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This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. It follows on from the old one, which is now full. An index of topics from old and new can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. And to suggest topics! |
| Novel #31 Voyage Home is a young adult fantasy story that clocks in at about 70k words. In it, a young man and his girlfriend are transported to a world created and ruled by a witch. But because the young man has wounded her, her sister now has the opportunity to destroy the world, and it is up to him to save it. However, he wants to find the girlfriend first. He hooks up with a couple of part-elves, and eventually the battle is joined. It was the proposed first part of a trilogy. Voyage North was to be next, with a new, internal antagonist, and Voyage Out was to be last, culminating in a battle in our world. Now, this story… It has had the most amazing, long gestation of anything I have ever written. It was started in 1987, even before I started Into The Crystal. A lot of the elements that later appeared in Into The Crystal were started here – teenagers thrust into a fantasy world, fighting evil, that sort of thing. But this one was a meandering nothing and so when …Crystal took off, it was rejected at about 3k words. A few years later I revisited it and started to flesh out especially the main character a bit more, but like so many of my male characters, he was a whiny emo-lite and I just didn’t like him. I created over-complicated situations and, again, stopped. I was writing myself into a corner. I finished my first uni degree in the early 1990s and started working with teenagers, and had a slightly better grasp of what normal teenagers wanted (having worked out I was probably not ‘normal’) and decided that this story would be perfect as a story for teenagers. So I rewrote chunks of it, discarded bigger chunks and tried again. But I still fell into the same hole of making my world not make sense. Fast forward a decade and I was at uni again, doing my second degree (education). One of the subjects was children’s literature, and so out this came again, and yet again I tried to work it. By now Harry Potter books were the big sellers and I tried to fit into that world of modified and borrowed mythologies, but it just didn’t feel right. The story had blown out to around 30k words and I was reluctant to let so much work go away, but I did. Then, in about 2007, after a few years in the classroom, I pulled it out again and rejected a lot of the changes, reducing it by about 10k words and tried again. I worked out the ending and completely changed the bad guys/monsters. It was going okay, but other stories got in the way and distracted me, and so it fell by the wayside yet again. So now we reach February of 2013. I found an online entry for a competition looking for young adult fiction that I had previously entered (and been short-listed for). I wanted to try again, but none of my completed young adult stories were young enough, and they had increased the minimum word length to 42k (max 80k). So I went through the incomplete stories and found this. I drew a map of the world! That was it, the spark that set me off. Always draw a map, people! Then came TAFE and the novel I decided to write for that, so for another few weeks it was again on the back-burner. Writing that so quickly had my brain wanting to write more. But finally I reached it. After 26 years I worked out what to do with this story. I think the only part I have kept is the opening 2 paragraphs, the names and the basic set-up. Everything else has changed completely. I rewrote everything from chapter 6 on after seriously modifying chapters 1 to 5. I changed the bad guys and monsters again. I upped the blood. I increased the feelings of being in the wrong place in the main character. I drew a more detailed map of my new world. I decided that if the world had not had a war in centuries they would not know how to wage one, so even someone with the limited experience of the main character would be a military genius in that situation. In short, I finally worked out how to make everything make sense, as much as anything can make sense in a fantasy world populated by elves, dwarves and anthropomorphic man-beasts. One thing I added in the final draft was that the kid from our world clearly has no idea how to use a sword, so the sword takes him over, does the fighting for him, puts him in that mind-set… but because he has connected with it, the negative is he gets a headache when he is too far ay from the weapon. Little things like that I would not have done in 1987 when I began this story. We learn as we get older. I re-read it over the past few days and – you know something? – it’s actually not horrendous or anything. Sure, it’s still not brilliant, but nothing a good edit couldn’t fix once the story’s gone past a beta reader. It was never entered in the competition, by the way. So that was a long and strange birth for this story. It’s a reason why I never throw any of my writing stuff away – you never know when it will become something worth working on. Still, 26 years. That’s a long time. Excerpt: (part of a fight scene from ch 27) I saw it coming and stepped out of the way as it landed, its claws striking me in the chest. I looked down at my torn shirt and the blood flowing from the gashes, and then back at the creature. It grinned at me and I punched as hard as I could, somehow catching it in the eye. It stumbled back a few steps, then rushed me. I had no idea what to do, so I jumped to meet it in mid-rush, but it seemed to anticipate my move and slid to the side. I turned to face it, but it was already waiting and its fist slammed into the side of my head. I felt the eye swell immediately. I staggered back and it punched me again, then opened its mouth wide. I kicked it between the legs as hard as I could, but all it did was shut its mouth and stare at me, then shake its head. I somehow dodged its own kick, but did not see the tail coming, which struck me in the stomach and doubled me over. The animal hooked my head under its arm and used its other claw to lift me into the air, then drop me across the nearest branch of the tree. All the air was knocked out of me and I sort of rolled off to land heavily on my back on the ground. Hyla screamed again, but her voice and the buzzing sound in my head had taken a back seat to the blood thumping through my brain. One of the clawed hands picked me up by the hair and then both hands grabbed me around the neck. I was hefted off the ground and swung in a semi-circle. The hands let go of me and I felt like I hung in mid-air for a moment before I landed on my stomach once again, this time flat on the ground. Breathing became a little more difficult and I had trouble feeling my legs. Look, it’s not a masterpiece, but I think this longer discussion of my work shows that time is irrelevant when it comes to writing. I do need to go through it again, then probably give it to my daughter to beta read, then see how I go if I decide to sell it. One thing I did notice was a complete lack of mobile phones; I am going to have to include them somehow if I am going to aim it for a modern audience. Despite 26 years of rewrites, it is still set in 1987! Writing is weird. |
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