Curmudgeon's Lair

The book came in just over 50k. It's the same length that most genre titles were published at back when I first started going to bookstores.

I am currently working on Blood Lies, book nine in the series and hope to have it finished by August. The rough draft is sitting at just slightly over 30k words and I suspect that it will be longer than Blood Hope. there are two more books in the series after Lies is finished.

I just passed the 50k mark on the final draft of Blood Hope. It's looking good. My editor likes what he has seen so far.

The Shadowed Princes and Kady's Vengeance are still sitting on the highest rated in dark fantasy list at Fictionwise. These things can be very ephemeral.

I hope to have Blood Hope finished by Monday and turned in for the final editorial go through.

I burned my breakfast when I lost track while working on a scene. I'm beginning to think that I'm back to the point of being able to burn water.

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.

Kady's Vengeance is out at Fictionwise and when I looked this morning was #13.

Publisher's Blurb:

Kady Maguire made her husband a promise. If anything happened to him she would flee to their allies in Creeya and not return without an army. When a treacherous assault by Malthus Estrobian leaves Kynyr crippled and close to death, Kady keeps her promise. Now heads are going to roll, as Kady places Kynyr's legendary grandfather, Todd Sinclair, in command of her forces. Cooley Blackwood steps into his father's shoes and goes in search of Stoneriver who is leading an army into Red Wolf to provide reinforcements for Kady. Malthus' ally, Belgair Doherty has rallied the Thanes of Red Wolf to place Malthus' son on the throne. Yet, neither Kady nor Malthus are prepared to handle the situation when the ancient vampire Lord Hoon arrives.



The Shadowed Princes has been turned into the editor with everything fixed.

One of my critters has still not forgiven me for one of the turns in the plot.

I sent the first draft of Blood Hope, the next book in the Dark Brothers of the Light series to my editor, Steven Beeho. While I'm waiting for his feedback, I am working on the first book in a new series that I plan to show around to agents. "Sins of Innocence" is the first novel in "The Child Profane and Sacrosanct" series.

okay, i sell well, but apparently I'm a washed up has-been. Have a look at the flamewar in progress over at Rusty Nail and this thread there also.

Enjoy the curmudgeonry.

With the Lycan Blood series completed, I have begun to get myself sorted out on two projects.

The first is the anthology, Things Are Not What They Seem. I need to go through the submissions I have already accepted and make certain that contracts went out on all of them. I'm thinking that the best way to approach that is to create a new folder and sort the copies of the contracts into it. The second is to make certain that I still have copies of everything from when I started it originally. Some of this will mean comparing what I have to what Natalie has and making some lists of it.

Once that is finished, I will place all the stories I have received recently into a new folder and start reading them and getting in touch with people.

The second project is Blood Hope, the next book in the Dark Brothers of the Light series. I am hoping that I can finish the series this year. At this point I estimate that, including Blood Hope, there are only three books left to complete.

First, I am doing a read through of what I have written already. Making a list of what needed to be done helped me a lot with the final book in the Lycan Blood series. It kept me focused. So i intend to do that with what I have so far on Hope.

On a rant note, if I should ever sell the DB series to a print company, I intend to put my original titles back on the books. I really dislike my publisher's insistence upon two words titles that start with the word 'blood.'

Next complaint, is that I really hate the first line of the blurb for Kady's Vengeance. Maybe I'm being vain, but I think the blurbs that i write and send Jean are better than the ones she writes herself. And nine times out of ten, when she does use the one I write, she adds something to them that makes me wince.

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.

CritGit said recently that the Lycan Blood books read like westerns. He hit the nail on the head.

The playlist I assembled for writing them included the soundtrack to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Additionally
The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton
Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean
The Ballad of Ira Hayes
Sink the Bismark by Johnny Horton
Jim Bridger by Johnny Horton
Ghostriders in the Sky by Johnny Cash
The Highwayman by Johnny Cash
The Gambler by Willie Nelson

My Dark Brothers of the Light series is now available at amazon.com as part of their Kindle books line.

And GUD Magazine is now available at Fictionwise and they listed me in the byline.

Kady's Vengeance is currently sitting at 79k words. There are a few scenes in the middle that need to be expanded and the last four chapters still need work, but it's getting closer and closer. I believe that it will go to the critters before the end of the month.

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.

The story that went up on the website yesterday was originally published in a hard cover anthology titled I, Vampire: Interviews with the Undead. "Visiting the Neighbors" was the first piece of fiction I completed after a 15 year writers block.

I never stopped writing. When I could not make fiction come together for me any longer, I switched over to journalism and non-fiction. It would still be several years before writing began to come easy for me again. I am of the opinion that for many writer's block occurs in response to stresses in real life that become overwhelming.

Until last year, VtN was the only first person story I had ever written.

