Nethermore

Hit 31k on the new book. I should be about halfway done, but it’s hard to tell. When I hit revision time, I think 25k will be about halfway. I habitually write a ton more than I really need. Darn exposition. I’m trying to learn how to dramatize more and tell less.

It’s feeling pretty good so far. I’m excited to go back through and revise it and add more structure to the story, but being able to make stuff up on the spot is really the way to go sometimes. The characters, especially the side characters, are so much more interesting when I create them as they’re needed. I’ve had to rewrite a few times, however, when I didn’t like the first side character I placed in a certain spot. The second time at it, the characters turned out really fun.

There are some interesting things I’ve had to do due to the fact that I had no outline to speak of when I began this book at the beginning of the month.

For example, I’ve cut a lot of stuff already when I notice that I’m straying from the preconceived story in my head.

I think being able to reign the story in a bit has come from the experience I had writing Nethermore, which was written mostly without an outline and wound up being a train wreck because I added every little deviation and tried to make each one make sense within the plot, which royally messed up character and pacing.

So, I have a little bit better idea now when I’m straying too far. The little deviations can be left and dealt with in revisions. The big deviations would muddy up the whole recipe and cause huge swathes of rewriting. Here’s to hoping I’ve learned my lesson on that and can move toward a more coherent first draft.

There a lot of days where I feel like what I’m writing is utter drivel, and I have to keep telling myself that I can fix things after the fact. A sculptor has to have material to sculpt from. Right now, I’m creating that material: the base, the underpainting, whatever you want to call it. Sculpting—revisions—will come later.

If I fixed everything as I went, it would be like painting a painting to completion in 1 inch by 1 inch squares, including all the nitpicky details and without having drawn the thing beforehand. It might be an interesting exercise but the fact remains that the painting’s still going to look weird when it’s done. (Which, again, is what happened with Nethermore.)

My friend Shawn asked me the other day if revision is something “pretty darn essential to being a writer.”

I’m afraid it’s pretty darn essential. Unless you’re .01% of the writing population. And it may not be so much rewriting everything, but a combination of rewriting and revising. But sentences are deleted, some are added or changed to create better clarity, scenes are added or deleted to make the story fill out better, etc.

Rewriting used to scare me to death! Until I started looking at novels as sculptures and saw in my writing group that all the published writers are not only good writers but also good REwriters.

In other news, I went to the midnight showing for Twilight with my wife and a group of family and friends. My review: it was a faithful adaptation of the book. Best part of the movie: insertion of music by Muse: Supermassive Black Hole. Best part of the night: seeing my wife get very excited to see the movie.

Last night after work I wound up at Costco with the intent of meeting my wife there.  We’ve been without a TV for two or three weeks now since my brother-in-law moved out of the basement.  We’re not big TV watchers, but we do have a Wii, and you kind of need a TV in order to get the video game fix.

I wound up waiting for about an hour, and even though it’s Costco, I can only do so much looking, and I’m wandering around wishing I could do some writing.

But wait!  They’ve got laptops here with usb drives and Notepad on them!  I picked the laptop with the most discreet location and a good view of the nearby employees.  I plugged in my thumb drive and wrote about 800 words in twenty minutes.

Not a bad output, considering.  I just wish I’d thought of it earlier.  Maybe I should start writing at Costco every night.

It’s time to start updating frequently again after a long absence.  Things have been crazy!  Since I last posted, I’ve gotten married, become a step-dad, moved to a new city, started a new job, and started my next novel.  Life has given me one crazy ride, and I’m still getting used to things.

Couple items of note.  In February, Shawn Boyles and I started a web comic, Rocket Road Trip, about the crazy adventures of a family of monster hunters.  We originally wanted this to be a cartoon.  (We had been writing cartoons at work for the previous year before this and wanted to create a property that was all our own.)  And the cartoons will be forthcoming…when time allows.

I’ve also had quite a year so far insomuch as my writing goes.  I finished Nethermore back in April or May.  It clocked in at 175,000 words and was a bigger train wreck than my first novel.  I actually didn’t even get to the end fo Nethermore.  It was just getting way too long.  I’d started the book at the wrong point, I’d added way too many characters, and I kept changing the characters’ motivations.

