Roughly 3,000 words the last two days on The Straits of Galahesh. That’s caught me up for missing last Friday. That’s pretty good for me. Steady Eddie. Straight’s the ship that stays the course.

You know what would be really cool, though? If someone told me they’d written like 4,000 words today. Ever read Cherie Priest’s blog? She writes like 18,000 words per freaking day. What’s up with that? Does she have a pod of imps chained to a bunch of old Mac laptops in her basement? It wouldn’t be so bad if she wrote crappy books. But she doesn’t. She writes cool books. Really cool books.

Sigh.

So, yeah, someone please tell me they wrote like three times as much as I did in the past few days. That would be wonderful.

I’ve come to a decision on the title for Book 2. It will be called The Straits of Galahesh, though I reserve the right to change it at any time. It’s important for me to have titles, though. For whatever reason, they help me shape the book. With The Winds of Khalakovo, it captured both the Russian feel I was shooting for and a bit of the of sense I was trying to give the reader: that something was amiss. Change was on the wind. And I used that to good effect throughout the writing of the book.

With Straits, I’m shooting for more of a flavor of the Empire that stands to the west of the Grand Duchy. They’re loosely based on the Ottoman Empire, and they’re a major player in this book, so I wanted to get them in to the title right away. On the island of Galahesh are, well, straits. They come into play quite a bit in the story, but I also wanted to again, make it a harbinger of the danger that lies ahead, which helps me to shape the story.

I’m about 48k into the book so far. I’m shooting for 20k per month so that I can finish around the February timeframe and then begin immediately edits for my May due date next year. It’s a little aggressive because of the size of the books I’m writing (roughly 180k or so each), but it’s doable. I usually get in about 1k per writing session, and I write most nights, so I think I’ll be able to do 20k a month without much trouble.

The Winds of Khalakovo is now listed on Night Shade’s site. I’m now an official member of the posse! Comment excitant!

Coming April 2011

Among inhospitable and unforgiving seas stands Khalakovo, a mountainous archipelago of seven islands, its prominent eyrie stretching a thousand feet into the sky. Serviced by windships bearing goods and dignitaries, Khalakovo’s eyrie stands at the crossroads of world trade. But all is not well in Khalakovo. Conflict has erupted between the ruling Landed, the indigenous Aramahn, and the fanatical Maharrhat, and a wasting disease has grown rampant over the past decade. Now, Khalakovo is to play host to the Nine Dukes, a meeting which will weigh heavily upon Khalakovo’s future.

When an elemental spirit attacks an incoming windship, murdering the Grand Duke and his retinue, Prince Nikandr, heir to the scepter of Khalakovo, is tasked with finding the child prodigy believed to be behind the summoning. However, Nikandr discovers that the boy is an autistic savant who may hold the key to lifting the blight that has been sweeping the islands. Can the Dukes, thirsty for revenge, be held at bay? Can Khalakovo be saved? The elusive answer drifts upon the Winds of Khalakovo…

Trade Paperback – 978-1-59780-218-5
500 Pages – $14.99

I just got word from my editor, Ross Lockhart over at Night Shade, that the artist that’s been assigned to work on the cover for Winds is Thomas Scholes. Not knowing terribly much about Mr. Scholes, I quickly googled him and came across his blog (love the name: Crayon Box of Doom) and his corner over at CGHub. He apparently likes doing environments and landscapes and such. And I can see why. He really excels at it. I love the orange and ochre landscape below with the clouds above it. He also uses light and darkness very well. Many of his pieces have this dark and serious tone that perfectly matches Winds. He does these livestreams of his artwork where you can watch him work on some of his artwork. I think he believes in the chaos theory of artwork, trying a million things on for size and seeing what works. It’s very interesting to watch.

I have no idea if I’ll be involved in any of the decision making. I’m perfectly fine if I’m not. Night Shade and Mr. Scholes certainly know what they’re doing. But I’d also be perfectly happy to help if I can. If there are character’s in the finished piece (which is not a given), I have a lot of pictures I’ve dug up while researching the costumes, etc. If it’s purely a landscape shot, there are several places in the world that would match up well with Tom’s strengths. The eyrie is one such. It’s a massive cliff face where there are dozens of stone perches on which the windships of the Grand Duchy can berth.

