This is from Doomster.

I know you've said that you felt that your D2 novel was not complete yet, and that you would only show it to someone if you felt it was, and provided that he would give you some constructive feedback. But, after reading your 1st chapter, I feel compelled to read the rest of it. Or to put it more accurately, I'm damn bloody curious and I want to read the whole thing, or as much of it as you've got written down.

I've managed to sneak into some part of chapter 2 that you posted, by screwing around with the numbers of the html page of your D2 novel {changed gathering 1-1 to 2-1 etc]. So, if you would kindly email me your D2 Novel, I'd be eternally grateful to you. Not that that's worth very much though...but..ahh well. 

Chapter 2 was up, (not anymore) at least the first 1/3 or so of it, with a bunch of notes, but it was a totally rough draft that I had only put online since Malaya wanted a quick peek.  Which is why it wasn't linked from Chapter One.

The Doomster is confused here though, since it's not the D2 novel that's finished but not very good.  That's Miss Pretty Lies, which is a contemporary horror story.  It's entirely finished (though it needs a lot of work) and is online now, but you'll never guess the URL, so don't bother. And you don't really want to read it anyway, it's crappy now.

The D2 novel is no more done than what Doomster saw; just chapter 1 in a semi-final version (some typos and a few repeated thing that need work) and a bit of chapter two and a bunch of notes about that chapter and the rest of the novel. And it's on hold since I concluded that there was no point in writing more of it now, since it has no commercial viability as a "Diablo II Novel".  But since it's very loosely inspired by, I can pretty easily modify parts of it and make it an entirely new story. At first I was looking at that as a huge, unpleasant, and onerous chore, but as I've been thinking about it the last few days, it's beginning to seem more like an opportunity than a bad thing.

Writing it in the Diablo world/mythology was easier in some ways, since I didn't need to explain what the classes were, describe how the spells and skills worked, etc.  However it was also limiting since I was going to have to explain a lot of things in terms of what I was changing.  Some skills were going to work very differently, lots of them were never going to appear at all, and the world itself was greatly changed from how it appears in the game.

As I said a couple of paragraphs ago, it was at best "very loosely-based" on the D2 world, and had as many original or different things as it did actual game elements. And all of the best stuff is not at all Diablo II, but is interactions between the characters, battle scenes, and other such stuff that can (and will) take place in an original world, one that has nothing to do with Diablo II at all.

So yes, I think I've made a decision, and it's going to require going over chapter one and making some major changes, mostly to names and spells, and it will be de-Diablo-ified.  I don't want to write any more until I figure exactly what I'm changing, and once I make those the rest of it will go just about as I had it planned, I'll just need to change a few things here and there in my planning, and put in more introduction and background info, since characters will now be a mystical sorceress, rather than a Diablo II sorceress.  Nothing in D2 is exactly original, they've just taken common fantasy character archetypes and given them their own unique spin, mostly in terms of spells and how the game mechanics work. Nothing at all like the game mechanics are in the story I'm writing, and the spells are easily changed, and I think will be improved upon.

If I want a Sorceress to have a very powerful fireball attack in my novel world, and describe it as much different than the D2 version of Fireball, that's fine, and readers will take it for how I describe it. Whereas if I had the exact same thing in the Diablo world most of the readers would be thinking, "Pfft, Fireball is a crappy Clvl 12 skill, and doesn't do jack for damage even at Slvl 40."

As for posting that version here or not, I dunno.

In theory I'm writing this to get it published and get money to live on and you could all buy the damn thing in paperback.  Using the Amazon.com link from here so I'd get an extra 5%, ideally. *cough*  And therefore I wouldn't want to post it online and steal my own thunder, much less worry about someone seeing it, snatching it up, and trying to sell it as their own story to some other publisher.

Actually, rather than Amazon.com I think I would buy 50 or 100 copies at the wholesale rate and resell them directly here.  Retail price plus shipping for a personally autographed copy, or something like that. That's assuming it happens, I've still got this site going then, etc.

I think I will have this site going, I'd keep it up even if I were big famous writer man.  I doubt I'd be doing long daily updates at that point, and I would hire some webmaster to handle and add technical stuff, forums, etc.  But I'd like to keep the site going, and would probably buy up ericbruce.com, which is taken by some really crappy home page, or at least it was 14 months ago when I was looking into getting my own domain name, a search which ended up with blackchampagne.com, a journey that is described in some of the very early blogs.

