Author’s Log 2709.19

Author’s Log 2709.19

Slow progress on the editing at the moment.

Mostly due to the editing and pre-publishing of my new Workbook for my nonfiction, which you can see over at Website Planning Guide.

I am at about 70% editing of the book, and spending time inspecting the nature of my characters at the moment. Especially the secondary characters. Once I opened this process it was like a can of worms. YOU develop one character a little better then you have to check them all.

In the long term it is the right thing to do but progress has slowed because of it.

Key Work of Late:

  • Editing the book
  • Character reviews
  • Adding more into the world wiki I am using to manage all the elements
illustration of a fantasy landscape with a forest and a river gorge in the distance

Author’s Log 2607.19

The last month has been a busy one in matters unrelated to my fiction writing, so there’s been a break from making solid progress.

In completing the latest Non-fiction draft, i set myself a reward for a trip away to reconnect with my novel and get new energy into the editing process.

I never had too much trouble sitting down to write, but the discipline of editing every day hasn’t stuck fully with me yet.

The reward week away on my own to rebuild momentum has been a big success, with my latest editing of A Fool’s Errand at over half the book.

It has been super helpful to get up every day and block out half the day with no other task but editing. That of course included new writing as well.

Key Work of Late:

  • Editing more than 50% of the book
  • Writing new chapters
  • Checking in on key elements of my storyworld
  • Finding some inconsistencies and correcting them
  • Adding more into the world wiki I am using to manage all the elements
Author’s Log 1406.19

Author’s Log 1406.19

At times it feels like I am back at the very beginning writing the first few scenes, and the end of the tunnel is not even imaginable let alone finding any light there.

The editing and structural fixes, require lots of time resolving world building elements, and components needed in the later books, that I find myself seemingly editing two paragraphs of real words and the rest all background work or research.

After such a lengthy process there are moments where the temptation would be to either just stop all together, although that’s not really my nature, or to rush it out.

The goal with this work is to make it as solid a story as I am capable of at this stage in my writing. That doesn’t mean never bringing it to conclusion by always editing and re-editing, but it does mean working through the story structure and making it as coherent and enjoyable as I can.

Key Work of late:

  • Editing scenes
  • Finalising key parts of the critical elements in my story, such as the key groups in my world, what they are all pushing for, where they come from etc. While each had a skeleton that helped draft the story, the polish is coming from refining those items and my key characters.
  • Adding more world building content to my encyclopedia of my world
Author’s Log 2203.19

Author’s Log 2203.19

Back in the words, and loving it. Currently working through scenes I identified in my structural audit that needed adjustment.
What does that mean?

Well in some cases when reviewing the structure of the story I could see that a key scene’s intensity needed to be raised. Think of a scale, if it was only a 3 it might need to be a 5 or a 6 in the context of where the story was.

Other scenes that just aren’t needed or are wrong for the story need to be re-written or removed.

While it took me longer than I wanted (or expected) to go through the structural editing the value now is very clear. Each day I pick off a scene and rewrite it to make the changes.

It’s so tempting to adjust other parts of the scenes as I read through, such as sentence structure or grammar, but I know at this point that getting the storyline to be complete is the key to getting this book published.

Key Work of late:

  • Editing scenes
  • Researching dyes, chalk, home cloth making in times gone by
  • Adding more world building content to my encyclopedia of my world
Author’s Log 0803.19

Author’s Log 0803.19

I had quite a major breakthrough this week which has seen me get back to actually laying more words on paper (figuratively speaking).

The positioning and placement of the key parts of the bad guy, my antagonist, in the story had been halting my progress on Book 1, and the whole editing process had become a grind for solutions to a problem I believed I had.

Lying in bed one evening it dawned on me that my original work on this was ok, and in fact matched some key masterworks and their stories in how they addressed this very issue. It was the best sleep I’ve had in a while that night and in the morning I woke lighter as if a great weight had been removed from my shoulders.

Words are back being written and I am working through the key scenes that needed ‘beefing up’ (I wonder what a vegan version of that phrase would be?) and starting to bring some of the layers of my world into the novel.

