So I’m a Writer. That’s what I tell people anyway when I’m not glaring daggers at hydraulic modeling software that’s decided, yes it really does want to crash for the seventh time this 9 hour working period, thanks for asking, also known as my day job.
This blog was started not only as a place to put my short stories, occasional poetry, food rants, and travel writing, but as a place to log progress made on my novel. It’s been an ongoing project for about five or six years now, which is back on the front burner after an editor friend took a hack at the first finalized rough draft last summer. The work of my youth was callously hacked it in to two books and I was bluntly told do a full rewrite of the first half of the first book which seemed as though it’d been written by a histrionic and verbose teen who thought concision was for pussies. Which, in her defense, it had.
If you ever want true conformation that you’re writing’s improved go take a gander at something you wrote five years ago. I dare you. If you’re lucky it won’t be something integral to an ongoing project and you can wince and laugh a bit to yourself about adverb usage and the all too seductive ellipse and move on. If you’re not lucky then we should chat about revamping a story that appealed to teenaged-you into something now-you wants to have their name publically attached to. But that’s neither here nor there. At present, I have two nearly completed novels each with a full story arch, a batch of memorable characters that hardly seem anything like the people that sixteen year old me thought up and a lot of loose ends and things to improve on bulleted in a dog eared notebook.
Here are some of the highlights that I’m going to focus my energy on this month:
- Isak, our villain with a capital V. Why are we afraid of him? What can he do, in concrete detail that makes him dangerous to cross. It is said but not shown. We almost never see him, he always just pops in with his newest scheme without warning.
- Show what happens to people who cross him
- Show what happened to Marcella
- Show his power over the lesser of the other 5 temples
Suggestions, comments, and good thoughts sent in my general direction are appreciated. Here’s my story pitch again for anyone interested.
The temple was quick to call it a gift of prophesy, while such a gift was useful. Llani discovers that her ability is much less of a blessing when she’s spouting omens of death and destruction on the head of the high priest, Isak Tornin. But even charged with blasphemy and named a false prophet, fallen from grace, the Goddess Jordaine, High Lady of the Heavens, is not done blessing Llani yet. After all, with the Empire of Braeth facing a war with the western hill tribes come summer, many people are looking for favor in the eyes of the Goddess of War.
G.A. Buba 