January Writing Update

I guess it time again for another writing update. Back in November I was working on my third and likely final Tropic Sea story, Passage to Jarpara, and thinking about a new standalone novel, Chantiere House that I wanted to start writing, well, now, i.e. right after the new year so as not to waste the long, cold Wisconsin winter. I had written about 25K words of Passage to Jarpara by the first week of November, when I paused work on the story for two reasons. There was going to be a climatic island adventure involving a sleeping god, and I didn’t have more than that title and an idea of how it would work. Sort of. Not much to write a story on. And secondly, I was losing my enthusiasm for the story because I kept having to stop and think about what comes next, and switch things around after I'd written them, rather than having the whole story in mind and just setting it down In short the story was still half baked. On the other hand, I was getting excited about the Chantiere House, and so I wanted to devote my daydreaming to that story rather than working out all the little details of the rest of the I story line.

Unfortunately, though I had a setting, a nose of a story, and two characters I liked, for Chantiere House, I just could not come up with a plot that I could get enthusiastic about. And since I write for fun, I need to be enthusiastic about writing to write. Long story short, I shelved the Chantiere House project in December, took a break and now I’m back to writing Passage to Jarpara at a new and better starting point. And this time, instead of a novella, I intend to make it a full length novel, a long and fond farewell to a setting and characters that I really like. And since it is the third book in the series, I only have to write it for the people who, like me, want to know more about the characters and the Tropic Sea. Thus, I’m not going to worry about making it anything more than an episodic travelogue across the Tropic Sea wherein they meet old friends from the previous stories, meet new friends, and visit new islands, each with a little adventure of sorts. Less a genre novel than a lighthearted literary fiction novel of travel. Nothing deep, lots of color and conversations, hopefully witty and perhaps insightful. It feels like every novel is my last, and this one may well be. We’ll see how it turns out, if it turns out.

My other project is to go through The Girl on the Kerb one last time. You would like to think that you get better at something the more you do it. And that your eleventh novel would be better than your fist published novel, but for some reason, this isn’t the case. I don’t know why I find myself disappointed by The Girl on the Kerb, but I can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t all that good. There were some sections that I had a lot of fun writing, but others were more work, than fun. I had to grind them out, and still they left me unsatisfied. Because I have had the time, while waiting to hear from Gollancz, I’ve been able to work on this story far longer than any of my recent novels. I’ve revised the final 1/3rd of the story, adding something like 5.5K words to it in the process, and still, I can’t shake that feeling… So I am going through it one last time, looking to make the writing better. I’m not going to be changing any plot elements, just words and sentences. Hopefully I’m wrong. And you’ll enjoy it. I still expect to release it sometime in March, so I have the time to tinker with it, and make it just a little better, if only for my sake.