I spent part of my childhood “abroad,” where I discovered anime (dubbed into various European languages) and foreign cinema, due to my family’s fondness for French and Italian comedians like Jacques Tati and Terence Hill. This led, in my thirties and early forties, to an interest in films made in India: mostly in the Hindi language, but also some in the South Indian languages. There was a big learning curve, in terms of sourcing the more obscure movies, getting a feel for the cultures involved, and figuring out what appealed to me beyond the famous song and dance numbers.
Continue reading “Where Did THAT Come From: The Jaiya Metaseries”Category: Uncategorized
Remember the Reason for the Season….
Happy Epiphany!
Happy New Year!
I hope it goes well for all of us. Right now, I just feel kind of mentally tapped out, but here are my writing/publishing plans for 2022:
-Star Master Book 2: The sequel to Shadow Captain. Originally supposed to be the middle book in a trilogy, but is now going to be the second half of a duology. I have a new ending to write, and some character scenes and loose ends to take care of as well before I start polishing. The Gantt chart I made for myself in Excel gives me the first week in January to work on cover art and such things, before I have to buckle down and start writing. Optimistic release date: sometime between late May and early July 2022. Pessimistic release date: Christmas 2022.
–ThornMaster: A prequel storyline about the parents of a character in the Star Master books, the three initial episodes haven’t picked up any interest on Vella. May work on it some more once I get Star Master Book 2 to the polishing stage; alternating between drafting a low-intensity work of fiction and polishing/editing a related work of fiction has worked for me in the past. I hope to keep putting up chapters on Vella as time and energy permit; I will need to do some more digging into Amazon’s policies before deciding how to handle the part where I compile it into an ebook.
–Ancestors of Jaiya: still need reediting and new covers. New covers might happen in one of the periods where I’m trying to respark my creativity, but reediting will most likely happen after Star Master Book 2 is done, because I’m pretty sure I won’t have the mental energy for it before then.
-Epic Fantasy: Very early stages of planning, so early that one key plot element is just called “Maguffin Artifact” in my notes and the main characters are being referred to by their dayjobs (wizard, princess, knight… etc) because they don’t have names yet. I’m torn on whether to go forward with this; on the one hand, I’m having a lot of fun with the early world-building stages and feel more invested in it right now than the alternative (see below). On the other hand, my level of interest could change very quickly, and this series would be in an extremely competitive genre.
-Gaslamp Fantasy: The advantage to this one is that I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of Regency/Victorian/Edwardian fiction. The disadvantage is at this point that I have characters and a rough idea of a setting but no plot, and not much interest in developing it further at this moment. The other thing is that it’s a much less competitive genre than epic fantasy, to the point of maybe being a niche with not enough readers. All of that could change very quickly though.
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Sorry, delayed post due to seasonal obligations, but wishing you all a very Merry Christmas. And to the Grinches out there, a formal response, or as formal as you can get while quoting adaptations of children’s books:
Dorothy Sayers, Quotes from “Creed or Chaos?”
Due disclaimer about not agreeing with Sayers about absolutely everything (she was Anglican and a British subject; I am Catholic and a citizen of the United States of America). But I think she is correct in these quotes, explaining the importance of theology, in the sense of clearly articulating one’s religious beliefs.
“If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; and if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is necessary, in the strict sense […] that a man believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all.”
“It is the dogma that is the drama — not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death — but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death.”
Halfway Through NaNoWriMo, Not Halfway Done
I should be at 25000 words by now, but am a bit more than 10000 words behind. I think I’ve been this far behind before and managed to make it up in the second half, so we’ll see how it goes. General thoughts:
-Dictation continues to be a not-so-good choice for me for NaNoWriMo. The rest of the year, I use it mostly when I am burned out and fed up with what I’m working on. It’s more mental work for me to get my thoughts in order before I speak them than to type quickly and backspace through anything I change my mind about, and the amount of tweaking needed to turn the dictation results into some kind of sense largely erases the speed advantage.
-Working on multiple projects in NaNoWriMo, also not a great choice for me. I’ve gotten maybe 499 words on Thorn Master, and 1000ish on Star Master Book 2, only just started on Star Master Book 3 in the past couple of days. I tend to write my way slowly and meditatively through the second half (and missing scenes) of a long, complicated first draft. So, although mentally I probably needed to get the Book 2 stuff out of the way, doing that first definitely slowed me down.