After consulting with the wise members of the writing group, I ended the novel with something along the lines of: "And then the vampires flew in from the west on the winds of unforeshadowed happenstance.  One by one, the main characters either died of surprise or were eaten by the vampires.  Then the vampires turned on each other until not one thing moved or breathed or spoke in the land.  In the end, all that is, and was, and ever will be succumbed to death and madness.  The End."

The advice of my writing group was to be finished with Nethermore and go back to it at another time.  I’d learned all I could from it, and it was time to start something new.

I began my next novel a few weeks later, and within days, I met the woman I would marry, and as many of you know, being engaged sucks up a lot of time.  I didn’t get much writing done, but I did gather notes and scenes for the next novel.  Last month, I outlined the entire thing and now have a stack of 3×5 cards waiting for me to sit down and write.

For Nanowrimo, I decided not to write that novel.  Several friends had suggested that I play to my strengths and write something short and quirky, with the idea of a younger audience in mind.

And so I’ve been hard at work on my middle grade novel, which–if I continue on at the same pace–I’ll finish this month or early next month, depending on how long it is.

I’m experimenting.  The new novel is a free write, and I have to sometimes reign myself in to stay focused on the story at hand, but I’m getting some of the most creative and fun scenes and characters that I’ve ever created.  I go back and massage out the glitches when this mad dash to finish the thing is over.

But in the meantime, I’m enjoying myself immensely.

Well, most of this post has been done for months, but I just haven’t gotten around to updating the blog. What a slacker I am! I’m not going to promise any regular updates, but I am going to say that I finished Nethermore finally and have moved onto the next novel on my list. Next time I post I’ll talk about the things I learned from Nethermore and how those affect how I’m approaching my next book.

Now back to the Wheel of Time cover countdown!

#3. Crossroads of Twilight

I’m putting this at #3, but at the same time I’m not sure if it accurately reflects how I feel about the cover. At this point, I’m having a hard time separating the covers from the contents of the books. This very well may be a pity award since this book is the one that catches the most flack from readers.

However, I love the design on this one. It makes it very pick-up-able. There are more identifiable characters on this cover than any of the res t of them. I can actually tell which one is Mat, Thom, and Tuon. And the purple foil letters are snazzy and magical like a big dose of Harry Potter. So this is #3 because it’s fun to look at, has identifiable characters, and has horses who are excited to be part of the story.

#2. The Dragon Reborn

This portrays one of the great moments of the series, when the sword that is not a sword is pulled from the heart of the stone in Tear. Rand, Perrin (looking more like a member of the Goonies than a blacksmith’s apprentice), and Mat are readily identifiable, as is the creepy visage of Baalzamon that peered out from the spine of this book. My biggest complaint about this cover was that it was during the time that Tor’s book binders whipped up a batch of bad glue, which had the covers falling off most of the paperback’s I bought during this era. The Dragon Reborn paperback was the poster child for this era, falling off more quickly than most. But that was nothing a little Elmer’s glue and blue food coloring couldn’t fix. (I was fifteen at the time…I don’t know why I added blue coloring to the glue.)

#1. The Eye of the World

This could have been in the generic-people-riding-horses post, but these are pretty identifiable characters. We know which ones are Lan and Moiraine and Rand. This cover holds a place in my life because of the sense of wonder that it portrays. I remember seeing The Eye of the World sitting on the end table at my best friend’s house back when I was fourteen or fifteen. I picked the book up, borrowed it from my friend’s father, read it, and then lost it in my locker at school. Moiraine and Lan still look like these characters in my imagination. Everything is right about this cover; not because the design and art are perfect, but because of the memories associated with it. Thanks, DKS, for a nice cover. And thanks, RJ, for a wonderful series full of memories.

Well, that’s it folks. I’ll definitely review the cover for A Memory of Light when it’s released. Until that time, I’m not sure how much cover reviewing I’ll do, but I will get back on track about the book writing updates. And maybe I’ll find a bit of time to update the website and add a better portfolio section. Thanks for reading, folks.

A bit belated, but here is part 3 of 4.

