What is The Lost Tower

So I said after the first hundred pages I would let people in on what I was working on. I thought about pulling some JJ Abrams crap and releasing a single word or something like that but decided that would be silly.

I'm sure you all remember The Long Night (all of you did read it right... of course you did). Anyway for a while I had been thinking how do I write a sequel to a story that has a very very definitive ending. I'm not spoiling anything by saying that it doesn't end with a to be continued or end of part one tag.

Anyway I finally figured out a sort of sequel. The Lost Tower builds off of things that were set up in The Long Night and takes place in the same world fifty years later. Think of it as kind of how The Hobbit is related to Lord of the Rings. That is also an apt comparison when it come to talking about scope, Because if this book is as long as I think it might turn out to be, I have at least a dualogy on my hands but probably a trilogy. That said I am going to write it as a single book and then worry about splitting later. I think stopping and splitting The Conflict Within is what killed my interest in the story.

So What is the story?

Rumors are coming from the west that Tygosh the longtime rival of the now fractured city of Lysta is building an army and marching on a war of conquest. A shadowy noble puts together a group of adventures to seek out a long lost relic called the Star of Fle'net, which he believes might help unite and save the city.

The only information they have about the star mentions three towers, and so the group sets out on their quest.

That is all for now, I'll do some character profiles or something a bit later down the line. For now it was just cool to dust off the blog.

Another book down.

Another book has fallen off the list.  Killing to Know my first NaNo project is now available for the Nook and Kindle.

The other part to this post is that I said I wouldn't shave or get a haircut until I was finished, as a way to push me along.  I got it up late yesterday and thus didn't have a chance to get trimmed. A day late is still better then nothing at all.

Me looking all rugged and such.

Now that it is over, I got a trim and ran a razor across my face, that scruffy was thicker then it looks, not if only it would grow together so I could have a proper goatee.

Me with a bit less hair.

Now who wants to guess how scruffy I'll look when I finish Breaking Overnight?

A meditation on killing Characters

One thing that I have learned from the school of Ice and Fire and pay cable over the last few years is that when there is a real chance that characters can die, a story has more weight and the consequences feel more real. And I'm not talking red shirt number one or viper piolet third from the left, I'm talking the big main my name is in the openning credits people.

It is a lesson I have taken to heart and when the fancy strikes me while building a story I won't hesitate to kill somebody, especially when I am outlining, I will just off people like it is going out of style, or like I am about to be canceled by the network. So it was a great shock to me yesterday when getting close to the end of the outline for Bodies under 95, that when the notion crossed my mind to kill somebody my pen hesitated, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't be the ruthless killer of my creations that I usually am.

I was taken aback by this, thought about it, and made a choice, you will just have to read to see what happons, but it was the first time that I struggled with the dessition to kill somebody. The person is central but hardly major, and not anybody I am horribly attached to so I can't say why I dithered on the call to end their text based imagenary life.

Maybe i am just learning to be less ruthless, or maybe the story just didn't demand their death I don't know, but it is interesting, and rest assured that more and more people will die I'm not going completely soft.

STING BREAKING OVERNIGHT

I mentioned Breaking Overnight in the last post when I was talking about editing by hand so I thought now might be a good time to go into detail about what that project was. (Yes I have to much on my plate sue me.)

Breaking Overnight as you might have gathered from the title is about news, something that is near and dear to me, seeing as how it pays the bills. The story can be summed up simply as Die Hard in a TV station, but there is a little bit more to it then that, as my bad guys are there for something more then a robbery. Because really what is there to steal in a TV station besides some cameras?

I think that the story of the books gestation is a bit more interesting for a blog post so that is the story I am going to tell.

It started back when I worked overnights as an idea for a movie. I didn't have a good motivation for the bad guys at the time and it didn't get more then a few pages in length. This was right at the end of my script phase when I would start something and then abandon it in a fit of depression. I envisioned the climax one rainy morning on my way home as I was walking out of the station . Stopping to look up at the tower, with it's blinking lights I saw two men chasing each other up it, exchanging gunfire in a raging storm. That idea never left me even after I moved on from overnights to just nights.

