What's it all about

gday gentle reader/s

Sometimes even I, its author, wonder what this trilogy is about. part of the problem is the length of time taken to write it. Since starting in 1999 I have read a couple hundred more books and had another 10 years of life experience all of which has undoubtedly influenced my writing.

The Restoration Legends

When I began I had several notions about differences: between faith and belief, between the genres of fantasy and science fiction and between the perceptions of science and magic - all of which I wished to explore in a riveting tale that people would read first and think about later. I'm nothing, if not ambitious for my writing. 

I decided on a post apocalyptic world for the trilogy but not earth, new Earth. Specifically a colony from Australia (no prizes for guessing why) The high tech colony prospers and invents matter transmitting portals. Then on the eve of it greatest triumph, expanding to yet another system and setting up a a Portal between them, self-destructs leaving an AI controlled orbiting ship full of hibernation colonists and remnant population on the destroyed world. That then is roughly the milieu.

One of my thematic explorations is based on the Arthur C. Clarke quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/arthur_c_clarke.html#ixzz1826Ire3H On my world the remaining working technology is considered magical - and religious practices, aided and abetted by the AI calling itself their goddess, have developed around it.

Next I decided to put the recovering world in further jeopardy from a meteor/asteroid collision, so my as yet unformulated hero/heroine could save everyone - very dramatic and over the top -  I've changed that but left it in as something the locals  believe is the goal. This along with the various personal beliefs about their world and ancestry is another of my explorations

In essence it's an SF (Speculative Fiction) story that should read like fantasy in as much as the magic has a technological base that the reader can identify while realizing the characters in the story can not. The last of my explorations.

The devil however is in the detail (subject of a future post)
Next post ~ Book 3's progress.

ooroo

Trilogy History Book 2

G'day

I went straight  into Book 2 the day after finishing Book 1.   We were still in a flat in Sydney, Felicity at work and me home - what else was I going to do?  Taking a break in the circumstances (where my wife Felicity is working to support my writing habit) did not seem politic besides my reading of the many tomes on "How to write ..." almost universally suggested letting a newly completed manuscript gestate a week or two before revising. Who am I to argue?

October 2000 we returned to our Ironbank home in the Adelaide hills and me to the the Blackwood Writers Group  - hereinafter BWG, not that I ever left in spirit thanks to the internet.   I came back with six chapters of Book 2 which started with the daughter of main protagonists - a generational change - 20 odd years after the closing event of Book 1   (incidentally book 1 covered a single year)

Koala Ridge Ironbank design by built by me, home for 20 years

About now I ran out of steam - not writers block so much as I didn't like where the story was going , it was on a side track heading away from the goal I had in mind and getting bogged down.

I decide to quit and revise book one for insights but that's a whole other story of which this is a quick summary  Revision 2 finished Dec 2000 at 196,000 words -  It went to 9 revisions  topping at 210,000, was broken into two books (hence later the 2 parts to each book), reassembled, culled and  revised endlessly with the object of sending it out while I worked on book 2.

However Book 1: The Break of Civilization  (Break) still needs work ( it's on the net if you want to help) but  I have decided to finish the whole trilogy then revise bearing mind what's to come. Still there is something to said for the naivety of the characters when I and they didn't know what was to come.  Too much editing is often worse than not enough.
 

Back in book The Face of the Goddess ( Face) two I started working backwards from the opening to fill in the years between Bk1 and Bk2. Several attempts, prologues and opening chapters were written and thrown away.  I felt, quite literally, like I had lost the plot. To cut a long story short.  It has taken from  2001 to 2010 (9 years)  to get book 2 from 6 chapters to near completion as it is now.   The original start is now chapter 14.  60,000 words have been inserted.   

