Category: Ysbaddaden and Game of Chess (Page 1 of 2)

Works in Progress July 2023

I’ve settled into a groove. My early morning writing routine has kept steady (with a few days here and there where I’ve had to shift my mornings to accommodate the varieties of parenting and life), and with my morning sessions, I’ve mostly focused on Norse City Limits. I’m up to 13,000 words in that project, which is amazing in some sense because it doesn’t feel like I’ve written that much. Not that 13,000 words is a lot, but when I see it all totaled together, and then I think of how I got to that 13,000, it doesn’t feel like I did any work. That’s the point of a daily habit, isn’t it? A little bit everyday adds up to a lot over time. Well, I’m proving that adage true.

My other project is a story I’m calling “Dark Was the Morning,” about an old dragon and an old dragon-slayer who must decide whether they want to face off against each other or not. They’re both tired and filled with ennui, facing the end of their lives and the slow betrayal of their minds and bodies as they age. I’m not sure if this will be a short story or a novella or something else. I’m just writin’ it and seein’ where it goes!

I wish I could say I’ve been working on Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, but that book is on the back burner again due to my focus on Norse City Limits. Maybe when fall rolls around and I’m getting to the midpoint of NCL, I’ll feel like I need a shift to something different and pick up Ysbaddaden again. I really want to finish the Merlin series, but I also know that these other stories are closer to the surface and need to be fished out first. I’m trying really hard to let my creative voice dictate my writing, and if Creative Voice says NCL is the way to go right now, that’s the way I’m going.

My blogging has been pretty shitty since summer started, but maybe that’s for the best. I should be outside doing summery things not hovering over my keyboard like a pasty crypt keeper. I would like to blog more, though, and maybe my renewed focus on Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and other OSR/indie games will be the material I need to start blogging with more regularity. I’ve written before about these old-school games, and perhaps I shall write about them again in the near future. Old school RPG stuff is wildly creative, particularly the modules and settings, and I find that it’s often more interesting and inspirational than any other fantasy media. Who needs AI when there’s a random d12 table to roll on for ideas!

I think my earlier goal of 2500 words per day is too ambitious. Maybe someday I’ll hit that goal with regularity, but I think the better goal is to keep the streak of days alive. Writing a little bit every morning before the family wakes up is working well so far. 13,000 words of fiction isn’t a lot, but it’s something. And if I can keep it up, by summer’s end, I’ll hopefully hit 30,000 words. That’s a third of a novel. Not bad for a few minutes every morning.

The other problem with my 2500 words per day goal, is that eventually summer will end, and when it does, I’ll be going back to a 9-5 job (well, more like an 8:30-3:30 job… more to say about that soon…), and 2500 words will be nigh impossible on most days simply because of time constraints. And I don’t want to make writing into a chore. I don’t want writing to be a pressured thing. I don’t want to even make writing into a “career” (I’ve discovered I don’t want to make anything into a career, frankly). I want to write. For pleasure. For myself. For the sheer joy of it. But making it into a career is not for me. It might be for others, but not for me. I’d like to make art and let the day job make money.

So 2500 words is too ambitious. I would rather write daily — no matter how many words, just daily — and let the practice of writing (not the word count or end goal) be what matters. A daily habit. This is much more enriching to me than striving for a word count goal. (I shiver when I think of the word “striving.” I am not a striver. Down with striving! Up with leisure and habit!)

Works in Progress April 2023

Since finishing both Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion, I haven’t been idle, though I do wish I was further along with my draft of the second Merlin book. I’ve written a few short stories that I’ve been sending out to different magazines, but so far, no luck.

And I’ve started drafting another novel, Norse City Limits, a story which I’ve had rolling around in my brain for almost ten years.

When I was in college, I took a class called “Icelandic Sagas,” and we read a whole bunch of them: Njal’s Saga, the Volsunga Saga, Grettir’s Saga, and a host of shorter sagas.

