So, there’s a blog-hop thing going on about current projects and writing process, which I was tagged on by Glynn Stewart, fellow client of Onyxhawke Agency and author of Starship’s Mage. And I always relish having blog topics handed to me.
1. What am I working on?
Currently I’ve got two key things on my plate: Editing A Murder of Mages to hand the final manuscript in to the publisher in the near future, and the rough draft of the sequel to Thorn of Dentonhill. I’m coming close to the end of Thorn II, which currently has a working title of Elements of Aventil.
Once those two things are done– and I suspect neither one will take me past the end of June, I’ll move on to working on the sequel to Murder of Mages. And at some point this year I’ll go back to Banshee, since I wrote about half of it before selling Thorn and Murder, and it’d be good to get that done before the year is out.
2. How does my work differ from other works in the same genre?
The main way, I think, is I strive to write fantasy that isn’t easy to pin down. It’s city-based, but it isn’t “urban fantasy” (which means something different than I think it ought to…). It isn’t set in a period that can easily be pegged as common for fantasy: not medieval or Renaissance or Victorian. It isn’t steampunk, but it does tweak on different technology paths.
3. Why do I write what I write?
Mostly because these are books I would want to read, but since they didn’t exist, I had to write them.
4. How does my writing process work?
It starts with outlining and character development. I get a sense of who the character is, and from that, what their story should be starts to coalesce. Once I have that together, in a rough sense (very rough– the origins of Thorn of Dentonhill can be found in some hand-scrawled sentence fragments in a notebook kept next to my bed), I then actually construct an outline using my twelve-part story structure as the scaffolding.
Once I have that in place, including a partial Dramatis Personae, I can actually start writing. I tend to write relatively linearly, but once in a while I’ll get stuck, and jump ahead to one of the “red meat” scenes, and then go back and fill in the parts in between. That can be quite helpful, actually. It’s one thing to know, “Hey, there’s a place where I’m going to need to get to so I can have this stuff happen.” It’s quite another to actually have Point A and Point B written, and then see from there the path you have to take, what you need to put in place to get there.
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With that done, I’ll pass the baton on to Audrey Lockwood, who recently signed with Stringer Literary Agency, and will probably have more awesome things to announce in the coming year.
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