#7. Fires of Heaven

At least this cover shows that there’s something lurking in the shadows, a phantom menace that may or not be a man in a Trolloc-head helmet or a Trolloc in a Trolloc-head helmet. Rand, Aviendha, and Mat stumble from the bar in Rhuidean only to find that the whole city has been cleared out. Rand (at a whopping 5’6”) contemplates going down the stairs in while wearing Chinese-silk pajamas; does he think better of it? What if he were to be ambushed in such a silly get-up? Aviendha hides her face from the camera so that we don’t know that it’s her doing the interpretive dance. Unfortunately, we do know what she’s doing. Mat looks cool. But he’s Mat, after all! It’s pretty hard to make him look stupid.

#6. Knife of Dreams

Perrin certainly doesn’t look as large as he’s described in the books. Here he’s doing the important task of pointing out the exact point where the series will end. The Aiel warrior is ready to defend Perrin’s declaration. A gray-haired general looks on skeptically, and an unidentifiable Aes Sedai is surprised that she’s thinking a lot about pudding. Regardless, the color scheme on this cover is very appealing; I love the heron-branded drapes and how Perrin is elbowing the guy behind him in the gut.

#5. The Great Hunt

This is the one that breaks the pattern of these four. Mat (or is that Rand?) has the horn of Valere. That’s a pretty important thing going on. It’s what the book’s actually about, never mind that Trollocs are portrayed as men in Trolloc-shaped armor. This cover gets brownie points for actually portraying an exciting event that actually happened in the book. I think this marks Loial’s only appearance on a cover in the series. He’s looking a little small for being such a giant. My favorite part about this cover is how well it portrays the feeling of autumn.

#4. A Crown of Swords

Rand is looking big and bad for his first ever music video, framed by a really nice/ominous color scheme. I’m a fan of blue, red, and yellow, as you can see by the colors I chose for my website, so the banal subject matter is really all that’s keeping this one from being in the top 3. All this cover is missing are the Trolloc back-up dancers.

Stay tuned for part 4 of 4, where we look at the Top 3 Wheel of Time covers ever!

Continuing on to the next set, I’ll review #s 10, 9, and 8, the “Generic Scenes of People Riding Horses.”

#10. Winter’s Heart

I think that’s supposed to be Perrin on the cover. However, it looks like it’s Perrin’s mini-me. I mean, isn’t he supposed to be big and threatening and wolf-like? In the book Perrin’s out to get his wife Faile from the renegade Aiel. This cover has Ricky Schroeder gone woodsman out to check his beaver traps and maybe smoke some jerky.

#9. The Path of Daggers

Starring on this cover, in the ugly thigh-boots, it’s Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, marching his armies into Ilian. There was a battle in this book. Why isn’t that on the cover instead of Rand riding with his sword drawn so awkwardly? I’ll be he runs with scissors too (which is a perk only channelers of the One Power are allowed).

#8. New Spring: the Novel

The cover of this book tells me that a group of people will ride horses a lot. One rider will wear green, one will wear red, and two will wear blue. The yellow bushes are used very nicely to offset the characters from the city in the background. It’s interesting that this one and the cover of The Great Hunt are the two covers whose color schemes are a little more complex, yet the artist is still able to create great contrast and vibrancy to draw the buyer’s eye. I love that I can identify Moiraine on this one, and especially like how it echoes the direction and posture of the characters and horses on The Eye of the World. Very fitting, since this was touted as the “new beginning” to the Wheel of Time series.

Tomorrow we’ll look at #s 4 through 7!

I’m going to catch flack for reviewing these; I just know I am. But I really wanted to do some posts in honor of the Wheel of Time series and have some fun talking about some of the best and some of the not-so-best covers of the series. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. When it’s all done, I’d love to hear some of your Top 12 Wheel of Time covers.

# 12. Lord of Chaos

This is one of my favorite titles ever, bold and red over the top of a brilliant color scheme, beautiful-enough to engage the eye and draw a reader to the book. As always, I love the graphic design on these books, mostly because they remind me of my youth. When I was younger, I wanted my books to be typeset just like these.

However, the cover belongs on a romance novel. Rand al’Fabio stands in the wind, shirt rippling to make him appear larger than he is as a random Aes Sedai gasps at his beauty. Strange things: the man in the rubber-bat suit and Rand’s tiny-looking right hand (not to mention his weirdly proportioned body and extra-tight Civil War pants).

