Revision: Something That Stayed in the Iceberg

By the “iceberg,” I mean Ernest Hemingway’s famous dictum that a great chunk of your setting and story will remain submerged. Just as people have subconscious energies, so should stories. There’s always a tendency to over-explain, but to a certain extent, we want some of the work’s content to remain submerged so that it can engage the reader actively, not just passively.

Recently, I have been tidying up my first chapter of The Eye of Wysaerie, as well as expanding the setting of the Cavarah Farmstead, Elessa’s home. Though I made many changes in the opening pages, there was an interesting departure between paragraphs two and three as I wondered exactly how both Elessa and Shaul would have responded to the presence of monsters so close to their farm. While much of this informed my revision of the opening pages, I’m undecided as to the dramatic effect of the new narrative elements. Though a version of this might make it in chapter one at some point, currently I’m treating it as apocryphal, Not everything that is narrative is dramatic. While I do like the dream, and their decision to bury the carrion that would attract vermin to the farm, the backstory may be too much. Currently, this is “submerged” material for the novel.

If I never include this in the novel, was I wasting my time? No. Everything that you imagine for your characters should be pursued. Even apocryphal scenes inform our image of our characters, so that the scenes that don’t make the cut breathe some new life into your characters and setting. That unseen context is no less real for being submerged.

This falls between paragraphs two and three:

When Elessa’s father Shaul heard the story, they stabled the horses early, locked the barn, then harnessed fat old Getta to the cart and returned to the kill. The horse was now more carrion than corpse, with rats and crows dining head to head. They hissed and cawed when Shaul flung them with the shovel, but scattered and skulked in the corn fields.

“A prize stallion, now not even fit for dog food,” said Elessa’s father.

“Samorn might feed him to his dogs,” said Elessa.

“I wouldn’t feed rat-eaten meat to innocent dogs, though I once might have stewed it for Samorn.”

“Weren’t you always friends with Samorn?”

“Not before you were born.”

“What did I have to do with it, papa?

“I’ll tell you the story on our way to the wall.” North of the farmstead was an old stone wall about three feet high, which used to mark the border between the Urgots, who held the farm before the Cavarahs, and the Kalbors, who once held the land north of the wall, and had since migrated to the capitol. After they climbed back onto the cart, and rode for several minutes, Shaul continued.

“Samorn’s wife, Kavura—rest her soul—was Glasford’s midwife. Her misgivings against your mother, Kala, were the original and constant cause of our quarrels, and on the day of your birth, she was not inclined to a forgiving mood; though Kavura’s hands birthed you, it was Samorn that brokered peace that day, and when I held you, I forgot every thought of resentment and called him friend.”

“Will you ever tell me why mother left?”

“Not today. That had little to do with Samorn.”

“Did Kavura ever forgive mother?”

“Maybe.”

“What couldn’t she forgive?”

“That’s a story for another day, Elessa.”

When they arrived at the north wall, Shaul and Elessa filled the wagon bed with the wall’s crumbling stones. While they carried the larger stones between them, most of the old wall was in lighter fragments that settled loosely around the slabs. Though their callused hands were not scraped, and their tough muscles did not ache, it was still nuisance work, for the decaying wall revenged itself upon the farmers by powdering them with ancient dust and chalking the air.

Once the cart was loaded, they returned to the dead horse. Though the rats and crows had returned to their feast, and fearless of the shovel, ignored the farmers, Shaul did not reach for that tool, but simply started burying the corpse under the stones from the wall. Elessa climbed into the wagon and handed down the stones to her father, and by that relay the work was done only an hour after sundown, though the vermin broke off from their feast just before sunset.

When they arrived home, Shaul unhitched Getta, and when he stabled her in the barn, Elessa went inside, climbed the ladder into the loft, flopped into her bed, and from that lazy, reclining position, already more than half-asleep and with a faceful of pillow, kicked her shoes across the one-room farmhouse to clatter against the wall. The moment her eyes closed, she saw a chimerical behemoth that changed from scales to feathers to shadows to fire with each breath; the dream seemed to flex all as one, not only the creature, but its phantasmic backdrop, all rippled like water until the monster screamed around a mouthful of horse, gobbets of blood and flesh raining, then running down into a blonde beard on a leonine head. She awoke when her father stoked the wood chips in the oven, then clambered into bed.

Unity of Dreamtime

If you’re going to have dreams in your novel (and you should), for them to be believable, the dreamscape they inhabit should be just as consistent as the waking backdrop. This is easier done than said, actually, as all you must do is contemplate all your dreams as if they are different glimpses of the same place. My recommendation is to put them into the same palette, so to speak, whether you do this by creating a “dream timeline” or a dream file that groups them together in one document.

It’s a mistake to think that the dreams aren’t a glimpse into your setting, for they are a glimpse of the psychic reality, not the material reality, of your novel. You want to hone the dreams in your novel until they are so indissoluble from your setting that your novel couldn’t be discussed for long without mentioning them, not unlike the inseparability of Coop’s plunge into the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks.

While your subordinate characters may or may not have the benefit of seeing this subconscious world, your hero should not lay her head down to sleep without dreaming. If your hero sleeps, and wakes up in the next paragraph without a dream intervening, that is a missed opportunity for exploring her fears, hopes, and other hidden drives. Though you may end up cutting a dream here or there from your novel, you should explore your hero’s dream every time they sleep. Even if you write something you’re not completely happy with, your character’s dream at that moment may give you a clue as to the future of the novel, or a deeper motive for your hero’s actions. Additionally, giving your characters a dream life helps to make them larger than life in your mind, and at the same time exponentially empowers your setting with a vibrant psychic reality. Every artist at some point needs the sense that they’re working on something larger than themselves, something that can be immersed in, an ego-death that translates to a transparent window into the world of your novel—focusing on the dream life of your protagonist is one of the keys to make that happen.

As to how you write a dream—this is a harder thing to convey. Start keeping a dream journal, for in transcribing dreams you will learn their structure. If you think that you don’t dream, you do—everyone does—and you simply need to figure out how to trick yourself into remembering your dreams. You could try automatic writing for five minutes after you wake up—this sometimes triggers memories of your dreams. (Automatic writing is simply writing non-stop, no matter how stupid or unpunctuated the writing may be. I’m not one of those that consider this a spiritual radio for listening to demons and spirits, but simply a way of bypassing the curtain in the bicameral mind to listen to the unedited monologue of the right brain.) You could try self-hypnosis—simply telling yourself a dozen times before you go to bed, “I will remember my dream.” If you’re in a religion that has concerns with automatic writing or self-hypnosis, try praying for a dream life. Once you’ve unlocked some dreams for your dream journal, try to develop them, like you would a story. This activity will prepare you for the creation of authentic dream material in your novel. Obviously, your characters will not dream of the same things that you do, as they have different drives than you do, but as you learn what you dream about, you will get an inkling of the things that will preoccupy your characters’ dream lives.

 

Revision: Scene Expansion Part II, The Cavarah Farmstead

Expanding the backdrop of The Cavarah Farmstead resulted in 271 words added to Chapter Ten, “The Lives Left Behind.” You can find it through here, starting with “Elessa remembered…”

While the farmstead appears in many chapters, in most of those appearances it was ashes, so my choices for expanding it as it originally appeared were few: expand the scene in Chapter One; add a prologue; or, insert the material in a flashback. While I’m inclined to leave a detailed description of the farm out of Chapter One, Elessa’s flashbacks in Chapter Ten proved to be an opportunity to introduce a vivid memory of the farmstead.

As a bonus, it also allowed me to tell more of the backstory I’ve embedded in the novel. That is, fourteen to fifteen years ago noteworthy things happened not only to Elessa, but Gaspar, Adelae, Ilmar, King Algus, and Lady Venihault, and this morning that I’ve described gives us another peek at that era.

Revision: More Thoughts on Science in a Fantasy Setting, Specifically Optics (telescopes/planets/astronomy)

Since I have all these unused names from yesterday, and I am desirous of expanding the setting of Lamuna in my WattPad novel, The Eye of Wysaerie:

Lamuna is the third planet from the sun, which has the ancient name of Feror, though most people simply call it “sun,” as it has become a material and scientific fact, and less of a metaphysical and mythical idea. Lamuna’s year is like our own, though all of the human kingdoms are in the warmer side of the temperate zone, so that cold days come, but not too much snow or ice.

Likewise, the moon is simply called “moon,”” though it has the ancient name of Namoz.

There are five planets known in the solar system, though astronomers of a mathematical bent speculate that there may be as many as eleven planets. The first planet is Almana, the second Erdod, the fourth Ipama, and the fifth Seidlas. (While it’s rare in the fantasy genre to name a place without making it a destination, I’m going to stress that there is no world-hopping in this series.) While the second and fifth planets are very bright, the others are the faintest of specks without the assistance of telescopes. Speaking of telescopes, all the human kingdoms use them, though most are made in Ardem.

Lest I underestimate the introduction of optics in Lamuna, I should have a think about what this entails in the setting. Other than astronomical data, what are some of the other side effects of optical technology in a fantasy world? Probably more influential than gunpowder, when you consider how much of an effect it has on consciousness, changing the center of the universe from the earth (or the Lamuna) to somewhere out there, in the vastness of space. It changes the focus of humanity from the gods to the eye of humanity. In concrete terms, it would lead to advances in medicine (if there’s a telescope, there’s a microscope), material science, and warfare; telescopes were possibly used in the battle described in chapter sixteen. Siege warfare would be much more precise, as well as nautical warfare, as siege weaponry would be more accurate. Corrected vision would lead to a more literate culture, and a longer career for authors. Hence, more books, scrolls, and the other literate productions of a culture, though I’m uncertain about the existence of a printing press.

