Never Say Never
Here's an entry that has nothing to do with guitar playing or bus driving... so if you guessed it's about writing, you're definitely smarter than the average bear.
Either that, or you looked at the icon.
In any case, the progress on Living After Midnight continues (no status bar tonight) and while I've been re-learning old riffs and licks that I should have gotten down a decade ago on the Ibanez, there's been a steadily simmering idea in the back of my head. A while back, I thought that perhaps it would be fun to do a series of novellas set in the Ring Of Fire 'verse. Each of them would take place between books of the series (the first being between Salvation and Covenant, the next between Covenant and Backlash and so on) and would go outside the box a little bit, telling stories that while they didn't deal with the main storyline itself, would still be interesting and fun to explore. If nothing else, they'd be good in an added texture fashion, which is a fancy phrase writers use when they want to write a story set in an imaginary world but can't really justify concretely why their audience should follow along. "Added texture" sounds much better than "bonus material," after all; just ask the New York Times book review.
Finding what story to do for each of them, with the exception of the one between Underworld and the as-yet-untitled fifth book, has been the hard part. Today I figured out what the first one is going to be. When doing the editing for Backlash, I had to pare the story down from 140,000 to roughly 90,000 words, and in doing so lost two major plotlines. One of them was the story that takes place after Underworld... and the other one is now going to be the story between Salvation and Covenant. It was originally rendered in a "telling the story" sort of way, where one character simply explains to another what happened. I think it would be a hell of a lot more visceral if I simply did the story, as it happened, directly from her perspective.
When I thought that today, it was like a nova went off in my head.
While I plug along on Living After Midnight, I have the feeling this story is going to eventually come out, so there you have it... my promised self-imposed embargo on writing after I got this book done and until NaNoWriMo starts up again didn't even last as long as it took me to finish the fucking book I am currently working on.
My muse is a slave driver sometimes. God bless him.
Either that, or you looked at the icon.
In any case, the progress on Living After Midnight continues (no status bar tonight) and while I've been re-learning old riffs and licks that I should have gotten down a decade ago on the Ibanez, there's been a steadily simmering idea in the back of my head. A while back, I thought that perhaps it would be fun to do a series of novellas set in the Ring Of Fire 'verse. Each of them would take place between books of the series (the first being between Salvation and Covenant, the next between Covenant and Backlash and so on) and would go outside the box a little bit, telling stories that while they didn't deal with the main storyline itself, would still be interesting and fun to explore. If nothing else, they'd be good in an added texture fashion, which is a fancy phrase writers use when they want to write a story set in an imaginary world but can't really justify concretely why their audience should follow along. "Added texture" sounds much better than "bonus material," after all; just ask the New York Times book review.
Finding what story to do for each of them, with the exception of the one between Underworld and the as-yet-untitled fifth book, has been the hard part. Today I figured out what the first one is going to be. When doing the editing for Backlash, I had to pare the story down from 140,000 to roughly 90,000 words, and in doing so lost two major plotlines. One of them was the story that takes place after Underworld... and the other one is now going to be the story between Salvation and Covenant. It was originally rendered in a "telling the story" sort of way, where one character simply explains to another what happened. I think it would be a hell of a lot more visceral if I simply did the story, as it happened, directly from her perspective.
When I thought that today, it was like a nova went off in my head.
While I plug along on Living After Midnight, I have the feeling this story is going to eventually come out, so there you have it... my promised self-imposed embargo on writing after I got this book done and until NaNoWriMo starts up again didn't even last as long as it took me to finish the fucking book I am currently working on.
My muse is a slave driver sometimes. God bless him.