# 11. The Shadow Rising

This might be my favorite book in the series, when the world opens up even more and Rand begins fulfilling more prophecies. I absolutely loved the trip to Rhuidean. So many interesting things happen in this book. Why couldn’t they be on the cover instead of . . . camping.

Rand and Mat (I assume) eat s’mores and discuss March Madness while weirdly-proportioned Egwene (?—she is wearing blue) stirs the chili.

Again, the typeface is nice (although the “Robert Jordan” looks a little crowded so that we can see that the fire is actually a cook fire and not something more insidious). The color scheme is beautiful and eye-catching, and I love the use of value as Rand and Mat’s shadows are thrown up against their Winnebago.

Most exciting subject matter of this cover: a Trolloc(?) shadow appear between the rock formations, hinting that this cover was a snapshot too late to show the attack on camp.

Return tomorrow for numbers 10, 9, and 8!

He’s been gone for a month. But I still can’t help but feel a great sense of loss in the wake of his passing. Even though I never met the man, Robert Jordan had a huge influence on my life during my teenage years. And to think, I came upon his books entirely by accident.

I was about fourteen. There on the lamp table in the living room of my best friend’s house was a copy of The Eye of the World in its first paperback printing (the one with the less-defined maps).

As you can imagine from reading my blog, I was originally drawn to the book by its beautiful cover and interior paintings. I remember the moment very distinctly, the feels, the smells. This may sound ridiculous, but deciding to pick up that book, to borrow it from my friend’s father, was a defining moment in my life.

All because of a beautiful cover. Okay, I guess it wasn’t just because of that–the tome’s width and heft were impressive. I’d been on a kick of reading thick fantasy novels for a year already, and I’d already gone through the Tad Williams’ books, and here was another book that looked like it would fill my hunger for thick fantasy.

And it did, every wit.

Two writers had a significant impact on the way I learned to write during that time of my life. Robert Jordan was one of these. When I was 18, I finished writing my first book and gave it to my father to read. He was the first one to point out all of the Jordan-isms I had used. It left me raising my eyebrows, having done this quite unintentionally. I spent the next little while trying not to write like him.

When I started working at the book store, I used our computer system (still sans internet) to find as many books as I could under Robert Jordan’s other pen names. A lot of my searching was fruitless, and I had to wait for the books to come out revealing that “Reagan O’Neal” and “Jackson O’Reilly” were actually pen names for Robert Jordan. And the bigger realization discovered in some encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy that Robert Jordan was really the pen name of James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

Gasp. It was like discovering that the man with fire-for-a-mouth that haunted Rand’s dreams wasn’t actually the Dark One.

I don’t know what ever happened to that first Eye of the World paperback that belonged to my friend’s dad. It was in my locker at school one day, and the next day it was gone. I don’t think he made me replace the book. Paperback books were transitory things to him. But to me . . . that book was like gold.

I read The Eye of the World in between classes at high school.

I read The Great Hunt while in line at Disneyland. The book’s there in every family picture of that trip, my nose in the book or my finger marking my place.

When my father barely slipped by the grasp of death in a terrible car accident, I stayed the evening by his bedside in the ER. The book I brought with me was the new Jordan paperback: The Dragon Reborn.

I had The Shadow Rising in my big hunting coat as Dad set me down at the bottom of a gulley and said he’d go to the top and flush the deer through. When the autumn sun rose high enough in the sky, I took the coat off, I sat on a sun-warmed rock, and I read.

I can go through my junior high, high school, and college years and remember what was going on in my life based on which Jordan book had come out at the time.

Coincidentally, I was thinking about RJ the day he died. I was on my way home from Idaho and had just pulled off the freeway into Provo. My thought was, “I need to check out RJ’s blog and see how he’s doing.”

I didn’t get around to that until the next day, when early that morning, a friend at work informed me of RJ’s death.

I’ll admit, I spent the day in a pseudo sense of mourning; it felt as if a friend had died.

And he really was a friend. I’d spent autumn afternoons in the mountains with him; I’d stood in line with him at Disneyland; he’d been there when my dad was in the emergency room at the hospital.

Goodbye, RJ. Thanks for all the good times.

Tomorrow, in honor of Robert Jordan, I’ll be doing a book cover countdown of the Twelve Best Wheel of Time Book Covers.

Just returned from some of the greatest trips I’ve ever been on. For anybody thinking about going to Scotland, I can’t recommend it enough. Sell everything you own, if you have to, and go!

