout the editing process.

That’s probably as brief as it gets, but I don’t want to detail everything right now.  

This is the novella that I took a month off from. I was having some difficulty with the plot, and rereading it now I still think there’s a good amount of work to be done. I had hoped for a late October release, but it might edge up into an early winter depending on how long the edits take.

I have to focus on getting the story, plot, and characters right. As the editing goes on I’ll make a few more posts detailing certain aspects of the world. For now, I’m going to stare at the manuscript and smash my head against the keyboard until it transmogrifies into something good. 

In Other News: I’ve been posting a blog twice a week, but I’m starting to think that’s a bit much. So, for awhile I’m going to try posting once a week on Mondays. This way there’ll be more time to work on each post since I won’t have to churn them out so quickly.

Halfhearted Harpies

The story that I started working on for Camp NaNoWriMo was tentatively titled The Harpies Den. Unfortunately I only got to the twenty thousand word mark before I decided to shift focus and try writing some short stories instead. The odd thing was that I had started writing The Harpies Den to get my mind off my current work in progress novella that I was having trouble with. The Camp Nano story was intended to be silly and fun, and I didn’t take it seriously. But the more I wrote the more I started to really like it, and the more I started to like it the more it started to flounder. It felt like I should just put it aside and come back to it later. 

It might have been because I’d never meant for it to be taken seriously. As the story grew and became more complicated, and as I realized it needed more work (and that I wanted to make it work) the more I wanted to set it aside. It had become the foundation for a big project, one that I didn’t want to tackle now. I wanted to try and make it the best it could be and that would’ve taken a long time. 

This was the first time I started something with the intention of it going nowhere, and it turned out to be the wrong approach. I realized that one of the things I enjoy most about writing is trying to make something good that others will enjoy. 

But it did help me get my mind off that other novella, and some good ideas popped out of my subconscious during the Harpies Den. By the end I was ready to tackle it again, but wanted to wait the full month before diving back in, which is why I started the short stories. It was a way for me to keep writing but on something that I could come back to and polish up for possible submissions. I didn’t entirely abandon The Harpies though, I made a rough outline with some notes for where the story was going, so when I finally get back to it there will be some direction. Hopefully at some point I can release The Harpies Den as a full novel. 

For now I’ve gone back to that novella, and will be talking about it soon. I’m aiming for an Octoberish release, so stay tuned to my twitter, Goodreads, and blog for updates.

Half-Orcs and Spellslingers

I had forgotten how much I enjoy High Fantasy. During Camp NaNoWriMo I decided to write some short stories to work towards my word count goal (spoiler: I didn’t make it). One of those stories was about a half-orc half-dwarf lady, and I kind of love it. Usually I try to keep my fantasy a bit more subdued and grounded (to an extent), but I decided to go all out with this and have angry gods and elves flinging fireballs at each other. Honestly I think it’s awesome and have been having a lot of fun with it. So much so that I’d like to turn it into a series. 

I’ve starting thinking about the worldbuilding elements and how the characters fit into that world. I don’t want the fantasy races to be carbon copies of those seen in other stories, but I still want them to have certain recognizable elements (like orcs being big burly tusked brutes). I’m also a sucker for magic systems, even the vague ones, because it always bugs me when the limits of a character’s powers aren’t communicated to the audience. If a wizard can melt steel with their fireballs, I want to know it and not have it contradicted later on for no reason. My goal is for this story to have something in between, a system that lets you know its limits but doesn’t outline every little detail and has some wiggle room to bend the guidelines.

So far there are gray skinned orcs, vagabond elves, and beetle-like bug people. The current draft takes place in a large city that has a varied mix of all these peoples. I think it's a good starting point that I can build outward from. 

Maybe it'll be a series of short stories (or novelettes), each dealing with different aspects of the world. It might not see the light of day anytime soon, but I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going. Who knows, maybe in a little while I’ll be able to share a story based in this new world.   

Fat Doors

I’m about to spend way too many words talking about a door. 

I was reading a novel and came across a description that struck me. It was the simplest thing, the kind I feel like would normally be glossed over, but for some reason I started to mull it over. It was in a fantasy novel that described the door to a house as a “heavy wooden door.” 

Wierd, because that’s probably as normal and to the point as it gets. But for some reason the description of the door being heavy struck me, because I couldn’t imagine it. When I thought of it as a wooden door, and then added the idea of it being heavy the image in my head stayed the same. It started to get me to think, particularly since I’ve used that same description too, about the context of objects and the environment they are in. 

I didn’t imagine the door differently because the house had already been established and I had already created an image of the door in my head. So when heavy was added into the mix it didn’t really change my idea of the door. Maybe if it had been wide or tall the image might have changed, but heavy came across as too vague and general to change what was already established in my mind as the house's door. 

But, if the environment had been a fortress, then a heavy door would have conjured something large and meant to keep out intruders. In that case it would be the environment that helped shape the image in my mind. 

That’s why I started thinking about context and the environment objects are set in. Chances are I’d imagine a couch differently if it was in a living room versus a study, even if the couches descriptions were the same. In both these cases it’s the environment and setting that helps to fill in the little details, and sometimes trying to add more specific descriptors can muddle the image.

It’s just something I started to mull over out of the blue, but now I’m going to keep it in mind to see how/if it changes the way I describe certain things. 

Shiny and New

So shiny, so pretty, so informative and relatively easy to navigate. Yup, I made a website. It’s got links to my book (soon to be books) and where links to short stories will be. Also a blog. Pretty typical website stuff. 

I actually experimented with a few styles, some including large banners and a cover page and so on. But this seems to be the best option, simple and clean with everything you need at a glance. 

I encourage you to go forth and peruse my site. Look at its nooks and crannies and behold its majesty.

(And yes the link text is orange because orange is my favourite colour.) 

Flash Fic and Brain Ooze

I’ve been racking my brain over flash fiction the last couple of weeks. The idea of getting a full story in 500 words makes my brain all snotty and oozy. So, I was pretty happy when my submission to 365 Tomorrows was accepted. It’s a cyberpunk story titled Shutters on Main, and it leans pretty heavy on some neo-noir themes. You can read it here.

Peeling away the excess fat of a story to try and get to the most import core elements is something that I’m still getting used to. I have to say though, I’ve been having a lot of fun writing flash fic (how much if it sees the light of day is another matter). 

My guidelines have been to try and tell a full story in 300-500 words. That means it has to be as lean and efficient as possible. I’m far from mastering it, but there are already things I’m learning that I hope will benefit my long form writing. It feels a little more like an instinct than a technical skill, like I’m getting better at sniffing out unwanted fat and cutting it from the draft. 

There is still a long way to go, but I like to think of this as a positive step forward.