Anovoca

I have been staring at this empty journal screen for 5 minutes not sure where to begin. I guess I need to be a little more diligent with my journal so I dont have so many topics to cover. So, let me just skip the life update and go straight to the literary updates. October is one week away and that means that the most productive months for my writing are directly ahead of me. So far I am still on pace to complete the second draft of my novel this year, though I say that with the most daunting rewrite still ahead of me. All in all I am nearly completed though. I have 350/600 pages done and I am rewriting them in order which means that the last hundred or so pages will need the least revisions if any. The task at hand is to get through the one chapter I have been eyeballing since the start of the rewrite. This chapter is the only chapter to feature one character exclusively from start to finish and it needs to carry a strong weight of suspense and tension that the original telling fell short of. I have decided to take some time over the next few days to get back into reading horror, as my tendencies towards fantasy literature have caused this book to drift closer to fantasy than a horror/fantasy hybrid.

My original drive to write a novel came back when I was still writing Poetry and got hooked on H.P. Lovecraft's epic yet horrifying mythos. I wanted to see a world like he envisioned encapsulated by a larger series of stories. Not just in the way that Stephen King hints at a unified world for his constructs, but to create an actual multi novel narrative inside an old god/demon infested landscape. I have been working hard lately to remind myself of these roots and to get back into a more horror mindset with my writing. I admit it has been difficult considering most of my reading is in fantasy and not horror, and the set of horror authors that write like Lovecraft is extremely limited.

On the other side of things, I am getting more and more into the mindset to hammer out my scifi novel. With all the editing I have done the past two years (on The Heirs novel) I have been craving some actual writing. Admittedly, what really sparked the fire to get working on this story was how close the new netflix movie What Happened to Monday came to touching on the premise of my story. I am not saying that my story follows that movie at all, but I do worry another writer might watch that movie and start playing the what-if game and scheme up something that does follow my idea to the T. Either way, with everything I have seen over the past year, I think the world could use a fresh new dystopian scifi classic and I intend to give it to them.  

In my last update I set out a list of goals for the year. I am happy to say the big one is knocked off my list and that I have closed on and finished moving into my first home. Coincidentally, there was a 2 month period in there where i was living with my sister waiting to close and move in, where I had not much else to do but sit and work on the book. I managed to knock out the first full half of the book. That was a few weeks ago and now that I finally have a home with an office and a nice window view of the garden I am looking forward to get cracking on the second half. As with the first half, any time constraints I put on this second draft works to my detriment as the more time I give myself the more areas I decide to revise and rewrite. I am extremely happy with the current half of revisions I have made. 

As for the kids book, I have made very little progress. I am spreading myself really thin which is unfortunate since this book has a close friend and family member waiting for the text to begin with his illustration work. It doesn't help that this book has a crazy rhyming scheme and form of humor that I am finding challenging to write in. I love what has done enough to not rethink the approach but it definitely a much more difficult project than I thought it would be going into it. I think I need to sit down and write it out without the rhyming and get the humor in place first then go back and try to get it to flow. We shall see. Like I said, a problem of priorities vs time. 

All my other works are not even in the back of my mind at the moment, but I will be sure to send an update if/when I switch focus to any of the other projects.

So 2017 is hear at last and it looks like it is going to be unrelenting as far as my schedule is concerned. I have a new series I am starting to scope out, I have an illustrator on-board to work with me on my first children's book/project, I am looking to buy my first house, I plan on going back to school to study Database administration, I am turning 30, I plan on rescuing a dog sometime after buying my house, and lastly,  I am putting a hard cutoff date for the end of this year to finish rewriting The Heirs book one. After this, it is going to be pencils down and I will try and turn in what ever I have at the end. I fear that this project is turning into a never ending spiral where every time I come back around full circle to wrap up a round of edits I find my skill level to be higher than where I started from and I have the urge to start rewriting the first half of the book to bring it up to snuff with the ending. This has gone around and around again 3 times by now and after the first half of the book is done with this rewrite, I will sure up a few weak points at the ending and then just walk away.

As for the sequel, the longer I forestall writing, the more I realize how little I am married to the current plot-lines and the more fresh new ideas come to me. I am still limited to an amount on what I can change going forward without having to make changes to book one (which I refuse to do at this point), but so far I like some of the newer directions and the different possible endings they might present. The original idea for this series back when I was a teenager was to make 1-3 books that roll into a video game. Currently however, I am really pushing away from that idea which leads me right now with a problem of not knowing how I want to end the series. For now, I may just continue to come up with plot lines I enjoy and just weave a narrative I want to tell and see where it takes me. This book has never been one to shed the usual fantasy archetypes and I think the only reason I can't see the ending right now is my refusal to look directly at the obvious. I would still love to end this book with a bang but so far the story is leading itself towards the usual hero meets villain and fights to save humanity sort of thing.  Perhaps I need to get back into reading A Song of Ice and Fire and get my stroke of cynical cruelty back. A thought for another day....