The following used to be on the front page of my website, but it was dropped when we revised it last March.
_____________

In the beginning, there was the Godwar...
It erupted in the night and brought a bloody dawn of burning temples, crumbling cities, and terrified people. The jihad of the Hellgod Bellocar swept across the continents of the world called Daverana with technology and magic: nuclear holocausts, biological warfare, genetic mutations, and ecological disasters. Humans and their allied races perished in the millions. Vampires and demons walked the world openly. One by one each nation that resisted fell. The Gods of Light were slain. Finally only one of them remained, Ishla the Tinkerer and she hid herself. When all appeared lost, Ishla gave forth a tremendous cry for help into the void and it was answered. One winter's solstice as the last free realm was about to fall, eight young god with their legions, their creatures, and their demi-gods as captains of their hosts emerged from the veils between the worlds.
The young gods threw back the Hellgod, slew his sons and many of his wives, hunted down his creatures and his monsters. Torundar the Storm Lord; Kalirion Sun-Lord; Tala of the moon and hunt; Davera, earthmother; Badonth, God of Aggressive Warfare and Vengeance; Aroana, The Lady of the Walled Cities; Nerindalori of the Waves, Mistress of the Depths; Willodarus, Lord of the Woodlands and Wild Creatures: they were the young gods that conquered, yet in the end were not strong enough to destroy Bellocar and so sealed him up behind walls of magic and stone, raising a tremendous escarpment to surround him.
But now Bellocar is close to getting free again and a fresh godwar threatens the world that the young gods have so lovingly rebuilt and made habitable again for refugees from countless worlds. Demi-gods and heroes stand between the minions of Bellocar and the halls of the Gods of Light.
Welcome to the fiction of Janrae Frank.

Since I am in the process of killing my LJ, I am reposting some of my more memorable LJ posts here.

January 4th, 2004
1/4/04 12:51 pm

life is ugly

My collection of short stories, In the Darkness, Hunting, will soon be appearing in print from Wildside Press with an awesome cover. I'm very proud of it. Five of the stories are reprint and two are new. You can check the website for more on the volume and I'll be updating it periodically in both places. It's dark sword and sorcery fiction with werewolves and demons and other nasties that slink around in the aftermath of a godwar.

I like writing violence. It is something that I understand from growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. Maybe not as bad a side as some, but far worse than most. I still live in dark territory, but I handle it, if not as well as I did when I was younger and more ready to get into a round of fisticuffs.

The old adage "write what you know" holds very true for me. I'm not interested in sweetness and light, pastoral poetry, or pretty. I write about damaged people, damaged lands, bigotry and prejudice, and basic survival in which a price must be paid and compromises made. There are no sterling heroes. My novel which is making the rounds opens with an alcoholic waking on the beach and screaming his lungs out in the grip of delerium tremins.

I tend to have a high body count in my fiction because life is ugly and this is my vision of it. It is also an historically accurate account of what happens in society and which we pretend does not exist while it lies dying on our doorsteps. Joe Klein, one of my favorite journalists and a writer for Time Magazine said a few months back that "Americans are a society afflicted by illusions of orderliness". And I must agreed wholeheartedly with him. There is no nice, neat, up-lifting message to my work, although frequently there is a soul-tearing, weary triumph at the end as the survivors pick themselves up again and mourn their losses.

LIFE IS UGLY.

I'm still feeling grouchy. Sometimes it's just because I'm tired or stressed. Right now, Mr. Porky is back to leaving me death threats and threats to steal my books to punish me for imagined slights.

I have resisted writing another rebuttal because I get tired of it. He knows better than to try coming to Massachusetts to get me (he's in Illinois) because I practice cast iron fry pan diplomacy as in WHOMP!

Sales of the new book are doing well. I really have no right to complain. But I'm still feeling grouchy. I assume that what I need is more access to my English boytoy.

People are wondering why the next Dark Brothers book has been delayed and other books have come out ahead of it. There are many reasons, but the largest is that I had to rethink it.

As the character of Stygean Loosestrife became more and more important to the plotline, he began to gradually take over the focus of the books. Then there were also the out of control side plots that I broke out into their own series.

When I pulled it all together in late spring, the first thing that I did was to rip out the side plots.

That allowed me to see just how much about Isranon there was compared to how much there was about Stygean.

Stygean had overwhelmed the story line. This happens sometimes and causes a protagonist to become a false protagonist. However, I did not want that fate to happen to Isranon. So I have had to gradually rethink the book and look for ways to alter the content and allow Isranon to keep his role as the primary protagonist. I also saw that many supporting characters had become lost in my obsession with Stygean. They need to be worked back into the main story line.

Blood Hope will contain one of the main turning points in the series and I find myself having to give it much more thought to get it right than any previous book in the series.

The fate of Stygean contributes heavily to the conclusion of the series and I must work this right for it to make sense and logic.

Hopefully everyone will bear with me while I try to get it right.