Eversong LIVES!

What I'm Listening To: Something on Investigation Discovery.

What I'm Doing: Brainstorming for the third novel of the Legends trilogy.

For the longest time, I had absolutely no idea what happened in the third book. I had a very basic sketch outlined in a single paragraph. A 'dark star' (comet) appears in the sky, and with it come monstrous black beasts that are seemingly undefeatable. They are the harbingers of a trio of powerful god-like beings that are looking to turn Eversong into their new home.

That... was it.

That's all I've had. For over a YEAR, I've been struggling to figure out the details.

And then, randomly, the word "Lunamari" popped into my head, and I knew that it was the name of a people who inhabit caverns on the northern continent.

I rolled it around for a few hours, and "Starravayn" followed - the name of said northern continent.

When I first created the map of Eversong, I included pictures of a globe with four continents, of which Eversong is the largest. I knew the southern continent was attached to Eversong by a land bridge, and was called Zen'la, the prison of the Dragon God Draevn. I knew Eversong was in the western hemisphere, but I hadn't the foggiest about the northern or eastern continents. Until now.

One day, I'll get my map scanned and show you my horrendous attempt at cartography.

But for now, the world has a name: Mana'riin. Eversong is - and always has been - just one of the continents. Now it joins Zen'la, Kor'l, and Starravayn.

Eversong is a heavily wooded continent, home to elves and faeries, among others.

Zen'la is a frozen wasteland dominated by a massive mountain called Zen'la'eng (which means something, but I need to reread all my notes - I've forgotten a lot of what I originally wrote down.) which is where Draevn was imprisoned.

Kor'l is in the East, and is a massive desert. I'm not sure who - or what - lives there yet, but a name and geography is more than I had yesterday.

Starravayn is in the far north (if it were Earth, it'd be in the Arctic Circle) and is solid ice (much like Anarctica is.) Beneath the ice, the land is practically hollow, a network of holes and massive caverns. The beings who live there have never seen the surface, and live their entire lives underground.

Even as I'm writing this down, more details are making themselves known. (I can't take credit for creating this; I had nothing to do with it. It's like the information is being sent to me telepathically, which brings to mind one of my favourite quotes: "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow.) I had previously decided to write Return to Eversong for Nano, but the more I think about it, the more excited I am about writing DSR. I may fling RtE out between now and November, and work on DSR for Nano instead.

I feel complete at last, now that I'm writing again.

Mock Covers!

What I'm Listening To: Practical Magic

What I'm Doing: Watching Practical Magic and trying to think of something interesting to do.

A while back, I doodled up what I imagined the covers of the Eversong trilogy would look like. Unfortunately, I'm no artist, and it came out looking... rather silly.

So, when a friend of mine on the Quill and Ink Forum posted the mock-up covers of her novels, I was intrigued.

And immediately started work on my own.

Lo, behold! A sneak peak at the covers of the Legends of Eversong Trilogy!

Writing For Something

What I'm Listening To: Crazy Loop - Crazy Loop

What I'm Doing: Reading Crystal Line by Anne McCaffrey, and poking at my novel, seeing if it'll want to cooperate today.

First of all, a shout-out to Tara Maya, who guest-blogged over at The Literary Lab with an utterly fabulous post on Epic Fantasy.

This post was spawned by the fact that Mami prodded me last night and said, "You haven't updated your blog for six days!"

My excuse was, "I have nothing to say!" but it's also been because my computer is going crazy, and refuses to let me do anything. I finally switched over from Firefox (which is constantly giving me seven-hour 'not responding' messages) to Internet Explorer for the duration. (Eventually Firefox will come crying back to me, and I am weak, so I will return to it.)

So, from IE, I blog again! Mostly about not blogging. But I did think up something useful to say this morning, as well, so you get an actual blog about writing, and not just some random ditherings about not being able to blog.

Work on Eversong was ... slow going, to say the least. I started writing weeks ago, and had only about 5k in words to show for it. When a friend of mine started updating her wordcount on Twitter, my competitive nature came out, and I realised I'd only feel better about it until I'd surpassed her wordcount.

Still, the inspiration was there, but the motivation was seriously lacking.

Until Mami shared details about her book, which she's currently in the process of querying about. (Good luck darling! I cannot wait to see it in print!!) I couldn't rest until I knew more. So I avoided work on Eversong in favour of figuring out her book, interviewed her on my favourite character, decided I was focusing too much on just one, started asking questions about the others...

And got the first three chapters out of her.

Oh. My. God. I'm a long-time fan of her fanfics, and knew she was a fantastic writer. I was still not prepared for how quickly it sucked me in, and how totally my obsession was cemented. I fell utterly in love with everything I'd seen so far, and immediately began plotting ways I could get her to send me the rest.