But the main effect of knowing that the lights in the sky are just lights, and not metaphysical entities, that can’t be overstated; no doubt there is a ton of Berkeley-ist (as in Bishop Berkeley’s idea that everything is a product of mind) backlash, with philosophers then retreating to the empirical cave, that everything we see is a kind of metaphysical light, since it is all a kind of imagination created by our minds as an interpretation of what we see, and not the things themselves. As fast as the scientists vacuum up all of the metaphysics, the philosophers will strive to put it back into the world. And since there are actual magicians in Lamuna, what kind of effect do they have on this historical dialectic between science and metaphysics?

You may think that these are inconsequent elements, but philosophy so consciously and subconsciously drives our world that it would be small-minded and stone-hearted not to consider it in Lamuna. Even if it stays in “the iceberg.” It may be why my characters, both good and bad, are so positive without anything to believe in—without a huge feast of bad faith everywhere they look, they’re clear-eyed and hungry to hear the truths of their own personalities. A villain uncompromised by bad faith and bad philosophy could very well be a smiling optimist, like the villains in The Princess Bride, as they can smother the voice of denial and have only to tune in the voice of their preferred reason. Which is not to say that Elessa doesn’t have a bright future without the baggage of belief, simply that it makes the villains interesting.

Notes on Setting: Technology, Religion, and An Anecdote on Place Names

While there are piratical archipelagos, bandit fiefdoms, puritanical plantations, cult compounds, and other pockets of collected humanity, human civilization in terms of cultures with a history and a mythos is constrained by the expansion of savage lands and monstrous territories on the world of The Eye of Wysaerie. As humans are not the only predator on this fantasy world that can be said to be dominant, with surrounding regions being particularly rife with dracoils, the protosentient cousins of the vanished dragons, human expansion is mainly limited to three kingdoms (Vanoor, Klyrn, and Ardem). Humans in this world are no less warlike and competitive than they are in our own, and with their dreams of conquest, exploration, and colonization frustrated, human culture has flourished internally, developing to a level approximating the 18^th to 19^th centuries on our Earth. Vanoor has the short end of the stick in this regard, as they use oil lamps for lighting; Klyrn uses gaslamps (seen in Chapter 15 in the sculpture garden); and, Ardem university (name TBD; I probably won’t call it Ardem University despite the significance of the abbreviation AU to physics and astronomy) has a battery powering electrical lighting (though they only currently provide it to the nine city blocks surrounding the university). As I’ve mentioned before, setting can determine the genre of your novel; if I had started this one in Ardem, it might have been steampunk.

While I’m often tempted in my fantasy projects (old D&D campaigns, unfinished novels, three of my finished novels) to engineer bizarre solar systems with unusual sun or moon counts, my first thought when creating this one was to make it, cosmically speaking of course, fairly close to our own, meaning one yellow sun, one moon, and only one life-supporting planet. I like “sword and planet” action, but there isn’t any in this fantasy setting. No one will be riding a griffin to the moon.

As I also like to infuse my settings with jealous, manipulative, and furious pantheons of deities, I decided that this setting would be Deity Lite, wanting to give Vanoor an Age of Reason vibe populated by deists, agnostics, and atheists, and all of them willing to talk about the idea of god or gods rationally. (Their Age of Reason is a lot more civil than ours was.) The main reference to religion is when Elessa prays to the “quiet gods,” a phrase I picked carefully when I decided that if anyone was the praying sort in this novel, it was Elessa, my hero. Not wanting to open the floodgates of religion in this world, I chose a phrase that might let me open it later. They’re not dead, only quiet. But as my other four fantasy novels are deep-dyed in gods, and they are SO MUCH DARKER, and as religion tends to paint with a black brush in our own world, I currently don’t see any reason to drab up my bright, albeit sometimes gory, fantasy. “Yes,” you say, “but who built the cloud island?”

The Vanoori call this world Lamuna, which means not Earth, but resting place; it’s a catch-all word to them, meaning not only a house or other dwelling place, but a bed, a dream, or even a pillow. It also may be borrowed from the ancient name of the earth goddess, one of the “quiet gods.”

An Anecdote on Place Names

When I’m coining my names, I tend to find a sound and a look to a word I like first, then head to Google if I’m happy with them. As I was casting around for something to call this world, I thought Lamosa, Lamota, and Lamora would be great world names, and I have Google to thank for not naming my world Muddy (Spanish, la mosa), Marijuana (also Spanish, la mota), or after the character of another fantasy novel (The Lies of Locke Lamora). Lamusa means muse in Spanish (la musa), which I can live with, but junk in Polish, (lamusa), which would make it entirely too easy for Polish reviewers. I went with Lamuna, as the only thing I could find in Google Translate is “lamunan” means in Indonesian daydream or fantasy.

Unused names (these never made it to the Google round): Seidlas, Klasim, Enor, Kuldan, Kultura (too allegorical), Yawan, Aned, Ipama, Feror, Urden, Urmoz, Namoz, Undan, Ulmo, Lomura, Lemuna, Lemula, Lemura, Lamana, Almana, Erdod.

Revision: Scene Expansion Part I, The Cavarah Farmstead

There are about 600 new words added to Chapter Thirteen, “Rude Beds and Cold Morning.” This comes out of my expansions to the third most important backdrop in The Eye of Wysaerie, the Cavarah Farmstead. While Ilmar’s castle is probably the most important dwelling place in the novel, and the cloud island is the most important exterior backdrop, I’m starting with the Cavarah Farmstead because it appears in Chapter One. Also, I have the feeling that it should become at least as important as the other two settings.

When you click through this Wattpad link, you’ll find the new passage between “the unfortunate dead” and “After her homecoming, Elessa gave Beast her will…” If you’re not shortcut key literate, use CTRL + F to find one of these text sections.

Below you’ll find the notes from my scene expansion, lifted nearly word for word from my Book Journal for The Eye of Wysaerie, though I removed spoilers.

One thing I’d like to stress is that in revision, it is just as important to gaze into your original imagery than to apply logic as you develop a setting. Logic is a wonderful thing. By its application, I decided that the Cavarahs not only farm livestock, but feed for the livestock, so there are arable acres with alfalfa, oats, corn, and the like. But logic would never have told me why, when I imagined the stream leading from Glasford to the farm, there was a shadowy patch reflected in the water. Why did I imagine the shadow reflected in the river? Upon reflection, I decided that a bridge spans the stream. Today I wrote about 600 words on that bridge, and discovered some interesting details in there that foreshadow a few possible directions for the sequel. I also realized something huge about one of my major characters that I can’t possibly blog about. But I’d just like to stress that a HUGE thing was–figuratively speaking–lurking in this bridge that was standing just outside the picture. While you won’t see it written plainly in those 600 words, it is latent in that passage.

Notes from the Scene Expansion:

In my image of the Cavarah farmstead, a rectangular farmhouse abuts a barn about half again as tall, half again as deep, and twice as wide. The barn doors are on its right hand side, facing away from the farmhouse and to the right of the stream when you are heading towards the farmstead. The farmhouse is a single story, but the barn has a loft, with a wooden ladder leading to the loft. At times I have thought the farmhouse was one room, though that seems strange now. Perhaps there is a loft in the farmhouse, too? And that’s where Elessa has slept since her childhood. She climbs a ladder into it. So the farmhouse is like a floor and a half, since the loft isn’t a full floor, and she has to stoop to crawl into bed.

The farmhouse has a porch (chapter two).

In my original image of the griffin reveal, the griffin was pinned to the wall of the loft to the left, and partially illuminated by moonlight streaming in from behind them. There is a window directly behind them, facing the stream, through which the moon shines. A guard gets tossed by a griffin through this window, widening it.

The stream cuts through the fields from Glasford village to the Cavarah farmstead. As there are horses, ponies, dogs, and dowsing pigs, there is also arable land so that the Cavarahs can grow their own feed. They grow alfalfa, oats, and corn in large quantities, and also garden other vegetables. The stream is also flanked by trees, a detail I sometimes forget (“a shallow stream that wended down a wooded gully” chapter two). The stream has narrow banks (chapter four).

Gaspar’s first sight of the farmstead: “a blocky farmhouse adjoining a huge half-crumbled barn.”

There should definitely be a garden described in the novel.

My Uncle Jack’s farm keeps interceding as I reach for the image of this farm, which shows how powerful a hold memory has. I have to be careful to separate the subtler imagined memories from the real ones, because the Cavarah farmstead looked nothing like it when I was writing the story.

There’s a bridge between the village and the farmstead, and the stream flows underneath it. I have looked away from this bridge in every imagination of it, but it was there, sometimes shading the scenes or flashbacks. Where does the bridge go? It’s the road to the Vanoor capitol on the one side, but where does it go in the other direction? Possibly Ardem, the third human kingdom, which I only mentioned once in The Eye of Wysaerie.

 

The Cavarah Farmstead backdrop appears in Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Four, Chapter Nine (the stream and the farm appear in The Knight of Nine Tails’s reminiscence), Chapter Thirteen, and Chapter Sixteen. There may also be a few flashbacks here and there.

The bridge has a painted interior, or perhaps some old advertisements papered by traveling actors, perhaps by the Klyrnish company that preceded the construction of the theater. There used to be a traveling show that passed through Glasford on the way to Ardem, but that stopped when the king built the Royal Theater. Yes, I like this idea. The posters are nailed in and have bonded with the wood and become moldered with time and the weather seeping into the covered bridge.