March 26, 2003

Speaking of writing, one bit of good news for me lately is that since I officially gave up on writing "the D2 Novel" and decided that it would become the seeds of "the Fantasy Novel", I've been having really cool and wild ideas about events and characters and societies to put into the tale. It's as if my plan to set it in the world of Diablo was constricting my imagination, since I didn't want to do anything too crazy and out of place in the game.  But now that I've decided to change around the few obviously Diablo-inspired things and do whatever I want to with the rest of the tale, cool ideas are coming up just left and right.

A short tease, from some notes I wrote myself yesterday.

Shocked at the information he was relating; the cannibals, the mad murdering king, the blood rituals in the streets, Vena spoke out of the corner of her mouth as they walked through the long tunnel into the city.

"Is there anything else I should do as we walk to our deaths?"

In a low voice the Necromancer replied, "Try not to look succulent."

Unfortunately that's something from like Chapter 4 or 5, and since you don't know the setting or the background info it probably doesn't mean much to you. But I was cracking up for half an hour over that "succulent" line.

The concept of a city/society of civilized cannibals would never have occurred to me when it was still going to be a Diablo-inspired story, though I'm not sure why.  I guess that's just too much deviance from the relatively boring and settled world of the game.

And just as a footnote, what's a "civilized cannibal?"  Well I don't have that all worked out yet, but basically they are like any other city state in the pseudo-medieval world, but their customs involve a lot of dueling and murdering and sacrifices to their gods (who are probably demons in disguise) and as an added bonus, they butcher and consume the dead in a ritualistic fashion.  And this will all be related in an exposition-heavy speech by the Necromancer (who won't be called a Necromancer in the final novel) before the short bit of dialogue I quoted above.

See it's all in my head.  I just need to spend several hours a day writing it, and it would unfold so nicely...

August 28, 2003

I have been thinking a lot about my fiction of late, namely the ex-D2 story that's become an original fantasy novel.  Just today I spent an hour+ chewing through the early stages of chapter two.  My whole progress is quite a few pages further along than that, but I skipped about 6 or 8 pages early on in Chapter Two since I wasn't sure how much the two characters would be talking about past history at that time, and how much I would bring out further along in Chapter Two and Three as they journey.

I didn't want them to be stuck in this cave full of rotting deer and rabbit meat with the Necromancer character conveniently giving a massive history lesson.  I try to leave that sort of blatant 2x4 exposition to hack writers like Anne Rice or Jean M. Auel. It was tempting, after I left so many things unexplained or hinted at in Chapter One, but I didn't want to bog down the story's pace after the exciting chase and escape of Chapter One.  So I'm still debating how much time I'll have them spend in the cave, talking.

Oh, I know how long they are in there for, chronologically; the question is how many pages do I devote to that/force the reader to read.  Describing a situation where a character is bored, especially if they are the narrator, is always tricky without doing it too well, and boring the reader as well. I've come down on the wrong side of that fine line in the past, and am endeavoring to avoid that fate this time.

I also realize that I'll be redoing much of Chapter One, both to remove everything Diablo-esque about it, but also to set up things that will pay off later in the book, and to change how the two main characters behave, since my conception of what sort of people they are has changed as I've worked on the outline of the rest of the novel.

Speaking of the outline, I have it pretty firm up through Chapter Six, and I know just how the last chapter will go.  It's the Chapter 7-10 area that's somewhat up in the air.  I have various events that need to fit into that time frame, and cool scenes I can't wait to write, but I'm not sure just how much more stuff I'll need to add, and just how many good ideas I'll have before I get that far, and just how long everything will be at that point.

Given my tendency (already on display in the later portions of Chapter Two, stuff that's never been online) to add in lots more details and events while I'm writing things I had planned out in advance, I am worried about the overall length.  Earlier in my planning I had many more events and a full on rogue's (no pun intended) gallery of bit characters making brief appearances, mostly as a series of homages to the Diablo II characters and game history.  I was thinking it would be way too long to be a single novel then, since I was looking at 20-30k words per chapter, and at least a dozen chapters.  A very long novel is 250k words, and I was thinking I'd do 400k easily.  That was an awkward size; not long enough for a trilogy, way too long for a novel.

However, I'm no longer writing it as a Diablo II-inspired work, and in fact have changed everything that was strongly-reminiscent of the game. This has the dual benefit of making it potentially publishable, as well as removing any reason to throw in Paladin or Druid or Amazon-inspired minor characters.  And that helps a lot in keeping the length down, as well as keeping it much more focused.

