Shank's Pony

gday gentle reader

(My last post, "Oh! the pain" was published? or re-published? Friday, I don't know which. When I began this one I found it sitting in the blogosphere in draft. This one has suffered a similar fate. It was drafted late Friday on a long weekend (in South Australia) hence it is only getting edited and published today 3 days later - life gets in the way of my writings - frequently)

I don't care what colour it is, forget the horse I'll walk.  The two most important lessons I learned/learnt (choose your own) from the Voyager submission were

Firstly - the editing method that suits me best is the same as I used to write the damn thing - I need to set a solid achievable deadline and daily/weekly milestones by which I can measure my progress. It's a common business ploy that works for me.

However with this book [book 1 "Break"] the Voyager deadline was too tight. I  was fooling myself that it was ready to publish and all it needed was a tidy up. I was wrong (I often am). During the edit I uncovered highlighted notes throughout the book suggesting  "needs more"  "rework this"  "new scene here" Notes I had forgotten even existed.  

The fact that I did get it done and send it off, is testament to my wife's forbearance. As said in my last post "midnight oil was burnt - rest of life put on hold." 

Secondly - by reading the novel thoroughly (looking for places to tighten it) in a compressed time frame with nothing allowed to distract I got a much better sense of the story as a whole; probably for the first time since writing it.

So two weeks  ago I set a new deadline to finish editing the trilogy on 31st July this year 2013 and divied up the remaining work ( stopped - while I fretted and waited for the voyager result). 

Yesterday I caught up the backlog and went into the black for the first time. Today I stayed there. I'm not fussed by the number per se, I edit to the nearest POV change that keeps it black. 

By  coincidence I am almost half way (49%) through editing book 2 and the whole trilogy at the same time. What continues to alarm me however is the size of each keeps growing. I thought editing meant cutting. (simultaneously I occasionally edit the scenes of book 3 that I want to parse through my writers group - hence a mild increase there)  

The only figure in the seemingly complex tracking sheet I alter at the end of each writing day is   new total   the rest is automatic. The  edited total  for bk2 only gets adjusted when I think about it. On a daily basis it's up and down like a yo-yo.

One day when this trilogy is properly published I will look back and marvel at the Machiavellian machinations I had to use, to convince myself, to get on with it and get it done.

ooroo until my next post
rob

The Never-Ending Edit

gday gentle readers  

I'm still only in chapter 2 (scene 11 of 1302) of the trilogy and still finding non trivial problems about a rate of one per scene.

The latest is a distance/time problem.  My heroine must catch a marching army before it reaches a certain point some 500 miles away. She has been delayed and I put this though into her head.
 

"I will have lost a whole day; the contingent will be gone, hard to catch even with a horse."
A bit of basic research however shows a marching army even with horse and carts can travel at 3mph.(18 miles per 6hr day)  My ultra fit well-trained heroine I let travel 5mph (about half the speed of an Olympic Walker over 30 miles) or 30 miles per 6hr day - as if she would only do 6 hours a day when she is desperate to catch them.

But that means she will catch them midday on the third day when they've only gone 45 miles nowhere near the 500 mile cut-off point. Even if I somehow delay her for 3 days she will still catch at the 135 mile point - still well short of the mark 

Did she just think, 'even with a horse' perhaps she isn't as well trained as I thought. To make it work I have to speed up the contingent, slow her down, delay her 12 days or rearrange the geography yet again. 


Let me add that this was not just a throw away thought, it was designed to show she couldn't catch them and hence was forced onto a dangerous less-well travelled path. I just didn't think it through: My map wasn't to scale, I didn't consider the relative speeds of the contingent and my heroine. 

It will have to be the delay, in the context of the remaining 500,000 words, the other solutions are no longer negotiable. It will still be a hefty rewrite because on her journey out she crosses paths with others in a critical sequence which precipitates the hero's journey.

This all came about because my map was upside down 

I'm Australian ergo southern hemisphere ergo if you go north it gets hotter. Naturally I wanted this for my world but my original map had the adjoining enemy continent south of my hero/heroines homelands.

The southern continent got so big during the telling of the later part of the tale it necessitated turning the entire map upside-down and that's when it all started going wrong. I've spent several days redrawing all the maps to fit the completed trilogy. It's a little more sophisticated (a.k.a. creeping elegance) than those drawn a decade ago. 

Created in a FractalMapper8 ~ http://www.nbos.com/

Oh well, back to plotting board.

until my next post ooroo

RoB

p.s. Later that same night. On thinking about it a 12 day delay will work nicely but it requires a brand new scene (#1303) in a story that hasn't had a radical change since last millennium.   

Finished - where to now?

The Prologue

This post was drafted ages ago but not posted. Why is a mystery. I guess I was just emerging from the mind-numbing blank time after finishing the trilogy as noted below.   
 

gday gentle reader/s 

The problem with finishing a big project that took a long time is where to now?  In writing the problem is exacerbated by the fact that finishing is a relative term. Ive had several of them: finishing Bk1 Feb 2000, Bk2 aug 2010 and the Bk3 last week aug 2011. 

All dates refer only to finishing the first draft. Book 1 has gone through three, losing 30,000 words in the process. Book 2 its hard to say with all the stops, starts and backtracking - the original start is now in the middle of the book - a real dog's breakfast. Book 3 is the only one written from start to end with only superficial editing.

This how finishing went on my Face book page. Towards the end I was writing furiously with no time to blog.

5/8/11

word target reached 11:18 Friday 5/8/11 ~ 17 days ahead of schedule  180,000 words in 50 weeks - yaaaah!

finishing the book 3 itself is close and might just get done in the next 17 days

20/8/11

I've just started work on the last scene, of the last chapter, of the last book of my thrilogy (Freudian slip or wishful thinking?) begun Sep 1995. ( that date is true but misleading, the work has been intermittent as I will blog when the whole damn thing is truly really actually finished - excluding the editing)

The blog promised above has been a long time coming. when i stopped writing the trilogy I stopped writing. Almost a month went by until I appeared drunk in charge of a keyboard.

10/9/11

Iam in a delightfil state of imnebriation 

deamn fingeres

this is waht happen when you have nothing to do you waste your face on life book.

And eventually to this  attempt to rationalise what was happening to me

16/9/11 

I, like nature, abhor the vacuum left after finishing the trilogy. Ten plus years with a single focus leaves a whacking great hole that the editing (absolutely necessary) and a new project don’t seem to fill. I feel lost. I fill the time with trivial pursuits. like this.

This drew a few comments from fellow strugglers-with-the-muse. to which I eventually replied  

26/9/11 

what I am doing is reshaping the chaotic sprawling tome/s into something resembling a story - Severne's tits - the contradictions, misdirections, blind alleys, bad science, and crap sentences are as numerous as stars ...

just completed my "master character sheet" which shows the trilogy has 141 named characters

Now its all done it has to be edited. 

ooroo

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