Every year, NaNoWriMo comes and goes, and for the past several years I haven’t been able to make it work. Part of this is due to the ever-fluctuating changes in my freelancing schedule, part of it is due to the fact that I wasn’t ready to dive into plotting a novel for submission on spec, […]
Category: Novels
For the Love of Story
I’ve decided to keep Raymond Day in my novel. I feel the story is going to suffer greatly without it; he needs to be there. Day, who first appeared in The Queen of Crows, is a problematic character for a few reasons. First, his origin story dates back to the Westward expansion in the 1830s […]
Book Trailer for Argentum, My Online Serial Novel
This is the first time I’ve delved into producing video. I’d appreciate you providing me with feedback if you have the time to check out this short book trailer for Argentum, Book One of the Violet War series I’m writing.
On Writing a Serial Novel
Last Spring, I had announced that I was working on a free urban fantasy website called Violet War. The goal of the website was to promote a series of books I’ve been working on and offer the first draft of the series’ first book (Argentum) for free.
Since starting this project, I’ve found that writing a serial novel comes with its own set of challenges related to the fact that this is a novel of discovery.
In this book, the main character (Sophie Miller) is an exile (think convict) from her magical world. Sophie committed a terrible crime and was later experimented on by the Alchemists then imprisoned by them in a House of Illusion. Those experiments ripped apart her memories, so much so that when the illusion “breaks” she is forced her to deal with the world around her in unusual ways. At first, she doesn’t trust herself but later questions everything she sees.
These questions have turned into information dumps at times, so much so that some chapters rely on discussion rather than action to drive the plot. Fortunately, I’ve been able to catch those moments by sketching out the entire novel from beginning to end. Pacing is really important to me, because as a reader I get very bored when the story doesn’t move, so my chapters are relatively short. They range from one thousand to twenty-five hundred words for that reason.