Then in July when they were putting the finishing touches on our former general manager, now regional VP's new office, the motivation for the bad guys popped into my head. That motivation also gave me who they were and what they were all about. With that figured out I sat down and started outlining. And no I'm not going to give it away, that would ruin everything now wouldn't it. We know it isn't robbery, so if you can guess what it is in the comments, I'll give you a free copy when the book comes out. (Yes that is a shameful ploy to get comments and conversation going, Hope it works.)  

The project might have fallen by the wayside again, except I mentioned it at work, and people started to pester me about it. Go figure that a bunch of news people would be interested in a thriller that takes place in a TV station that might or might not be loosely based on where they work.  Who would have thought?

So mid way through July I set out to write the book, establishing the same word count goals that I used for National Write a Novel Month, so about 2000 words a day.  I plugged along only falling off the wagon a few times, and finished in just over a month, with 62,000 words or there abouts.  I am happy with the story and charators.  After taking a few weeks off from the book, ten days dictated by Irene stealing my power and another few by work on The Long Night. When I was able to return I polished the first draft once, and gave it to a alpha reader just to make sure that everything made since plot wise.

Now I am working through each chapter by hand and then running it through Serenity so that I can pass it off to a real person to be edited without to much embarrassment.  Once that is done we will be very close to that book being released to the word. I am excited about this one because it takes place in a word that I know relatively well, unlike one that I am just making up or kind of faking based on things I have read in the past.

The Age of Chaos: part 1

As a creative person I get stuck on ideas that never seem to leave me, but never seem to get done. The Age of Chaos - a four volume Sci-Fi work - is one of them. The germ of the idea started way back on April 1, 1996. I was watching an episode of Babylon 5, one of the best shows ever, and had an idea for a space ship.  The next day in school I started drawing, it was flat and 2D but it got my mind racing. I drew these space ships everywhere and kept improving them, and slowly coming up with history and factions for them basically back story. I wouldn't start writing the first volume of the Age of Chaos, The Conflict Within until early 1998.

The EAS Enterprise plus escort. 

Virginia Class Battleship

I was sitting in health not paying attention, so much of my early writing history involves me sitting in class not paying attention. I was day dreaming probably drawing a spaceship when a scene took form, so I started writing. I kept writing stashing the pages of louse paper into my note books. The story kept growing and I had no idea where I was going with it.  

The basic plot is as follows. The Earth Alliance is at an uneasy peace with its neighbors and pushing farther out into the stars when a Civil War starts up, fueled by oppression on Mars and other worlds most notably in the Slavic sector. As the Civil War picks up the humans are caught unaware when a much larger threat starts to loom, I'll give you a hint ET doesn't want to just phone home. 

My influences were from just about everywhere though mostly, Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Space Above and Beyond, and Tom Clancy. That last one doesn't seem to fit but his 80's techno thriller fingerprints are still all over the basic plot and feel of the story.  As I have gone on other places have worked their way into my influence list, like Dune, Starship Troopers and Battlestar Gallactica, but they don't have the same foot print on the story as the original influences did. Maybe it's because I'm not 13 anymore and see that I'm leaching ideas or maybe it is because they just don't fit as well into the story that I already have.

Of course when I started it wasn't this massive four book cycle that didn't come till 9th grade right now in early 1998 I'm just writing, writing and loving every second of it. But come summer I would fall out of love with The Conflict Within and move on to a different idea that was set in the same world that was 8th grade that was when the Aliens came into the picture. 

 The First Stand (1999)

While doing free writing in my creative writing class another story started taking shape that at first I didn't know was in the same world as The Conflict Within, but by the end of the day I knew it was not only in the same world but a sequel. I would take that story to completion over the next two or three mouths. Every class I was in you could see me pull this massive wad of pages from my blue day planer and start working. I was more into my story then just about anything else at school.  Once I finished that I started a few other partial stories that didn't go anywhere but that left me with all of these bits, and it wouldn't be until high school after a breef flutation with Fan Fiction that I would put all of that toghter as a massive series that still haunts me when I sit down to work on something else. 

To be Continued.

The Great Jet Rescue

It was a sunny day in November of 1994. I only know this because we lived in southern California and everyday was sunny. In my room was a computer that my dad had built in a class, that had been stuffed with games, like the original Duke Nukem and Woldenstein 3D. Thre was also this little word prossessor called the Children's publisher or somthing like that. It was a simple program that allowed you to write and put clip art into your documents. Clip art was all the rage in th early 90's. i also remember that it had a four page limit for how long your documents could be.