Here are a few of my favorites:

I've sold a book! Check that. I've sold three books. A trilogy, even… The Winds of Khalakovo, The Straits of Galahesh, and a third book yet to be titled (and written, for that matter). I'm proud and excited to be with Night Shade Books, who are well known for publishing high quality fiction in a number of speculative fiction genres. Night Shade are a passionate group, and they have a beautiful sense of style when it comes to the artwork and layout for their books, which, as strange as it sounds, is a major key to attracting an audience, especially for a budding writer.

The first book is set to come out spring or summer of next year. Fast, I know! We've only just signed the contracts, so I know there's a roller coaster ride ahead of me. Right now I'm going through that early, chug-chug stage as the car heads for that first big drop…

I'll be posting more about the whole process and my thoughts on it, but for now, I'll close with this one simple thought: I've sold a book! Check that. Since it's a trilogy, I'll close with three thoughts: I've sold a book! I've sold a book! I've sold a book!

I'm buzzing with excitement to get moving on this book. Things always move slowly for me in the beginning of new projects, though. I suppose this is par for the course for writers tackling new projects, but I get pretty hung up on things like names. I can't write a character until I know their name. Same with places. I have to get that down before I can move on. It sort of defines the character or the place for me. Cements it. There are several new characters coming into play in this book from the neighboring Empire of Yrstanla, which I'm loosely modeling after the Ottoman Empire circa 1600. One of the main characters will be the Emperor. After steeping myself in the names of people and places during that time, I think I've finally found something I can work with. His name is Hakan ül Ayese, Kamarisi of Yrstanla. It was common to tack on tons of honorifics, to sort of aggrandize their status, but in this case, at least for now, I think I'll largely forgo those things.

Onward and upward!

For my part, I learned a lot. As with any workshop, you learn as much about writing from listening to others critique something that you’ve also read and critiqued as you do from people critiquing your own work. It’s always eye opening for me to hear what other people have to say about something I’ve tried really hard to find all the faults in. Invariably there are things that I missed, and it’s in those moments that you can grow as a writer if you internalize those thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong. I got a ton out of my first-50 crits and my novel crits as well. I have an issue with likeable protagonists. I try to paint them as people that need to grow. I show them with weaknesses early on so that the reader can see that they’re not perfect, that they have room to grow. That they’re regular people, basically. But the way I go about doing it is a bit off, I think. First impressions really count in fiction. It’s important to show them with heroic or admirable qualities early so that later, when they do see the bad stuff, they’re already predisposed to like them. The exact same person could be portrayed in an opening scene, but if the bad stuff comes first, then that’s what sticks with the reader. Not that my characterization was exactly on the money, either. I was a bit off the mark with Nikandr, the Prince and windship captain who the story is largely focused on. He came across as infantile, whiny, petty. I certainly wasn’t trying to portray him that way, but that’s certainly the way he came across. So I need to work on that. I think (hope) that those traits begin to fall away as the book progresses, and so the majority of the rework is going to come in the early parts of the novel. But I’m sure those changes will lead to other changes later on.

So I have my work cut out for me. I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there (at least by my self-assigned schedule), but I’m very hopeful that the end product is in sight now. I’m going to shoot for having Winds done by the time World Fantasy rolls around.

I’ve also been working on a collaboration. My second. The first one of my first efforts ever, with a friend who as also interested in writing but similarly new to the craft. Predictably, it didn’t work out. Neither of us were good enough to pull something like that off, so we set it aside.

The new one is a sci-fi story about a solar power transmission platform and a pair of solar flare racers that get caught between a chance to leave their brutal existence on the station for a new life on Earth and a growing movement to overthrow the choke hold the platforms have had on the working populace for decades. I’m working on it with Steve Gaskell, one of my fellow Clarionites. Needless to say, I’m a bit more up to a collaboration than I was back when. It’s been enlightening, as Steve and I have slightly different approaches to story generation. I really admired Steve’s work at Clarion, so it’s been fun batting story ideas back and forth and also editing each other’s drafts. We’re almost done with the first draft, and hopefully we’ll have it ready for review in early Feb.

We’ve been using Skype to talk back and forth about the story (he lives in the U.K., so Skype has been very useful). And we’re using Google docs to collaborate on the actual writing. That’s been … ok. From a collaboration standpoint, it’s great. We can edit one another’s stuff, add comments, etc., without handing a document back and forth via email. I was trying to do the Word doc shuffle in the beginning, and it was a real pain in the ass. But from a pure word processing standpoint, Google docs has a way to go. It’s a beta, so I’m trying to be charitable about it, but there are quite a few quirks (bugs) and quite a few features missing that I’m used to in Word. But it’ll work for this one story, and I’m sure it’ll improve as time goes on.

