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

Last Post

G'day

It is now two months, one week and two days since Felicity and I went under the knife and things are pretty much back to normal; we work, we play, we eat sleep and ..... A month ago I felt so good, I started thinking about this post, but I was too interested in other projects to bother and time just slipped away.

Felicity still has a little bit of pain, rising after extended sitting but I was back to normal at one month, and better than normal at two.

Better than normal?

Perhaps that needs explaining :- my kidneys gradually failed over a decade and my body gradually adjusted as toxins I couldn't excrete - you guessed it - gradually built up in my blood. I didn't notice any change (and I'm not the only one) By the time of the op I had serious doubts about the necessity of having the transplant at all. Why go through all that pain and put my wife through all that pain when I felt no different than I had yesterday or the day before. The blood work however said I was on the cusp of renal failure.

That all changed on the 19th May - the new kidney cleared the toxic backlog in a matter of hours, not that I noticed immediately but as recovery proceeded the changes became obvious; I had more energy, I began doing long neglected jobs around the house. For me personally the biggest change is in my writing. Pre-transplant I would struggle for hours to write 300 words. Post-transplant I can sit down for a couple of hours and churn out 600. It always astounds me when I do the count.

When you think about it, it stands to reason. One of the biggest arteries goes to the brain. What does a big artery full of toxins do to one's mind? Obviously a helluva lot. Again I stress that the gradual toxin build up led to a gradual decline in mental acuity that went unnoticed: the sudden restoration however, of good clean blood to the old brain box, did not go unnoticed.

Now at two plus months I'm already down to a once a fortnight clinic and I feel better than ever despite that my lovely donor wife sees me as just a growth on her kidney.

This blog will now fall into disuse. Unless/until something goes wrong I will concentrate on writing and my writing blog where I hope to chronicle the process of turning this wannabe into a published author. See you there http://ozwritersblog.blogspot.com/

Rob