Novel Roulette

I don't presume to know how many other novelists out there are like me and constantly playing roulette with their projects.

I figure I've got seven fiction novels that I've created detailed worlds for and written large portions of their plots. Seven. And I am not the most productive wordsmith in the world by a long shot. So I end up focusing on maybe two of these projects at a time, only one if I'm either extremely inspired or if I'm being perversely focused, but usually two so I can world build for one (which is fun and relaxing) when I'm stuck in actually writing the other one.

For example, here's how the past five months of my writing life have gone:

October: got wicked excited about plotting Grave of the Goddess and decided to write that while waiting for NaNoWriMo to start. Pretty much focused exclusively on this world even while nominally working on some kind of plot and characters for my planned NaNo, Solemn Vow. Also spent a ton if time in the NaNo forums soaking up all things writing.

November: ditched the chick lit idea immediately to write Grave of the Goddess for NaNo. Worked only on this all month. Wildly successful except for one week where I got bogged down by a slow part of the plot and the presence of relatives.

December: relative crash and burn. Set everything aside for several weeks. Wrote nothing, not even journal entries. I still can't decide if I did this to recover from NaNo or if the bad effects of unemployment were starting to gnaw at my creativity.

January: slow slow slow. Set Grave aside entirely. Instead, spent all my creative time invested in rereading and thinking about how to restructure A Hunter's Fire, and also creating ridiculously detailed history for my Stormwatch series.

February: got a freaking job! Also completely lucked out as the job has copious amounts of free time where no one cares if I'm reading or writing my own stuff. I've finally come back to Grave of the Goddess, just as enthused as November. But Face the Flames and Stormwatch are at my fingertips too.

I don't know if there's something wrong with me that I operate like this - with a writing backup, waiting to see where the ball lands today. But that's how it seems to be.

Strike That, Reverse It

Strike everything I said about Stormwatch being my superbook project. My real project is going to be.... dun dun dun... Mortal Coils! I've set up a glittery new blog for it and the first post is already up. I figure this is a great way for me to develop the story further AND to get to hear from more of the characters than I had originally planned. Everyone's a winner! Drinks all around!

Blog is HERE.

Superbooks

My best writing friend and I have long-discussed writing exercises that are especially good for character development.

A few years back, I began a word document titled "Subconscious Theater" specifically for this purpose. It's the place all of my characters go when I'm not writing about them. It's a place where they can interact with each other - across genres and plot lines - and tell me things about them I might not find out otherwise. I add bits and pieces to this document all the time, but most especially when I have writer's block. It doesn't seem to matter how much I can't write in the midst of a novel or short story, I can always get someone to say something to me in the theater.

Anyway, last night, best writing friend was telling me about this man named Henry Darger who worked for years and years as a janitor - and was all the while writing and illustrating a fairly epic fantasy novel (15,145-page, single-spaced manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion). This excited best writing friend into something he's calling superbooks.

It's a writing exercise in which hundreds of characters are treated in four to five page installments in an interconnected world but without necessarily interacting. The purpose is to develop characters, concepts and scenes for later use in conventional writing.

This made me insanely excited because it sounds like a better organized version of my Subconscious Theater, or the soap opera project I've been trying to put together. So I suggested: oh, hey, blog format. And he agreed.

So, here we go. Two superbooks for you to lose yourselves in. Two very different superbooks, I might add.

Best writing friend's can be found here: Godhead of the Immortal Moth-King. He is a fantastic writer (the Terror member of TTT) so I can attest that his blog will definitely be awesome.

Mine will be the polar opposite of his in many ways. A somewhat trashy, but hopefully immersive and possibly surprising, soap opera style story. It can be found here: Stormwatch