The Winds of Khalakovo has taken baby steps forward. I’m going to finish up the solar story with Steve and then hit it hard. I’d really like to have the second draft wrapped up in a few months and then send it out for full review.

Winds clocked in at 160,808 words. I had planned on 120k for this novel, so obviously I overran. But (and this is a bug, erm, but) about midway through I realized that I needed one more point of view to truly tell this story. I had had two already, so I ended up with three POVs, and I think it turned out quite well. There are two warring factions of a Grand Duchy plus a group of downtrodden pacifists, so the three points of view allow the entire story to be told.

It’s really tough to tell at this point, as close as I am to the story, but it feels really good right now. The end is awfully rough. I felt myself wanting to finish really badly. I tried to curb those emotions, knowing that if I rushed it would just create more work on the other end, but I know I still ended up rushing some of the last several chapters. Even so, I’m excited about it. It feels like something I can hang my hat on. Or rather, that I’ll be able to once I get around to the next several drafts.

In other news, my house flooded. I’m in the Midwest, which as you know got positively hammered. Racine and Milwaukee counties got it rough in Wisconsin, though not nearly as bad as Iowa. Our house? Sewer backup. The good thing? It wasn’t as bad as some. The bad thing? No insurance. I would have sworn I had insurance for this, but the insurance guy says no. Still need to check my old insurance statements to see if it was there and was somehow dropped. The good news? It might be covered because of a faulty sump pump. Won’t know until the end of the month when the insurance adjuster gets beyond the fourteen-thousand other claims he has to evaluate.

I  was unfortunately gone for all of this. I got called away to a trip to Sweden. I’m still here, in fact. Writing from my hotel in Stockholm. Joanne called me a few days after I arrived and told me about the water she had found in the basement. It seemed like a small thing at first. Thought it was just rainwater. But over the next few days it became apparent that (A) it was sewer water and (B) even a small sewer backup is a big, big deal. Lots and lots of cleanup to take care of. And our basement was partially finished. So of course the water got just high enough to hit the insulation, and when that happens, it wicks the sewer water right up. They had to rip out the drywall to 16" and tear out all the insulation. Carpeting? Yeah, that too. All gone.

My only consolation is that I hadn’t yet finished everything I was going to finish in the basement. I’m actually glad at this point I didn’t put more money into it, because a certain portion of that would have been washed down the drain, almost completely literally.

Joanne kicked some serious ass while I was gone. I felt like crap not coming home, but the customer I’m visiting, Ericsson, would have needed me to come back in just a few weeks, and by the time I could have arrange to get home, the cleanup crew would have been essentially done with everything. So I would have come home to exactly what I’m coming home to tomorrow: a big gaping hole where my partially finished basement used to be. But that didn’t keep me from feeling like shit for quite some time. I still feel bad, but at least I won’t have to head back to Sweden, and I can just concentrate on recovering from the whole mess.

Again, I’m actually not terribly torn up about this. It’s just stuff, and a lot of people had it way worse than we did. We’ll recover in time. Hopefully the gubment will be able to help the people who lost their homes and/or livelihood.

Still, despite the feeling of pressure and the potential of not quite getting there, I’m very excited to have it almost wrapped up. The story feels good. It’s not nearly as raw as a typical first draft would be because I often go back and revise as I feel the need. Not prose stuff, but plot stuff. In the past I’ve gotten in trouble by simply plowing ahead, either not knowing any better or figuring I can revise on the second draft. Trouble is, at least for me, I could head down a wrong path, and that could lead to all sorts of wrong decisions that would force me to revise much, much more than I would have if I had simply gone back and fixed the offending, ill-advised left turn. At this point in my writing I’m rather sensitive (I prefer to think of it as attuned) to the plot and whether or not its taking the right path. The problem with that is that I could become too safe, so I’m sensitive to that as well. Writing is a constant struggle to keep the story interesting but make it plausible as well – providing twists that are surprising yet believable.

I’ll wrap Winds, Take 1, soon, and I hope I can get it ready for beta readers (including my agent) by mid-summerish.

Also, wish me luck. I’m supposed to hear back relatively soon on my previous novel, The Tears of Tendali, from a couple of editors.