I would have come to that realization eventually, as I was writing it, but it was sort of nice that the "remove D2 influences" project forced me to it, before I dug any deeper into that particular hole.

And if I could only spend as much time per day writing it as I do thinking about it, or doing other things to put off having to write it, I'd be damn near done by now.

September 18, 2003

I got about 2.5 hours of work done on my novel tonight, (I want to get into the habit of at least 4 hours a day) and got past a tough stretch I'd been ignoring for a week.  It's near the end of the (way too long) Chapter Two, and I just had problems with the introduction to the 5th section of the chapter, where the two main characters are finishing a several week long journey to a ruined city.  There was no real reason for the writing problems I was having, except that I couldn't think of anything for them to do as a bridge to the big action finish to the chapter, and kept writing stupid stuff that had way too much description of the forest they are walking through, or the weather, or the history of the land, etc.

My new version of it isn't brilliant or anything, but it does at least get me past that part, though to do it I added in a new section and character which added like 15 pages to an already way too long chapter.  But I can deal with cutting out the deadwood later; for now I'm moving on in the plot advancement.  I have the big dramatic action ending to 2 all worked out in my head, and then most of 3, which should be relatively short.  The story really gets going in 4, where the 3rd main character comes in, and since she's the most interesting one in the novel, at least for me, I'm eager to get to that part.

Unfortunately I can't be so eager that I just skip the parts I get stuck on as I go, since I'm changing my overall conception of things constantly. Just lately I've been debating how much the alchemist aspect of the main male character will come through, and how much he'll just use mental magics (mind control type stuff) vs. how much physical manifestation of magic there will be, in terms of him creating potions or elixirs that do various useful things.

I'm also changing around things in the world of the novel a lot. I've gone over all of this in the past, so apologies to long time readers with good memories. I'll be brief.

The whole novel started out as a mostly Diablo II inspired thing; in fact it was going to be really long fan fiction, of a sort.  However I eventually realized that I had way too many cool things in it to just write it for fun on the Internet, and that since almost none of the cool things were in any way related to the game or world mythology of D2, but were instead all my own ideas (many of them character-driven) that would work in any fantasy world, I got the idea to expand the novel into a whole new world, and make it entirely my own creation.

The thing I've been wrestling with lately is just what sort of world it's taking place in.  Initially it was my slightly-altered version of the Diablo II world, which works out to be a sort of Tolkien-light fantasy world, basically the same "Dark Ages with magic" thing that Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time stories are set in, or the truly Tolkien-light world of Shannara, or the basic sword/sorcery world of AD&D, and so on.

However as I write more and think about it more (I do a lot of thinking about it while playing D2, which is a sort of meditation for me) I am beginning to wonder why I should limit myself to that same old tired dark ages-esque archetype. I'm not going to throw in some steampunk age of machines thing, or sci fi elements, or anything like that, but I'm primarily a horror writer, at least going by my short stories and favorite writers, and I have a lot of novel and weird ideas for how their world can be. Why settle for the same old Tolkien-esque land when I can invent anything I want?

I'm not going for some sort of "nothing but magic" world where anything goes and there's no logic; this isn't Xanth or Disc World; but I can put in skinwalkers and ancient quarries of the gods and living mountains and nature spirits and civilized societies of cannibals and every other damn thing I can think of, if I want to and it works to advance the story.

So maybe I will.

November 17, 2003

I got a bunch of writing done on the novel on Friday night, and then woke up early Saturday morning, despite having gone to bed pretty late, and put in another hour then, and a bit more late Saturday night.  Progress is good, though I know I'm putting in way too much detail for the sections I'm writing about now.  When I start rewriting I'm going to be trimming page and pages of good writing, just since the events being described are redundant or the plot is dragging.  Pity.

I think there will probably be less of that problem later on in the novel, since I have a much better idea of what's going to be happening, and there's more action to get to/through, so I'll keep it more concise to move things along.  Plus as I write now I'm still figuring out the characters and how they react to things and what their opinions and personalities are like, and sometimes I have to write a scene longer than a reader is going to want to read it to get in every bit of info, much of which I just need to know myself.

It's odd in writing, at least for me, that I generally don't really know the characters that well until I actually write them out, and quite often once I do start writing them out a lot of my outline ideas and preconceptions are changed. I'll think I know what's going to happen in a scene, and then when I'm getting into it it just starts going in some other way, subtly or overtly, and as the writer I sometimes feel almost powerless to make things happen how I wanted them to happen.