I hadn’t realised how much time had passed since I was truly writing words and I recognise now that even if I am researching and editing a book, I also need to be laying down words for another story at the same time to keep my writing hand in. So now I will make sure I am first drafting the rest of Book 2 if I get stuck resolving conceptual issues again.

Key Work of late:

  • writing words. yes real words back into scenes to improve them
  • heaps of research reading around disabilities in medieval and similar periods
  • research into some old crafts from early years
  • a little bit of world building for the map of Book 2 & 3 which isn’t included in my current map.
Misty view with tower

Author’s Log 2402.19

Major advances in settling key issues around my protagonist and her story line have been made in the previous weeks, as part of edit 2. This was significant but slow moving.

It has taken me a lot more time to get my head around resolving key issues in fiction, verse my non-fiction. I have been enjoying learning every week on how best to attack the issues, and instead of writing, editing, writing, editing and never getting pleased with the work, taking time to understand what it is that’s wrong with a certain scene or arc is making it much easier to resolve.

I bounce between Robert Mckee’s Story, John Truby’s Anatomy of a story and Shaun Coyne’s Story Grid as my tools of choice in resolving the story elements. Time will tell if it has worked.

Key work of late:

  • outlining missing scenes required for antagonists story
  • researching elements relating to antagonists story lines
  • adding depth to key placements in world affecting book 1 and 2
  • editing scene chronology and placement

 

Final Stages of Book 1 – A Fool’s Errand

Final Stages of Book 1 – A Fool’s Errand

This update is exciting for me because (a) I’ve hit an important milestone with the current manuscript and (b) because it’s video not words.

Enjoy!

[siteorigin_widget class=”WP_Widget_Media_Video”][/siteorigin_widget]
How one book became two

How one book became two

The entire process of writing fiction has been quite different to my non-fiction writing, as was to be expected.

How much different I definitely misjudged. The ability to write what you know and see it factually correct and know it can be quickly edited and handed to your editor for finalising is completely different to the process I have been through in this Epic Fantasy series.

Once I got into a rhythm using scrivener (my writing software) and the daily goals I ploughed through the first 100,000 words of my 110,000 word initial target.

At that stage I hit a major snag, which was that the story was nowhere near complete and I was a little rudderless as to what to do.

My choices were to bring it to a close as near to the mark I had set as possible and work out how to reshuffle my story to it all fit in, or to keep writing until the end point was reached.

Without providing any spoilers before it’s out, there is a major journey that takes place as part of the story and at this stage I was only about half way through the geographical journey, as well as the plot lines.

I was attending a writer’s workshop in Brisbane and ended up striking up a conversation with successful Crime/Thriller author Rachel Amphlett, who was one of the presenters.

She pointed me in the direction of a book to review, which she felt might help me, Christopher Vogler’s, The Writers Journey.

It was a great start and I pushed on ending up at 180,000 words and arrived at the end of the story, happy, feeling like I had achieved a major milestone – completing the first draft – but not convinced I had told the full story.

I took a week or so off to have a break from the act of writing after the best part of nine months writing every evening after dinner four to five days a week

When that mini break was over I had no idea what to do next. I leapt into marking up the printed manuscript for errors and issues and started taking notes about the key things I needed to fix when I sat back down to rewrite things.

As I went through my doubts about the story came back and it took me several months and a lot of reading and listening (podcasts) to get a grip on what needed to be done.

The biggest aide in this was Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid and his podcast co-hosted with Tim Grahl. As I crammed the podcast and read the book and then brought his method to the story I knew at a macro level I needed to split the story up.

Being a novice this took nearly four months to come to terms with. I didn’t want to make a rash decision and I needed to feel confident in my reasons and that the story would still be true to what I believed it would be when I started it.

Looking back now with a lot of time spent going back over that decision I am glad I did.

It would be easy to think that when you’ve finished the first draft you have it nailed and it just needs some checking. The truth is I had no idea what to do and the different books and podcasts I used as resources all contributed to me beginning to learn the craft of fiction writing.

I was careful to not get too hung up on perfection or needing to know everything and having split my first draft into two novels I then had the better part of 100,000 words for book one and 80,000 words for book two.