(SPOILER REDACTED)

Interestingly, a huge clue to the narrative was lurking in this covered bridge that I overlooked in my first draft dynamism. I’ll need to describe the interior, at least, at some point in the novel. I suppose I’ll do it now. Which character goes there? Perhaps Elessa in Chapter Thirteen, during her walkabout, either before or after she buries the bodies.

Revision: On Timelines and Lacunae

la·cu·na

ləˈk(y)o͞onə/

noun

plural noun: lacunae

1. an unfilled space or interval; a gap.

   “the journal has filled a lacuna in Middle Eastern studies”

   • a missing portion in a book or manuscript.

     From Google Dictionary.

A word typically applied to passages lost to time or ancient censors, lacuna literally means any missing section of a book, and could be used to describe those parts that you haven’t yet written. By thinking of them in this way, they take on a measure of reality in advance of their production. By creating timelines for your fantasy setting, you may reveal these hidden passages, or even chapters, skulking in the subconscious.

In my third draft of The Eye of Wysaerie, I have been creating timelines and scene catalogs to plot out everything consistently. This is my usual third step, and I highly recommend it. As it’s now fresh in my mind, I thought I’d share just what this does for an author. Previously, I remarked that it brings the writer’s full attention to bear on every moment and scene in the novel, so that you can flag certain moments for expansion, and this is very true. What also happens is that you begin to wonder what’s happening during the unaccounted time. You begin to chip the ice in the iceberg to a definite shape, much of which you may decide to keep tacit, but some of which can be imported into your novel. And in this stage of The Eye of Wysaerie, it is becoming apparent that there is at least one unwritten chapter, perhaps two, that I need to write if only for my own benefit, before any thought of writing a sequel. While these may not be necessary to the novel, and may even impede the flow of the story, certain events happening behind the scenes need to be hammered out to the certainty of a fact.

You may ask, how is it possible that a secret history can exist in something that I’ve written while wide awake? Authors aren’t intentionally censoring themselves, of course, when they’re writing the first draft, but often our attention is focused on the foreground characters, our bright, Apollonian protagonists. Following their romps can get us very quickly to the conclusion of the novel. But as we’re following the heroes’ moral thread, we may lose sight of the ickier causal thread of evil, and as we plot out the timeline, the full tableau of effects stands revealed, so that we say to ourselves, this might happen here, or that would definitely happen there. And as your timeline gets fleshed out, soon every character has an effect on the narrative.

Revision: On Assiduity

Assiduous: adjective 

1. constant; unremitting: assiduous reading.

2. constant in application or effort; working diligently at a task;persevering; industrious; attentive: an assiduous student.

–from Dictionary.com.

Assiduity: noun, plural assiduities.

1. constant or close application or effort; diligence; industry.

2. assiduities, devoted or solicitous attentions.

While I recommend writing your first draft in a state of flow consciousness, revising a novel is an exercise in assiduousness. In our fractured era that scatters our attention on so many screens, the concept of assiduity is somewhat foreign, just as the assiduous are an endangered species, probably no doubt exclusively devotees of intellectual, creative, or artisan pursuits. Many people with an assiduous inclination are drawn to long form video games, less for their immersive qualities than for the promise of rewarding constant devotion. There is something of assiduity in the end-of-the-week NYT crossword puzzles (but definitely not the Monday).

For assiduity is more than simply concentration, which can be redirected and spread thick or thin as you will (my reading habits are by no means assiduous, as I find myself with bookmarks in dozens of print and digital books); it is not simply a discipline, which can become thoughtless muscle memory, so that all thought of diligence is abstracted in an unwilled and indulgent virtuosity (this is why I have mainly given up poetry); in assiduity, there is always what the Dhammapada calls earnestness, a sincere intent to attend to the sense of a matter. Simply put, assiduity is unending willed concentration bent sincerely to a task. During revision, we are pleased when inspiration causes the work to flower at our slightest touch, but on the days that it doesn’t, we still sit down to tinker at the novel. We reach into our toolbox for our thesaurus when we choke on that word on the tip of our tongue, or we work on the prosaic tasks of drafting, such as timelines, scene catalogs, glossaries, character studies, and synopses. We find that room that is scantily described and dress it up. We read the novel both silently and out loud, to see how it comes alive to the ear and the eye. Though you should trust to inspiration when it strikes, you should devote yourself also to assiduity. While the inspired have the fickle rewards of inspiration, the assiduous have the constant rewards of assiduity.

The Eye of Wysaerie Chapter 16 “The Hungry Gates” (Completed #Wattpad)

I posted “The Hungry Gates,” chapter 16 of The Eye of Wysaerie today, which completes my Wattpad. This concludes the second draft of my first novel, but it does not conclude the story.

I know I have absolutely no reason for allowing The Knight of Nine Tails to appear in this chapter. That will probably be the first fix. I couldn’t bring myself to cut that scene from the chapter, though it no longer made sense after revisions to “A Taste of Pie.” I have a few explanations that could work, though having not given the matter much thought, I’d like to wait to think of a more exciting justification.  I also feel like adding a scene checking in on Lady Honor and the other Brynnelmark, as well as Renae, who is probably still in their care.

I underestimated how long my novel would be when I guessed 75,000 words, as I hit 79249 words.

From here, I will probably head in to a timetable and scene catalog, and fix any inconsistencies as to time and space as it exists in this world.

More #Revision Notes: Exterminating the Leprechauns

When we’re writing a fast first draft, we follow the leprechaun, whose rainbow-brained turns of phrase can lead us to the golden finish of our novel.

When we’re revising, we have to exterminate most of these leprechauns.

Some valueless Leprechaunisms: (all of hich follow a nine in 10 rule, so you can cling to them 10% of the time if you want): after all, of course, it was good to know, entire, whole (“the whole banana” doesn’t differ very much from “the banana,” and your story shouldn’t bank on that petty descriptor for emphasis), rest of the (not much difference between “he wanted to keep the rest of the money” and “he wanted to keep the money,” and the latter sounds greedier and baser), indubitably, certainly, and many, many other adverbs that will be covered in another post.

“After all, of course, it is good to know that this line is banjaxed.”

One common error is unnecessarily flagging sense descriptors. For instance, “Mickey Mouse noticed that Donald was angry.” When a story or chapter is presented from Mickey Mouse’s POV, there’s no need to say that Mickey notices this or that. “Donald was angry” is stronger, so long as you do not then make the mistake of jumping from Mickey to Donald’s POV.

Other variations on this are “saw that,” “looked at,” “heard that.” Rather than telling us that your hero heard this or that, just play the sound for us. Not “Superman heard a machine gun echo in the alley,” but “A machine gun echoed in the alley.” The reader presumably already knows they’re reading a Superman story.

One sense which is a little more difficult not to flag is smell, simply because we don’t have that many scent related verbs. However, there are ways. “Rotten apples ruined the air.” Generally, though, you will use “he smelled,” or “There was the scent ot” simply because this sense has to be flagged more than other senses.

“considered that…” Just tell us what they’re considering, unless there are actually multiple considerations. If you mean to say “Jill considered that she wanted to kill Jack,” just say “Jill wanted to kill Jack.” On the other hand, “Jill considered whether she should kill Jack by pushing him down the hill, drowning him in the pail, braining him with a rock, or…” you get the idea, is an acceptable use of “considered”

Needless double negatives. Sometimes a double negative can be used to humorous effect, but this is not one of those cases: “so that delicacies that were once not uncommon became inordinately rare,” should be rewritten as “so that once common delicacies became rare.” The inordinately isn’t really killing this line, but it isn’t necessary. “Not uncommon,” on the other hand, isn’t doing anything for this line.

“There was a moment in which” = fancypants “when”

Image credit: John D. Batten (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Celtic_Fairy_Tales)

Thoughts on Editing: Unknotting Ropes of Prose

I’m about two-thirds of the way through (page 222 of 311) the second draft of my second novel, The Dragon’s Dollhouse. Like The Eye of Wysaerie, this one lay in first draft for over a year before I looked at it. The main difference between writing this novel and The Eye of Wysaerie is that while my first novel was written paper and pencil to combat my overly critical tendencies, The Dragon’s Dollhouse was the first one I typed straight into the computer.

And honestly, sometimes I couldn’t help myself from picking at the first draft, and reworking a line here and there, but most of the time I wrote that one from beginning to end without too much editing. Often I would think of a new way to phrase what I was writing mid-sentence, and simply choke that critical thought so that I could keep going. Do I still recommend writing your first draft this way? Yes, because in the first draft, your eye should be on the beginning, the middle, and the end–in short, the story. You don’t want the momentum of your story to get strangled by an unmanageable line.

So while I’m a firm believer in a fast first draft, what this process unfortunately means is that in the second draft you must unkink and unknot your ropes of prose.

Here’s an example from today’s edit. The first draft: “They took the reins of his horse, and when they did so…”

When is a powerful word, so this was rewritten as “When they took the reins of his horse.,,,” When I did this, I released an and, a they, a did, and a so back into the wild.

While there are other subtle connectors that can take the place of multiple words, and make a sentence more muscular, when is one of the chief condensers. That when also happens to be a great help when writing your synopsis means it is a good word to master.

“May” is a pussyfooting word, and often unnecessary. For instance, “dreaded that news may have reached Krunhalm” is more effectively written as “dreaded that news reached Krunhalm.” “May” is often used in conditional circumstances, such as those involving suspense, like horrific and humorous moments or realizations, and those lines are usually improved by removing the “may” which takes power away from the more potent conditional word, in this case “dread.” Taking away the may makes the dread more potent. Unless one character is asking another “may I,” you might not need the may. Things either are or aren’t, and if you want to evoke uncertainty, suspense, or some other conditional feeling, you may want a stronger verb. Like many other practices in writing, this follows a nine in ten rule, however, so if you think your use of the word “may” works, it may be one of the 1 in 10.

