Traveller's Tales

No, not me — the owner of the fey mood would be Casnodyn ap Eira, a major character in The Grey Knight, and the target of yet another long-overdue character interview.  Casnodyn is a native of the Chrysialbau — in other words, he’s a fey beast in a very literal sense, and to get him right I needed to really dig into the mindset of these alien creatures.  So Cas gets a little free with his thinking, and the result is… well, very Fey, I think.

Go ahead and have a look for yourself; I’d love to know if he has the same effect on you that he does on me.

Though the character is not a new one, her interview is very recent — and this is as much an exercise in research and development as it is a lesson learned.  Any character I write that has more than a page or so of visibility simply needs a profile, a history and an interview if I’m going to do them justice.

Poor Elori Kelaru, Champion of Elwan, was lacking in all of these:  assuming (incorrectly) that I had the character locked down in my head, I plowed ahead and wrote her without doing a proper analysis.  Needless to say, it showed, so Job One has been to give her her due.  This interview is the first of the results of that in-depth analysis, and it reveals a much more interesting and subtle character than I imagined in passing.

So go ahead, pop on over and give her a read.

I obsess over research.

I mentioned this in passing a while ago, but I really didn’t get into how much I really obsess over it; just that I like to do it.  The example I gave then was about researching suspension bridges so I could extrapolate to make a magical one; what I didn’t mention was that I researched for two days solid, and then a bunch of hours stolen from work (er, I mean while I was having lunch) rounding out the details.  Now I can tell you about the oldest suspension bridges, about contests that were held to develop creative means of making them, about components of a suspension bridge, variants, and all sorts of things that, trust me, you probably don’t want to know.

Anyway, I’ve got a new bit of research going on now, inspired by the growing prominence of the Fey in the second book.  Casnodyn was the sole representative of the Courts in the first book (and, as he repeatedly insisted, he was never there in his official capacity at any rate), but their influence is going to be felt much more strongly in the second and thereafter.  Since I’d already used the name ‘Casnodyn’ as a prototype name, and since I know Casnodyn is Welsh, I figured, what the heck, I’d get some more Welsh names to cover the other Fey.

That’s when I found the Enwogion Cymru.

By Monday I’ll most likely have launched right past simply grabbing some Welsh names, sped at top speed through the obsessive loop and crash-landed in a place where I know enough about Welsh historical figures to teach a class.  This, of course, was not my intention, but I’m too caught up in it now to care.

That’s why I love research.

(Yes, I did the above pixelart as a mind break from the research.  I shamelessly stole the pattern from here, so if you want to make a more real-world version than mine, go for it.)

There are lots of reasons to love the wintertime: snow, fires in the fireplace, lots of excuses to eat awesome food, and hot cider with rum. Mmm.

Leaving the house for work while it’s black outside, and coming home in the same visual state, however, are not reasons to love the winter.

So today, I’m pleased to announce we had a sunrise before I left the house.

To hell with the groundhog, I say. Winter, have your last big snowstorm this weekend, and I’ll toast your timely departure with one last hot cider and rum.

(Edit: as ever, the Dee does a much better job of capturing these things than I do (though, to be fair, she’s also using a much better camera and not bumbling down the road while she’s shooting): check this shot out for a better idea as to what it looked like.)

Appearing amazed about how long it’s been since you blogged is so last year.  Or maybe it’s the year before, I can’t keep track anymore.  Anyway, it’s not a big surprise, it’s obvious I haven’t written for a while since I didn’t, you know, log in.

But there’s good news, at least about The Grey Knight, and it’s the reason I haven’t done this in a while.  I’ve had a massive edit ongoing:  the first 200 pages have changed incredibly, with an eye towards clarifying the initial story elements and more quickly engaging the story.  As I described it to my writing friends, it’s been a bit like unraveling a tree-sized knot at the roots, and wondering idly whether the last strand you pulled was going to topple the entire tree.

But it’s nearing completion.  This weekend I’m determined to have this version, which I’ve christened “The Bloodbath,” complete (Version 10, revision D, to be technical, but that’s not very memorable, is it?).  It’s been a long road, and a lot of things have changed significantly – but all for the better, and all with careful and thoughtful consideration, with my finger on the pulse of the story and watching the hearts of my dear, stubborn characters as I tinker.

I’ve learned a lot in the last few months.  I’ll talk about that stuff in the future, as I absorb what it is I’ve actually learned, but it’s clear that just when you think you know how to do something – that’s when you should be wondering what the hell you’ve missed.  Chances are, it’s something important.

Later this weekend I’ll post another character interview, but for now I thought it would be worthwhile just to de-rust the blog fingers and post a quick status.  The interview is spooky but short, and it’s with an unexpectedly compelling companion, a secondary character who needed to be a bit better fleshed out – and, now that he is, the story is far better for it.  Coming soon.

Just a quick update really, as it’s been a while and I’ve been busy as, um, a generally very busy thing, being exceptionally busy.  But of interest to the writerly:

An Interview: Fellow author Realm Lovejoy and I met via the twitter #amwriting tag-community (which, if you’re a writer using twitter, you should most certainly join!), and while she’s got some great art up at her site for her upcoming novel CLAN, she was also kind enough to give me an opportunity to run off at the mouth during an interview at her site, where she also put my lead antagonist, Paldor, together for the first time in a visual format.  The interview may be more of the usual Finch drivel, but her art isn’t, so go have a look!