I love the beginning and ending of book two now that I have written it and can see so much more to add that I pulled out as I rushed to the completion when it was only one book.

Of course book one and the overall story is so much better now too and so book two will be the better for all the extra work I have done.

That decision to split the first draft was the best decision I could make and in the next post I will talk about the editing process I have been through.

As I write this I am about to start editing the last quarter of A Fool’s Errand (book one) on the first successful major edit.

Building the world

Building the world

World building is important to any fiction novel. In it’s simplest it is just setting up the geographical space that the characters and the story operate in.

For a Fantasy novel where the entire world is a fictional construct it is a much bigger job than it can be in more real life settings. I knew this before I started on the novel and I think the magical, wonderful and diverse worlds of some of the best Epic Fantasy novels I’ve read are a big part of the attraction.

It doesn’t have to be as elaborate as Tolkien’s worlds with languages and history dating back thousands of years, but the richness of the world is part of what makes the story so powerful.

The types of races, their unique characteristics, the geography and architecture all are an open slate to build on.

Which of course is as much a curse as it is exciting.

Where do you start?
How far do you go?

As a first time Fantasy author I could see a bunch of pitfalls in the process of world building. It’s so much easier to research and create worlds than lay down tens of thousands of words in your draft.

What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

For me it was a bit of both. I had to have a world and so I started there. I found an amazing resource ‘A Magical Society: Guide to Mapping’, www.exp.citymax.com, which covers a load of information about making a map that makes sense.

I used this to shape my world and give it the depth and texture it needed with enough earth like realities to make it feel suitable for me. In this series I felt I had enough to do to make the story work and bring out the characters that I didn’t want the additional challenge of a completely different set of worlds that would require much more from me than I might be able to give.

The basics of the geography worked well to give the world some structure, something tangible I could look at and build out from.Then came the detail.

I worked my way through creating the key realms that matched to the landmasses and suddenly it dawned on me how much more was required.

The detail that is needed to give substance to the countries, populations, religions, economies becomes mind boggling. Much as I do day to day I turned to my favourite online organisation tool, Trello, to help me capture and store the information as I created it.

As you can see in the image below, I created lists for each of the realms, sorry no spoilers here I’ve not displayed the tops of each column, and added in the same cards in each one.

Progressively as I finalised the back-story and history to the world and those events that came before when my story started I was able to start filling in the tiles (cards) in trello and not lose my way.

As I created the races and search for visual imagery and words that reflected what I wanted I ended up in an ever-cascading world of research, none of which was actually helping me write anything that would go into my manuscript.

At that point I had a decision to make, which ended up being me choosing to scratch the itch and start the book. And I am so glad I did. The first scenes began flowing out of me and before long I had twenty thousand words on paper (well in my writing app).

Then I hit a hurdle. My main character needed to leave their surroundings and while I knew the immediate surroundings I started having to write they left XXXX and headed to XXXX (well not quite like that), and that became very problematic.

This was my first big pause in my writing, as I then had to go back and finish what I had started. It’s not just about the names of the towns or cities but in being able to adequately describe where the characters are you need to be able to give names and descriptions to rivers or woodlands and mountains.

It took me at least another three months of plotting out all the cities, towns and roads that mattered in my main landmass, and then filling in the elements around it that allowed me to progress.

It worked for me, and the next one hundred and sixty thousand words came out and the world took shape before my eyes.

I am not sure I could have done it much differently; the story directed parts of what the world needed to be and the world has obviously shaped the story.

There’s been a lot more world building happen in the later stages of the editing and revisiting how everything works together, and the beauty of Book 1, A Fool’s Errand, is that it only touches on certain parts of the map and world so there is much more to expand and reveal throughout the series.

Of course there is a map, I have had one carefully created by a wonderful artist and that will be part of our reveals once the book readies for market.

You can see it before others by joining my list.

A float in a sea of fantasy

Why Epic Fantasy?

I love many genres of fiction, but Epic Fantasy has always been one close to my heart.

Growing up, like many people of my era, I read and fell in love with Tolkien and his epic tales. The simplicity of his stories wrapped around such a deep level of world-building hooked me. While many friends hated having to read The Hobbit at school, it exposed me to a plethora of new stories.