I should clarify that the transition between first and second draft usually requires more than one word choice. Here’s a good example of a more complicated edit:

First draft: “…there was one day that she decided she would not brook any more of his infidelities, and she simply told him that she would be remaining a little while longer in Krunhalm; this little while stretched into a longer little while, and then into a season, and from thence into a year.”

Second draft: “When she could not brook another infidelity, she said she would remain a little while in Krunhalm; little while stretched to long while, then a season, then a year.”

The semicolon is optional. I like them, especially in this case, when the abutted sentence comments on the preceding thought. If you wanted, you could write it as two separate sentences.

And while these cases involve trimming, just as often the second draft adds verbiage to a section. The following isn’t the best example of this, as I only added a line to the paragraph, but it’s the best example from today. Also, I trimmed a bit (like the needless “to them”) prior to expanding.

First draft: “The inner gate opened to them before they came up to it, and Aranto was yammering about something that Tilonus was in the main ignoring as they walked through the gatehouse into Krunhalm proper. “Your Lordship blah blah blah blah goats blah blah blah wheat blah blah blah scrolls blah blah blah blah blah gold blah blah…””

Second draft: “The inner gate opened before they neared it. As they walked through the gatehouse, Tilonus mainly ignored Aranto, though as a longtime military commander he could not help sifting for key words, so that the steward’s yammering sounded something like this: “Your Lordship blah blah blah blah goats blah blah blah wheat blah blah blah scrolls blah blah blah blah blah gold blah blah…””

Generally speaking, in the second draft, you’re disentangling your original thought.

“Well-Fed Beasts in Bejeweled Cages”; The Eye of Wysaerie Chapter 15

“Well-Fed Beasts in Bejweled Cages” marks Gaspar’s last chapter.

This fifteenth chapter of The Eye of Wysaerie also marks the first appearance of Klyrn, the rival nation to the south and east of Vanoor, and of a few new characters, the most important of which are Bryttienne and her father, Lord Chemeryn.

While Adelae is mentioned in this chapter, she’s done with her posthumous appearances. Though Ilmar makes an off-screen appearance. While that’s an oxymoron, his contribution to the plot is noteworthy despite that he never walks on stage.

https://www.wattpad.com/502976069-the-eye-of-wysaerie-well-fed-beasts-in-bejeweled

Image credit: wyvern etching by Lucas Jennis (1590-1630). Public domain, found on http://petslady.com/article/why-not-wyvern-mythical-monday

“Write What You Know” in #Fantasy #Writing

It’s not what you think. Especially if you’ve had creative writing classes, or a few hours focusing on creative writing in high school, only to be disappointed that your teachers didn’t want to see any genre writing. “Write what you know,” is the common credo of these classes, which is understood as dredging over and over again through your personal memory.

You do need to “write what you know.” Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that “write what you know” means so much more than sifting through memory for gold.  

Not that there is nothing of value in the lifetime’s treasure hoard of our memory. Writing from memory will improve your technique, as we practice our ear and ability to turn a phrase on the details of our own lives. By copying the structure of memory, we learn the structure of meaning and the structure of fiction, and that includes the structure of fantasy. Also, it can be therapeutic, as one of the surest means to remove the stone of writers’s block is to write from memory.

And relatively quickly, as you turn your aesthetic eye on your memory, you realize that your memories are already imperfect fictions. They’ve been fictionalized as our egoes swing the sword of selective memory, and as such, don’t hold the mirror to reality, but to our psyche, so that in crafting sentences and paragraphs from memory, we learn little about reality and much about ourselves. The Rashomon Effect teaches us that we are splintered subjectivities living in a shattered mirror, though a shareable truth might be glimpsed in our unique vision of the whole.

The good news is that you can change the channel. The source of fiction is a wide stream of personal consciousness that flows through those embedded memories, but also includes your dream life, all those Harry Potter, Middle Earth, and Narnia books you read–in fact, all the books you’ve ever read, from Dr. Seuss to Shakespeare to the Kalevala–movies, TV shows, comics, manga, video games, cooking magazines, and literally anything else that has magnetized your consciousness.

Some will call these other things merely influences, and others will call them reflected lights, but they are simply touchstones of our greater being. Anyone who has read The Hobbit or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe knows what I am saying when I write that once you’ve read a novel five, seven, or ten times, it is at least as much a part of you, and at least as evocative as, anything in your personal strongbox. While you can choose to write with that part of your consciousness blinded, you will write with more power, individuality, and sincerity by writing your novel as if it was a love letter to one of your touchstones instead.

If you focus only on the memories embedded in your stream of consciousness, you will lose sight of where the stream goes–or what made you you, and what made you want to become a writer. If you became a writer because you fell in love with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and wanted to give something like that back to the world, then that drive, and your passion for that series, is at least as important as anything in your memory. For you to forget that is a loss of awareness, and you may end up floundering in the stream of your own self-consciousness, writing books that you don’t want to write.

You are more than your memories, and “write what you know” is more than writing from memory–it is also writing from everything else you’ve recorded in your consciousness, as well as your drives and your desires, to create the kind of world that you want to create. To forget these other lights in our mind is a kind of arrogant self-snobbery, an excision of many things that you care about from your fictional world. Do you think that others would prefer to read a novel with these influences removed, or a novel that has intimations of everything important? Which one do you think will have more of a sense of urgency to your readers?

“Write what you know” is simply a directive to write with urgency about everything that is important to you on every page of your novel.

Footnote: “Write What you Know” Applied to Drafting

In writing the first draft, “writing what you know” is easier, because if you find the flow consciousness that lets you write 1000-2000 words a day, you probably have already hit that vein of urgency and importance. In the second draft, if you have to research something you don’t know, make sure you find a personal angle in it so that it will be at least as convinciing as everything that flowed out of you in the first draft.

“A Taste of Pie,” Chapter 14 of The Eye of Wysaerie

I’ve updated the Wattpad of The Eye of Wysaerie with chapter 14, “A Taste of Pie.”

While the original draft of this chapter was four pages that were 90% dialogue, I’ve stretched it to eleven in the second draft.  While the bulk of the four page first draft simply took place in an unnamed restaurant, in the second draft, the eatery took on a homier character.

An interesting thing about revision is that you get to know your characters. It’s as if you’ve only just met them in the first draft, and through continued association (drafting) you strengthen your bond and uncover hidden layers.

https://www.wattpad.com/498389726-the-eye-of-wysaerie-chapter-fourteen-a-taste-of

Some Thoughts on Urban Fantasy

As the comics section editor for NerdSpan.com, I also review comics, manga, and books.

Yen Press sent me their graphic novel adaptation of The Mortal Instruments Volume 1, and in my review, you’ll also find some of my thoughts on urban fantasy.

For those that don’t click on the link below, here’s the gist:

The constant churn of Lestat’s hand-me-downs has made urban fantasy the tabloid version of high fantasy.

http://www.nerdspan.com/mortal-instruments-volume-1-review/

The Eye of Wysaerie, Chapter 13: “Rude Beds and Cold Mourning”

Today I posted “Rude Beds and Cold Mourning,” the thirteenth chapter of The Eye of Wysaerie, to Wattpad.  In standard manuscript format, this chapter runs to thirty pages. It was 24 pages in the first draft, and in both drafts, it is the longest chapter of my novel.

There are only 35 pages left to revise in this novel.

Adelae gets another postscript, sort of. It’s like she wants the last word, despite that I killed her two chapters ago.

https://www.wattpad.com/496137052-the-eye-of-wysaerie-chapter-thirteen-rude-beds-and

Expanding the Scene

Expanding the scene takes honesty, not imagination. You’ve already written an entire novel with your imagination, so when you’re revisiting a scene to flesh it out, you must only remember or recreate that scene in your mind, and write down everything you see. Only this time, you’re writing down every detail, not just the things that caught your eye in the first draft.

If you imagine a castle as made of blood red stone, and the color is never described in your novel, then you haven’t followed through on your fantasy. Similarly, in every scene that you mark for expansion, you want to be honest to yourself about what you see, what you hear, what you smell, and so forth.

Though this post is about expanding the scene, you also want to flesh out the appearance of your characters, to communicate your vision of them to your readership.

So pick a scene for expansion. Read it to yourself. Read it out loud, if you want. As you’re reading it, imagine that you’re writing the scene for the first time, so that you remember as much as you can of your original vision. What did you miss? Colors will be the first thing that you notice, then textures, the grain of wood, the design of the plates, things that you glossed over in your haste to complete the first draft.

Don’t get me wrong–that haste is the most important part of first draft writing–you need that urgency to get your beginning, middle, and end together as fast as possible, to preserve the organic integrity of the whole. But your vision is equally important. And you’ll be surprised how much you remember, as well as how much you create fresh, when you revisit these scenes. If there’s a sense you’re not addressing, address it, because hidden details of your story wait in that muted sense.

Though scent is often the most overlooked sense in writing, it can be the most important for revising a scene. Just as neuroscience tells us scent is directly connected to memory, and a scent can open a relevant memory, I’ve found that a fictional scent can open up a scene. In the expansion of a scene, I often start with scent, as from that one aroma a vast tableau of other sensations can arise. For me, it can be the fastest way to build up a scene.

