"Book 1" Status Update
Published: 03/04/2015 10:17 pm
When I decided to write a novel, it was before I believed I really could write a book. NaNoWriMo took away my fears of writing so many words. I've still yet to master the art of 'silencing the inner editor,' but I really feel I have the capability of actually writing a book (maybe not a good book, but a cohesive book nonetheless).
Before I wrote Sentry for NaNoWriMo I had actually started writing a much more complex book beforehand. I wrote Sentry to prove to myself that I can write so many words in a simple, single plot story. "Book 1" (the name of the entire book still escapes me while each chapter title has been spot on). Is sitting near 20K words and the story and mainline characters are just starting to warm up. You'll see references to Pankeen and Hal Irving and others on this site when they're barely mentioned in Sentry. That's because they do exist in the incomplete manuscript which I'll announce officially as soon as I finally find a name for the novel. The first few paragraphs exist in the screenshot below.
The book has currently three converging plots with at least four primary protagonists (one being an "protaginist-ish," if I keep him in the book). Although Sentry will (more than likely) be released first, it'll still be a prequel to this book in my heart. It was here were Jeri was born. I was about 17K words in when I switched gears to write Sentry in November of 2014 then put "Book 1" on hold while I developed the world more cohesively. It has some pretty unique elements. I've tried to make Raltha familiar yet entirely alien at the same time. I've kept elements of today's mythology and fears on an earth-like planet that has some completely non-earth features, such as the ring that makes the dark nights be as bright as twilight as long as the cloud cover is sparse. I've not found any example imagery that conveys this well except for a couple of "what if earth had a ring" Google image searches that yielded very poor (yet stunning and inspiring) resolution images.