Writing hard or hardly writing? Working double time.

Provisional cover, second book

Every other day, an article comes out about how dang hard it is to get published, how even if you get published, you might wish you hadn’t, and how success will probably not be measured too much in terms of dollars and cents. A dismal outlook is what most writers face, the hundreds of thousands of us or millions, who knows. We do it anyway.

Because you can’t live without it? That sounds very melodramatic. Let’s just say that it’s hard to stop once you’ve found your groove. I mean, if that’s how you are…

I couldn’t wait to start the sequel to the fourth, and while I was writing that, I started the fifth. Two novels with completely different stories and characters, possibly in the same fictional world, but it’s not clearly stated. The reason one might think it’s the same is that I use the same vocabulary.

One thing about writing fantasy is that you start rejecting words with certain roots, or you ask yourself why they would call 'this' X. You make up new words for things like hours and days. You don’t use idiomatic expressions that refer to our world. Little by little you winnow your manuscript for words that don’t belong. Then you invent equivalents, and that’s where all the fun starts.

Same goes for names of people and places. You go spelunking in the etymological dictionary until you find the perfect match with the concept, and for the world you’ve built.

It surprised me that I could write two books at the same time, but with my roadmaps, the outlines, it was easier to get back in. The worlds of both books felt very palpable to me, more so perhaps if I’d only written one at a time. While I wrote about one, I could see/feel the other, or grasp it in some other way that’s a bit hard to describe. It’s the same feeling you get when you try to sum up the feeling of a city in the real world. LA vs. Chicago, or New York or Atlanta. That essence. I rely on that when I create a fictional place, and I walk around in it in my mind as if I were using Google Street View. This is part of an immersion process. Once inside that world, I see it and sense things in it. Now the words come easily.

Then there is all the other stuff. Somewhere in there, I start asking myself for the cover. I don't have one yet for book 1, To Douse A Flame. But I do have a few other illustrations that needed to come out of me.

Book 1 Ch. 2, the box of invitations with Master Galaersen's emblem

Depicting exciting moments in the story

The Portal Carriage from book one

Or describing some of the main characters

King Mazaril from the sequel to book one (Yes! Already written)

When will any of this see the light of day?

To be queried...