There aren't any real character revolts going on in my novel yet, but then again the first three chapters are very tightly-focused on just the two (initial) main characters, and are mostly action-oriented, so there haven't been too many opportunities for character conflict of the sort that would bring about changes to my initial intentions anyway.  Those will begin in Chapters 4 and 5...

November 18, 2003

It came time to crank out the blog last night, around 2am, once Malaya was off to bed and tucked in, and... I didn't wanna.  Well, I did want to, but I had nothing done on the notes page, no news surfed or commented on, and no real burning desire to do so.  What I wanted to do was write.  To work on my novel.

So I did.

I finally finished the enormously-long chapter two Sunday night (it's something like 49k words long, and will probably lose at least 10k of those in final form) and while I'm still thinking about how exactly chapter three will begin (I know the middle and ending well, but I'm not sure about the beginning) I went back to the beginning of chapter two and began to tidy up and trim things. I got into that, and next thing I knew it was 4:30am and I was flagging.  Some days I'm up until 6 or 7am and going strong the whole time, but yesterday I was beat, so I packed it in by 5.  I did get a lot of tricky editing and rewriting done though, so I was happy with my effort.

I just wished I'd spent about 6 more hours at it, Monday.

I can feel this book's jaws creaking open, as it prepares to eat me. And by that I mean I want to spend hours a day on it.  Six, eight, ten a day, doing nothing but working on it.  I remember some days years ago, when I was working on my first novel and lots of short stories, when I'd wake up early, so eager to get back to writing that I couldn't sleep, turn on the computer and get to it. And the next thing I knew it was 16 or 18 hours later and I was bleary eyed and mentally exhausted.

I can't really do that anymore, not with various online responsibilities and a real life girlfriend living with me, but since finishing this novel is the most important thing in my life, in terms of career goals, I'm going to try and spend as much time on it as I can.  And that means cutting way back on surfing and dicking around, and probably cutting back on time spent blogging and working on other things, such as the D2 site.

I'm not going to stop blogging or doing content here, since sometimes it's nice to get a break from writing in this deep fictional world and just babble about celebrities or society or cute kitty photos.  But there may be delays or somewhat less length per day.

For instance, I'm itching to get back to working on the novel even as I type this.

December 2, 2003

Chapter Two went long.  Way long, like 45,000 words, which is a novella in itself, and since there aren't a great deal of action events in the chapter, I feared it was very slow and would be boring for the reader.  However after reworking and greatly-improving most of Chapter One (the original version of it can still be seen in the fiction section, as it was when posted on the D2 site last Halloween, when it was still a D2 story) and starting off on Chapter Three, I realized I wanted to go back to 2 and see just how bad it was, and just what the tone was over the last 50 pages of so.

I was surprised to find that I liked it, and saw very little to change.  It read quickly and flowed well and didn't seem at all slow or lagging or over-long, so I'm pretty encouraged by that.  I still need to finish redoing chapter one (tightening it up, editing and improving the wording, and changing everything that was D2-inspired) and I skipped an action scene in the middle of chapter 2 when I was writing it weeks ago which I need to go back and add in, and the start of chapter 3 is sort of slow, but once I'm past that, I'm really going to be rolling.

I'm in the mood to write on it now and have gotten my schedule worked around to eliminate or reduce all of my major distractions (gaming and surfing, mainly) so I really think I'll be doing several hours a day from now on, and more than that on good days.  I'm eager to get to chapter 4 and 5 since that's where the story really gets good when the 3rd main character comes in, and the plot begins to thicken.

I still have no idea what the final length will be like.  Months ago when it was still mostly in the planning stages I thought it would be novel-sized, maybe 500 pages in paperback.  Then when I mapped out the whole thing and all of the sub plots and sub quests it started to seem far larger, like 2 or 3x the initial size and I was thinking it might have to be 2 or 3 novels.  And yes, trilogies are cash cows, but they're also so cliché for fantasy series. And I don't want to be a cliché fantasy writer.

It will really depend on how long chapters 3-6 go, since I have those all well mapped out in my head and in outline form, and then how much more I feel like I need after that.  It could end in chapter 8 or 9, or go well into the teens if I add in every bit of additional plot and action and character events I have on my outline.  I think most of that is unnecessary though, and would just extend it for the sake of making it longer, rather than making it better. And I don't want to pull a Robert Jordan here.

