Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the longest-running* yet least-read** blog on the internet! Here you'll find me writing about all the things that I write about, which strikes me, just now, as somewhat recursive. In any case, enjoy :)

* not true ** probably true

Thursday, October 24, 2019

New book on the way - first chapter

Hello all-

Halloween will soon be here (my absolute favorite holiday).

That's it. That's the post.


No, but seriously,  I've got a new book coming out on December 3rd, and it's a little bit different. It's still fantasy (though perhaps a bit darker than you're used to from me) but it's in the dungeon core subgenre.

Those of you familiar with Gamelit and LitRPG will know what that is, and I have to warn you that this book is all secondary world, no stats- no RPG, in other words.

Those of you not familiar with these fantasy subgenres should give them a try! They're relatively new, but already some great books have been written in them.

For both groups, it's important that you know I am a practical and also a deeply lazy man, so instead of spending lots of words defining these categories of fantasy, I thought I'd just include the first chapter here in this post (it already being written), so you can see if it's something you'd enjoy.

If it is, then you could pre-order it on Amazon here. For pretty much everywhere else (B&N, Kobo, Apple etc), this link should do the trick - but it might take a while to show up, so if it doesn't work for you right now, you could check back in a day or so.

On a final note, the chapter that follows is formatted for the blog. It will of course be in book format in the actual book. Right, okay, then. Onward!

* * *

CHAPTER ONE

The day that Anomus ip Garma died began, for him, hours before the sun rose. A sickle moon rode low in the cloudless sky above the Desert of Kings, and was reflected faintly from the gray stone face of the Targus Cliffs, and in the placid, black surface of the Great River as it slithered and twisted its long way through the desert to the capital, to the Delta, to the sea.

In the Subori Empire, it was known as a reaping moon, or a blood moon – not for its color, which was no redder than might be expected, but for its mostly forgotten connotations. To a few of the knowledgeable, it was known as the faceless moon, after the old god whose symbol it was. It was known as such, but it was not referred to as such. Not in the Subori Empire, on pain of death. The empire had its own gods, newer and more vital, and they did not countenance worship of their elders. Or at least their priests did not.

In the black night before dawn, Anomus, the greatest living architect of the empire, woke and rose from his cot at the touch of his servant. He made his ablutions, prayed briefly to his faraway household god for the safety of his family and then, letting a silent breath escape from his long nose, he cut his arm with a paring knife and let the blood flow into the clay ewer his servant held for him. His arms were scarred from a half-dozen years of such incisions; despite the desert heat, he kept his arms covered to hide the marks.

When he had bled enough, he bound the wound and wiped away the crimson rivulet from his brown-skinned arm with a rag while his servant Orthus mixed honey and fresh goat’s milk into the ewer to complete the offering.

“One way or the other, we’ll not be doing this again, Orthus,” Anomus said.

“I am glad of it, master,” Orthus replied. “A man’s blood should stay inside him, where it belongs.”

Anomus snorted softly. “The gods prefer it otherwise. Some of them, at least.”

“Subori gods do not demand human blood, master.”

“Do they not? Bris for one delights in battlefields, and He cares not whose blood wets the sand. Sometimes it seems to me the entire empire rests upon a bloody flood.”

“I beg you, do not speak so master. Soon we will return to the capital, where such words will find ears connected to lips eager to report them.”

Anomus gave his servant a small smile, and clasped him gently on the shoulder. “You have the right of it. I have been in the wilderness too long, away from scheming priests and their informants. My tongue has become too free. It is a habit I must break, lest it turns and breaks me.”

Orthus nodded and held out the ewer. “It is time, master, this last time.”

Anomus took up the ewer and Orthus checked to be sure the short walk to the tomb’s entrance was without spying eyes. When he signaled, Anomus carried the ewer into the Tomb. No hands but his could carry the ewer, the offering. No light could guide him down the immeasurably ancient steps that awaited him. No one save Orthus, with him since childhood, could be trusted to know what he was about, or why.

The consequence would be a grisly death, after prolonged torture.