New Picture Links Below

Paris
Scotland

For those who are interested in knowing, I’ll be returning home Wednesday and will move into my apartment in Utah on the 22nd. I can’t wait to be back!

It’s been awhile since I’ve given any updates. Life has been pretty exciting. We just got back from a trip to Munich a few weeks ago, during which we traveled to a bazillion different towns, saw a thousand really cool cathedrals, hiked in the Alps, and ate a lot of sausage.

Now, back at the apartment, I realize again that I’m tied to the bus schedule and feel a little secluded. Regardless of the isolation–if I was really outgoing I could go to discoteks or just go downtown and make friends–I’m going to miss Germany when I get home. The cheese, the yogurt, the bread, the gummy bears–all these things are really great. Not to mention the castles, the Roman battlefields, and deep history that this place has going on.

In the end, though, I’m an American and love my country. I can’t imagine living anywhere else permanently. I mean, true, Germany has castles. But we have the 4th of July.

The 4th
Speaking of the 4th, let me tell you what I did for that day. I watched Bruce Willis take out domestic terrorists in Stirb Langsam (Die Slowly) 4.0. Afterward, Matthias and I went to an ice cream parlor where I ordered a scoop each of red, white, and blue ice cream. We asked a Russian guy to take our picture, and he declined as he raced into the parlor as if getting his fix of ice cream RIGHT NOW was a matter of life and death. Man, he thinks he has it bad; the only blue ice cream they had was bubblegum flavor. Everything else was on the purple side.

I had to have red, white, and blue . . . so I took one for patriotism and ordered bubblegum. Afterward I ate a burger and fries at McDonalds and then wondered why I didn’t just settle for Pizza Hut.

Snow White
A few weeks ago I was in Hanover at a local Doner place. (Doners are a Middle-Eastern lamb-filled pita that Germany has adopted as their own.) I looked down from the second floor at the dinner guests eating at tables in the open. A woman dressed as Snow White caught my eye. She was placing dinners in front of seven of her friends, each wearing dwarf hats and t-shirts proclaiming which dwarf each was supposed to be. Something made Snow White very mad, and as she refused dinner to one of her dwarf pals, she let out a string of German expletives. Tally this one up there with Mickey Mouse beating up rowdy kids at Disneyland.

Grunt French
On the subway in Munich, I heard a girl speaking with a family a few seats in front of us. She wasn’t speaking German. Over the sound of the moving subway, all I could tell is that it sounded like French to me, except it wasn’t French. It was like, Grunt French, as if someone had taught a monkey to speak French and he couldn’t smoothly articulate all the syllables and can’t pronounce anything right.

When the subway stopped, the girl’s talking became clear. She was speaking English and was an American.

Skater Boi
A few days ago on my way to a young men’s activity, I was sitting on the bus reading China Mieville’s brilliant Perdido Street Station, when the bus stopped and let on a new passenger. A kid no older than twelve sat down in front of me and set two broken halves of a skateboard in his lap. He looked on the verge of tears, and I caught his eye and nodded a manly hello. He nodded back, looked out the window, determined not to let his emotions show. He couldn’t have looked more discouraged if the skateboard in his lap had been a dead puppy. This scene is one of the most heart-breaking ever.

Gummy Bears
I figured I’m going to run out of memory for my camera on my France and Scotland trips, so I ordered two 2gig SD cards from Amazon. They came in the mail yesterday from their affiliate partner. Included with the memory?: a mini bag of gummy bears. I’m going to order more stuff. I hope my Harry Potter book comes with Bertie Botts beans. So long as they’re not the rotten-fish flavor.

Cola Tigers
My coolest purchase lately has been a bag of Trolli gummy tigers called “Cola Tigers.” There are all sorts of cola candy here in Germany (no caffeine! so they don’t keep me up at night), and these little tigers are just another attempt to candyfy another German drink: the Spezi. Spezi is a mix of cola and orange juice. Cola tigers are a mix of gummy cola and gummy orange, which may or may not taste like their fruit counterparts. They taste good, and not at all like what tigers in the wild taste like. I don’t think.

Pizza Hut
Less greasy than the American counterpart. I ate myself silly last night and still had leftovers. Including cheezy crust!