And yes, I'm getting way, way ahead of myself.

And yes, it's very boring to read about what I'm writing when I'm not posting any examples of it. Which is why I try not to talk about it constantly, even though I'm thinking about it constantly.

December 16, 2003

As for the writing, it's going well.  I stalled out late in chapter three a few days ago, unsure where I was going to go in the last section and it and feeling like it was running way long with too many mundane events, with all the big action and interesting events ready to start happening in chapter four and beyond.  But I didn't have the heart or perspective to go back over it all then, so to work on and get some other stuff done, I've delved back into the old chapter one, which was written over a year before the rest of the story and needed a lot of editing and rewriting that I'd been putting off doing since it's a lot of work.

But now that I'm doing it, it's going pretty well, though it is hard work.  I often find myself staring at 4 or 5 paragraphs of loose text that I want to condense into 2 paragraphs of lean muscle, with no flabby extra words, and I want to work in two additional ideas as well, relating to things that will happen later in the novel that I hadn't thought of when I wrote the chapter initially, last Halloween.

I generally feel it's ridiculous to say writing is hard, since it's something that comes very effortlessly to me. And writing new material, fiction or non-fiction is generally pretty effortless, but the super nit picky type of editing and rewriting I do on fiction that's important to me is indeed difficult.

I spent probably six hours Monday and at least eight Tuesday going over the old chapter one, wrote initially for a 2002 Halloween story on the D2 site.  You can see the old version here, and while it's pretty good for free fanfic on a gaming website, I always knew I'd need to do a major edit on it if I were actually going to go forward with the whole novel begun with that chapter.

Yet I also realized that writing a whole novel just for fun on the internet for free would be a tremendous amount of work for no real reward.  That was enough to stop me, but eventually I realized that since about 95% of the novel was all my own invention and had nothing to do with the plot or events of Diablo II, it was pretty stupid to limit myself to that world and no potential for publication.

That's the short version, the long version can be seen in many blogs posted over the last year+, several of which are collected here in one long "let me type this out while I try to figure out what I'm doing here" redundant heap that I don't really recommend anyone read through at this point.

I'm about 80% done with the total chapter one rewrite, and it's really been that, a "total rewrite." The plot is basically the same; thief breaks into royal cemetery, picks up tool, breaks into tomb, finds summoner already there, etc.  But I've rewritten almost every word as I've gone over it, and where I haven't rewritten it I've changed around sentences and paragraphs to flow better, put in chapter breaks, renamed characters, added more description and events and background info, set up more things for later in the novel, etc.  In the process it's gotten a lot longer, and far better.  I'm looking to trim some length somewhere though, and may do that in the end of the chapter, where I always thought the long "roaming the warehouses with a golem" part was unclear and overlong.  It seemed silly that their escape from the city would take so long while no one got outside of the city to search for them, and that the city wall would be so over-fortified for no apparent reason. So I'll probably streamline that whole section.

I've also de-D2'ed the whole thing, which didn't require much more than changing the names of types of magic that the necromancer and the paladins use, since everything else was different than D2, and everything else in D2 is just taken from the standard "fantasy world" that every pseudo-D&D game and pseudo-Tolkien fantasy novel already has.  Of course I've put in my own things, types of magic, types of potions, world political setting, etc.

I could go on and on about it, but anyway, I'm pleased with the progress I'm making on it, and I think it's much improved over the old Halloween version. That's a good sign, since plenty of people mailed me at the time I posted it to say they would love to buy the whole thing in a paperback.  With any luck, they'll one day get their chance.

January 19, 2004

I spent most of my free time over the weekend writing on the novel. Since that's what I'm always saying I should be doing, I suppose it's a good thing that I did, eh?

I didn't write anything new, just upgraded old stuff, but it had to be done and I feel pretty good about doing it.  Well, that's not an entirely accurate statement, since it's all new, just not new in terms of plowing into the fun stuff in chapters 4 or 5.

What I did was finish rewriting chapter one, and when I say that I don't mean that I was nibbling a bit here or there; snipping a few words or changing around a sentence.  I mean that I rewrote it completely, using the earlier one for a rough outline, but typing 98% of the words completely new, with all changed sentence structure, flow, tempo, analogy, etc.  You'll still recognize if the start of the novel, if you read the original version I posted on the D2 site last Halloween, since the basic events of the female thief in the Royal Cemetery, the encounter with the reanimating Necromancer, the battle to escape, etc are still there.  It's all of the details that have been changed, including how the fight goes, what sort of knights they face in the Cemetery, how they escape from the city, and so on.