She said she felt bad, because she didn't want to take away from my writing time. I joked that I wasn't getting much writing done anyway, and was more interested in her book than my own to boot. Then I remembered that if I have something to work FOR, I work BETTER.

So I said, I'll set myself a goal of 500 to 1000 words written before I read the next chapter.

With the knowledge of her book waiting for me, a chapter at a time if only I could write, my wordcount exploded. Whereas it had taken me several weeks to get to only 5k words, over the course of three or four days, my wordcount doubled, and is currently sitting at over 12k. Knowing that I couldn't allow myself to read more before I got something written suddenly overcame the hesitancy in my writing, and it advanced by leaps and bounds. It actually feels like it's going to become a novel now, and not remain unfinished forever. I have the end of her book waiting for me to write some more, and as soon as I'm done, I'm already wondering if she'll continue this for the next two books.

Now, because I know she reads this, I don't want to guilt her into thinking she's got to send it to me - it will just be very much loved. And I can write without AftG... it just tends to be more along the lines of one or two hundred words every few days. I'm not sure what I'll do when I've finished reading it all.

Start again, I suppose. It's easy enough to do. I'm afraid that my love for her books will never be diminished, and will remain a lifelong obsession. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)

What about the rest of you? Do you write for something, or do you just... write when the mood strikes?

A Discussion Post!

What I'm Listening To: Cinema Bizarre - Escape to the Stars

What I'm Doing: Reading Nightmare by Piers Anthony, and trying to decide between actual food, or more coffee.

Because I can't (or don't know how to) reply to comments, and some of you have left meaningful, interesting, and insightful comments on some of the things I've got to say about writing, and I just can't not start a discussion about them. (Mostly because, if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know this already: I like to talk.)

Point of View

tokidoki-muse: I was mostly ranting because I'd just seen thirty plus badly written, first person excerpts. First person isn't as horrible as I seemed to have made it out to be, in my own opinion. Mami said something similar, that once she starts working on a book, it'll tell her what it's going to be written in, and some of them refuse to be written in anything BUT first person, so I'm not going to rag on your book, simply because it's in first person, which would make me a hipocrite in any case, because the vampire-novel idea that I've got kicking around around in my brain is in first person, itself. Also, a bit of a nightmare is a bit of an understatement. XDD Instead of rewriting the whole MS, just try rewriting certain scenes in third person limited, see how they work, and if you could possibly do the whole thing that way, or if it would be better off as is, in first person.

marynoel: That felt weird. I'm so used to calling you Mami... XD Any way, I've already told you about the spine-creasing and whatnot. And I've always thought that I wouldn't be able to write in first person, and obviously, after thirty-fourty first-person, badly written excerpts, I was ready to tear first-person out of the book altogether, but then I found myself building the possible-vampire novel in my head, and the main character immediately started narrating in first person. I was actually tempted to post the first words that came out of his mouth in my own 'are you hooked' post, and find out if it would be decently eye-catching. AND PERHAPS I SHALL SUGGEST THAT TO THE ANONYMOUS AUTHORESS, AND YOU WILL GET ANOTHER CHANCE. ^3^

farfums: I don't think it limits possible dialogue, because I see it as instead of sitting on the shoulder of the main character, you are instead sitting inside the head of the main character; you'd still be hearing the same things that your MC hears, so it doesn't matter if you're outside or inside, if there's two people too far away from the MC to hear what they're saying, you're still getting no dialogue. And I HEARTILY suggest you find The Shadowy Horses and Sunshine, as they are, to me, the pinnacle of first-person, as well as altogether amazing novels.


Story Creation

Valerie Wangnet: Thank you for commenting! I love hearing about how other people write, because it's such a personal process. I've heard fiction described as 'pouring your soul out to complete strangers' but I consider it more like... making a pretty picture. With words, naturally. But I often compare writing to drawing. You're doing the same thing, in my opinion, only instead of presenting people with ready-made images, you're creating the images with words, and then giving people the option of creating their own pictures from those words. No matter how a character is described to me in a book, I form my own image of their appearance based on how they act, and on other characters that I've seen. Prince Josua, from The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy by Tad Williams, is described as having close-cropped hair (which I initially imagine to look like the stereotyped 'Roman' look) but after that first mention of his hair, when I picture him in my mind, he's got somewhat shaggy, ear-length hair.
And I suppose I lied slightly about creating a story, and then stuffing characters into it. Mostly, my ideas come to me as single-shot images, or ideas - a world where dragons, elves, and unicorns are the norm, a forest ravaged by a nuclear explosion, a 'vampire story' unlike most of the popular vampire novels out there. The stories come to me (I'd be fooling myself and everyone else if I tried to say I create these ideas) based on those initial images or wants, and then the characters to fill those stories arrive.

tokidoki-muse: Gladly taken. They own mine, too, but I refuse to allow myself to fall into the 'vampire romanticism' that has swept the nation with Twilight; if you get right down to the bare bones of it, there's nothing romantic about vampires. Someone said (and I forget who) that vampires are walking corpses who eat people.
No one romanticises zombies.