The new series has got me at a level of excitement I haven't felt in years. I don't want to put The Heirs series on hold, but I do think that this one is more marketable and a better foot to put forward as a writer without any publications. Either way, it is my hope that I have enough projects underway that I may be able to find myself good representation with an experienced agent. I don't want to tip my hand on this one too much, but I can say it is more in the YA-Fantasy realm. There will be two lead characters, one of them is non-human and the other a young girl. The other thing I can tell you is this book is being written with a specific agenda of flipping the fantasy script and breaking most of the archetypes. So far I have the broader timeline fleshed out for the first book and a general idea oh the direction overall for the series. It still just feels like the earliest seed of an idea but it has more substance now than the heirs did when I began writing it.  Now it is just a matter of living the highlight moments over and over again in my head, ingraining all the details and flushing out dialog. All that being said I guess it is time to get back to work. I will try and do a better job at keeping these updates coming. regardless if people read these or leave comments, it gives me good motivation to hold to my schedule. 

Over the past two weeks I have seen a string of "On This Day" memories popping up on my facebook page. Scrolling deeper into the memories section, I have been following a long string of memories, now 10 years old, that I did not have an option to share. Out of context, these simple quips seem small and irrelevant among the larger mix of posts; but to me, they stirred up a wealth of memories. 

Ten years ago this month was when I made that first trip down to Milwaukee, during my first year in college, to visit my friends living there. That trip was a catalyst for one of the most important friendships I have ever had. Now, I could spend the next hour writing here and expressing all of my emotions and telling you of the ups and downs on that two year journey; but the truth is, in a way - I already have. You see, it was this period of my life that shifted me from a mediocre wanna-be lyricist, to a growing and budding poet and eventually an amateur novelist. Without both the encouragement from this friend, as well as the never ending emotional highs and lows that friendship brought me, I never would have found that spark or have been able to develop the skills needed to eloquently express myself as an artist. 

I hesitate to leave it rest there. As nice as that sentiment may sound, to say that that friendship meant the most to me because of the writing skills I got out of it, is about as far from hitting the mark as possible. Writing came to me as a side effect. It was the inevitable bye-product of a relationship so meaningful to me at that time, that I had no alternative but to constantly write and express myself or begin to drown in a turgid sea of constantly shifting doubts & hopes, fears & dreams, longings & hesitations. So once again, I can only say that to truly grasp the importance of this time for me, you have only but to look through my gallery and read through my work, not just the poems and stories from 10 years ago, but my entire body of work. Everything I have ever written has been in some way touched by these memories.

Today though, I am left sitting and pondering about memories in general. The value they have in our lives, and the importance of knowing which memories to let go and which ones to cherish. For this, I have only one piece of art which I need to look to, one of my most recent poems, and one I still hold to as, while not my best, easily my most cherished.
Lament notI long now to roll back these pages
To see through the mists of the ages
On stories that memories can't tell
Lament not what passed through the fingers
Arresting the scene here to linger
Unsoured by heart's staining shell
If I could but live there forever
No thought for the pain here and after
But holding the truths not to quell
I'd never again live in anguish
Alone in my thoughts left to languish
Remembering just the farewell

In full swing at the moment with my rewrites of The Heirs-Book One. About 50 pages have been rewritten so far and the content is getting very filled out. It took me a while to get going despite having strong ideas on where I wanted to head. I guess it just took a little bit of progress to get the excitement there. This effort is significantly different than my first major edit where I mostly touched up places my beta readers pointed out and fixed any grammar issues I found along the way. This time around I am completely rewriting the weaker sections and some of the older content so that the writing style is more consistent throughout the entire book. I grew leaps and bounds as a writer through this whole process and I wanted to be able to showcase that growth in the finished product. 

I received a lot of positive and helpful feedback from my initial beta readers whom all agreed that the story was great but very rough along the edges. They also encouraged me by letting me know that the final chapters were written very well and that I clearly had the capability to make the entire novel a masterpiece, so long as I was willing to put in the effort. At the time that was not what I had wanted to hear, but after sitting on the finished manuscript for two years, making no real confident movements with it (combined with a growing restlessness at my job and desire to escape from the M-F lifestyle) I have finally begun the process of rewriting that the story so desperately needed. 

As far as content goes, the story will not change much. I am adding more character details and trying to build up more backstories and motivations behind them. In the process I am also growing my world to include references to places and events not immediately relevant to the first book, but which will aid in the writing of future novels. I am also adding in some side stories that I previously would have considered irrelevant to the main plot. These stories show greatly increase the likability of some of the protagonists and draw the reader into their own individual journeys a little better.

All-in-all, I am extremely satisfied with the product so far and I can't wait to keep this momentum going until it is done. I think this version of the story will have a strong possibility of seeing publication but that doesn't mean this version will be without its own set of flaws. As always, I would love some feedback and a few beta readers. I know I can always sends copies to some of the first readers but I don't want to take up any more of their time. I also wouldn't mind some fresh perspectives from people new to the story.

If you are reading this and are interested please leave me a comment below and I will send you a copy through google drive. If you are interested in trading review for review I would be willing to work something out, but bear in mind my schedule is pretty busy as I have 500 more pages of rewrites to go.