Wow, that last post was really depressing, wasn't it? Gotta love mood swings... It's all better now. Better living through pharmaceuticals. ;)

Sacrifice is now available as an ebook through Lulu.com and on Amazon.com, which is exciting. We have a little ad that pops up on internet searches (primarily through bing.com) about vampire books. It's all going slowly in the right direction.

If only I had massive amounts of free money sitting about, just waiting to be used for marketing... then I could afford a Facebook ad and a limited print run. Since I have yet to hit the lottery, though, that will all have to wait until later.

I'm back to retyping Nightchild, which I'm not totally hating. That's a good sign. I'm getting itchy to get back to Catherine's Wheel, but all in due time.

Eureka

I realized what tripped me up on Knight of Sorrows. I was trying to be too historically accurate and yet true to the original Arthurian story, which was an anachronism when it was first recorded in the 1400’s. I just have to tell the story as it’s in my head and stop worrying about what historians and Arthurian purists are going to say. Once I finish Catherine’s Wheel, I’m going back to Tristan.

Refocusing

I was rampaging through my notes and scribbles for the Clans universe and found the prologue and four chapters that I'd already written for Catherine's Wheel. They're infected by the same off-balance focus that I had to correct in Sacrifice, so they will definitely not be used. I'm almost thinking that there's nothing in the 1870 Berlin era that's important enough to be a whole book, so I might just skip ahead to one of the next books, either Le Club Madrid or The Belly of the Beast. I don't know. I have a lot of material about intervening years and secondary characters that would probably make good short stories or novella-length works, but I'll have to be choosy about what gets to be a book. I don't want to take a slender plot and stretch it to illogical lengths.

I need to review the timeline and pertinent events that I mapped out all those years ago and really decide what goes in and what gets left for side-line projects. I know that I need to keep focus on the triangle (Tobyn/Ara/Dumas) and where that leads. Some of the books that I had synopsized in my notes have nothing to do with any of them, and will be left for later.

I have a lot of work ahead of me. The Clans universe is the monster that ate my brain!

Accomplishment, but ever onward

At long last, I'm pleased to say that I finished the re-write on Sacrifice. I celebrated with dinner out, then came home to start researching for the next book, Catherine's Wheel. It's set in Berlin in 1870, and I confess, I don't know much about the Kingdom of Prussia or the North German Federation (which became the German Empire in 1871). I'm taking copious notes and need to obtain a map so I can get a handle on the geography of the place. I try not to bog my writing down with too many historical or geographical details, but it helps me to have a sense of place and time. I'll be doing a lot of reading and probably spending some quality library time.

Research is so much a part of writing, even if your work isn't technically a historical piece. I think it's important to try to ground even the most fantastical work in some breath of reality. Even if you're creating a new world, it should bear at least enough of a passing similarity to the real world to be understandable to the reader. Besides, history is filled with fascinating nooks and crannies where the seeds of many stories can be planted and eventually bear fruit.

So, until further notice, my brain will be living in a city I've never seen, in a country I've never visited, in a time long past. It will be vivid and alive when I return .

I love this part of the process.

Awake too late

Once again, I've stayed up far too late at night working on Sacrifice. It's a little funny, really, how my normally diurnal self turns markedly nocturnal when I'm writing my vampires. I guess I need to be in the night to really feel them, as if the grainy quality of electric light vainly holding off encroaching shadows helps infuse the writing with a sense of darkness.

The ending, I think, will be strong, and it certainly sets up for the third book (working title for book 3 is Catherine's Wheel, by the way). I'm still uncertain about the rest of the book, but once I've finished the re-write and given myself a few days of mental quiet (characters permitting), I'll have a look and see what I think. It's very difficult to be truly objective about your own work, but I'm the only editor I have right now.