Inspiration (in the weirdest places)

moonrat: My friend told me about you commenting on my blog, and for a moment, I was terrified. Thank you for taking the time to drop by, though! I'm glad you think so. I'm excited, too.


Some Good Advice and a little more

jessjordan: I read this at nearly three in the morning last night, and it was your comment that sparked the need to create this post, because you raised some interesting points, and I couldn't let it rest without talking to you about it. First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to leave such a comment. It was incredibly heartening to know that I'm not just blowing smoke, and actually say things worth thinking about occasionally, and your comment gave me quite a lot to think about, myself.

I'd originally imagined Eversong to be three, self-contained books in which the conflict of each book is resolved at the end of the book, not the end of the trilogy, but what makes it a trilogy, a set, and not just three books in the same 'world' is that they follow Vicky as a person, going from a slightly-lost twenty-something with no aim in life, and few friends, to finding - and losing - her first love, to finding good friends, and growing as a person, to eventually become a powerful, important person with great inner-strength.

I believe what I'm trying to say is character-driven stories, not plot-driven. I use the same example as from my post here, in the LotR trilogy; characters drive the story anyway, I'm aware of that. Someone (my memory feels like a collander at the moment, and all the important bits slipped out through the holes and left me with vague ideas and memories of what people have said, but not who said it in the first place) said that if in LotR, Aragorn had been the one to take the One Ring to the volcano, then the story would have been much different, nigh unrecognisable. It's Frodo's journey to destroy the ring that makes it what it is, but there is no resolution of major conflicts at the end of each book. You've got to read all three, in order, in order to reach a satisfying conclusion, and as I said, the first book is interesting and attention grabbing because it's the introduction; you get to know your characters, get to see them starting out on their massive journey, and become friends with them. The last book is interesting, because you see how their travels have changed these new friends of yours, and you get to see them triumph in the end, but the middle book sags just a bit, because there's nothing really... happening. They're traveling a lot, and having mini-adventures, and fighting battles, but it just put me in mind of a rope-bridge - on either side of the chasm you're crossing, the bridge is tight and balanced, but in the middle, it droops because of gravity. And that's just my own opinion, and what I, personally, took away from them, and it coloured my desire to NOT fall into the same rope-bridge story, to instead make it a suspension bridge - it's solid and bends enough in the wind so as to not break, but without the suspension cables - the characters, in this case - the whole thing would collapse under it's own weight.

Also; longwindedness is a word if you say it is. x3 The stars and spirits know that I've made up enough words in my day (publishment, I think was the one I said in a previous post)

I value people's opinions, because in my own, Eversong can do no wrong, and I wouldn't see it from enough distance to know why people were calling it contrived, and not good enough, or whatever else you can think of to say about it. It's like being on a mountain, versus looking at it from afar. When you're on a mountain, the only thing that matters is what's right in front of you, but if you're standing at a proper distance, you can get a proper look at the whole thing, and make observations about it as a complete unit.

I hadn't thought of it that way, as in your examples of option 1 and option 2, but you made an extremely good point, and I'm going to try to work that in somehow in order to keep it flowing, introducing the conflict of the next book at the end of the one that precedes it. That would also negate the need for a prologue in book two, explaining how the Dragon problem got started in the first place, I can make an epilogue at the end of the first one, showing that despite the defeat of the Mir'naam (what I referred to as 'dark elves' up until the point that I actually started writing) all is not well in the land of Eversong, that someone is climbing a forbidden mountain, and no good will come of it.

That sets up the next book neatly, and gets people's attention, "OMG, what's going to happen next? I can't wait for the next book!"

I just realised that I'm talking my way through this to you, and somewhat apologise. It's just easier for me to talk my way through problems, rather than sit and think about it myself.

As for the characters, I could also begin set-up for the emotional conflict between Jesse and Vicky somehow; I'm glad you pointed that out. You've helped immensely. <3

And I couldn't get that out of my head all last night; "If you make me love Vicky, I'll follow her anywhere." It's reinforced my desire to make Vicky a likable, relatable person, and not just a 'hollow placeholder for fans' in the way Bella Swan of Twilight was described; someone you wouldn't want to BE, but someone you can sympathise with, and become friends with as you read.