Since then there have been many different Fantasy authors I have loved to read. I am not sure if it’s the multiple points of view, the many slow-burning plots crisscrossing through the book or the fantastical magic and anything can happen nature of fantasy.

It’s not long only epic fantasy stories that I read, I also like short fast reads in mystery and crime, I love horror and thrillers and especially dark novels.

When I was very young and first thought I wanted to be a novelist I was reading war novels like Alistair Maclean and Spy thrillers from Le Carre and others.

When I gave up on my journalism degree and moved away from thinking about writing, I lost the idea for a long time, and it lay dormant for many years.

When it forced its way back into my mind, the first novel I drafted was a fantasy novel. I still have the notes of it and map sitting in a folder in a draw in my studio. It burned away in my mind, never really getting much attention, only those few moments when I would grant myself time.

I am not sure it would ever amount to a good story, looking back at it it was a mixed type of tale, and maybe it would be better if it was more in the vein of Terry Pratchett’s style. I am not so sure that style is best suited to me. I love his books, just not sure I could be as funny.

When I did decide not to wait any longer and get on with writing my first novel another small concept surfaced. It started as a tiny idea, and it has quickly evolved into the stories I am writing now.

The In All Jest series grew from a question in my mind about the typical court jester and what if they were more than just a ‘fool’.

Once the idea took hold, it became clear that it was going to be more than just one novel and it did fit the mould of an Epic Fantasy.

Every time I sat and drafted out the bigger story the series has grown. At the moment it looks like a six book series to me.

I never imagined the sort of research I would do to help write the book. Initially, the writing was simple writing until the world-building portion commenced, then I was driven in search of answers to many questions.

What has been intriguing is how much ‘history’ I have ended up studying and how far and wide the Jester existed around the world.

The Jester existed across all continents and in every race in one form or other. Not always like the commonly portrayed Medieval Jester of Europe.

In Asia and Africa, they had powerful character types, rules and dress styles. Interestingly there are similarities in different places which may or may not have influenced each other.

The trickster in some cultures, jester in others and simply the fool all left their impression both in reality and in classic composition. Shakespeare’s fools are known to many.

The In All Jest series I hope provides a different story than the typical one found in straight Medieval history and common tales, one where the Jester is more than just a fool, and the people around the Jester are part of the bigger narrative.

One of the tag lines for book 1, A Fool’s Errand, that I have been playing with is… “It’s all fun and games until somebody kills the Jester!”

illustration o f a fantasy landscape with a castle on a hill against the backdrop of a mountain reaching into the clouds

Why King Darryl?

When I set out on my author journey I had little idea about who I would be as a persona and the way things are shaped by algorithms.

I should have given I have spent my life working with web technology and data, and as soon as I started publishing my non-fiction I realised there was going to be a conflict in the way my name needed to be used for my books.

I have always used my name, Darryl King, for my blogging and work-related publications, under the handles of ireckon which is my company brand. So when I needed to differentiate for search on Amazon and other distribution channels I figured it was time to be a little creative.

My middle initial is E so the pen name D.E. King sprang quickly to mind and of course the play on words as De King was humorous if nothing else.

I then set out to create an online identity and sadly deking wasn’t readily available as a domain name given how close to decking it is.

I initially setup dekingauthor.com as the site for my fiction and had earlier set up an initial series site inalljest.com for the series. This became too much to manage conceptually with the number of sites and identities to manage, so taking the advice I give many clients, I decided to centralise a few things.

I had purchased kingdarryl.com mainly for the humour and as an option but decided with my series all set in fantasy worlds inhabited with kings, queens and of course jesters that why not leap in fully and just flip my name about.

Thus here we have it. Born out of nothing other than a touch of piss-taking, irreverence and the irony that in terms of writing I am the furthest point of being a king, I hope you enjoy the site, understand why we decided to brand it as we have and best of all like the things I am writing.

That’s really the point after all. I am lucky to have the resources to make beautiful websites but all of this is really about my writing. And if a few people enjoy it then that makes it all worthwhile.