I also removed everything that was derived directly from Diablo II, so all of the spells and special abilities are now different, and lots of the stuff is much cooler than what I had translated from the game, at least in my opinion.  And that's just in Chapter One, which is the only portion of the novel that's at all like the game.  The rest of the story, which no one has yet read any of, is entirely different, aside from some of the same character archetypes existing (sorceresses, necromancers, knights in armor, etc) and none of those are presented at all like they are in Diablo II.

It's funny, since I'm spending so much effort changing things so they aren't like D2, and adding so much more stuff in that's got nothing to do with D2, but I'm sure that I've inadvertently put some things in that are basically identical to things other authors have had in their fantasy novels, or other sword/sorcery games have had, and once the novel(s) are published I'll hear from people saying that I copied some character or event from the Elfstones of Shannara, or Baldur's Gate, or some old fantasy film, and you just know the person pointing that out won't believe me when I tell her/him that I never played that game or saw that movie or read that book.

February 12, 2004

I've also gotten a lot of writing done on the novel over the last couple of days, and am making nice progress, even though I'm just now in the middle of chapter two, and need to rewrite the last 50 pages of that chapter (yes, they're very long chapters) due to several major changes I made in the start of it.  The novel is improving greatly though, both since I know better what I want to do now, and since I'm adding lots of good minor improvements and details as I rewrite.

Everything past chapter 3 is really well set in my mind, and that's where all the really cool stuff begins (not that there isn't an abundance of coolness in the first 3 chapters as well), and I think the writing will accelerate then, since the plot really swings into gear, with most of the world set up and introductions completed.

I can also easily envision writing additional stories in this world, after this one. Sequels, or just other tales in the same land, and I never thought I'd be able to say that.  In fact, I've often thought it was pretty lazy of writers to keep putting novels in their same worlds, even after they've long since sucked all the originality and joy out of it.

I'm not criticizing authors who endlessly stretch out an ongoing story in the same world, I.E. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.  Well, I do criticize them, but that's not what I'm talking about now. I'm talking about authors who create a good world, put two or three or six novels in it, and then run it into the ground by writing another half dozen progressively less interesting stories in that world, stories filled with the kids, or the grandkids, of the original, interesting characters.  For example: Piers Anthony's Xanth, Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept, Anne McCaffrey's Pern, Brian Lumley's Necroscope, Terry Brooks' Shannara, Terry Goodkind's Sword of Creation, etc.  And no, I haven't read all of the books in those series.  I'm going somewhat by what I've read about their declining work in fan reviews.

Anyway, I don't intend to endlessly stretch out and milk my story, since I know exactly how it's going to end, and while there could be sequels (assuming the book I'm writing doesn't see print as a 2 or 3 book series, which is possible given how long I think it's going to go) they wouldn't be of the Wheel of Time type.  They'd more likely be prequels, or other stories in the same world.

And I'm not happy about that, since I've never liked it when other authors did it.  I can't speak for them, whether they did it out of love, or need, or greed, or whatever.  I'm thinking that I might do it out of desire, mostly because as I write more and more of the book, and think about more things to put in later, and add more depth to the world (much of it in my notes, so I have no idea how much will or won't make it into this actual volume) I see how much more I could write about it.  The background stuff is interesting to me, I'd like to write more about it.  There are lots of legends and tales mentioned or hinted about that would be fascinating to write more of.  It would actually be sort of like reading it for me, since I don't really know just how things will happen until I'm writing them.  I think most deeply about the work as I write it, and often come up with new, better, cooler ideas as I'm going along; things that I never would have thought of just by working on an outline, or thinking about it idly.

I don't really go for Stephen King's writing metaphor that a novel or short story idea is like digging something up.  Like it's all there already, and you just have to unearth it.  It's not all there in advance for me; I make up 90% of my stories as I'm expanding my short rough notes into book form, and even before I get to that point I'm constantly adding to and revising my notes. I've changed the circumstances and motivations that lead up to the conclusion of my novel three or four times thus far, and always for the better; it's gotten better and juicier each time, as I've come up with better, deeper, more involving plot twists. Twists that add more resonance and depth to the story, and should make the conclusion more satisfying to readers.

