Nuked From Orbit

An Author’s Journal, 14-20 June 2021

Well… the title says it all. I mentioned in my previous posts that I was struggling with my new novel. I’d gone all pretentious and created a double prologue. While I stand by the reasoning and the structural reasons behind that choice… in execution… it was less than stellar.

For weeks I have wanted to go back and rewrite it and I kept putting it off because I was trying to write the entire rough draft before I went to revision. But it just kept getting worse. First off, I forgot some of my ideas for the new prologue and I had to start writing them all down. Might as well rewrite the whole thing.

Then I spent an incredible amount of time writing all of the material between the previous book and the “real start” of this book. More than twenty pages devoted to rehashing the previous novel, introducing characters who were just going to leave this story for future stories. Dropping exposition in the middle of dialogue, flashbacks, and other tools.

All of which could have been handled better.

NUKED

So, at the beginning of last week I simply started a new Scrivener Project and re-outlined the first half of the book again. I shuffled chapters around, I decided to take three chapters and cut them up and reorder them. I excised three whole chapters and the original prologue.

My manuscript went from 32K down to about 13-14k and then I rewrote the prologue and started on the new versions of the first chapters. This was a good week of writing and I managed over 7000 words. Most of it was just revision, but the new prologue is 90% new material and the new chapter 1 is about 50-50 new and old.

Manuscript 2.0 is sitting at 20,430 total words and after I finish this post, I will be hammering out the other revised chapters.

The Original Outline:

And now the NEW 2.0 Outline (First half of the Novel)

What Else if Happening?

Haven’t heard back from the two live queries and it’s still too early to start sending out the next batch.

I started trying to draw new maps for the setting, but got bogged down with scale and such. I’ve done them multiple times, over and over, and am not super happy with them. I’m going to do smaller scale maps of local areas and leave the overall world map a little vague.

I’ve also started work on a character list and glossary and keep going back and forth if I should make it detailed list, with spoilers and everything, or if I should just keep it to something that would be in the beginning of the book for reference. So, just names and a single line of text for each name versus paragraphs of text. Either way, it is a bit of a time sync but will help keep track of characters in the long run. I’ll devote time to this side project and talk about it occasionally here.

Goals for this Week:

I want to finish all of the revised/new chapters and get back to writing new material. If I can finish that this week, I’ll be super happy.

I want to get the maps of the small local sections all finished up and I need to workshop a chapter for my buddy.

There are also a bunch of gaming goals for this week, and I have to do a dramatic in-character story for the podcast. I really need to get the script written for that. So… yeah. The week is going to get busy.

Gaming this Week

First, the Curse of Strahd monthly game was postponed from last week to this week. And we’re in the middle of a bunch of fights in the basement of the Death House. That’s pretty exciting. I’m hoping to survive and make it into the actual module (as the Death house is really just an extended Prologue/intro to the game).

Second, my long running and high-level Saturday Night game came to a close this weekend. My character was a total beast, just a nigh-unkillable barbarian of mass destruction. The game had gone crazy in the end, with us taking down a god-like dragon who was powerful enough to grant warlock pacts, to finally taking out the entire Fae Courts. I won’t bore you all with the details but… god it was a glorious end.

And finally, I have to create a new character for the next Saturday Campaign. We’re doing another history meets fantasy mash-up. The previous game was 13^th Century Russia with Fantasy races. The new game is Victorian England Explorers finding Egypt and a passage to Feudal Japan. It’s going to be a very weird mash-up of eras and personalities.

In a twist, all three players in the game are playing Artificers and Explorers from the same college. A fantasy version of Oxford. Each of us is playing a different subclass and might multiclass into other professions to shore up our weaknesses.

My Tuesday Game is also progressing well.

Comics Last Week

What a week! Donny Cates’ final issue of Venom shipped, better late than never. But Venom 200 was pretty awesome. I have a few things that worry me, but I feel really good with how things have been altered and changed for the future. I can’t wait to see what Al Ewing and Ram V do with the next series.

I’ve been working my way through a lot of older comic material. The originally series of Ghost Rider two weeks ago and now I’m most of my way through the Dr. Strange 60’s material. In order to get everything, I had to mix Epic Collections, Essential (B&W) material, and a few individual books. It’s slightly wasteful as the books overlap a lot in the material presented. Meaning you end up buying a book just to get 3-8 more issues, but the bulk of the book you already have.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Maybe I’ll do comic’s blog since my Thursday extra posts are starting to come to an end.

Be well and thanks for reading.