I always thought the style of the saga writers reminded me of the way screenwriters write screenplays: terse description, a focus on dialogue and action, and a point of view that resembles the “camera-eye-view” we get in a script. There’s no room for inner monologue; the thoughts and feelings of the characters are expressed in conversation and action. To my mind, these sagas worked a lot like the old film noir/hard-boiled movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age: fate and bad luck often played a huge role, society was controlled by a few rich and powerful networks that often manipulated the system to maintain power, and down-on-their-luck individuals had to find a way to survive in a hostile environment that answered only to money or force.

So Norse City Limits is my idea for melding Icelandic sagas with film noir. I know mixing hard-boiled fiction with fantasy stuff isn’t anything new (it’s Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files or Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid, right?), but I really love film noir and I really love the Icelandic sagas and the Norse legends and mythology that they’re infused with, so I wanted to write my own version of this urban fantasy staple.

For Norse City Limits, my main character is not going to be a detective, but instead a “regular Joe” who is down on his luck and trapped in a bad situation. Much more of an Out of the Past situation than a Big Sleep one.

I’m hoping that Norse City, the fictional island metropolis that is cut off from the rest of the world, will serve as a setting for other books inspired by the sagas. Norse City Limits book 1 is partially based on Grettir’s Saga, but it’s not a retelling of that story. It’s more of a jumping-off point for an original tale of my own invention.

I’m not a very fast writer — partly because I need a lot of time for thinking and exploring, and what often looks like procrastinating is really my way of letting my brain ruminate on things — but, despite the way my brain works, I’m trying to write 2500 words per day (with Saturdays a little bit less, and no writing on Sundays). I know I have to work up to that amount, a bit like a runner working up to a 5k or a marathon, but I figure 2500 per day isn’t too high of a goal for now.

How to Feed the Ysbaddaden Muse

It’s no secret that I’ve been working on side projects lately instead of writing Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I explained part of my anxieties already, but the other annoying thing about being away from a novel-in-progress is that everything’s been forgotten. I can’t remember what’s happened in the story or what I wanted to write about next.

I probably should keep a notepad nearby and record major events, arcs, settings, etc. (and proper names), but so far, I haven’t used that strategy.

So now, as I hope to reembark on my journey into the novel, I have to go back and reread at least the last three or four chapters. It’s not the end of the world, but all that rereading time is time spent NOT writing. And what I most desperately want is to be writing this novel, getting words on paper, and finishing it.

Maybe as I reread, I’ll do the notepad thing. If nothing else, it’ll save me time rereading next time I get in this situation.

Another thought I just had — unrelated to rereading my manuscript, but related to my slow-going with Ysbaddaden: Perhaps I haven’t been taking in the right input. I’ve been reading the pope’s new book, The Golem and the Jinni, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, and I’m about to start reading Nella Larsen’s Passing (for my teaching work).

But maybe I need to mix things up and read/watch/listen to stuff that’ll feed my muse specifically for the Ysbaddaden story. Stuff like medieval Arthurian romances, Appendix N books, 80s fantasy movies, old school heavy metal and prog rock, The Smiths, comic books like The Sandman series. These are all influences on my Merlin’s Last Magic world, so maybe I need to go back to those influences and draw more sustenance from them. If nothing else, it’ll be a change of pace and that might shake something loose in my imagination.

Confessions

Look, the second book in my Merlin’s Last Magic trilogy is not finished.

It has been more than four years since The Thirteen Treasures of Britain came out. This is not something I’m proud of. I HATE that it’s taking me so long to finish.

Part of the problem is that I’ve written a lot of words, but they haven’t all stayed in the manuscript; by this point I’ve written well over 75,000 words, but only about 40,000 of them are usable. This has slowed things down.

What’s also slowed me down is lack of inspiration. I want the novel to be great, but so many of my ideas are not great. They are cliche, predictable, boring. Whenever I work on coming up with ideas, I end up coming up with ideas for other stories, other worlds, other novels.

It’s not like I haven’t been writing. I’ve written short stories, poems, blog posts, even several chapters of a novella. And I’ve been working on Ysbaddaden too. It’s just taking awhile.