His was the only tent on the tomb-side of the river, a half-dozen steps from its entrance. If he had had to walk through the worker’s camp, he would have been discovered long ago. He did not look up at the massive façade carved into the cliff. He knew it intimately. He had designed it, after all. Within a few steps the ever-present sounds of the Great River – the gurgle and splash of the water, the sigh of the reeds in wave and gentle breeze, the frog’s croak and night bird’s cry – all had faded to silence, and the only sound was the soft whisper of his own sandals on the marble floor. He made his way like a spirit through the main corridor to the Well – the massive, cylindrical chamber open to the sky above the cliff – and slipped through the concealed door to the lightless stairs that led down to the undertomb.

~ ~ ~

Anomus had never been a particularly pious man. The gods of the Subori demanded only acknowledgment of their preeminence, not slavish devotion. Anomus had made the required sacrifices at the required times to the gods of war, the river, the harvest and all the others, but no shrine other than the household altar was to be found in his villa in the faraway capital. Left to his own devices, Anomus would happily have left all gods, be they domestic, foreign, or elder, to theirs.

Such was not his fate.

The emperor’s beloved concubine had died ten years before. The emperor, in his grief, had ordered the construction of a tomb for her in the very face of the Targus Cliffs, one of the oldest sacred places in the empire, and one that was remote – far upriver from the capital, surrounded only by the vast Great Desert and scattered ancient monuments built by forgotten cultures.

The emperor had ordered Anomus ip Garma, greatest architect of the empire, to build a tomb for his lost love. What the emperor ordered, lesser mortals toiled upon pain of death to do. For ten years Anomus had labored to bring the emperor’s wish to fruition, while the dead consort, beauty of her age, lay ensorcelled and undecaying in the capital, waiting for her final resting place to be constructed. Nearly ten thousand workers had labored to hack Anomus’s vision out of the rugged, unyielding stone of the cliffs. They were watched, guarded, driven on by and imprisoned by a thousand unspeaking, unsmiling, tongueless soldiers of the emperor’s Eternal Guard.

For ten years, Anomus had not seen his home, his wife, his children. He had been absent at the birth of his daughter, and the death and burial of his son and father, for no-one who toiled on the tomb’s construction was allowed to leave before its completion, and the emperor’s approval.

None could leave before the task was finished, save by death’s gate.

Many had walked through it over the course of a decade; some by misfortune - for such an undertaking carried risks, even when managed by one as careful and conscientious as Anomus. Some had perished by serpent’s bite or scorpion’s sting, while others had been carried away by simoom or plague or crocodile or river horse. Some had died in pointless camp squabbles. And some had exited the mortal realm by their own hand.

Of all who labored to bring forth from bitter stone the emperor’s desire, only Anomus had been allowed word of his family, or of the world outside the microcosm of the work site. When he had been notified of his daughter’s birth, he had celebrated. When news came to him of the death of his father, he had wept. When he had been informed of the death of his son, he had raged. But even as he beat at the uncaring stone of the cliffs until his fists were bloody, he knew the only way out was through. And so the next day he returned, dead-eyed, to his work, hands bound in linen by the ever quiet, sad-eyed Orthus.

But such hardships were past. The Concubine’s tomb was complete; come the dawn, the emperor would arrive to inspect what he had demanded be brought forth. And if he was pleased by what he saw, Anomus and all those who had worked so hard for so long to bring the emperor’s desire and Anomus’s vision to reality would finally be rewarded and released.

Release would be reward enough, for Anomus at least. Gods willing, he had a wife and daughter waiting for him, and ten years of absence to try and fill. So he descended the stairs with extreme care, determined not to spill a single drop of the old god’s final offering.

The emperor had stipulated very few things regarding the tomb’s construction. One of the stipulations had been that there would be a large – a massive – chamber beneath the tomb proper, a sort of basement hewn into the living rock. When Anomus had learned of this requirement, his heart had quailed even as his mind calculated how long it would take to mine such a vast space out of the bedrock, and what sort of supports would be necessary to keep the tomb above from collapsing into it. He had not really wondered why the emperor would wish such a thing; in the Subori empire, it was not a healthy thing to question the emperor, even in the privacy of one’s own thoughts.

It was when they had begun the underchamber’s excavation that they had discovered the ancient cave system. It was when they discovered those caves that a rash of misfortunes began to descend upon them. Massive swarms of the black, biting flies and desert wasps, then locusts, then scorpions. Wild animal attacks increased tenfold, then twentyfold. Simooms, the deadly sandstorms of the upper desert, descended upon the worksite, halting nearly all progress for days at a time.