In other words, if I die before I write the whole thing you'll want to come and piss on my grave even after Malaya posts my notes, since they're just short lines about this or that, quick character sketches, and very brief outlines that are inevitably changed in whole or part when I actually write them out full length. Just reading the notes wouldn't come close to satisfying a fan, especially not since I can guarantee major things in the notes would change in the actual novel.

February 13, 2004

First up, here's C, which is short for his actual name, which he apparently no longer wishes to be known by.

Are you sure it is a good idea to keep rewriting the initial chapters while you have not written a single thing of the later chapters? I am no professional writer myself (I give it to you that you are the net value of one), but will the changes ever end? Is it not better to just add notes to the initial chapters as you go along, and rewrite them later? Just curious.

About the "in the same world" idea: I think it works marvelously if you do not blow it. I think it is pretty acceptable if you don't do one of the "world is gonna end and then the new world order comes" type of thing, what is hard to continue (see Ann(e) Rice). I think it is totally acceptable if one falls in love with one's own creation, and something as immense as a world is hard to create. Then again, if you "burn out" your world with a (potential) cataclysm, the upcoming books will have a hard time. Maybe it's just me but I really enjoy when a story does not end with "the good winning and destroying the evil" (whether the good is a death-worshipping necromancer fighting against the bad healers, or the good healers fighting against the bad necromancer). I love when evil always wins, that it says in power, and that it happens in the same book. It is understandable (but cheap) when an author "recycles" the "burned out" world by resurrecting the same evil or by the rise of a new one - in the sequel. If you put it in the same book (say, have it end with the new "good" government fall apart, economic upheaval result, etc...). Ok, if you read Terry Pratchet you'd guess from this that I truly admire his work, since it is not only unbelievably funny but also teaches about the world as well... Maybe fantasy is not supposed to be about this, but I believe recycling should be avoided at the time of writing the original book, and not at sequel-time.

As for the first point, that would be true if I were just going over and over them.  I wrote chapter one initially for Halloween 2002 on the D2 site, and then it was a D2-inspired fan fic thing.  Hardly related to the game, but still, I used character archetypes and spells and such from the game.  I didn't write chapter two until over a year later, by which time I'd decided to do the whole novel as my own original world, rather than anything Diablo-inspired, and knew that I'd have to rework Chapter One a great deal, at some point.  However I put that off and worked on chapter 2, skipping a long stretch at the beginning of it, and then a tricky confrontation in the middle, to focus on the action ending of 2, and then went on to chapter 3.  In the process I got to know the two main characters (as of chapter 1 and 2 at least; others come in later) better, changed some of the ways they acted and worked together, and had a lot of new ideas about how the world should work, including tons of new things that added depth and detail and background to the universe.

So when I got back to the difficult rewrite of chapter one, in December, I had to remove or modify all D2 references, work in much more character detail and change the events somewhat to make things move along more smoothly and compellingly, tighten up the wording and pacing, add several new events and change the way lots of magical things worked, and much more.  It took a couple of weeks to get through the whole thing, but I think it worked out pretty well.  Malaya would be a better judge of that than I, since she knows very little of the story past chapter one (I don't tell her the details so she'll be able to eventually it objectively.) and can therefore read it more or less like anyone who just happened to pick it up in a bookstore.  She said it was better than most fantasy she's read, that it was definitely book quality, and that it was much improved over the original version.  And yes, she had several complaints and things she didn't like at all, so it wasn't like she was just sucking my dick.  I encourage her to mention anything she didn't like, and she's not real shy about it.

Anyway, I'm not just endlessly going over the same stuff; I'm changing major things around, for the better, and I need to get the beginning stuff straight before I move on, since I'm really trying to keep the characters interesting and consistent, while also having them grow dynamically throughout the novel (well, most of them, some are well-set in their traits and aren't changing for anything other than cruel deception).  They aren't stereotypes or archetypes, like most fantasy (and book) characters are, where you can always count on them to react the same way in every situation.  At least I hope not.

And I have a much better idea of what's going to happen in chapters oh... 4-8 or so, than I did the earlier ones, before I wrote them.  If that makes any sense. Later on there's a lot more plot-driven action type stuff, with major things that need to happen for the story to advance, while early on it's a lot of "we're stuck in a cave/walking for days through a forest" where I need to fill the time with character introductions and traits and conversations, and while doing those I'm figuring everything out for myself as well a for the reader. They are much more malleable in structure and presentation, while the larger scenes and battles and chases and such later on will be more set in their form, since I need to present a set amount of action/events.