 9 years - LIFE got in the way - Health issues,  a house move  and new bookshop - a 7-day coffee-shop/post-office/bookshop  as below. (those three years devoid of writing)  an operation,  a world trip 2004 (recuperation), two house moves, another world trip 2007 just in case  (during which I plotted in broad strokes the rest of the trilogy) Another house move 2009 and another operation 2010 (see my blog "That's Life" )

My second bookshop ~ the BookPost, Charleston, Sth. Aust.

Funny how I used to think a book shop the perfect business for a writer.  I tried it twice; the first failed because I wrote - the second thrived but I wrote almost nothing. There's a moral there somewhere.

Next post will be as I start book 3,  sometime next week -  Yaye!

'Ooroo

Trilogy History Book 1

G'day

As I've said elsewhere the second book in the trilogy is racing towards its end, health issues as blogged on That's Life (http://eyeoftherobot.blogspot.com/) have settled, and left me feeling better than I have in years.

So I have decide to Blog the whole damn process of writing the next novel; the third in the "legends" trilogy ~ working title "The Arch of Restoration" ~ hereinafter referred to by its short title "Arch"

First some background: The trilogy began in Sept 1995 in Fort Collins, Colorado: as they say in the classics - it was long ago and far away.

I was there on holiday and to save a failing relationship; It didn't work out but the novel stuck and on my return, grew and grew and gradually morphed from a love triangle into fantasy trilogy. But it didn't happen overnight. I was then in the middle of  decade of crisis, alone, jobless and with a recently deceased mother. So I opened a secondhand bookshop.

In 1966 when I started the Blackwood Writers Group  my father had also passed on,  the bookshop was failing and the few odd scribblings that became book one of the trilogy, languished in the bottom draw.

The group mostly SF writers reinvigorated me  as they followed the well worn track to publication by writing short stories and 1997 saw some early success for almost all group members; enough by 1998 for a anthology to showcase our work. http://www.blackwoodwritersgroup.com/Tessellations/index.htm

By then my short stories were getting longer and longer and I decided  to again tackle the novel.  I like the space a novel gives to explore.  It was about now that the story began morphing into the trilogy using a short piece that couldn't find a market as the prologue. This changed the Fantasy into SF.

I was about 10,000 thousand words in by 1999 when I met and married Felicity and we moved to Sydney  for her work.in September of that year. My decade of disquiet was over. I worked full time on the novel. The first draft finished up at 163,000 thousand words.   Here' a clip from the end of that draft.

The trails and trials of  book two next post
'Ooroo

The Trilogy

G'day

The whole box and die as writ thus far and tentatively titled "The Restoration Legends" is now up on my site under my author tab, through the labyrinth portal to http://www.rob.bleckly.com/Legends/index.html.

Each book has two parts as follows:-

Book 1 "Break" (was 'The Break of Civilization')

• part 1 "Reason" (was 'The Test of Reason")
• part 2 "Faith" (was 'The Test of Faith")

Book 2 "Face" (was 'The Face of the Goddess')

• part 1 "Guilt" (was 'The Guilt of Sanctuary')
• part 2 "Innocence" (was 'The Innocence of Face')

Book 3 "Arch" (was 'The Arch of Restoration')

• part 1 "Love" (was 'The Design of Ancients')
• part 2 "Hate" (was 'The Waking of Sleepers')

home-made covers - book 3's is deliberately blurry -it's not your eyes
I like symmetry. The shortening to one word titles is just the latest in a long line of changes stretching back years. The reasons for the changes I'll leave for another post. Suffice to say it's a work in progress, a long work and and slow progress. I'm not happy with the last two parts - the long titles better reflect where the story has to go but then again none of book 3 is written.

On the site each book has a page listing chapters available and roughly when they where last updated (the dates will become more accurate as I progressive upload new and edited chapters)

The .pdf format chapters, especially in Book 2 "Face", are writing in the raw, unedited first draft straight of the top of the head via the fingertips to the keyboard. I'm a two finger typist and my brain is often well ahead of my fingers. The spelling and grammar checker's do a reasonable job but don't pick up everything.

Enjoy

'Ooroo