Anomus began to believe the gods themselves had cursed their endeavor. In that, he had been partially correct. Not all the gods had cast a disfavoring eye on the tomb’s construction – only one. The one he had spent years, now, placating.

In the fourth year of the tomb’s construction, after nearly two months of cruel, deadly misfortune, a four-man work crew had discovered a secret down in the dark. They were led by a grizzled old miner wise enough to keep it quiet. He brought the news straight to Anomus. The man knew exactly what sort of panic their discovery would cause in a work force already as unsettled as theirs was.
“We found something,” the man had told Anomus, eyes cast to the ground.

“Yes? What did you find?”

“Best I don’t say. Best you come and see, Architect.”

And so Anomus had gone down in the dark to investigate.

The entrance was concealed by folds in the cavern wall that hid it unless you were almost upon it. But once you stood before the narrow black maw, it was impossible to miss the sickle moon carved above it.

Anomus was a learned man. One of the subjects his tutors had drilled into his young mind was an overview of what the Subori empire chose to call the occult – the worship of the old gods. His father being a justiciar, Anomus had been groomed from a young age for the imperial courts. Knowledge of such things was necessary for one who might one day sit in judgment of a person accused of worship of occult gods. That he had not in fact followed in his father’s footsteps had not erased his knowledge of what he beheld – the sickle moon of the Faceless One, the old god of death, of retribution, of darkness.

“Can you trust your men?” he’d asked the old crew boss in a quiet voice. “Answer truthfully and be sure, because all our lives depend upon it.”

“I trust ‘em,” the older man had replied.

“Are any of them prone to talking when they are deep in their cups?”

“Only one. I’ll sort ‘im.” The crew boss did not elaborate, and Anomus did not ask him to. He hadn’t liked the hard, pitiless look in the man’s eyes.

“If word of this spreads, this site will have to be abandoned. That means-”

“We’ll have to start over somewhere else, aye, and four years wasted.”

Anomus put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “That would be the best outcome we could hope for. It is not the likeliest. Do you understand?”

He had. Anomus had altered the plans for the sub-tomb, shifting its footprint ten feet westward and having the crew build a concealed door to the cavern that held the Faceless One’s entrance.

“Do I want to know why?” the crew boss had asked.

“You definitely do not want to know why,” Anomus had replied.

“Aye, Architect. It will be as you say.”

They had never spoken of it again. Terrified, Anomus had used his occult knowledge to placate the old god during the next sickle moon. Goat’s milk was plentiful. Honey less so, but as the most favored of the emperor’s tomb-slaves, he asked for and received a small monthly allotment.

The blood came from his own body, as it must. But it was a small price to pay, to save himself and all the thousands who toiled on the tomb from the wrath of the old god – or, eventually, the emperor.

After the first offering, all the cruel plagues and attacks ceased. And so Anomus had continued to pay the Faceless One’s tithe month after month for six years, in secret, down in the darkness. The work proceeded, the tomb took shape. And now, in the deep dark between midnight and dawn, Anomus the Architect made one final offering down in the bowels of the earth, for the emperor would arrive in a few hours to judge his work. One way or another, Anomus would be shut of this damned place forever.

He navigated the undertomb blindly but confidently. Every step and flagstone had been conceived in his own mind, and a half-dozen years had only deepened his instinctual knowledge of the space. But once he passed under the Faceless One’s sickle sigil, such knowledge, such confidence, died.

Anomus descended these deeper, unimaginably older stairs slowly, carefully, blindly – after six years of monthly offerings, he still could claim no real familiarity with the lightless realm beneath the Concubine’s Tomb. No familiarity, and certainly no indifference. His heart beat too fast, and sweat covered him despite the unnatural chill that only increased with every downward step that he took. He was able to overrule his body’s inclination to tremble, if only just; he desperately did not want to spill a single drop of the offering. Too much depended upon the continuing goodwill of its recipient. Here, at the end, with so much at stake, he could not – would not – stumble, and put everything in jeopardy.

Eventually, Anomus’s questing foot found the end of the steps. Try as he might, he had never been able to count the number of steps that led down to the old god’s chamber. Eventually he had quit trying.

