Now It Begins!

Work commences on The White Dragon. Writing-wise it will be a leap forward from The Holy White Fire and I keep beating myself up over that. I can’t though. It’s time to let the first one go, warts and all and move on. Paraphrasing the words of Mike Portnoy paraphrasing someone else: “A work is never finished, merely abandoned,” and it’s true in this case. I’ve worked on versions of this story for a long time. Each time I figure I’ve got a new angle on it, I return to what I had because it says what I want it to say. Even published through a legitimate publisher with editors and a person to help promote, it was turned into something that I thought would be a best fit for their line of titles. If they were going to do all that for me, I would absolutely turn it into something geared a little more to what they saw it as - more Young Reader and more “Christian” or at least more spiritually positive. It was that, but young reader meant toning down some of the violence and some of the sexuality - but not by much. Still, it wasn’t really what I wanted and the more I read it, the more grammar and continuity errors I find and I just cringe when reading it. At the time, I didn’t really know better, but now after going through their process and finding other resources to work with, I can see where the text is really burdened by grammatical issues.

I’m not a wizard at grammar, but at this point, if I can’t understand why something is wrong, I at least know to stop fighting with it and re-write it in clearer, more simpler language. My text is deemed “simple” and something that a 5th or 6th grader could easily understand. I’m fine with that. It’s action / adventure not Faulkner, and thus, it doesn’t need to be overwritten. In fact, in cleaning up the text after not having gone threw in some months, it was easy to combine repetitive scenes that didn’t need to be separate, and to take out passages that had nothing to do with the protagonists character arc.

I pulled most of the extraneous material that was “foreshadowing” or “telling the tale in parts” or “puzzle-boxing” and put it back where it came from originally. It streamlined the story of the Holy White Fire coming to Bully and it pointed out that series was about the carriers of the White Fire and not about all the lovely world building and backstory and extraneous characters that I was so in love with. I still shed a tear for my edited precious words… and then move forward!

Today I will work on re-outlining and layout the pieces parts for The White Dragon and I will see what needs to be done with the promotion of the first book which is now available for purchase in paperback in the Amazon BookStore! There is two books worth of material for this part of the story and I need to beat it down and whip it into shape. What was going to be a five book series will only be a trilogy at this point if I can help it. There is so much backstory and history and setting devoted to these books that it will be easy to write any genre of story set within.