Current mood:	okay
Current music:	The Smashing Pumpkins - 'Stellar'

Shadows of the past

When I put The Ashes of Autumn project on hold earlier this year, it was nice in a way to be free of the commitment I'd made to writing every day. I stopped writing the novel in January due to the problems I discussed in an earlier post, and for the last few months I've put all writing projects on the backburner. During this time I've written one short story and not much else.

Recently I've got itchy fingers and have increasingly found myself thinking about the novel again. This doesn't surprise me, as writing is something I can't escape (not that I would want to). Every time I take a prolonged break from writing, the urge always comes back eventually. And with the urge, the desire to create. 

So once again I find myself in the early stages of planning a novel. It's a sitation I've been in many times before; I've lost count of the novels I've started and abandoned. You might think this would become frustrating, but it's all part of the organic process of writing. Each time I've learned different things - not to infodump so much, not to introduce four new characters in the same chapter, not to overload the prose with description, and so on. 

The two main things I learned from the Ashes of Autumn project were that firstly I'm the type of writer that needs some semblance of a plan, a structure, an outline. Secondly, that novels change dramatically as you write them. The Ashes of Autumn, when I was planning it, started out as a novel that focused on a handful of characters and one particular place - the Duchy of Runevia. By the time I'd reached chapter eight, it had grown into a bit of a monster that strayed a long way from the original premise. 

This time, I'm going to do things a little differently. I don't want to write 70,000 words just to find that the main character is boring, like last time. (I wouldn't tell Lukan that to his face, but he was boring, and he knows it). I'm going to make a detailed plot outline this time, rather than the trees-in-the-mist approach I took last time. I'm also going to try and flesh out the characters as much as possible. I'm not stupid - I know that only when you write about them do they truly spring to life, but I want to try and get their main personalities nailed as much as possible so that when I write about them the sparks fly. 

So when am I going to be able to do all this preparation when I'm working myself to the bone with 50+ hour weeks? Well, for one thing work is slowly starting to quieten down a bit now and hopefully my hours will be a bit more forgiving than they have been over the last few months. Secondly, I'm off to France for a couple of weeks with my family and will be taking a blank notebook. The idea is to get as much down as possible in terms of characters, plot and themes. 

The intention for the moment is for three plotlines, two taking place in Remgarde - a sub-arctic land. The other will take place in the City of Ember. I want to take the attributes that I like (adventure and mystery/political intrigue) and meld them together with these three plots.

The City of Ember is something I'm quite excited about, and I had a whole  raft of ideas fleshed out. Unfortunately these were lost when my computer died a few weeks back, but most are still locked in my head so they are not completely gone. I actually didn't lose quite as much as I initially reported when the pc breathed its last - in terms of writing, I at least had the foresight to email the prologue and first eight chapters to myself, so they are not lost. 

So, I hope by the start of September that I will be in a far more advanced position with this project. It doesn't really have a name yet, so I'm calling it The Winterstone, just so at least there is some sense of permanence. I'll divulge further details as and when they come to me...

In other news, I went and saw the Transformers movie. As this post has already turned into a bit of a Behemoth, I won't go into much detail. It will suffice to say that it was pretty much what I expected - brilliant CGI coupled with a dull plot and poor script. It was a bit like biting into a sweet-looking peach, only to find it is grey and mushy inside. As a bit of a Transformers fan-boy, I was always going to be hard to please, but I just couldn't help thinking that this movie was a waste of the license. The Transformers universe is vast, with so much background and scope. This movie just doesn't make use of this background material. A shame. The transformers themselves were hideously under-developed as well; the confrontation between Megatron and Prime completely lacked the epic quality it had in the original animated movie. They even stole one of the best lines from the animated film -'one shall stand, one shall fall' but it completely lacked dramatic impact. 

Sigh. Anyway, better sign out now. As ever, to those of you that have managed to read this far, I salute you.