The mess we're in

All Time's Exodus, book four in Stars of the New Gods, is taking much longer than expected.  Not that many of you are out there waiting with bated breath, but I thought it was fair.  I'm hoping to finish it by the end of the fall and hopefully have it up on Amazon by December or January.  Life has taken the front seat, and unfortunately composition is somewhere between the backseat and the trunk.  Nothing terrible, just find myself watching the hours in the day run out before I can sit down at the computer to start back up on the story.

Composition is a tricky thing for me.  Stephen King wrote a fantastic memoir about his approach to composition, simply titled On Writing.  He stresses trying to get at least 2000 words (roughly 6-10 raw pages) down everyday.  He also stresses trying to do it as fast as you can, in other words, writing at least five days a week.  The Stephen King approach has always worked for me.  Sure, it takes me about a year to turn out a book, but I feel that's pretty good considering I work a full-time job on top of that.  All Time's Exodus has strayed very far during the last year.  Sometimes there were weeks between composition sessions, and the fact that I lost a great chunk of the first draft to a faulty computer made the work pretty demoralizing.  I'm sure I've romanticized that draft in my head and it probably wasn't as great as I thought it was, but I do know I was having a very fun time writing it.  When I came to the conclusion that the many pages and chapters I pumped out with a pretty good cadence were lost, I began the demoralizing work of trying to rewrite them.  It was not fun...it was work.  Stephen King also refers to work as the "kiss of death for many writers".  I was determined and I do feel the story benefited from it, but the pace slowed and I wandered very far from what should have been straightforward composition.

I've always set a deadline for myself.  My goal has always been to start writing a book in the fall and have it ready to go up on Amazon by August or September.  It's almost August and I'm pretty sure All Time's Exodus is not going to be going up.  So, I put my chin up and work toward my new goal of a January publication, as well as a set of short stories I've started working on.

The anthology of short stories will cover the eight year gap between When The Red Moon Runs Dry and The Falling Stars.  Three stories, each one devoted to a single character.  Violetta's is my favorite so far.  Marshal and Charles will get theirs as well, and hopefully it will enrich your enjoyment of the characters despite the fact each story has little consequence on the overall Stars of the New Gods series.

That's all for now.  Hope you all stay sane throughout the fucking farce that is this upcoming election.  Donald Trump is evil.  Hillary will make a great president, and Bernie did a stupendous job bringing his issues to the Democratic convention.  I think that's about the cut and dry of it all.

So long from a very toasty Portland.

Block, Wall, Hit, Writer...All of the Above

It feels like we are coasting out of a very dull winter into an earlier spring here in Portland, Oregon.  The rain is still falling, but the days are starting to feel a little warmer and longer.

I wish I could say the weather has improved my creative energy.  It has not.  To be honest, I've fallen considerably behind in the fourth Stars of the New Gods.  I took a risk– at least in my opinion it was a risk– and the road I took at the crossroads of the story seems to have reached the end of ideas I originally thought it was paved with.  When I wrote Find the Star, I had very little idea where the book was going as I put the chapters together.  It was, more or less, a creative exercise with an underlying ambition to actually finish a novel.  I was pleasantly surprised I could put together a story with a sort-of end.  When the Red Moon Runs Dry and The Falling Stars were all but mapped out when I opened my computer to put them together.  They began and ended how I predicted they would, with only a few changes in the composition and revisions.

This fourth book, at this point it's titled All Time's Exodus, has me up against the wall.  I think I'm a little over halfway finished with the first draft, but I honestly don't know how the story is going to end.  I'm faced with some interesting prospects, but the pages seem to be devoted to justifying the strange turns I've been taking with certain characters.  I don't think I'm ruining anything by saying this, but the fourth book picks up only a few weeks after The Falling Stars.  I often found the time gap between books as way to cheat immediate explanations of how characters reflected on events.

Take Violetta, for example; she suffered a tremendous loss during the events of the third book, so she is still dealing with very raw grief during this fourth story.  It's difficult to navigate her through this fourth story without that grief controlling her every action.  I put her through hell and now the decisions she makes are so greatly shaped by her sense of complete loss, and it's become difficult for me to move the story forward when I continue to address the grief.  For now, I'm just rolling with it and hoping I will find answers in the revisions of this story.  I am very fond and protective of Violetta, despite the misery I've piled on her plate.  I guess me continuing to detail her sense of sorrow in this story is my way of showing concern and regard for what she is going through.

I used to sit down and write at least 2,000 words a day during the initial composition.  That's what I should be doing now, but I just stared at the bits of an unfinished chapter, and decided to step away for a moment.  I figured if I came over to this much neglected blog of mine and aired a few frustrations that might get the wheels turning.  We'll see.

I suppose I should be excited that I don't know the end of this book.  I do not see it concluding Stars of the New Gods.  There will be a fifth book and my little plan is for that one to be the finale.  I'm drafting outlines, making character sketches, and coming up settings.  I figure if I put enough creative energy into the elements of the story then the story will speak to me.

Suppose, since it's that season, I should talk politics.  I support Bernie Sanders.  I have strong feelings about it, but I think people need to get off of their high horses about Bernie.  Yes, I'm proud to support Bernie, but I'm not out to make people who would support another candidate feel like shit about it.  I think Hilary Clinton would make a great president, and if she gets the nomination, I'll gladly get behind her.  Donal Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio scare the living shit out of me.  I think republicans could have done a hell of a lot better and I'm ashamed of our collective American image pretty much every time one of those guys opens their mouth.

Well, not sure when I'll write again.  Hopefully it will be to announce I've finished the rough draft.