Last week, I posted a short excerpt from Stars Fall Out in which my main character runs like hell after stealing a magic vial from her sister’s professor. All she knows about the vial is …
It’s tough to find a good first draft excerpt. Something that isn’t too clunky, too spoilery, or too rife with notes-to-self and bracketed terms I need to research. After starting to post excerpts at the …
Research rabbit holes: I had to look up the name of a mapmaking tool for a character who is an amateur cartographer, and now I, too, am an amateur cartographer.
This excerpt features Master Zanhori, known as one of the greatest living oneiromancers, who travels throughout the Kirosz Empire with his three fearsome beasts, negotiating for peace where he can, and sometimes leaving destruction where he can’t.
My completed first draft of Stars Fall Out is 234,000 words, 173 scenes, and 1125 pages, with a printing time of two hours. I posted on Facebook that hole-punching would be my hobby for the …
Me: Time to print a 1,125 page draft.
HP Officejet Pro, 95 pages in: Align the printheads. DO IT DO IT NOW.
I’m on one of the final climactic scenes of Stars Fall Out, and have ended up in a situation where my female main character is, in a not at all tongue-in-cheek fashion, trying to break a glass ceiling.
I’ve found I have two methods for developing my magic systems in Stars Fall Out, and I’ve used each one exclusively for a single type of magic. First there’s the Painstaking Research method, which I’ve …
In these days of coronavirus isolation, I already miss my Thursday morning writing routine at Dunkin Donuts.
Rereading some of my scenes in Stars Fall Out lead me to develop the theory that I gave one of my secondary-world characters coronavirus.
When you Google “goat injuries” for book reasons because you need to get a guy out of an animal pasture so his wife can talk to her would-be-lover about some perjury they’re going to commit…
…and then a week later you still have six browser tabs dedicated to goat injuries, even though you decided not to go all plot devicey like that.
That’s writer life.
Back in November, I set myself the goal of either finishing Stars Fall Out or writing 25 scenes. I did my 25 scenes, but my planned ending has taken many more words than I anticipated. Now, at the beginning of March, I think I’m at a point where I can say I have a month of work left. This time, I’m basing that on the rate at which I’ve been finishing scenes since November, and that I can much more accurately count how many I have left. Here’s a recent excerpt:
“Can’t you make another one?’
“Do you have any idea of the intricacies of creating that particular item?”
In fact, I did not. For all the reading I’d done, for all the notes I’d found scattered in his various places of work, I still had found nothing that explained how his vials worked.
What I had found instead was his attempt at a book of aphorisms—his answer to the widespread popularity he was certain his magic would enjoy. Everyone would look to him not only as the creator of a new magical discipline, but as a fount of wisdom in all areas. It combined abstractions about shadowmantic theory—long paragraphs as winding and impenetrable as a hedge maze—with advice on sleep, diet, and the raising of children. Rise with the sun. Meat only on Athuday. He’d even written rules of etiquette for how to treat oneiromancers once his own magic supplanted theirs: treat them with the bemused kindness one would show an elder, but the distant wariness one would show a strange dog.
“You’ve yet to teach me how the vials work,” I said at last.
