Man, I don’t write for this blog as much as I should.
Life is going well. I just recently got a part time job doing telephone surveys; hopefully, it will help tide things over until I can get something better. Between that and donating plasma, I should be able to pay the bills for the next couple of months.
I’ve also been writing quite a bit, hitting between 2k and 4k words per day. At this rate, Mercenary Savior 3.0 should be finished by the end of next week. That’s good, because I’m excited to start submitting it. I’ve already got Genesis Earth making the rounds, but the sooner I can get another project out there, the better.
For my next project after , I want to recycle Hero in Exile (ugh, it needs a new title) and turn that into a complete novel. I have a lot of ideas for it, but it will require some research, which may delay the actual start date.
For example, the main character (who I’m going to rename) has this major conflict where he’s trying to go home. As a young boy, his parents put him in an escape pod that crash landed on the planet, where he was raised by the locals. As the writer, I’m going to need to know about adoptions, know a handful o f adoption stories to pattern things off of, and maybe read a couple of essays on the meaning of “home.”
As another example, one of the major themes I want to get across is the struggle to maintain personal moral integrity in a morally corrupt world. I probably won’t have to look too far for that–being Mormon has given me lots of opportunities for research there–but I need to do a lot more to be aware of that particular conflict. When you’re slogging away, it’s very easy to focus too much on plot and no enough on the rest.
Probably the biggest preparation is going to be working through the character motivations, and that inevitably means building a background, since motivations grow out of the character’s history and background. But that’s going to involve a fair degree of pre-writing, which I may or may not be able to do before I start page one.
And that’s another scene; I’ve got to completely revamp the beginning. What I have now involves the main character staring out over the desert just before a sandstorm. Picturesque, but essentially navel gazing with little real character development. Instead, I want to show him thinking or doing something that reveals the central, most important aspect of his character, the way Brandon Sanderson did it in Elantris.
So anyways, lots of work to look forward to, in terms of writing that is. Other kinds of work…well, it’s good to have a sense of security. Even though I’ve been producing a lot, I’m sure I could have been producing more (upwards of 6k or 8k per day) if I’d had that sense of security provided.
Anyways, there is more that I could say, but I’m going to go to bed because it’s freaking 2:22 AM. Night.