Sherlock: I’ve finished reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the first time, and oh man have I been missing out all these years.  Aside from the stories being individually quite good, the characterizations priceless and my own affinity for Holmes growing as I realize how utterly anti-social and unlikable he really is, I’ve found that Arthur Conan Doyle was, apprarently, as likable and forthright a gentleman as one could hope to be.  I can’t do ACD’s story justice here, but I’ll say that knowing the author of these famous and respected tales was humble, easy-going and generous definitely enhanced my own enjoyment of them.  If you’re not familiar, I urge you to learn more for yourself.

(I also have a personal theory now, that Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft were the bastard children of Edgar Allen Poe by different wives, but that’s a story for another day.)

Stormbringer:  Now that Sherlock’s on the “have-read” pile, Elric is next on the list.  I’ve already downed two of the seven prime Elric stories, and I’m finding myself enjoying them a lot more than I remembered I did the first time through, many years ago.  Full report when I’m done.

Scriptwriting: This is what I’ve been up to lately; while my super-agent Colleen goes through the latest version of the manuscript for The Grey Knight, I’ve been working on alternate media to tie into the novel’s backstory.  I’m really excited about the script, and while I can’t really go into detail quite yet, it’s turning into quite a serious live-action video production.  I’m very much looking forward to sharing the results with everyone when it’s finished.

That’s it for now; work on the sequel to The Grey Knight continues, but there’s a lot of forward momentum on Knight, and I’m enjoying the oblique approach to the fantasy world in my head, so while I’m still doing a lot of scenework on the sequel… I’m still having fun with Knight now, too.

Now that the edits are over — for now, at least! — I’m working on the second book again.  I’ve been doing what I always do when I’m working on a new story, which is writing all the cool scenes that come to me.  What eventually happens is I take those scenes, toss them back into the framework I created in the outline, and then stitch them together with all the other cool scenes until a novel happens (yeah, okay, it becomes a little more complicated than that at some point, but that’s the general idea).

(Tangent: new character alert, which means you should probably expect a new character interview in the next few days.)

(Second tangent: I once tried writing in linear fashion, beginning to end, but I just can’t do it — too many things pop into my head and need to get written; different scenes generate higher energy levels on different days, and while it’s all still forming I think it’s important to let the scene that’s screaming the loudest have the pen for the day.)

Anyway, the neat thing that happened today was that, for the very first time, I saw a scene from the third book.  The last book in the first part of the story; the end of the beginning, and I just saw how it ends.

It was awesome.

I have no idea if I can write it so it’s as awesome as I saw it, but when I saw it while I was sitting on the bus, stunned and watching it in my head as though it had been cast, filmed, produced and projected directly into my skull, I knew that’s how it had to go.  Because it was so totally awesome.

I’m excited because while the end of the overall story doesn’t come with the third book — this is a story of three threes, for reasons that become immensely clear — still, it represents a serious hard stop; the world changes viciously, violently and irrevocably at the end of the third book, and it’s a big enough leap, barrier, shift or evolution that it may almost feel like a new story when the second three kick in.  Anyway, while I always knew where things were heading, and what in general had to happen, the specifics were veiled to me.

Well, not after today they’re not.

Anyway, I love it when I see new pieces to the puzzle like that.  I know it’s going well when the scenes are revealed to me so clearly that all I have to do is sit my ass down and write as fast and as hard as I can before I forget what I just saw.  The psychotic break does all the hard creative work for me; all I have to do is take notes.

So while I’m not going to give in to the temptation of writing more of the third book, it really gives me another really cool thing to shoot for, you know?

Love this writing thing.

There was only ever really one Holmes, of course, but WordPress and LibraryThing were not playing nicely together for reasons entirely beyond my comprehension, and as a result the LibraryThing widget was yelling at me for trying to put two of it on a page (which I wasn’t).  Fidgeting around on the widgets screen seems to have fixed things, though, so with no more LibraryThing yelling, WordPress behaving and only One Holmes gracing the right-hand column, I feel confident in calling the disaster averted.

By the way, LibraryThing is a really, really cool thing.  Almost, but not quite, as cool as Holmes (and Conan Doyle, for that matter), but I’ll save both of those for later posts.

Also, I know about the pop-up.

I’ve got a post up on the LibraryThing message boards to suss it, as I already use their service and would like to use their widget, given I’ve already done the hard work of cataloging a tiny fraction of my library there.

In the meantime, click OK and ignore the second Sherlock Holmes.  We all know there’s only one.

Yes, that means the edits to The Grey Knight are done!  Complete!  Finito!  This version, at least, is finished at last; huge structural changes blew through the manuscript, not entirely unlike how large cars blow through outdoor advertising signs during a tornado, and the result, much like with the signs, is a highly positive improvement on the original.  Colleen now has it, it’s out of my hands for at least a while, so now…

…now I have a lot to do!

I’m working on the sequel, of course, as well as its own sequel, in a tangential sort of way, and by definition worldbuilding and such.   I’m working pretty hard on putting other material together as well, stuff I’ll be adding here in the weeks and months to come.  Not giving anything away yet, but it’s fun making it so I hope it’s at least as fun getting it.

I have to admit, though, with the last month being pretty hot and heavy on edits… it’s a little odd to boot up the laptop and NOT open up the Knight manuscript.