The story that I have been working on over at wattpad for some time is now complete.
Stormraven comes in at around 65,000 words, a bit longer than I expected than when I started.
It can be read here.
At some stage I will have to clean it up and turn it inot an e-book – and work on the follow up stories.
The story that I started working on for NaNoWriMo, Stormraven, I am now starting to release as a serial over on wattpad.
For those who do not know about wattpad, it is a site where writers and readers come together to share stories. I have a number of my free stories available there. For me it is another way of trying to raise awareness of my stories.
The plan is to release a new chapter each week, and once it is concluded, to release the whole story via the normal means.
Stormraven can be read here. Feel free to vote and comment. 🙂
In between working to finish off a couple of short story collections, I’ve been doing some world building for an epic fantasy series that I’ve talked of before – The Oncoming Storm. Back some time ago I made a solid start to the first novel (almost 60K words) but it has been sitting idle for a while, something I want to rectify.
In contrast to my other stories, it is a more traditional fantasy, set to have knights and castles and princesses and all that. Yet, as ever, other ideas and inspirations have come in that threaten to change things up again. One thing especially among that are the Polish Winged Hussars, one of the most dominant, and striking cavalry forces of their time.
For a view of what they looked like I found this youtube clip.
So, I’ve been wanting to add something similar to the setting, but somehow retain the knights and also another group, the Warrior Brotherhoods, plus various other groups, which has led to a varied mix, and also decentralised, make up of the setting. I think I may have figured it out as well.
The setting comprises a number of states that form a unified League – while semi-autonomous, they are under a High King. Each state has their own nobles, with their personal collection of retainers. Normally this is where the Knights would figure, but instead I’ve made them more like the old Military Orders, such as the Knights Hospitaller, the Knights Templar, or the Teutonic Knights – independent entities that owe allegiance to no state or noble, but operate across all of them. The Warrior Brotherhoods operate in the same manner, but are a precursor to the Knight Orders, and aren’t made up of noble born like the Knights. The largest of the states, Liantria, home to the High King, is the one that uses the Winged Lancers. The nobles and their retainers form the various units of the Winged Lancers, and when combined they are a formidable cavalry force.
And one of these days I’ll get it all written up and a story finished…
January has come and gone – yes already. One twelfth of the year has already flown by.
Writing wise it was a decent month. Notable points are;
130K words written – mostly rewriting old drafts but still that is progress.
70K done on rewrite of Winter Wolves novel.
10.5K done of rewrite of Dawn of Wolves novella.
Tears of the Mountain published on Smashwords/Amazon.
Halfway into the rewrite of He Stands Between.
Various notes and ideas done for other stories.
Hope I can keep up the pace for February.
Aims for February are finishing off Winter Wolves and hopefully Dawn of the Wolves, plus a short story or two. And trying to market Tears of the Mountain better.
I’m not going to look back at my resolutions for last year – I know that most of them never got done, which is why I normally don’t bother.
It is a good time, however, to look back over 2010 and to look forward to 2011.
2010 was a year of missed opportunities, both writing and otherwise. While I did actually complete my first proper, full length novel, my writing output was way down on what it should have been and that single novel should have been more. Moreover, it is still sitting there gathering dust and hasn’t been used yet, something that needs to be rectified.
2011 needs to see an improvement. I’m not going to make any resolutions – because they will just be broken – but I want to see a lot more writing done, both novels and short stories. I’ve got all these ideas floating around not being used.
I’m going to go over the Pure Escapism page and stories and clean it up, make it look more professional. That includes new and improved covers. I have a few that I’ve worked on and that I need to upgrade the rest to that level.
I’d like to try and add at least one new short story to the collection a month – more of the time permits – and of course to try and exchange the reader base. Cleaning up and polishing the pages here and at Smashwords, plus starting to join up on various forums should help with that a bit.
The big one is of course the novels. I’ve got one complete and two half complete. They need to get completed, polished and made ready as soon as I can. And then I have to make a big decision.
Do I try for an agent and publisher, a long and laborious process that has no guarantees of any success?
Or do I try and go independent? There is no success guaranteed there either but there will at least be something to show for it, which is more than would happen if I ended up with no agent. It would require a whole new skillset – that of self marketting – but there have been a number of successes to show it is not impossible.
I was poking around some old half written stories and drafts and game across one I started some time back – and found it was 47K in length. That is a fair chunk of novel just sitting there getting no use so I thought I would return to it and finish it, as I have plans for it.
The story itself is currently called He Stands Between, the first book of a epic fantasy series called The Oncoming Storm. As with any epic fantasy it has the full array of tropes; a host of characters, daring deeds and heroic last stands, noble heroes and dastardly villains, world shaking events and everything else that epic fantasy holds dear. There are still a few details to work out, such as the name of one of the main characters. He has been through a couple and I am still not entirely satisfied.
The rewrite is coming along great, almost to 10K words from only just over 2 days. I am slowly ramping up as I haven’t had a good stretch of writing for a while. Hopefully I can match the output when I first started writing the draft, back last year. The first 40K came in just 7 days.
By the end of the year, which is only 13 days away, I’d like to well on the way to finishing. I am still considering my options with what to do with it once done, but one main one is a thought to go indie with it.
Mist and Shadows 