Curmudgeon's Lair

I know that a lot of you are waiting for this. It has been over a year since I wrote another Dark Brothers of the Light novel. Well, fear not, I'm getting very close to finished. Despite tossing out a great portion of my previous draft, Blood Hope is getting close to finished.

42,821 / 75,000 (57.1%)

Dane Jayce, who some of you met in the Sacred King novels and in the first books of the Dark Brothers series, returns, bringing revelations about the origins of the demon-eaters, the true nature of Isranon's opponent, Gylorean Galee, and the locations of secret laboratories that survived the previous godwar.

The final volume of the Lycan Blood series is now complete in first draft. The Shadowed Princes came in at just over 70k words. By the time i smooth it all out, I expect that it will be somewhere between 90 and 100k words long.

Over the next few weeks, I will be concentrating on my anthologies, and getting contracts and payments out to people. Acceptances and so forth. I feel very good about it.

I am weary and very satisfied by the way the novel tumbled out. I wrote the final two chapters in a blaze of inspiration, feeling driven to keep going until I was too tired to think each day. But it's finished.

Once i wrap up the anthology, I will be back to finish the final volumes of the Dark Brothers series.

There's no must have on my brain getting lost and not seeing that I was actually trying to force more than one story beneath a single set of covers.

Starting in late 2004, I became a slush reader for a literary agency. That effectively doubled my workload. By the end of 2005 I was so burnt out that I was starting to make a lot of mistakes.

Here's a classic one I made that will illustrate my point. I was given a manuscript to read by a big name author. The agent, knowing that I had been an editor in my heyday, wanted an opinion on it and I gave it. I assured her that I found nothing wrong with it. It was well written.

Then she asked me a second time if I had failed to spot errors.

Well, the problem was glaring at me, but I was too exhausted and burnt out for it to register.

The author had used eyeballs instead of stars to indicate scene changes.

When 06 dawned, I left the agency and started trimming my workload. The money was not worth killing myself over. But being a workaholic, instead of getting more rest, I kept working. I put all that effort into my own writing, but the burn out and exhaustion were haunting me in ways that I never expected and could not recognize even with them glaring at me like those eyeballs.

When my computer started to die in late 06, I kept buying parts for it in a vain attempt to fix it. In the end it turned out to be the memory on the motherboard. The computer must have overheated at some time, and damaged the onboard video memory. As the computer died, i was less and less able to write on things or keep in touch with people. the last thing to go was my IMs. I had friends posting my blog entries for me to keep them going. I had to write longhand or not at all and I spent months with a recurring cold/flu that would get a bit better and then turn about and bite me on the arse again.

It all boiled down to an enforced rest I would not have taken. During that period of enforced inactivity, my head cleared up and I saw what i had done.

Like those eyeballs, they were glaring at me. I had not one series, but four squeezed into the pages of what was supposed to be a single series.

So I hope that people will bear with me while I correct my mistakes and eat my serving of humble pie.

Seeing something naked shows up the flaws. We all fuck up.

when I hit Blood Paladin in the Dark Brothers of the Light series, my brain must have started to get lost in left field. I added a thread, sub-plot about a sa'necari infiltrator going after Isranon's son.

that was not in the original rough draft I did four years ago. It was the first time that I had veered away from the original to that degree. I thought i would tie everything up in a few volumes and that would be that. It is also why most print publishers want a detailed outline for a series before they buy it. To avoid creative brain farts like that one.

I also was not realizing that I could do more than one series at the same time and have them dove tail together. That knowledge came to me in the course of lengthy conversations with people who had read my work. Their feedback has helped me continue to grow as a writer.

Had I stayed in fiction, instead of rushing over into a fifteen year stay in Journalism, I would probably have known that already. But that's water under the bridge.

It was when I started work on Blood harvest that i really started to become aware that what i was doing was way off base. the tale of isranon became more and more lost amongst the tales of the sub plots, especially the lycan one and the tale of Lukasz.

I kept obsessively trying to fit them together by alternating chapters precisely. But then my publisher's determination to have the books stay under a certain length made it harder and harder as the books became more and more crowded with excess plots and stories.

When I finally ripped them all apart last year at this time, and realized what i really had, i started to see the holes in everything. The emperor was naked.

If all the chapters that took place among the lycans were stipped out of Blood Paladin, arcane, and harvest, what would I have? Well, when i looked at it I saw i had a novel and the protagonist was Malthus.

At this point, you might wonder how I managed to write a book about a villain. I have absolutely no clue as to how or why I did that. The muse is mightier than the writer and the writer is blind to her depredations.

Any way, I pondered while I was waiting for my January royalties to get here and I was constrained to write out the next book in long hand. A new character had popped into my mind: Kynyr maguire.