Only when he stood with both feet on the floor of the old god’s sanctuary did a glimmer of light relive the total darkness. It flickered, pale blue and small, ahead of him. Anomus could not say with certainty but he believed that, over they course of years and dozens of offerings, that light had grown stronger. It might have been his imagination.

Anomus carried the ewer towards the light.

The room was featureless, as far as he knew – the cold, blue-white flame illuminated almost nothing, and served only as a beacon. It danced in a bowl-shaped depression at the top of a rough-hewn block of black stone that was not native to the cliffs.

Anomus reached the stone and its flame and, as he had done dozens of times before, carefully descended to both knees while lifting the ewer above his head.

“Faceless One,” he whispered, “on this sickle moon, this blood moon, this reaper’s moon, I offer You a worthless token of my fear and desperation, in the hope that You will withhold Your wrath for the passage of another month.” Anomus carefully set the ewer on the floor, then bent forward and pressed his forehead to the cold, dusty stone for thirteen heartbeats. Then he rose and picked up the ewer once more, and poured the contents into the bowl that contained the flame.

The bloody concoction sizzled and evaporated before touching stone or flame, as it had every time before. The blue-white fire burned brighter, as it had for every other offering. But when the ewer was empty and Anomus bent forehead to stone once again, something happened that had never happened previously. Anomus suddenly felt a presence in the chamber, invisible, irrefutable.

Terrifying.

The Faceless One spoke in a whisper made of shadows and dust.

You fear the Faceless, as you should. But today your fear has a face.

“What face, oh Dark One?” Anomus whispered, eyes tight-shut, heart hammering in his chest.

A face of gold, diamond tear sparkling. You should flee this place, mortal. I can offer you no protection from what comes. Such is not My nature.

Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the presence was gone. Anomus let out a terrified breath and waited for the trembling to pass.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

The post book release blues


(This blog post has been adapted from a Twitter thread at the request of Carrie D. Miller, whose latest book, Copper Pennies, is out as we speak.)

* * *

Hi friends. Today I want to talk about the post book release blues. Not every author gets it, nor is it the same for every author, but it's a real thing. Having just seen The Thief Who Went to War out the door, it has been heavily on my mind. Again.

What am I talking about? I mean the creative slump that can follow the release of a book. It happens to me pretty much every time. The new book is out, and I know what I'm supposed to be working on next but I sit down to write and... eh.

The words don't want to come. They just don't. Writing feels like monotony, even when it's a project I was previously excited about. I'd rather check sales, check twitter, clip my toenails - anything but write.

Because I always have multiple projects going (at a glacial pace, most of them, but still) I am at least not faced with a blank page - that would be far, far worse - but I still feel like when I was a kid, forced to memorize multiplication tables. Something in me rebels.

I think perhaps it's because some part of my psyche still looks at writing and publishing an entire book as the end of a quest - a massive undertaking completed. That part wants its happily ever after, not *another* damned hike to Mordor.

That's nonsense of course. Writers write. We write climaxes and denouements, but we don't actually get them. Life is not fiction, after all. We generally write the world as it should ultimately be, not how it is. But the small me kicking the desk in front doesn't care.

Now some writers will have no clue what I'm talking about. They finish one project and immediately dive into the next, because that's just who they are and how they're wired. If that's you, great! I mean, I hate you but awesome!

If that's *not* you, though, come sit over here. Put that guilt and self-doubt over there on the shelf; it looks heavy.

The first thing you need to know is that the feeling will pass. You're a writer; you write. How do I know? Because I have ten titles out there, despite myself.

"But I need to write x books a year!" you cry. Okay, you have goals, and I respect that. Your inner dissident does not, however. Give them a week to sulk, is my advice. Just enough time to start getting bored. Forbid yourself even a peek at anything writing-related.

Next, get petty. Go to the top 100 list on Amazon for your writing category. Find a book you've never heard of despite it being in the top 100. Read the sample. I will bet dollars to donuts it will be... not very good. But it is in the top 100, and your book probably isn't. That means that author is living the dream while you have been binge watching Storage Wars or whatever.
Don't feel guilty - feel the righteous fire of WTF and NAW coursing through your authorly veins. (Every night when I go to sleep I remind myself that Terry Goodkind has an amazing writing career. Yes, it makes it hard to fall asleep. Yes, I require lots of antacid.)