-Anyway, feel free to learn from my mistakes here.
Chesterton on the Decadence of Ancient Rome
From The Everlasting Man:
“There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the best thing that was going to the bad. It is necessary to insist again and again that many civilisations had met in one civilisation of the Mediterranean sea; that it was already universal with a stale and sterile universality. The peoples had pooled their resources and still there was not enough. The empires had gone into partnership and they
were still bankrupt. No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything except that, in that central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.”
September SFF Book Bonanza!
Hello, there!
Dean F. Wilson has pulled together an impressive sale of science fiction and fantasy books to help beat those end of summer blues – all on Amazon, each for just $0.99!
He has graciously agreed to include my own novel, Loving a Deathseer, in this sale. It is the third book in the Jaiya series of urban fantasy/paranormal romance novels. The first book in the series is free and the second book is also $0.99. If you need to do some early Christmas shopping, the complete collected series in one volume can be found here.
In Dean’s sale, you can find Loving a Deathseer under the fantasy and paranormal romance heading, when you click on this link to check out all the discounted books! We hope I can help you find some new reading material at a price you can afford. Good Hunting! (Book Hunting, that is!)
Fiction Versus Non-Fiction
As a writer, I have two wolves inside of me. One is called Non-Fiction, and the other is called Fiction. They are constantly fighting. Which one will win? The one I feed.
Okay, that is not how that story is usually told, but it’s a good representation of something I believe about the writing process: every bit of time and energy you dedicate to non-fiction is a piece of time and energy your fiction is not getting.
Case in point: I took a new job earlier this year, in the March/April timeframe. My main WIP was around 55K at that point. I had to write guidance documents for both my old job (for the benefit of the co-workers who would be covering those tasks) and my new job (for my own benefit).
Today, the fiction WIP is 67K, the Vella project (started after new job) is maybe 4K-5K, the WIP guidance document for new job is 13K and counting, and guidance document for old job is 9K. I’m happy I took the new job: it’s interesting stuff, and it came with a bump in pay. But where would I be on my fiction project without it? Probably a lot further along.
This is why I am not a very prolific blogger, and why I generally try to avoid expressing political opinions or reviews of media I consume on this blog. I don’t want to be a pundit or a reviewer, I want to be a novelist. Off-hand, I can think of maybe six authors I enjoy where I would read their fiction and non-fiction works with equal enthusiasm, and five of them are dead. I’m not saying I couldn’t be that good some day, because I honestly don’t know the answer to that. But I’m certainly not there now.
Something to keep in mind, if your fiction keeps getting sidetracked by Things You Have to Blog About. What kind of writer do you want to be? What kind of writing is the most essential to you?
Just Keep On Truckin’
No, I am not done with the rough draft of Star Master Book 2 yet. But I am past one of the sticking points, and hope to be done with another sticking point soon. I wanted to talk to you today about a third sticking point, though…
Pretty much from the earliest outlines this book was going to contain a major disagreement between the hero and the heroine. I knew more or less what it was about, but not all the finer details of why and how this particular subject would hit them hard. And when I sat down to write it, the hero’s attitude kept feeling undermotivated.
I tried everything I could to get at why the heroine’s actions would bother the hero so much, and nothing seemed to work. My characters don’t always tell me what’s going on with them. It’s one of their more uniformly realistic traits.
I had to just leave the relevant scenes like that in rough draft, and hope that I could figure it out later.
Jump to earlier this week, when I suddenly realized that there were some things the heroine needed to do (or rather ask someone to do for her) for “OpSec” reasons, before initiating the plan the hero objected to. And once I realized that the hero might have to be the one to take care of those things for her, I realized what his problem was. The things she would be asking him to do for her are things that he would be extremely uncomfortable with, given his past experiences.
So that’s a load off my mind. It’s going to involve a lot of rewriting (by my standards), but at least I know where I’m going with that subplot now. Just another example of how sometimes all you can do in life is keep stumbling blindly forward, and trust in God and the skills He gave you to make sense of it all later.
Jaglion Press 