Suddenly malthus had an opponent and i liked him a lot.

At first I agonized over the entire 'lost prince' concept and then I accepted that i had to work with it. it simply felt right. It helped that i was driving poor Debbie Moorhouse, author of Sundown, crazy and she kept telling me to have more confidence in what I was doing and that I was beginning to sound depressed. I listened and listened and listened, and then I went back to the beginning and wrote Kynyr into the book from the get go.

Now, I was going to start the lycan series with the murder of Caimbeul. However, when I showed the initial draft to another critter, Lilac, she pointed out to me that she was completely lost and asked if I would please start at the beginning. So I started Serpent's Quest with the entrance of Malthus into Red Wolf. She said that was better and she was no longer confused.

My advice to readers at this point is to skip the lycan sections of the Dark Brothers novels. I have redone the material in the lycan books.

The Angrim thread and the Lukasz thread are also being broken out into their own expanded volumes. I intend to go more deeply into what is happening in Angrim and Beltria. I am going to show more of Stefan and how he hid the Oracle of Badonth and why he put the clues for lukasz to find in the hidden room. Readers will encounter the Hermit of Jasmine Falls early on.

I have written about this before at my xanga blog, but that has not always been accessible to non-xangans.

I started off writing the lycan sequence as a side story in the Dark Brothers of the Light Series. The two storylines were intended to merge at a certain point. Problems developed when I added the side story of Lukasz and then a third one arrived. In Blood Harvest, the main thread about Isranon had become lost and it shows that the book is flawed.

Around the time that Blood Harvest came out, my computer started dying. I tried to fix it to no avail. It was old and the parts were obsolete. Problems with it continued for months until it finally died and I was without while waiting for my royalties.

During that time I became more aware of the problems caused by the side threads. I broke them out of the Dark Brothers novels. At first I thought I could just pick up with them at the point they ended in DB. However, I had two new critters at the time and the consensus opinion was that it would be nearly impossible to understand what was happening unless I started at the beginning.

So I ripped all the chapters out of Dark Brothers and looked at them.

Just before the the computer died, I printed out all the sections I had torn from the books and had them in front of me.

Writers can be blind creatures, myself especially.

Once the chapters of each thread were seen in isolation from the rest of the tales, I realized that I had written them about Malthus. Writing a book about the villian rather than the heroes is not something I was willing to do.

Since it was not completely cast in stone, I took the chapters and refashioned a new story around them. In the beginning, Kynyr showed up later in the DB books. but seeing it all isolated, I realized that he needed to appear much earlier. I started putting him in and in the course of it, he stole the books.

the chapters taken from Dark Brothers stop appearing in the fourth book. Most of the material is new. The last sequence from Dark Brothers to appear in the Lycan Blood series is the scene where Malthus plots to kill Caimbeul. The addition of the Kynyr and Kady storyline required me to alter most of the sequences from the earlier version. If I ever have the opportunity to do a new edition of the lycan novels, I have a huge list of things I want to add and even scenes I took out that I would like to add back.

As to the repeated descriptions, some of them I just happen to like a lot. Others are inadvertant. I keep a file of descriptions so that i won't make a mistake and describe something wrong, such a a character having black hair in one book and the next he is a blonde. I'm trying to alter them more. they have become a kind of stock footage.

Originally, I planned to do two more books in the lycan series, Kady's Vengeance and Shadow's Prince. Then I changed my mind because it looked like I could get it all into a single volume. WRONG. I'm back to making it two books. It hit 75k and finished was not in sight.

Back to my first plan.

Because I'm doing the ebooks, I can pretty much do as i like with them. If I ever manage to get into print editions, I'm going to miss that freedom.

I've been going through a sick spell again and have been extremely tired for the past three days. However, I have written a tiny bit on Kady's Vengeance.

58,539 / 75,000 (78.1%)

This is the primary draft. Once I have gone all the way through it to the end, I will toss it at the CritGit to read for flaws. We found a way to turn one chapter around that I was having trouble with. I don't normally like to show unfinished material at anyone. I also rarely let anyone read an early draft. I am insecure about my early drafts and they are usually changed a great deal before they go to my initial readers.

One of the biggest challenges on doing a series is that after awhile it becomes difficult to see what is really there because you have covered it so many times. Until CritGit had a look at my novel Kynyr's War, I had not realized how much information had been left out of it. For instance I had not described what many of the characters looked like. Nor had I explained what the sa'necari were and how they function. I had done that in the earlier books, but now my head had programmed itself in such a way that I perceived it as being there and it was not.

First readers, especially highly perceptive ones like CritGit are invaluable.