Anyway, I don't mean to sound defensive or overlong (though I probably do and already am) but there is a method to what I'm doing. And while it would be better if I'd had it all brilliantly arranged and plotted out well in advance, I will never do that with a novel, no matter how hard I try.  And honestly this is a good thing, since I always get more cool ideas about a story once I start writing it, and they're always better ideas than I had in advance, and add to what I had planned going in. If I just had an outline and stuck to it and didn't add anything that necessitated changing things that came before, I'd finish the work a lot more quickly. It just wouldn't be as good.

March 2, 2004

I also had some really good ideas for my novel while lying sleepless in the hotel bed (for about 4 hours Friday night, and then a couple more Saturday morning), and filled three note pages with notes on my ideas, and took the time to type them in and elaborate some Monday evening.

It was pretty cool; I was lying in bed Friday night, unable to sleep with the snoring (not from Malaya), and as my mind wandered over various absurd things such as me winning several thousand dollars playing Texas Hold 'em, or doing impossible snowboarding tricks in the halfpipe, I thought to myself, "Quit thinking about all that bullshit and think about your novel."

And I did.

That night I thought a great deal about some of the later chapters in the book, and how events need to unfold towards the conclusion. And it's a really cool conclusion, if I do say so myself.  Surprises, satisfying ending, body count, etc. But even though I know basically how it'll end, I don't have all of the details worked out, and I keep thinking of new things to add in, more plot twists or complications or details to include, etc.  And I thought of some great ones that night.  If I'd had a lap top and there weren't 3 other people trying (and mostly succeeding) to sleep in the room with me, I'd have gotten up and spent an hour or two typing them in.

Saturday morning we were up early to get to Heavenly by 8:30 so Malaya and one of the two other friends on the trip with us could get their snowboards rented, and since I only got to sleep around 4 or 5am, I was dragging, and certainly not lying around in bed for long that morning.

However on Sunday, we had no hurry to get up, and I had gotten to sleep by midnight, though I slept about two hours and woke up and laid there thinking for about an hour in the middle of the night, before managing to fall back to sleep after that.  I woke up for good around 7, when the bright morning sun filled the room from the wall-length sliding glass door with the lake view (the lake 30 feet away, all of that 30 feet covered in very puffy, light, thigh-deep snow), and since everyone else was still asleep, I snuggled up to Malaya and thought about the novel some more.

And much to my surprise and chagrin, I thought of an absolutely perfect idea for... the sequel.

Yes, sequel, that dirty six-letter word that I have so often maligned other authors for delving into, when they've clearly exhausted all creative possibilities in their story world and just want a paycheck.  But see, mine is different since um... I'm doing the whole thing for the paycheck, and not just tacking on a sequel?  Because I thought of the sequel while I'm still less than 1/4 of the way through the first novel?  Because I'm special and the rules I apply to others don't apply to me?

All of the above.

Anyway, it's a really great idea for a sequel, if I do say so myself.  As I'd said in the past, I had no interest in doing lame sequels just to fill up more pages or humor fans who didn't want to read my other work, but I can easily see myself doing this sequel, though I'd like to write another novel on some totally other subject between Gathering of Prophecy (which will probably go 2 or 3 books anyway, as long as it's going in manuscript form) and the sequel (which might be a trilogy in of itself).  Yes, I'm a goddamned dirty whore.

But honestly, it's a great sequel idea, set some years later, and it's a sequel worth writing.  None of that "further adventures of" bullshit; the world has been massively changed by events in the first novel/trilogy, and things as they were in the first 3 novels are no more.  That's what makes me interested in doing it, that it would be very different in plot and events and overall feel, yet it's in the same world.  A world that's been changed in ways the reader of the first novels would never imagine.  And that's a cliche, but it's also true in this case.  I almost want to start on the sequels right now, the concept for them is so cool.

Unfortunately, I need to finish the first novel(s) before I even think about the later stuff, and I don't have any idea how the overall plot of the later stuff would go.  I just know the basic concept to start things off with and more or less how they'd progress towards the conclusion.  Pity I can't tell you all without being a total spoiler, and even if I did it wouldn't mean anything to you, since no one but me knows how the first book(s) will go, so all of the cool twists and changes would require extensive explanation.  Explanation that will be best given over the course of two or three 700 page novels.