The manuscript I’ve been calling “Happy Farm Adventures” is finally complete. I’ll be working on the second draft for the rest of the month, and hopefully bring it up to a point where I feel comfortable dropping the name and blurb before December.
It feels weird to be sitting on the fourth manuscript I’ve completed in a year. I finished Sapphire’s Flight I believe on the 21st of November, 2016. I’m excited, exhilarated, but also a little frightened. The reception to my work has been interesting the past year. Lots of pleasant surprises, a couple of heartaches–mostly good, but it’s scary because I can’t even pretend that I don’t put as much as I do into these novels.
When I first started talking about this novel and my intention to enter it in SPFBO 4 (if that becomes a reality), my friend Julie Midnight cautioned me. The main theme of this novel involves failure, rejection, and not living up to expectations, and she tells me it would be ironic to enter it in a contest where others get to decide whether it lives up to expectations or not. She said, “So try to be kind to yourself when the results come in, because they’re gonna hit close to home no matter what.”
Therein lies the fear, made more poignant by the time I hit the last scenes and the fact that the abrupt elimination of my novel Jaeth’s Eye a couple of weeks ago is still rather fresh on my mind.
“You could be rotting in a gutter somewhere. Your bones could be at the bottom of the sea. You must not have been the only child in that ship that day, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the only one left alive. And maybe you’ve decided that it ought to mean something, that you were destined for great things if only you could do better, be better, anything but yourself…but that is asking for too much from a single man, Luc. Too much. You are not made lesser by your circumstances. It is how you respond that dictates your worth.”
-[Happy Farm Adventures]
I feel a weird mix of pride and frustration now that I’ve finished this novel. Pride because it’s never easy to finish a novel, and I always feel a sense of accomplishment each time I slay that dragon. But frustration because I keep trying to learn to write better, but it only ends up that I write myself better. As my voice becomes stronger, I come closer to the realization that my writing is limited. I’ve been slowly improving the pacing and structure of my novels, but the content remains the same: the human behind the fantastic, which is lovely to those looking for it but not always the most imaginative or expected or praise-worthy.
I can’t stop writing it, though.
The nice thing is I’ve now proven to myself that I can write a novel even with some marvelous constraints. This one is a sword-and-sorcery, with a limited setting: southern Hafod, which is Generic Fantasy Setting 101. We see only one city, one town, one castle, and one ruins, and we go back and forth through the same environments several times. There’s only two POVs, and they’re not the most interesting characters: a farm boy and a spoiled noblewoman. I also wrote it in the span of seven weeks, all nearly 109k words of it, to the tune of 2000-4000 words a day.
In that time, there’s intrigue, drama, some hilarious banter (as always), character growth, interactions, monsters–in short, everything my readers have come to expect from my work all crammed in one neat novel. Yes, that includes the semi-convoluted plot that still manages to pull a couple of twists up until the end. Quite a bit of fighting and action, and even some rewards for readers who have finished The Agartes Epilogues. Pre-Jaeth’s Eye, I would’ve never been able to write this thing. I wouldn’t even have tried.
So what’s in store for me next? Well, next month, I’ll be taking a good long break to prep my brain for the crazy fucker I’m starting in January, entitled The Xiaran Mongrel–the conclusion to the Annals of the Bitch Queen trilogy and which I am hoping is going to be at least half as awesome as it is in my head. Guys, my goal is to literally be able to stream these scenes straight into your brain. The emotion, the drama, the action, the super climactic ending…this is probably going to be the hardest novel I’ll be attempting yet. One thing is for sure: I’ll be a Goddamned wreck by the time it’s done.