I’m also blocked by my perfectionism. I freeze up and can’t write because I’m afraid that my writing will suck.

I wish I didn’t think of this novel as being “important.” That would help a lot. But since it’s been more than four years since my first book, I feel like this sequel has taken on importance just because the wait has been so long. I don’t want to be frozen by perfectionism. I don’t want to go another year without finishing this book.

I wish I had a snazzy pep-talk thing to tell myself so that I could blaze through the next few months and finish this novel. But I don’t have any snazzy pep-talk things to say. I know I need to sit down and put words on paper. I know I need to have the courage to write as well as I can and not worry what people will think. I know I need to somehow find the energy and time to get my work done. I know I will eventually finish, even if it’s not anytime soon. But I will finish, as long as I keep writing. That much I know.

 

A Wizard of Earthsea and How Great Books Can Inspire My Writing

earthsea_coverWhen I wrote the second draft of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I was also reading The Last Unicorn. Even though my story and Beagle’s had little in common, the music of his prose, the vitality of his world made an impact on me while I was writing. I wanted my book to capture some strain of the magic that I felt The Last Unicorn possessed. Even though I knew my own novel would never equal Beagle’s masterpiece, I wanted to try. In short, The Last Unicorn was inspiring. It energized my writing, and I found myself more joyful while I read it, and more joyful while I was writing my own story.

It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble finishing my second novel, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I’ve had babies, become the mother of three children all under the age of five, struggled to navigate the demands of teaching, mothering, and adulting, and all the while, I’ve felt less joyful and more overwhelmed. My writing time has evaporated, and with it, a lot of my enthusiasm. I’ve still managed to push on, to write even when it feels like a slog through the Swamps of Sadness, but without that spark of joyfulness that I felt when drafting The Thirteen Treasures. So this second book is taking an eternity to finish.

Curiously, at this very moment, I’m reading another classic of fantasy literature (A Wizard of Earthsea), and I’m finding myself suddenly joyful and energized again, inspired to sit down and work on the draft of my own novel.

Just like what happened with The Last Unicorn.

Le Guin’s prose, the depth of her world and her themes, the way I become completely immersed and lost in her story, the way it feeds my imagination — all of these things remind me of what it’s like to be a fantasy writer, to dream up characters and places and fantastical creatures. And when I do sit down to write, I feel nourished by Le Guin’s story. Great writing makes us as writers see what’s possible, what can be achieved with words, and when I know there are storytellers out there who have reached greatness, then in some small way, I hope I can reach it too. I know I won’t; that’s not the point. It’s the striving for greatness that gives me energy, that helps me find joy in my writing.

I am, at times, haunted by Ray Bradbury’s maxim to “write with gusto.” So much of my writing over the last year and a half has not been filled with much gusto. But when I read a great book — fantasy or otherwise — I gain some measure of gusto, some “kick-joy” (as Kerouac? would say), and I begin to wonder why I don’t just read great books all the time. If these books work like a tonic on my brain, why wouldn’t I imbibed every day? Why am I spending time on things that don’t fill me up with this kind of excitement and awe?

I suppose it’s because we don’t know which books will contain the magic until we start them, and I’m the sort of reader who hates to abandon a book once I’ve started it. There are a few that I DNF, but they are very few. And I also feel obliged to read widely in my genre, most particularly the books being published right now; I can’t exactly restrict myself to the Great Classics of Fantasy if I’m trying to keep up with what’s being written currently. Of course, I’ve read some current fantasy that has indeed been the magical-kind-of-great that I’m describing in this post, but without the benefit of time and distance, it’s hard to know which of these books will be The Ones, and which won’t.

Maybe I need to constantly have a great book on hand, for those times when my verve seems a little limp. I can always read more than one book at a time; I’ve been that kind of reader since I was a kid. But now I realize that I DO need to keep pumping blood into my imagination via these great books. I need Ged — naming the otak, struggling against the shadow, overcoming his pride — and others of his kind to journey with me, keeping me on the path of adventure, like Gandalf and the dwarves leading Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain.

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