The power of petty should have put your muse on notice at this point. If no, maybe you really do need a break. It happens. If yes, time to give yourself some writing goals. Only you know your writing quirks. There are lots of books out there to help you get writing. None will help everyone, but at least one of them will help *you*.

But I will say that you need to have daily goals. You can start out small; it's probably best. The thing is to write every day. Even if it's only a couple hundred words. Even if they suck. The thing is to get your inner dissident used to working again. Mordor ain't coming to the Shire, after all. And once you're back in the groove, the post-book launch hangover will dissipate.
Until the next one. And now you know what to do.


Saturday, June 08, 2019

The Thief Who Went to War




Well. It’s, uh, been a while since we least heard from Amra and Hogren. According to Amazon, the first publication of Thief Who Wasn’t There was on June 5th, 2015, so at the time of this writing, it’s been four years and two days. That’s a long time to wait for a sequel. Not GRRM long, not Patrick Rothfuss long, but long. Too long. And for that I’d like to apologize and explain a bit.

When I wrote Amra #4, my youngest was still a baby. I’d entered Mark Lawrence’s first ever Self Published Fantasy Blog-Off (the SPFBO) with Amra #1, and been offered a contract with Ragnarok Publications. I’d already put Amra #4 up for pre-order when the offer was made, and so a grand total of 32 people got the book before I had to take it down, so that Ragnarok could issue their own versions of the series.

If memory serves, that was only supposed to take about four months. In reality it took around a year.

Anyway, money was tight for us then. I mean, really, really tight. I was teaching English as a Second Language at the time in Vietnam, but they’d just put in place a new law that you had to have a degree to do so. I had a decade of experience, but no degree. I worked under the table for a while, because family’s gotta eat, but it wasn’t a sustainable situation. So I ended up moving to Cambodia for a time, where I could work legally, and at the same time worked like hell to finish up my Bachelor’s.

Long story short, Amra and Holgren’s next misadventure got put on the backburner, since I knew it wouldn’t be published by Ragnarok in any reasonable time frame and thus would buy no diapers. Then, by the time I left Ragnarok, it had moved from the back burner to the closet.

But I never stopped hearing it bumping around in there. Amra isn’t the kind of character who waits patiently for attention.

It has taken me roughly two years to get this book out. I’ve written and then discarded more words for it than you now hold in your hand – four previous versions went onto the scrap pile. Sometimes I had to stop, because I was completely lost and devoid of confidence. I wrote Prayers in Steel, An Unclean Strength and The Last God in the gap between Amra #4 and this book, as well as another untitled and unreleased book that’s quite different from all my others, and still not ready.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I’m super late with this, and super sorry, but I swear I wasn’t being lazy.

The Thief Who Went To War is currently being picked over by some amazing beta readers. After that, it'll be off to a proofreader, to kill typos and bad punctuation with fire. It will be in all the usual places on August 10th. I've just set up the pre-order on Amazon, and when the link becomes available I'll share that in a new post. I'll also set up the pre-order for all other venues besides Amazon sharpish.

I hope you’ll judge it worth the wait.


Friday, May 17, 2019

The Madness of ‘The Bells’


The fifth episode of the final season of Game of Thrones brought rioting from its fans. I’ma talk about it. As if you didn’t already know, spoilers ahead.

The scene was set thusly: The Iron Fleet is burning. The city’s gates are breached. The dozens of scorpions that line the city’s walls have been reduced to ash and splinters by the creature they were designed to kill. The allied troops of the Mother of Dragons are within the walls of the city, though not yet the Red Keep, where Cersei stands looking out, stone-faced and in denial.

Dany, atop Drogon, is perched on a tower, looking down at her troops facing off with Cersei’s. The opposition drops their swords, an unmistakable sign of surrender. Then the bells begin to ring out across the city, an established signal to all and sundry that the city as a whole is capitulating. In a word, Daenerys Stormborn has won. All that remains is mopping up the Red Keep, doing a dracarys on Cersei, and giving the Iron Throne a good disinfecting.

It is then and only then, in a wordless and commendable moment of the actor’s craft, that we see in Dany’s eyes rage and hate overwhelm her. Really, it’s a brilliant bit of acting on Emilia Clark’s part. Unfortunately, it’s also completely undeserved in terms of her character’s arc.