Because of the way that fictional scents seem to trigger fictional memories, I conjecture that the art of writing fiction is less a kind of artistic deception and more of a creation of new memories. Authors aren’t lying to us, they’re actually creating new worlds, though they’re made not of matter and energy, but sparks that flow between the author’s words and the reader’s brain-fire.

Though scent is a primary scent for memory creation, this is not to say that you want to neglect tastes, and tactile sensations, as these sensations are the most intimate and personal. Scent and sound are communal, and vision can be impersonal and distancing, but taste and touch can get your readers into your POV characters’ heads in a whole new way. In fact, you will often find that as you build the tactile and gustatory world in your novel, that this gives you more insight into your characters.

Similarly, sounds will make your backdrop vibrant. As you build the sonic world in your novel, you will find that everything you’re describing will become much more immanent, much more in the now.

Though I’m addressing sight last, it’s only because most people are visual thinkers, and you are already prejudicing your interpretation of the world toward your visual sense. It’s obviously incredibly important, and you will probably spend most of your time in your scene expansion getting the visual details just right. Because it is a predominant sense, though, I recommend that you use your other senses first, especially when you’re expanding a scene which already is more than one page in your novel.

The Appearance of Randomness and Angst in Fantasy

Coincidence and accident lead to the horror and humor of everyday life. Stupid stuff happens all the time in our world, and it should happen in your worlds as well. This appearance of randomness adds credibility to a setting, and makes it easier for the author’s tone to shift into horrific descriptions or humorous observations, because the appearance of randomness fuels the sense of the unknown, and the sense of the unknown creates suspense, the root of both horror and humor.

In addition to the semblance of randomness in the physical world of your fantasy, good fantasy fiction also creates randomness in the mental landscape of your POV characters.

Which is not to say that readers shouldn’t know what a character will think or say a third to a half of the time; this comforting sense of predictability, which we expect of our real world friends, we get in a well-painted character as well, the sense that they are faithful to their role.

That said, our friends and our favorite literary heroes have the capacity to impress us as well, and elicit our admiration, when they take a step that exceeds our expectations; as literary characters also have their inner landscapes on display, we can also be affected by their rise of consciousness.

A good example of this is the Lady Amalthea in The Last Unicorn, whose discontinuity of self between her unicorn and human identities is heart-wrenching; Peter S. Beagle not only shows us how a unicorn thinks, he shows us how this unicorn self is nearly snuffed out in the human shape, creating a kind of ‘body horror’ from the shape-changing enchantment. We are aghast to think that the uniqueness of this fantastic creature was lost in feelings as banal as our own, so that in the moment she falls for Lir, we want to warn her of the trap that she’s fallen into, that her happiness is a chimera. Following this full circle, if in that moment Amalthea is truly human, how much of the readers’ happiness is chimerical? How many of our wishes have been shape-changed by the will of others?

A great example of rise of consciousness in a book for younger readers is Soman Chomaini’s The School for Good and Evil. The first novel is Sophie’s journey of ego destruction, in which her conceits that she is the hero of her story are thwarted when she is placed in the villain dormitory, clad in black, and told often that she is not worthy of the handsome prince, doomed to a friendless life, and waiting on her grim final chapter, in which she will either be run down by dwarves or have her dragon heart pierced, or some other cruelly apt fairy tale conclusion. The best that she can expect in terms of a social life is to gather minions about her, but she can’t hope for victory over Good, for that hasn’t happened in over a hundred years in this unbalanced moral universe. While Agatha is a wonderful traditional hero on a rising story arc, the more captivating of the two is the anti-protagonist Sophie, as nearly anyone can sympathize with the idea of wrestling with a distasteful script, the sense that we are more than our stars, and that we will force our fairy tale ending on the author, the readers and on our selves.

Ideally, your fantasy world characters should have moments of raised consciousness like this, in which the heartless logic of your world’s fantasy is played out to full extension, to the point that the readers question the falsehoods in their own lives, even the constructs of their reality and their own identities.

Image credit: “Woman Riding Unicorn Silhouette” by Karen Arnold, from PublicDomainPictures.net.

More Thoughts on Drafting: Following the Fractal

Currently, I’m editing what may be my longest chapter in my Wattpad book, The Eye of Wysaerie. It was 22 pages in the original draft, and is 26 pages at this point, halfway through the edit. I’m guessing it will end up around 30-32 pages, which will make it the largest chapter in the second draft as well.

This is par for the course for the second draft, which is not simply editing, but the first stage in a fuller vision of the novel, and should either increase in size or become more articulate, or both. You’re not simply fixing typos and switching to active voice. As a whole, the first draft of The Eye of Wysaerie was c. 55,000 words, and now it is 71814.

I’m guessing the second draft of The Eye of Wysaerie will end around 75000 words. Chapter fourteen is skeletal (five pages in the first draft) and will no doubt double, and chapter sixteen is another big chapter, but also ambitious, and hence needs to be much bigger. Whereas most of the chapters have a central POV character, or possibly two characters sharing the POV like the Norns sharing their eye, the last chapter has a ton of characters sharing the POV as if it was a hot potato–an exploding, messy hot potato. It might split into multiple chapters.

To be fair, because I’m posting it to Wattpad as I complete each chapter edit, my consciousness of a small readership on that digital platform is leading to my doing both second and third draft activities (i.e. scene expansion) at the same time. Not that I set out to double draft, but I simply found myself doing it. While revision techniques do change over time, this is less a reflection on a change in my revision practices than the higher consciousness I have of this novel due to my self-publishing it as a serial e-book. In my other edits, I’m still doing things the same way.

The nice thing about longer chapters is that there’s more room for surprises. That is, when I started this chapter, I set the stage and selected the principal characters, but what happens in a longer chapter is that new characters are spawned, as if from the setting itself, as well as unplanned surprises that start off as scene-establishing moments and become integral. Not that I stated off by saying ‘this chapter will be 22 pages’, or even ‘this chapter will be long’, but as it progressed, the scene bloomed into a whole act with many separate scenes.

My first draft practice is to let these things happen, as I never know where they’re going (I tell myself I can trim or delete them in the second draft, but rarely do), and they usually end up being not extraneous but dovetailing back to my plot. While my waking mind can’t see the logic, the dream logic of my story follows the fractal of these efflorescences and rejoins the narrative. One of my teachers used to tell the class “the poem is smarter than you are,” and this is true of all creative work–the product not only of logic, but a unified mind. So f you can’t keep a laser-like focus on the plot of your story, that may be a good thing–your story, and your mind, is bigger than that plot arrow.

Following the fractal is what John Keats called “negative capability.”

In the second draft, it’s amazing to see how these efflorescences develop.

Photo credit: “Pretty Fractal” by Sharon Apted from publicdomainpictures.net.

The Eye of Wysaerie Chapter 12: “Split Ends and Private Shows”

Here’s chapter twelve of my WattPad novel, The Eye of Wysaerie.

Though I would hate to meet King Algus in real life, I like him as a character. Though he got to browbeat Ilmar a little in “Good Neighbors and Sovereign Storms,” this is Algus’s spotlight chapter.

Gaspar gets promoted a couple of times, though he may be the least deserving character in the novel. Adelae gets a postscript, and a new (literal) monster gets a prologue.

https://www.wattpad.com/490957690-the-eye-of-wysaerie-chapter-twelve-split-ends-and

#Editing and Revising #Fiction #1: How Many Drafts?

\Yesterday, I finished the fourth draft of The Web of the Abyss, the third novel in my Abyss cycle. While telling you I finished a draft doesn’t sound as dramatic as telling you that I finished the first draft of a new novel, it is just as satisfying. As each journey through your novel refines it and gets it closer to the finished product, each completed stage also refines that satisfaction.

Because writing is an art, not a science, everyone’s drafting process becomes what works for each author. While your method, in the end, will be different than mine, everyone needs a starting point. Since you found this page by searching for writing or editing tips, feel free to use my system as the basis for your own method. 

Currently, I have four stages in my drafting process.

1) First draft. Write, write, write, as fast as you can. Don’t stop, not even to right click on the red and green squiggles. You can find out more about writing your first draft through this link.

2) Second draft. The close edit. This is where I comb through the manuscript, correcting the grammar, adopting active voice when it’s appropriate (this follows a nine in ten rule, as 10% of the time passive voice might work better), making sure the dialogue follows the economy of the human breath, and making notes in my book journal about scenes to expand. Don’t expand those scenes yet—that’s material for the third draft.

When you notice inconsistencies, fix them. Things like an evolution in the way you spell characters’ or places’ names, or differences in a character’s backstory from page 20 to page 110. Though you should find most inconsistencies in this stage, you will notice subtler inconsistencies in the third draft.

Most importantly, in the second draft you’re using your first draft as the raw material to make the best possible sentences, paragraphs, and pages. If you don’t have a dictionary, thesaurus, and style manual, I recommend having them, though a good word processor has a built-in thesaurus, and there are resources online if you prefer to google. Just don’t do it on your phone, or you’ll be distracted by your apps. I recommend using your own judgment first before plunging into your toolbox, or you’ll get dependent on these tools; that said, a carpenter wouldn’t deprive themselves of their tools, and you shouldn’t deprive yourself of yours either. Use, don’t overuse. And if you only had one of these books always close at hand, make it the style manual, not the thesaurus.

Creating your second draft will be easier for you if you duplicate your novel into a brand new file with a new file name. Trust me, it will be reassuring for you to have that, as you will want to know that the first draft you spent so long in writing is still there in its original, virginal format.

