Return

Wow, it has been a long time!   I've moved house, and my computer broke shortly before I had to move (argh, backlight) so it's been serious downtime.   But the computer's fixed now, and my stuff is on the way to being in order.   (Though still a mess, should be ordered soon.)

I've got a whole bunch of potential writing projects going now.   I'm in the very first stages of planning (read: thinking of random ideas) for my NaNoWriMo novel for this year.   I'm planning the story for my game.   And I'm editing Kosmos.   And I'm taking an optional humanities module at university, for which I'm doing some creative work too.

And above all else, I'm looking forward to getting back to editing Songlord!   I'll be compiling a list of all the changes that I want to make to draft 2 while they're all fresh in my mind, and while I still remember what people who've read it have told me.  

The End of Everything

Songlord is finished!   It's still a first draft, most definitively, there's a lot I want to change before going on to publication, but it's done nonetheless.   Songlord is one of the writing works I'm most proud, more so than anything I've ever written before.   It started out as a simple idea, singing to control magic, and grew into the behemoth that it is today.   Inspiration can come from anywhere (especially since I don't sing) and parts of Songlord that I'd found so difficult in other manuscripts just seemed to work.

Naming my characters is normally extremely difficult for me, but with Songlord I was continually impressed with myself, the names just seemed to come and go as needed.   That's not to say I never stopped and got stuck on names.   (*Minor spoiler*   The metal electrum took a long time for me to decide on the name for.)   Catherine and Isaac, Langford and Darksbane, they all work with their respective roles.   The one that was the biggest in terms of sheer inspiration was Gregarin Tionysis.   I was writing the paragraph that was first going to mention the King of Tryst, and I hadn't even gotten to the sentence yet when the name jumped out at me.   It was great.

I started Songlord last December, and it's been a great journey since then.   I'll be revisiting Songlord soon, to edit and then hopefully go on and find myself an agent to get into the publishing industry.   Somehow, I have more faith in Songlord for publication than Kosmos, but you never know.   (I even wrote a short piece for Songlord's back cover, in my optimism. ;) )

So my next step is to take a step back from Songlord so I can approach it as a reader, rather than a writer, when I look for changes I want to make to the story.   For a while I'll be venturing back into Kosmos and see if I can't streamline the NaNoWriMo story into a more coherent whole.   I will, of course, be doing NaNoWriMo again this year, so that will hopefully give me a third manuscript to be working with.   And I'm developing my own video game, which I'll be doing the story-writing for as well as the programming.   (I will need an artist and a music person eventually for that though.)

Back to Songlord, *fairly big spoilers in the rest of this post*, the Epilogue was the first departure from Catherine's point of view in the story, jumping back to her brother Jacob, who we haven't seen in a long time.   Usually my stories do change point of view relatively often, but for Songlord I made myself stick just with Catherine.   I figured the Epilogue could tell a very essential part of the story in a very different way to make it stand out, and it was very liberating to suddenly have an entirely new personality to toy with for the narration.   It was an affected personality, Jacob is not quite himself during the events of the Epilogue, but that makes it even more fun.

I also, since I couldn't get the thought out of my head, wrote the first few paragraphs of the second Songlord book.   (Of course Songlord is a series.)   I don't intend to continue it right away, I need to pin the first one down before I do that, but that particular scene wouldn't leave me alone.   Following on with the theme of character perspective, I change it again for that chapter, and I think the second Songlord book won't be tied down entirely to Catherine, though I'll make sure she has a definite commanding presence.   She's still my protagonist, but there's room for me to jump off to other characters now that my readers are familiar with Allirya and it's royal family.   For instance, were you wondering what Geoffrey Langford was like?   You'll probably see a lot more of him next time.   No promises, nothing's set in stone, but he's part of my unwritten plan for now.

Almost There

I've been looking at the word "Epilogue" printed on the latest page of Songlord for a while now.   So, yes, that means that I'm almost finished, the first draft of the entire Songlord manuscript is coming to an end, after about 8 months from when I started it last December.   I know pretty much what's going to happen in the Epilogue, barring some details which will come to mind when I'm writing.   It's a big scene, and I want to make sure I'm able to write it as well as I've envisioned it in my head.

And as is inevitable, thoughts of how the second Songlord book is going to go have been creeping into my head as well.   It's best for now if I keep notes on them rather than writing them out in full, starting up the second Songlord before I've even done any editing of the first one would not be the best idea.   And my plan isn't to edit Songlord straight away, I have a kind of alternating conveyor-belt system going, where now I can approach Kosmos more as a reader than a writer, so I'll be better able to edit it.

All part of the long road to publication.   I'll let you know when I finally write Songlord's Epilogue and get on to editing Kosmos.