Some people disagree. They point to all the many harsh and bloody things Daenerys has done in her struggle for power. They tote up the body count, as if every death was equal, and equally heinous. They are not; not in fiction and not in real life. If they were, every soldier would be a war criminal. Whatever your beliefs about violence and nonviolence, the world has come to a general agreement that, even in war, there are actions that are too inhuman to countenance. We call them war crimes, and when the stars align, we punish them as such.

But let us put modern, real world notions of war atrocities aside. Let us look solely at the previous actions of the Mother of Dragons. She crucified slavers in the hundreds, and burned others of them alive. She looked on as her husband killed her abusive brother, the rightful Targaryen heir, in an exceptionally brutal fashion. She burned to death a powerful witch who killed her husband and unborn child, making her barren in the process. She locked another powerful, treacherous lord away in a lightless cell, there to die of thirst and starvation. She killed a powerful, thieving sorcerer. She burned the collected leaders of the Dothraki when they were going to imprison her. She burned two noblemen who took up arms against her to death, because they refused to bend the knee. She executed by means of dragon fire lord Varys, for the crime of treason. And of course countless enemy soldiers and sailors have died by her hand or at her orders.

In short, if you are powerful and/or belligerent and oppose her, maybe don’t make long-range plans.

But do you know who she’s never killed, or had killed? Peasants. Commoners. Children. The powerless. People who have not threatened, harmed, or taken up arms against her.

In nearly eight seasons, she has shown exactly who she is – a ruthless, powerful woman who will fight to her dying breath to reclaim what she sees as her birth right. But she has also known and shown what lines she was not willing to cross.

Let’s go back to Dany, perched on Drogon atop that wall. The bells are ringing. King’s Landing is prostrate before her. Her enemy, the one who beheaded her close advisor days before, is about thirty seconds away as the dragon flies, waiting to get dracarysed.

And so Dany decides she’s gonna torch the defenceless, surrendered city, with her troops still inside it, instead of flapping straight to the Red Keep – which holds Cersei and any remaining troops willing to fight for her, and the iron throne. Why torch the town first?

Because fuck those filthy peasants, I guess.

The truth is, we know why. The showrunners decided that Jon and Dany had to go at it in the last episode. That’s all. That’s it. That’s the only reason. They tried to backpedal the character in the last season, putting her on an ‘I saved you all, why don’t you love me? The brown people loved me when I saved them!’ jag – with tasteless overtones of jilted lover sprinkled on top for added flavor – that was somehow supposed to prepare the ground for what she did in King’s Landing.

It didn’t. Most fans weren’t fooled or satisfied, because for six plus seasons they watched Dany grow into who she was. And it wasn’t that. It wasn’t perfect, mind you – but it definitely wasn’t that. The Bells required Dany to not only be insane, but stupid. To burn what she had already won. To delay destroying her worst enemy for the sake of murdering a city full of nobodies.

‘But she wants them to fear her!’ I hear the Game of Thrones writer’s room cry out. ‘She can’t have love like in Meereen, so all that’s left is fear!’

Except she’s got a fucking dragon and the living already fear her, and the dead fear nothing, and Dany is not stupid enough to not understand either of these points.

‘But she’s craaaazy now!’ that same writer’s room bleats. ‘She snapped! There’s no accounting for craaaazy!’

Except there is. There was a way to show Dany deciding to finish off her dear old dad’s bucket list item of roasting King’s Landing, a way that, while unsatisfying, would at least have made a grudging sort of sense. If she had destroyed the Red Keep first, and then some dumbfuck commoner had pelted her with horse dung while she was giving her liberation speech, I might have reluctantly swallowed the ensuing incineration. It would have been at least tenuously supported by her character development.

But that’s not what happened.

The Bells, and indeed the entire seventh and eighth season, has displayed other instances where the decision was made to prioritize plot expedience over established character development, but none were as unearned and unforgivable as those few, wordless seconds showing a woman atop a dragon deciding to destroy what she had just conquered.

The Bells should serve as a reminder for every writer that your plot needs to be true to your characters. If it’s not, we’re watching or reading about puppets, not people – and even Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy.

Shoutout to the Goodest Boy.


Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Notes from the trenches #1

It's hard to give crunchy updates, ones that can objectively measure progress on a novel. The most obvious one is word count, and it is a useful measure, of course; a book is a collection of words, after all, and the more of them there are in a draft, the closer it likely is to being finished. Currently Amra 5 is sitting at just over 11,000 words. Averaging the other Amra books, we'd get a word count of just over 70,000 words, which give you an indication of sorts. But as I get older, I get fatter, and my books might suffer the same fate.

Sadly, word counts can also be deceptive. They might not be the right words, and until a writer (ok, me) hits the flow, it's entirely possible that the word count can go down as well as up. There are approximately 80,000 wrong words, all told, from the previous scrapped drafts of Amra 5, after all.

But let's pretend that these words are definitely golden. Going by the average word counts of the previous Amra books, that means we're approximately 1/7th of the way home. In what is a good sign, last night I had a fairly brain-bending idea about the ending that I think will make it more powerful than what I'd plotted, and when I woke up this morning, it was the first thing I thought about after 'gotta pee gotta pee gotta pee'. That's always a good sign.

Thus endeth the update. The rest is just blathering.

* * *

I mentioned flow somewhere up above, and I think I should explain what I mean by it. Basically I mean being in the zone - when I've got energized focus on the book and I'm feeling fully immersed in the story and I'm perfectly confident about what's happening as I write. It doesn't mean speed or continuous effort; I've always been the kind of writer that works in bursts. But it's a feeling that what you're doing, the story you're telling, isn't arbitrary but rather inevitable. A is followed by B is followed by C, and you don't have to give it much conscious thought. It's not effortless; I've never experienced an effortless writing session. Never. But it's more like cutting grass with a power mower, and less like cutting grass with the scissors they give you in kindergarten so you don't accidentally cut Jimmy's finger off. Or maybe not so accidentally. Jimmy was a little shit.

Anyway, a book doesn't have to be written that way, not even by me. But it sure helps.

My problem is that I've always written by what I think of as the flashlight method - meaning I don't need to have the whole plot mapped out, just a beginning and an end, maybe two or three oomph scenes, and then just far enough ahead of wherever I am in the process to get to the next scene or two. In other words, the plot is mostly in darkness, but I've got this flashlight that makes sure I don't fall into a pit or off the side of a cliff.

Most of the time it has worked well enough. I like it because it means I get surprised, and if I get surprised while writing, then there's a good chance that the reader gets surprised while reading. Sure, it's a little bit dangerous, but it has worked well enough for me.

Until Amra 5.

I mentioned that I've had to re-teach myself how to plot. For this book, at least, my old method just hasn't worked. I won't bore you with the details, but after months of struggling, I finally came to the conclusion that I had to plot this book to a much greater degree than I had anything else I've written. Not because the plot was substantially more intricate than any other Amra book, but because I kept writing in the wrong direction, realizing it only when I was deep, deep in the weeds.

Why? Because this is the fifth book in a series that's probably going to be a dozen or so books long. Flashlight plotting works for a standalone, or even a trilogy. I am here to inform you that it doesn't cut it for stories much bigger than that. You have to balance the needs of the individual book against the trajectory of the series, while keeping in mind all that has gone before. You'd need a bigger brain than was given to me, to do that on the fly.

Let's just say I now have some sympathy for the later books in the Wheel of Time series, and for George Martin. That shit ain't easy to balance properly. It's very tempting indeed to descend into minor plot points and just sort of... hang out there, where things aren't so crazy and messy. And then call it deep characterization/world building instead of fear and avoidance. You even get to point to the swelling word count and say 'but I'm making progress! This book is progressing!'

Well, your word count is. Your plot...














This, by the way, was a consistent issue with the trashed versions of Amra 5. Not the only one, by any stretch, but a recurring one. It's one I am trying very hard to avoid in the latest.

* * *

On a final note, I want to thank you folks who have left comments of support. I haven't responded individually; but it's not because I don't care. My personalized flavor of anxiety makes it very difficult for me to interact for periods of time, is all. I turn into a hermit. I withdraw. I'm, uh, working on it, but it might take me a while longer to get back to being sociable. It was worse when I was younger; at least I'm not dumping my phone into the toilet because notifications have brought on an anxiety/panic attack. I ask for your indulgence.