If you’re having problems changing things in your second draft, copy the section you’d like to edit for the day, paste it in a brand new Wordpad, and then have at it. It will be easier for you to experiment with different phrasings if you think you’re not making any permanent changes to your brainchild. When you’re done for the day, if you like your new sections better, paste them into your novel, and if you’re still attached to the prior sections, you have them in your original file. If you came up with three different versions of the same passage, and you like them all, put the one you like best in your novel and the other two in your book journal.

If you’re doing this step right, it can take from half as long to as long as your first draft.

3) Third draft. Scenes and times. This is kind of like a voyage through my book, so to speak, as I’m paying close attention to the catalog of scenes and the timetable, as if they were actual picture postcards and a travel itinerary.

First I figure out how much time passed from the beginning to the end of the book, while breaking down those time changes into a timetable. This may make you aware of any plot inconsistencies you didn’t observe in your close edit.

Then I create a catalog of scenes by listing each scene change and the page count for that scene. If a scene change is one sentence long, chances are it can use some expansion, even if it’s the character staring into a closet, a kitchen, or an office. Conversely, if a scene is forty pages long, and your novel is 200 pages, you may want to look for more economy in that scene. Notice I said ‘may,’ because long scenes can be awesome. Generally, the catalog of scenes will serve as a guide for which scenes need expanding.

When I’ve finished my timetable and catalog of scenes, I first fix any timetable inconsistencies; this is easy, as usually to fix two inconsistent passages I must only change one. Then I dive into the scene expansion. Any scene I flagged during the close edit or during my construction of the catalog of scenes gets scrutinized, and not only for the visual sense, but to appeal to all of the reader’s senses.

This part doesn’t take as long as your second or third draft, but it is just as important, and it really helps you get a handle on your novel. Your timetable and catalog of scenes will also come in handy when agents and publishers ask for synopses.

4) Fourth draft. The auditory reading. In the fourth draft, I read the novel from beginning to end, out loud. While it’s nice to hear how it sounds, this is primarily to check not for sound, but sense. The human mind processes sight words and auditory words in different ways, so this is also a good way to get a different part of your brain to look at your book, the one that lives not on the page and in the imaginary world, but in the real world and gets by through common sense. When I find something that doesn’t seem to say what I want it to say to any possible reader, I rework it. Usually a subtle change only is required, but sometimes a passage needs a true revision. As one of my teachers used to say, the revision is not just editing, it’s “re-vision,” or changing your vision for the passage.

Rarely, I might leave a tough paragraph as is because altering it might water down the meaning, and, as I said, sense or meaning is paramount in this draft. There may be no way to re-work a passage without dilution, and if the dilution would impair the meaning or the sense, it becomes a disservice to the reader. That said, in The Web of the Abyss, that only happened twice. Usually there’s a way to improve the transmission of an idea.

While I don’t mind leaving two nuggets for the reader to puzzle, as readers like puzzles, and those that don’t can parse or skip, I’m not writing The Critique of Pure Reason, but a fantasy novel.

Though the auditory is the easiest edit, it’s also the most time-consuming. I don’t like to do too many pages a day in this step, or they might start running together. I need that “first page awareness” on every page during the auditory edit.

This is when it’s nice to have different novels in different draft stages to work on, as I do now, so that I can jump from my auditory edit of Web of the Abyss to the close edit of The Eye of Wysaerie. I had three novels before I started revising any of them, and I recommend this for others, as it worked for me. While some might recommend working on one novel at a time, and I do that myself during the first draft, bringing my drafts into communion with each other during the editing stage has helped me find commonalities of theme and find my voice as an author.

Keeping Your Spark Lit During #NaNoWriMo

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

It’s hard to write without the lights on, both literally and figuratively. Just as it would be difficult to hit 50,000 words in a pitch black room, it can also be difficult to hit that goal without the lights on upstairs, figuratively speaking.

Though some of you already have excellent reading habits, take this as a reminder to keep the relay torches in your skull running during NaNoWriMo. You take that heightened consciousness for granted. It’s easy to get ground down by repetititve tasks, and that can include non-stop key-punching or pencil-pushing. Which isn’t to say that if you need to make time for your novel, you can’t live on a leaner literary diet during NaNoWriMo. Think of it as an ice cream sundae reward for hitting your daily goal.

For those of you that haven’t touched a book in over a year, started writing a novel today, and felt the cerebral desolation and alienation from the page that results from being in a literary desert, this is an exhortation for you to get over your anxieties of influence or cut down your daily TV itinerary in order to put yourself in the vicarious company of other authors.

If you’re not reading because you “want to get there by yourself,” or “don’t want to be influenced,” that’s crazy–no one builds a house without looking at other houses. Reading is less like stealing wood from another builder or literary espionage, and more like paying the cable bill.

If you’re not reading because you don’t have the time, refer to the Stephen King citation that prefaced this essay.

(Image credit: “Sparks of Fire in the Wind” by Sabine Sauermaul at Public Domain Pictures.net)

Playing to Lose #NaNoWriMo

I love NaNoWriMo, and have written two of my five novels during one. As my wife, daughter, and eldest son are participating in 2017, I am even more enthusiastic to plunge into NaNoWriMo.

That said, I can’t suspend my three productive edits due to the sparks that are flying in them. Sparks are sparks, whether they’re first draft sparks or edit sparks, and I want to keep them surging and scintillating. After a month off, my connection to these works would not be what it is now.

So this will be the first year that I’m playing to lose NaNoWriMo, and as I just brainstormed a wonderful idea for this new novel, I recommend the idea to other busy writers as well. Even if you’re knee deep in drafts, it can be an awesome feeling to put that first dab of color on a completely blank canvass, even if you can’t commit to 50000 words in a month. Yesterday my new idea did not exist, and now it does. Writing is amazing.

Just as I recommend NaNoWriMo to everyone that has always wanted to write a novel, I recommend playing to lose at NaNoWriMo to anyone that would like to write a novel, but feels that they’re too busy to commit to the goal. Even if you’re not a NaNoWriMo winner with 50,000 words by November 30th, you can’t really call it losing to have 40,000 words, say, or even 25,000 words, of your own authorship. By any measure, that much of a dent in a book is a win.  Compared to Stephen King’s 180,000 words in three months, it’s a baby step, but when you’re not a giant, baby steps are big wins.

All this said, I am intensely competitive, and simply starting this year may ensure that I finish. One of my edits should be finished in a week, and another in about three weeks, so my time will open up more and more as the month passes.

The Eye of Wysaerie, Chapter 11

The first major character death of “The Eye of Wysaerie” happens in Chapter 11, “Good Neighbors and Sovereign Storms.” Hopefully you’re not bothered by my use of the word “they” to refer to this character, since I’m trying to avoid spoilers with a gender neutral pronoun.

In five different novels, I’ve only killed three major characters. I don’t like to kill characters, whether they’re good or evil, if they’re good characters–not morally speaking, but in terms of seeming to live on the page. In my Abyss series–three novels so far–I haven’t killed a single major character, as I love all of them, no matter how horrible they can be to each other.

With this character, however, though they were vivacious and were the source of great conflict, I was happy to write their last page. Charles Schulz said that he hated Lucy but needed her, and I’m fortunate in that my hate for the character I killed was not mitigated by my creativity. Unlike the deep-dyed villains of this fantasy, this character had no redeeming qualities, and had run their course.

There’s one other major character death before the end of this novel.

https://www.wattpad.com/story/109437305-the-eye-of-wysaerie

Starting with Setting in Fantasy Novels and #NaNoWriMo

What the great fantasies have in common is a great setting. While there are many readable and enjoyable fantasy novels, the ones that bring us back for multiple re-reads, and that are memorable, the ones that readers long for the moment that they finish reading an installment, are the fantasies with the greatest settings. For example, I present to you Harry Potter‘s Wizarding World, Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth, Game of Thrones‘ Westeros, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe‘s Narnia. While I could rattle off many more, these four settings have such textured settings that their appeal is nearly universal, and you might find my other choices personal in comparison.¹

While a good read satisfies us, a fantasy with a great setting gives us a sense of immersion, so that we feel that we are arriving with Harry in the Wizarding World or traveling with Corwin through shadows to the one true Amber. Far from providing closure, finishing a fantasy with an outstanding setting can make us sorrowful that we’ve reached the end of the road into this fantasy world.

I have a theory that all novels start with setting. More than that, I think that once you decide you want to write a novel, you’re already germinating a setting, even before your hero’s first words.

Which isn’t to say that writers don’t think they’re beginning with their hero. However, while many writers think that they start their novels with a character in mind, if you examine the character that they started with, you can see certain assumptions about that character that indicate that the writer also has assumptions about their world, and this conscious or subsconscious background work, even picking the genre of the novel, shows a faint outline of a setting. Since the character is grown from these seeds, the chicken and the egg question is problematic–did the novelist begin with the character, or the nascent setting?

Just as people don’t exist apart from a world, neither do characters. If you see someone with a pink mohawk and a black t-shirt sporting a british flag, you start coloring in their punk rock backstory before they open their mouth, and if, as a novelist, you start thinking about a wizard that speaks backmasked spells, that character is already encoded with a lot of information about their setting as well. The genre is fantasy, and the setting is either a magical otherworld or a magical alternate Earth, more likely the latter if the word ‘backmask’ is in general parlance. Now most writers these days, due to the immense inheritance of tropes and cliches that we have, begin to counter presumptions and expectations by throwing a few wrenches into the cogs of fantasy, in order to make a better machine from the wreckage that the canon has become. In the example above, the writer might fuse the punk rocker with the backmasking wizard, giving the character an even larger windfall from the trope vortex. But it is hard to deny that when you start to write this character’s story, in the beginning you’re unfolding a setting that was partly packaged with them.