Thank you SO SO SO MUCH for your huge comment. <333 You may find yourself mentioned somewhere when I FINALLY get myself to the point of publication, because you've contributed immensely to the way Eversong is going to work.


Pseudonyms

ReNu: Oh thank god. XDD Thank you for commenting! I am absolute pants at naming things (or rather, titling things, as names come to me as easily as breathing.) I was slightly worried that Eversong, despite it's aesthetically pleasing sound (to me), wouldn't grab people's attention, and that's the base of all books. It doesn't matter how well it's written, or how good it is overall, if it's got a bad title, no one's going to pick it up to find out if it's good.


Thank you again to everyone who's taken the time to read and comment so far, and a thank you in advance to anyone who feels the need to comment in the future. I absolutely adore your comments, and every little bit of good advice helps.

Some Good Advice and a little more.

I've been reading Robert Gregory Browne's blog of sorts, and it's filled to the brim with interesting articles and anecdotes about writing and publishing. He's a little confused on the subject of agents, but that's because he's never (by his own admission) written a good query letter in his life.

But he raised some interesting questions for me, and I have no idea how to answer them myself. He's discussing structure and conflict, and the three acts of a story; act one - the beginning, the set up, the lead in, what-have-you. Act two - the middle, the meat of the story, the bridge. Act three - the conclusion, the climax, wrapping it all up and finishing with a bang.

And it made me start thinking about my book, versus the other fantasy trilogies I've read, and another sci-fi trilogy that just popped into my mind.


I'll clarify.

Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Trilogy is one mega-quest that spans three novels in order to complete, the quest to save the world from The One Great Evil, and it's stuffed full of mini-quests, and tangents, and the stories and set up of other characters that don't show up until later, at which point they serve a great deal of good towards the completion of the Mega-Quest.

In contrast, Eversong is one book with two sequels
rather than a comprehensive story that spans three novels. Does this make sense?

I'll rephrase, because it's not really making sense to me, so I can't expect it to make sense to other people.

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is one story that spans three novels. Eversong is three completely separate stories, and over the course of those stories, Vicky grows as a person. The same thing happens in MST, granted; Simon starts off as a care-free lad more interested in daydreaming than anything serious, and by the end of the trilogy, he's a mature young man who becomes king. I'm still making no sense to myself.

Expect the rest of this entry to be likewise as rambling.

The problem I'm seeing with Eversong is that it doesn't quite need to be a trilogy. From where I see it now, each book could probably stand on it's own, with references from the previous novels standing in for having read the novel itself. If you picked up Eversong: Dark Star Rising, you'd see Vicky on the eve of her wedding, when something happens to disrupt it, and then she goes on a quest to defeat the newest threat to Eversong, does so, gets married, and lives happily ever after. You won't have to read Eversong or Return to Eversong in order to understand Dark Star, because each novel is it's own, contained arc, with it's own, contained three acts. The reason there's three of them is to follow Vicky on her quest to find love, friendship, and a place in life, and to see how she matures through the trials she experiences.

The reason I mentioned The Crystal Singer Trilogy above, is because it does the same thing. You don't need to have read Crystal Singer and Killashandra in order to understand Crystal Line. They're each self-contained stories, within the same universe and with the same characters. There are references (in Killashandra, the main character talks about 'The Trundimoux Installation', an event that took place near the end of Crystal Singer.) but from the surrounding paragraphs, it's easy to deduct that the Trundimoux Installation was a complete mess for Killa, and she didn't like it, and she doesn't want a repeat of the event in the newest mission she's been given.

And here's where I feel like I need to go shout my blog from the roof-tops, because I need people to read it, and tell me what they think, as I'm wondering which why is better. After having gone through all this trouble to set up the three novels as self-contained stories that simply follow Vicky on her journey, should I scrap the whole thing and re-write it to be one cohesive story, that the dark-elf menace and the Dragon Wars were the harbingers of the Dark Star problem?

TL;DR: Most trilogies ARE the three acts of novel writing. The first novel is the set up, the second novel is the bridge, and the third novel is the climax.

This way of writing is good, but often the end result is something like The Lord of the Rings, in that the first novel, the set up, is infinitely interesting, because you're just beginning to learn about your main character, and the troubles they're about to face. The third novel is also infinitely interesting, because the story is wrapping up, the threads are coming together, and the Ultimate Evil is about to be vanquished once and for all. The middle book, the bridge, is unquestionably the most boring, and the toughest to get through, because nothing's happening. It's just a path between the set up and the climax.

With Eversong, this isn't the case, and I just want some opinions on what the majority of readers think is a better way of going about it.