Well it was a nice day, and I wasn't outside playing for some reason that I can't remember 16 years later but I was inside, and this would be the first time that the need to write somthing gripped me and was spit out onto a computer.

The Great Jet Rescue (Nov 20, 1994)

The plot was simple an experimental jet goes haywire and flies towards the sun, and NASA scrambles a shuttle to rescue the pilot. Being ten and LD the words that flowed didn't make that much sense. I had forgotten a few important things such as giving my characters names, denoting when people talked or used any kind of punctuation at all. Clearly I was a young Faulkner.

After finishing my brilliant story I went to my mom to get her to read it. she didn't understand what was going on in my wall of text, and so we started piecing it toghter and creating somthing that was an actual readable story. all of the characters had color names, and after a lot of cryptography all the dialogue got quotation marks and paragraphs were laid out. add a little clip the title and BAM I had a short story written before noon.

I should have written more and sold them at school like people did with little comic strips. Oh well missed opertunity.  Full text of The Great Jet Rescue

Prologue

As far as introductions go I’ll get the basic stuff out of the way. My name is Sean I’m in my mid 20’s live in Virginia, and I’m a writer. Not a published one yet, more a hobbyist with my eye on the prize if you will. I’m just some guy with a computer and an overactive imagination that writes because I can't draw to save my life, that and I find it very relaxing. That is what this blog will be about.  I want to trace my steps as a writer how I got here and where I am going in the future towards publication, wither that be with a self-published eBook or though the more traditional style. So this will be the story of my life told kind of Memento style with this being the middle.

I have been coming up with stories for as long as I can remember, and there is a box in my parents’ house as proof that is filled with little story books. Just a few bound pages of louse leaf paper. On those pages is my bad handwriting and equally bad pictures  

 Racetrack of the Underworld (1994-5)

Let’s just say that my decision to transfer to pros instead of sticking with illustrations was probably a good idea. Most of them were about pirates and space men, the fantasies of a child that I have never gotten away from, not that pirates and space men are bad things at all.

Later on I would move on to drawing space ships on my spelling tests and those space ships would lead to hundreds of hand written pages stuffed into my middle school binders telling the epic story of a civil war and alien invasion. It’s an epic story that I would come back to in High school and again this year. It is the recurring dream that I keep having, even though I know I’m not quite ready yet to see it all the way though. 

 The Conflict within (1998 draft)

People used to look at me funny when I would open my binders in 8^th grade and pull out the novel I was working on, and set upon it like a starving child, filling the pages with my horrific handwriting.  In between all of that I dipped my toe in Star Wars fanfic, mostly to impress a girl but also because I’m a massive Star Wars geek. And in ’99 we as a culture still didn’t know just how damning the Phantom Menace was going to be to the saga that we all loved so dearly.

Then in High School I found my second love, screenplays. It started as an exercise in trying to write a video game movie that didn’t suck, and resulted in my first script The Lord of Terror which was based on Diablo. Looking back it wasn’t a great script, but it did show me that scripts write so much faster then prose, that I ditched the 50,000 completed words and 200 page outline that was the age of chaos to embark on making movies. 

 Fellowship of the Slacker (2003)

Eventually the movie well would dry up, mostly killed by my imagination being too big for my budgets, and World of Warcraft. Eventually on a lark I would return to pros in late 2009, while doing prewriting work on a Dragon Age mod that I never made. But those ten pages of prose to get my mind turning and the resulting outline turned into my first finished novel, The Long Night, and it has been forward down the writing path ever since. 

 The Long Night (2010 3ed draft)

I didn’t fully feel the desire to self publish till I got a Nook last year and dove into the world of eBooks, and realized that most of the ones out there by real people aren’t bad at all. It was a revelation to me as a writer because my last experience with people putting up their stuff outside the imposing gates of a publisher was fanfic and most of that is overblown at best and just Han Luke slash at worst.

As now as I write this I’m sitting on two books out with people to be torn apart in a hail of red ink, looking at one as my toe in the water for self publishing and the other as a toe in real publishing. I’ve got a third that I’m working on, and a whole slew of outlines ideas and characters banging on the walls of my brain ready to live a second life on paper. So hold on to your hats as I take you for a ride down memory lane and forward into what I’m doing right now. I hope you enjoy.