So if you’re having a problem deciding what to NaNoWriMo (or what to write any other month of the year), you might want to shift your attention away from the hero and start with setting. Trust that there’s a hero there, and you’ll find them by cutting away the negativity and uncertainty that’s holding you back from committing to your novel. Just as the setting lurks in the hero, so does the hero lurk in your burgeoning novel. Ask yourself what kind of novel you want to write. Is it a fantasy? Is it an urban fantasy? Is it a high fantasy? Is your setting one world, or are there many worlds? Are there lots of cities, or lots of country journeys? Are the villains orcs, dragons, wicked schoolteachers, or some other monsters? Can gods make an appearance in this world? Who are the little people of your novel? Many fantasies have a “little people,” whether they’re first year Hogwarts students, hobbits, or talking animals, so this is a good question to ask, as the presence of such “little people” will change the shape of your world. Is magic something you learn, or something you’re born with, or both?

Like sowing a lamppost rod in the beginning of Narnia, hopefully these questions give you some light into your creation. Even if all you have is a void, that’s a place to start, if you’re willing to begin by eliminiating negative space and breathing life into your setting.

Footnote

Like the comedic Many Worlds setting of Robert Aspirin’s Myth books, the world steeped in dark gods that is Moorcock’s Melnibone and the Young Kingdoms, the infinite psychedelia of Zelazny’s Amber, Rebma, and the Shadows, and the sordid grunge of Lieber’s Nehwon and Lankhmar.

The Eye of Wysaerie, Chapter Ten “The Lives Left Behind”

Here’s chapter ten of my WattPad, The Eye of Wysaerie, “The Lives Left Behind.”

Chapter Ten focuses on Elessa, who is the protagonist of the novel in the traditional sense (Gaspar is disqualified by virtue of his cowardice), though I like my antiprotagonists just as much.

https://www.wattpad.com/486948220-the-eye-of-wysaerie-chapter-ten-the-lives-left

https://embed.wattpad.com/story/109437305

First Draft Tricks #2 For Novels and #NaNoWriMo: Keeping a Book Journal

As I mentioned yesterday, writing your first draft can involve creative assassination of your internal critic. Your main task in producing the first draft is to put all of your thoughts onto the page one after the other, all the while looking forward.

While this sounds fairly easy, and I shared a few strategies to make it even easier, what will happen is that some thoughts won’t fit in your narrative. Some won’t fit yet, because they’re events foreshadowed in pages written today, and some may always remain submerged details, or subtext, or thematic links that you find yourself inserting subtly.

You still want to write these thoughts down. You don’t want to forget them. But where do you put them?

In your book journal. Whether it’s a separate computer file or a paper journal isn’t important. I do recommend that you keep it separate from your novel, and also that you keep it separate from your other diarist writings.

Here’s the important thing, though. You’re not doing this to feed your internal critic, but to feed your novel. You don’t want the book journal to become your main focus, so that you go in there every day and blab about your book for an hour, and then say that you’ll write that all up tomorrow. You want to keep your book journal on a tight leash, like no more than five minutes a day. It’s okay to go a little longer if you had a ton of ideas for later chapters, so long as you get my point that this is a supplementary activity.

When you’re done writing for the day, open your book journal and write down your word count.

Then write all the ideas you had that didn’t make it into that day’s pages. You don’t want to lose these to time and memory. Write as quickly and simply as possible so that you’ll understand what you meant tomorrow, next week, or next year.

If you’re unhappy with something–especially secondary character and place names–instead of wasting valuable first draft momentum agonizing over that detail, write down your dissatisfaction with it in the book journal. File and forget to keep the draft moving. However, you do want to remember your initial response, otherwise through time and repetition you will accustom yourself to any bad details, just like you would annoying names in the real world. (You may want to take a few minutes to hammer out a primary character name, because if you don’t love it, it may affect how you write for them.)

If you’re happy with something, make sure you write that down. You don’t want to forget that either—until this book has readers, you’re the only one that’s going to give you back claps and applause.

While the book journal is an invaluable source of self-feedback for your first draft, you may find it to be even more of an asset as a user’s manual for your second draft.

First Draft Tricks for Novels and #NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo is approaching. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it is the abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November. In 2016, there were 384,126 participants that attempted to break 50,000 words, and over 34,000 winners that completed their novel. Two of my five novels were written during NaNoWriMo. If you’ve ever wanted to write a novel, I recommend it. If you think you can’t do it, you probably can if you’re unwilling to unlearn some behaviors and make some new ones. The desire to write one is the most important thing.

If you’re assuming that you’re not a writer, I doubt it; my guess, considering that you’re on the internet right now, is that you’re a new media writer, or a social media writer, spoiled by the ability to publish instantaneously anything you want. Social media has created a world of writers and editors. Facebook has not only given its subscribers a voice and the instant gratification of publishing their thoughts via online posts, but Twitter has taught its subscribers the brevity and economy of 140 characters.

That said, though many more are accustomed to seeing their prose published in 2017 than in the 19th or 20th century–albeit not in print, but in the scintillating instantaneity of digital formats such as Facebook and Twitter–long formats such as the novella or the novel might seem to be too large of a gulp to these new media writers.

While this might be the case for those that can’t unlearn behaviors, here are a few recommendations that have worked for me.

1. The internal editor must die. Just as in editing the key thing is to “kill your darlings,” in writing the first draft, the key thing is to kill your internal editor and keep their hands off of your precious darlings, because following the romp and frolic of those darlings might get you to the end of your novel. Your focus in the first draft is the beginning, the middle, and the end, and that’s it. Editing habits are liabilities in the first draft. You want to be in a state of mind where you can sneer at those squiggly red and green lines in Word without backing up to correct them. And you absolutely have to break yourself of the temptation to scroll back, whether it’s to bask in the one, two, or even five pages you just wrote, or it’s to rewrite that sentence that still doesn’t look right. When you’re writing the first draft, you should wall off the Editor voice like Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Eventually you want to let the guy out to edit your work and snuff our your darlings, but not until you have the beginning, the middle, and the ending.
2. You might not be able to kill the Editor. This was the case writing my first novel. In that case, write like it’s the eighteenth century. Not that you want to use thines and thous, or write in couplets Alexander Pope would envy. By writing like it’s the eighteenth century, I mean turn off your computer and write analog, pen to paper. Also, write on one side of the page and turn it face down when you get to the bottom, so that your eyes won’t stray from the page in front of you. If you’re too eco-conscious to write like it’s the eighteenth century, or to write on one side of hundreds of sheets of paper, then you will have to master #1. I only had to use these blinders one time.
3. Become comfortable with your voice. Whether the words coming out of your pencil are baby talk or Braniac monologues, refer to rule #1 above and keep pushing keys (or that pencil, if your Editor voice is unkillable).

Obviously, this list is by no means exhaustive; I’m sure you see the point is to create whatever behavior is required to get you to the end of your book.

More NaNoWriMo thoughts later…

 

Halos and Shadows

I’m editing three different novels these days  This will be the first time I have posted part of my second novel, The Dragon’s Dollhouse, online. I’m posting this one because it doesn’t divulge too much of the plot.

That said, there are some things you should know. Urgu, a dragon, and Khlarn, a Djaltoujim, are the two main non-human characters of my book. While there are human main characters, they don’t appear in this chapter. While I’m sure you’ve heard of dragons, the Djaltoujimin (singular Djaltoujim) are a race of shape-changing swan wizards, and the goddess Coruna (only referenced) is the main deity worshiped by the people of Cjantosk.

The Dragon’s Dollhouse Part One, Chapter 11–Halos and Shadows

Urgu exulted as he soared, his outstretched wings grasping the air in huge clawfuls and mighty sweeps, and his squirming prize tightly pinned between two hind talons. To the farmers and tulip-gazers below, the dragon seemed aimless, as his sinuous body was in the throes of such a victory dance that he zigged and zagged like a spurting balloon. His captive’s moans made his pleasure more delicious, and snorts of gleeful fire tickled his nose.

Now they knew. Now they knew what it was like to fear an avaricious enemy that crossed your doorstep and dredged through your treasures for prizes to hoard. For laying their hands on his rightful hostages, he flayed their pink tissuey scales, spoiled their delicacies, and stole their cherished leader.

Or would they know? A few generations past, as dragons measure their millennia-spanning generations, humans hid in trees, and sharpened stones and sticks. Once, Urgu had chortled over the scholar Jakursal’s scroll, in which that worthy author theorized that the clever humans were a false offshoot of draconic development, for even to consider the scrawny beasts failed dragons was too charitable, for their breath was far too weak, unable to burn even dry leaves, their hind legs bent the wrong way, and their clawless, wingless, forelegs were doomed to remain as useless as a hatchling’s. Though Urgu disagreed with Jakursal’s evolutionary argument, the premise—that humans were dead ends of some sort, that had somehow attracted the pity of the gods to elevate beyond their station—was inarguable, since Jakursal had founded it in Urgu’s own philosophy. That the gods had chosen some humans to sire the line that would become dragons, however, was laughable, not only for the intimations of bestiality, but because the human beasts were such lamentable lizards.

As rain spattered from low-flying, dark clouds, flashes arced over the jagged hills of Urgu’s lair, though the lightning was anchored neither in the ground nor the sky, but batted from side to side by two swans, each wrestling with the storm’s exploding turbulence. As the electric bolts were lobbed back and forth, they rebounded faster and faster like an increasing metronome, until one of the swans broke into a dive, and the other pursued, the ball of lightning blazing just ahead of him.

