Hey y’all.
My last post was quite a while ago — sorry about that — and pretty different compared to the norm, so to amend that, I’ll be quite regular this time, haha.
Unfortunately, life’s required my attention more than my writing, this month — things need doing around the house, family needs help, friends want to spend time with me. It’s all quite annoying — I’m joking, I’m joking. And, while I’ve accepted setting my writing aside until my life’s a little more copasetic, it’s still unsettling to me that I’ve only written one chapter in Echoes In Reed House, this month. It was a good chapter, though, so i shouldn’t despair entirely — besides, I’ve been working in other ways.
Even still, with something like thirteen chapter left in the novel, the pace is speeding up. The puzzles I’ve put in place are coming together. The veil is slowly being parted to reveal pieces of the mystery. Characters are either falling in place or stumbling deeper in. Everything’s set for the story to go from a steady jog to a fierce gallop through the last chapters — rather like being chased by a murderer, wink-wink.
It’s been amazing to see my characters evolve and grow — for better or worse — and to see the world flesh itself out in ways I’d never intended. I can’t wait for the fourth and fifth drafts after everything’s finished so I can equally disperse all the worldbuilding nuggets I came up with on the fly. But, if I’m being honest, the past year-and-a-half has been exhausting — moving from first to second to now third novel with two more in production has wrung my mind half to dust. Which leads me to something I’ve been debating for a while and finally made a decision to go forward with.
Once EIRH is done and shelved until the next round of edits, I’m taking a break from staring new work to focus on what I have and get it all done. For the three finished novels, that means editing — which is always so much easier than writing the dang thing. For Our Holy Mother: Secrets (book 2) and Project Apocalypse, that means working one one to two chapters a week to dedicate my time to editing The Seat of Cath (it really should be Kath), Our Holy Mother: Evercrown (book 1), and soon-to-be Echoes In Reed House.
I’ve never reached this stage in the writing process before, but my mind’s so spent from all the past work that I want to make sure I do it right and devote myself as much as possible to the editing — no distractions, one book at a time, cover to cover. It’ll mean a year’s work without pumping out another five books — good Lord when you look at it like that — but it’ll good work by the time I’m through.
Not to mention, It’ll also give me time to write out the history behind my grand world and weave it all together. I can make a proper world-bible — God bless me with the money for ink and paper, haha. And that’s something I’ve always enjoyed doing, anyway. I can refine the rough edges of my world while I flesh it out on paper, which will lend itself nicely to my stories — I might end up renaming a few things once the languages and cultures are fully assembled.
However, I should be honest and say, I’ve started a bit early on the wind-down.
Most of this month’s been dedicated to world-building — namely creating the language family that trickles down into the godly tongue heavily used in TSOC, but also the ones that trickle into my other works. It’s been good to bend my mind on creation again, and not just fleshing out the details of a scene I already outlined a year ago. It’s become something of a project what with the creation of grammar, gender, syntax, sentence structure, accent, sound-changes, and trying to do all of it while keeping my fictional history in mind, but it’s a labor of love. (It’ll also make writing much easier, as I don’t have to make something up on the fly anymore.)
The first novel I ever finished, The Seat of Cath (it really should be The Seat of Kath, I’ll fix that later) actually includes quite a few languages, but none of them so much as that spoken by the god, Kath, and his people. However, even this is only a regional dialect of the official language, and that’s just the official language — there are something like twenty-three or thirty regional languages that naturally arose given the enormity of Kath’s territory.
But, firstly, I’ll only be focusing on fleshing out the the languages that appear in the story! Yes . . . Yes I will . . . I promise.
Aside from working on this language, there’s more and more to this world, which I’ve decided needs to be a comic — I do love to make things more complicated for myself, don’t I? The world’s rich with history and culture and people. It’s shaped by its hardships and secrets — hard-won peace barely held together by people who never knew anything but peace and never knew the terrors that displaced the gods and might threaten them in the future. But, more than the world, the characters are so interesting — if I do say so myself. There’re relationships I never thought would occur, characters I never thought would be important or meaningful, one’s I thought would have more impact that are actually just filler, and others I never expected to go down the paths I foresee them taking.
It’s so interesting to see a world and characters unfold in my mind with absolutely no idea what the story’s going to be. I’ve never had it take this long to get a coax a story out of a world, characters, and plot — of which, I have all three — but that just means I get more time spent daydreaming and sculpting the wet clay of an idea into something I can finally transfer to stone.
That’s what’s kept me away from my blog and other socials. It’s all fitted a bit to my teeth and steered me like a dumb ox, haha, but I remembered this morning that there’s more to this writing business than just writing. So, I’m sorry I’ve forgotten to update, but I’ll be doing so more regularly again from here on.
Has this month gone according to plan? Absolutely not. Am I still dealing with my depression and sometimes fighting to find a reason to get out of bed? Yep. Am I giving up? You better believe that aint the truth!
Slow and different as my progress has been, it’s still progress — I can’t let myself forget that — and one step, even if I could’ve taken twenty in the same time, is better than a step backward.
Bye, y’all!