As some may have noticed, I haven’t been posting as much on here of late – though that isn’t due to lack of want, just lack of time and topics.
But I do have news, of a type.
A few weeks back I went through an old novel I had started quite a long while back now – Tears of the Mountain – looking for some information that was in it I wanted for another story. In doing so I was surprised at just how much I had done. The synopsis/rough draft was around 44,000 words long and better than I remembered.
Long story short, I returned to it. The rewrite is now at 55,000 words and still plenty to go. That is just the main plot, which has another 5-10,000 words left in it. Then I have to go and do the secondary plot and weave them together. All up I reckon come the end it’ll be 90,000 words long, which is a good length for a novel.
Once the rewrite is done I can start on editing and polishing and then the long hunt for rejections, er an agent.
Just a quick recap on what the story is about. It features Halir the explorer, adventurer and historian who features in Gifts and Sacrifices and also Tomb of the Tagosa Kings. It takes place about twenty years after the first and ten before the second and is one of my gunpowder fantasy stories. It features deserts, lost cities, a treasure hunt using an old map (or in this case an old journal), monsters, magic and a war.
Here is the unedited, unpolished opening few paragraphs.
The sheet of lightning flared bright, rending apart the night’s sky with its intense brilliance. For a split second it illuminated white the city that huddled around the sheltered bay, weathering the wild storm. Then the light was gone and it its wake came booming peals of thunder that rolled on and on through the night.
The wild tempest that had raged through out the day and battered the city had eased as night had fallen, though constant drizzling rain was still being swept across the city, collecting in growing puddles along streets and rooftops. A breeze gusted, swirling the falling rain in billowing veils before it, splattering it across a cloaked man as he scampered on down a street. Droplets of water beaded across his hood and cloak, running down them in rivulets to fall to the already sodden ground. His sandalled feet and the lower portion of his baggy trousers which peeked out from beneath his cloak were already soaked through from having splashed through puddles of water.
Another raucous crack of thunder rumbled across the rooftops overhead. For the cloaked man it carried within it the ominous overtones of the executioner’s drumbeats as they ushered their victims to their final fate. A shiver ran through the man, and not from the cold for despite the storm the night’s air was fairly mild. Worry frayed at nerves tightly strung, and in each shadow he half expected lurking danger. What he was undertaking he did not see as treason. Ho could it be, supporting the rightful prince? There were many others that would not share that view, and foremost amongst them was the current prince. He knew that if he were to be apprehended then it would not be the thunder he heard but the drums themselves.
Mist and Shadows 