Urgu was amused to observe the fleeing swan veer towards him, for did this bit of fluff fear another lint ball more than a dragon? Its wings thrummed circling the dragon’s head, nearly droning out its warbling, then hissing, as it repeated its short speech in both the ancient language of the Djaltoujimin and Draconian. “Help me, mighty guardian of the earth’s riches!” Urgu remembered that this was exactly what the elder Djaltoujimin wizard, Trikrerta, had once said to Wise King Vultoq.

“‘This is not your nest, little bird, but mine’” said Urgu, also citing the ancient Histories of the Dragon Kings, though his next line was of his own invention. “If you were me, would you help two nest thieves having a falling out?”

The swan said “I am no hatchling, but Khlarn, a Djaltoujim full grown. I stole nothing, and share neither nest, nor flock, nor bevy with that one.” Khlarn continued, “Slyvena ulminsener divessa truminya Djaltoujimin uri wyrmus,” which meant “Oh, great wyrm, I ask thee to honor the ancient pact of our peoples” and its sudden translation was like a great gust that cleared more dust from the caverns of Urgu’s mind, shaking his spine and shivering his tail.

“Show me my people,” snorted the dragon. “Only Urgu remains.”

“Not true,” said the Djaltoujimin, “they are few, but you are not alone.”

The other Djaltoujimin called out, “Blessed and honorable Urgu! This one’s lies offend even the gods, and I shall take him from your sight.”

“Either one or both of you shall die,” said Urgu, “and as he knows the scrolls and you do not, it is he that may escape my wrath.”

“You don’t have my measure, slitherer.” The Djaltoujim pointed its wingtips toward the skies, cantillated a hellish birdsong, and the clouds swelled and darkened. The stormy mass of the nimbostratus sunk lower and lower, crackling with balls and darts of lightning. Khlarn felt a stab of envy to see an ancient enchantment fluently accomplished.

Though the storm clouds were now like a gigantic halo above their heads, Urgu was unimpressed. “You’re a surprising one—one surprise away from death. With me, what you see is what you get.” The dragon’s monstrous wings rippled, coursing him towards the Djaltoujim, who at the last moment remembered that it had wings and forgot its spell in its haste to fly from the dragon.

When sunlight glinted through the dispersing clouds, Urgu dropped something in his charge, and Khlarn pulled his wings straight back, dropping like a stone to overtake the brightly robed human that plummeted to their death. Gripping the human by the shoulders, Khlarn then buoyed them with a whispered charm, to drift to a crag jutting from Urgu’s lair.

As they settled to the rocky spur, Khlarn saw on the slopes beneath him an old man, a girl. and a lamb, and with practiced ease and a sigh of satisfaction, slipped into his cozy human skin. He was often in a hurry to cast off his tattered, ill-tailored swan plumage, for that pelt cast a long shadow over many sorrows, including the massacre of his people and their missing eggs and scrolls, while his human hide covered that like a set of new clothes and a free and easy smile.

When the robed one removed her golden mask and dipped into a shallow curtsy, Khlarn shivered in a recognition numbed by its enveloping memory. She was a young monk a hundred years ago, her hair cropped, and her monk’s habit less ornate than these robes inscribed with stars and suns. Her religious zeal that day was signified by the torch she touched to their houses.

Though for decades a day had not passed without daydreams of retribution, decades more had passed Khlarn by, and now he mostly found himself struck dumb with astonishment at the fact of seeing, somewhat aged but alive, one of the monks that caused the swan diaspora. Though logic said this priestess should be well over a hundred, she looked scarcely older than fifty, and though he knew he should first think of her as a murderess, he could not help viewing her as a human anomaly and historical fact. Even more than he wanted to throttle her, he wanted to question this witness to reify his fading memory of that day.

When Khlarn took a step back and opened his mouth, words escaped him, but not the spell to unwrap the human skin encumbering his swan self, which then flew free from Urgu’s lair.

While Urgu’s immense wings cleaved the space between him and his prey, that Djaltoujimin was more maneuverable, and darted like a water bug toward Khlarn, leading the dragon’s murderous speed towards both swans.

As his venerable grief had not rekindled but reoccurred, Khlarn flew not from the hated enemy, but from the shadow of his sorrow, which after a centuries-long pursuit overtook him. Emboldened by the shadow of his monstrous ally, the heat of his sadness erupted in rage, and he turned upon the other Djaltoujim.

Pinioned between Khlarn and Urgu, the other swan dove for the treetops, and Khlarn followed, less from his own volition than dangling like a puppet from his anger, which quivered in him wingtip to wingtip. Rounding a tree trunk, Khlarn’s beak cracked a wing, sending his opponent in a spiraling, dizzying glide, to collide with the promontory below.

Khlarn alighted shape changing, so that boar’s feet flattened the grass charging the wicked Djaltoujim, who hobbled away a broken-winged swan, so shaken that it thought neither of a four legged stride or even human feet to hasten its flight. His enemy’s animal desperation moved Khlarn so that his anger cooled, and he changed to his second skin. “Why do you want me dead?” he asked.

The swan stopped its lame hop, turned on its good wing, transformed, and shook her human hand at Khlarn. The Djaltoujim’s naked human form had hair the color of blood and bright white, oddly unblemished skin, with neither freckle nor the discoloration of veins, less like human skin than like placid cream. “You are an abomination,” it said, “a bit of spell-singing divinity that spites the divine.”

“Would you find holiness in killing me?” Khlarn chuckled through the still labored breathing from being both pursued and pursuer.

“Aside from the goddess, blasphemer, no one finds holiness.”

This was too much for the ancient Djaltoujim, who wept freely his tears of frustration, pity, and sorrow. “You worship one who orphaned you,” he said, “and are lost to those who wish you saved.”

“Coruna saved me.” When she raised her good arm, a jagged burst of light cleaved Khlarn’s shoulder.

Blood soaked Khlarn’s robe, beard, hair, and right eye, so that he squinted up at the leering, younger Djaltoujim, whose face was both haloed and shadowed by the burning, midday sun. As he lay wounded, he forgave this poor egg, who had never learned right from wrong, but was twisted by the lies of divinity. “I forgive you,” he said, choking blood that trickled into the blood pooling under him. “How many?”

She kicked him in the side. “Though evil knows not how to forgive, I will answer you, as your soul will not echo in the dwindling darkness. You assumed wrongly that the monks smashed the eggs. They saved a full flock.”

“One zealot shy of full,” said another voice. Craning his neck as best as he could, Khlarn was rewarded with a fresh spate of bleeding and the sight of a tall, muscled man, dressed simply in bright swaths of green linen. Merry green eyes blazed from a face fringed by a wild mane of red hair and a tangled beard.

“Step back!” shouted the albino Djaltoujim. “Who are you?”

“Two commands, one in the interrogative sense,” said the green-clad man. “If I disobey both, I transgress twice. You have much to learn about authority, hatchling.” His tone was a shade friendlier than neutral, like a school teacher. “In a very short time,” he added, and from his face fire erupted in an incendiary stream, engulfing the Djaltoujim and sending a back-blast of cinders and ashes over Khlarn.

When the fiery deluge stopped, the man’s face was immaculately unkempt, not one frowsy beard hair singed or out of place. He stooped to pick up Khlarn. “You could make this easier on me, you know,” the large man grumbled, but grunted only a little under the weight.

“Urgu,” Khlarn said feebly.

“Did my manner of speech or the fire tip you off?”

“Is she…”

“Oh yes.”

“I didn’t know…”

“That sentences have an object? That I change shape? That you should save your strength? All three are true,” he said. “Sleep,” he added, and Khlarn obliged him.

The Eye of Wysaerie

If this is your first visit to “Shoreless Seas and Stars Uncounted” aka keithhendricks.wordpress.com, welcome! This blog will be home to my thoughts on my novels, as well as a commonplace book of sorts for my thoughts on writing and fantasy. (Where you see the generic background art, please imagine dragons, unicorns, wizards, and what have you, as I’m still sifting through public domain images to dress up the site.)

Originally written in 2014, The Eye of Wysaerie has laid around unedited for longer than my other novels because of how skeletal many chapters were originally.  Some chapters doubled during the edit. I’m currently editing chapter 10 of 16.

Though The Eye of Wysaerie has a fantasy backdrop, its protagonists start off not unlike horror or comedy characters, in that they are somewhat weak, have impaired decision-making ability, and run from monsters. Not that there is a ton of horror in The Eye of Wysaerie, but the monsters have some scary, gory moments, sometimes played for laughs. And unlike the horror genre, Elessa and Gaspar’s stories will have upward momentum, which lies more in the purview of the fantasy genre.

“Genre flow” is not uncommon, in that many genres have backroads and alleys into each other. You can see in my review of Fritz Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry my thoughts on how the horror genre flows into the fantasy genre. If you don’t click on the link, the gist is that black magic is horror. Fantasy monsters can be horrific too, depending on their treatment by the writer. (A dragon should be scarier than hundreds of zombies.)

You can find a link to the novel below. If you’re new to WattPad, there’s a convenient “continue” button at the bottom of each chapter that will lead you to the next installment of the story.

https://www.wattpad.com/story/109437305-the-eye-of-wysaerie

https://embed.wattpad.com/story/109437305

Contemplating Cantillating

Though I should use the word chanted for the reader’s sake, I want to use cantillated. Though “kill your darlings” surely applies to logophilia as much as narcissism, there’s an excruciating temptation to give in to the writer’s birdsong instinct, and write the exact word rather than the right word.