Ooh boy, last night Nethermore was this close to being canned for a time indefinite–and yes, if that ever happens, you can still throw fruit at me.

I sent a six-page document detailing the magic system in Nethermore to a writer friend of mine whose opinion I trust and whose writing I admire. The object of this was to get some feedback so that I could press ahead on the novel and avoid some pitfalls that his 17+ novels of experience had shown him. We had quite the discussion, and it was very insightful and helpful.

Some of the things I learned:

1) Books that sit too long in your head before being written tend to take on a life of their own as ideas get interwoven and everything becomes way too complex. The solution to this problem is focus and streamline the story, if possible, or just write the silly thing and get it out of your system. On future books, it’s better to not let the idea sit so long in the fridge that it starts to own the fridge.

2) When starting a book it’s best to have one unique idea for the following: each viewpoint character, the world, the magic, and the conflict. If you get too many unique ideas going on in each of those categories, then the book may get too complex for readers to follow. Clarity and character are the keys to accessible stories. In Nethermore I was making things too complex, sometimes unnecessarily so.

3) Themed magic systems. My magic system had no real focus. Once I was able to articulate what I wanted my main character to be able to do, then the magic system fell into place. After that, it was easy to think up powers that my character needed in order to fulfill his job. The connection between the magic and Nethermore became a whole lot clearer, and the magic itself became more internally consistent.

4) Characters in conflict make the most interesting characters. Make the conflict personal. For example, if you have a character who wants to stop a village from being destroyed because he hates it when people take over villages, then that’s all fine and good. But the main character should be a member of the village that’s about to get destroyed. The conflict for her is personal.

We talked about a lot of other things, and I took a few notes, but in the end, despite some rearranging and changing of the magic system, I left feeling motivating to continue writing.

So Nethermore is still being written, with some changes made to the magic system. And I’m still going to finish this monster by the end of July.

Oh, by the way, here’s today’s cool pic. What’s with this? Do they just happen to have Fluffy chained in their front yard to keep out attackers? Or did this lady climb the fence at the zoo and this is just the Before picture of a Before and After set?