The end of fantasy?

{ September 18, 2008 @ 10:53 am } · { Offbeat News }
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Went shopping for books a few nights ago, and noticed the real depth of an issue I feared would happen. Out of all the books in the fantasy section, hardly any of the good ones weren’t supernatural. An odd complaint coming from a vampire worshiper, I know, but….there just isn’t much true fantasy left out there. None that I actually like, anyway. Well over half of all the new books at B&N had something to do with vamps, werewolves, witches, slayers, strange sado-masochistic femmes, and people that are in love with one of the above. What happened to all the dragons and wizards and elves? Did the vampires eat them or something?

Seeing this trend concerns me. It makes me wonder if I’m doing the right thing by writing a pure fantasy book as opposed to a supernatural wonder. Should I abandon my main ms. forever, or just until vampire fever wears off? And believe me, it WILL wear off. Vampires had their reign waaay back when an angsty fellow named Barnabas Collins was the primary neck biter we girls swooned over, and that was in the 60’s and 70’s. Now, 40 years later, vampires have made an incredible comeback. But…it took 40 years. That’s longer than it takes for fashion trends to come back into style.

I love vampires. I really do. I want them to stay forever. But do we have to sacrifice the meaning and mysticism of true fantasy to keep them?

Well, how do you like that?

{ September 9, 2008 @ 2:53 pm } · { Life Updates, The Netbook, Writing In General }
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I finally made myself sit down and work on SaSu, cleaning up the few kinks I saw, and ended up not really changing much at all. A few errors I missed the first time, but nothing major. Also, I regained my sense of direction with that little guy.

For a while, I thought I had completely lost sight of the original purpose of Sapphire Sunlight. That was exactly what I thought my problem was three days ago, but when I opened it and was ready to fix, tweak, and totally erase some of it, I found that I was quite pleased with it thus far, and that the only thing I was guilty of was forgetting my direction. After reading the whole thing from page one to thirty-eight, I think it’s safe to say I’m back on track. Now, if only I can find the little black book I was using to outline everything in. I have no idea where it went to! I know I saw it recently, but it’s not where it should be. Fun.

My main mss. was giving me a headache yesterday, but as usual, after I spent a few hours away from it, I found a way to get around my problem. Things are otherwise going smoothly, and I’m finally getting into the chapters that need less and less reworking done to them. Thank god. Other than the last change, I shouldn’t have much more left to seriously fix. Of course, I could have just jinxed myself with that…

If the story does not progress…

{ August 26, 2008 @ 12:58 pm } · { Edits, The Daily Grind }
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I might have mentioned earlier (haven’t been here in a while, so I really don’t remember much of the last post I made) that I revised the prologue of my main ms. to death. There is so much aqua colored font in that chapter that it is positively insane what I had missed the first three times I edited it, and up until this weekend, I thought chapter one and three had suffered the heaviest rewriting. But as I said, that was up until this weekend.

While painstakingly going through and attempting to revise through chapter seven, I encountered a problem. Since I had trimmed four pages off of chapter three and added two new ones, the changes, naturally, had a ripple effect. If I had fought for it, I suppose I could have edited chapter seven to death like I was originally planning, but then a certain phrase came to mind right in the middle of my struggle. “If the story does not progress, you have a mess.” In other words, make sure the tangents don’t take you so far away from them main storyline that you end up somewhere in Oz.

Just like that, I decided to do the most drastic thing I have done to date. I marked chapters seven through nine with the grey highlights of future deletion, went back to make sure everything dealing with that entire ordeal was adjusted accordingly, and found that most of chapters four through six either needed to be marked for death, or revised in bright pink font to show a complete story rewrite. In the end, I had to jump from chapter four to chapter ten, killing off a massive 9,271 words. And the fun hasn’t ended yet.

After contorting chapter ten enough to make all of Cirque du Soleil cry out in agony, I saw that the next step in my journey would send chapter eleven to hell and back again. You see, I liked the encounter held between chapters seven and nine, and unfortunately, that encounter is very detrimental to one of the aspects of the plot. So now I need to go through, splice the critical factors from chapter eight-ish into chapter eleven, kill what I don’t need, and somehow survive to see the end of a–hopefully–much brighter tunnel.

The revisions so far have been for the best, improving the plot, flow, and interactions immensely, but seeing what I just had to do and knowing that I’m going to stop the book about five chapters early, I have to wonder how much of a book I’ll actually have left…

Progress

{ August 5, 2008 @ 11:56 am } · { Edits, Life Updates, Netbook Progress }
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Now that you’re older and wiser for it, how often have you thought back, really thought back, to the very first thing you really wanted to be when you grew up, and wish, now, that you had managed to do it?

As the job hunt continues–fruitless though it may be–I can at least be thankful that, while I am unemployed, I can get at least through the revisions of my fantasy book without the hassle of life on top of that.
Whether I’ll make my personal deadline before I find a job is a very certain uncertainty, but I will happily take whatever progress I can grasp at.

Thus far, the prologue has had a very long face-life. I mean it–the prologue is longer than my first chapter! In ms. format, the prologue is nine pages long, while the first chapter is only six. I was originally working to shorten the prologue, as I–and many others are guilty of this, I’m sure–usually skip it if it’s more than a paragraph when I’m reading. Shameful, but true! The information in mine is…well, it isn’t critical to the plot at all. I use the prologue as a place to insert back-story and information that you don’t really need to know, but would help you get a sense of what the overall story would be about. I made it so that if you did skip it like I would, the first chapter would still catch your eye, and with any luck, reel you in just the same.

Chapter one had the next largest amount of re-working that got done. I hacked it down by three pages and replaced them with one and a half fresh ones, which was a very good move. The hook has a lot more bite to it now, and that is very pleasing. Chapters two through four we adjusted accordingly, but nothing overly impressive had to be changed. I cut down the end of chapter four by three pages as well, and only replaced it with a paragraph.
The first twenty or so chapters of the fantasy book are probably going to eat me alive with minor errors, but I’m hoping it won’t take too much time away from being able to continue work on SaSu. It’s only a side job, and obviously takes a backseat where my novel is concerned, but I’m working on a schedule right now to get that done at the same time. Only time will tell if it works out.

In retrospect

{ July 22, 2008 @ 11:17 am } · { Life Updates, Netbook Progress }
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Looking back at the last three chapters, I noticed something. I….really am not happy with them. That’s why I haven’t been updating the chapters lately. It’ll probably be another week before something new is posted, but until then, I’m going to work on sprucing up chapters seven through nine until they make me happy. Only then will I be able to move on to chapter ten.

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