Busy busy busy!!!

I’m afraid this week I only managed to get 1500 words done this week. The good news is that I finished a chapter so the next chapter will have the climax and then I will be close to finishing the first draft. The problem is that I will need to think a bit on this next chapter as I know how it ends but I am not quite sure how I am going to get there other than knowing what the main character needs to do to get to the end I envision.

This means that I will need some quiet time for a few hours to gather the threads of the story and figure out the scenes for this chapter. It is easy enough to write a scene not that says, hero confronts villain, but it is a lot harder to actually walk your hero through it step by step. I can usually write an hour here and there once I know what I am going to be writing about but sometimes I need a bit longer than that to first figure out what is going to happen in the story.

Real life again is rearing its head. My novel is at this moment my third hobby after World of Warcraft and Eve online, games I play with different groups of friends. The simple fact is that at this moment my home life is not really a good atmosphere for writing. I usually manage to finish off the week’s writings on Saturday or Sunday morning while my wife is asleep but the rest of the time there is usually a TV show or movie playing in the background at home, often in Chinese, which makes it even harder to concentrate on writing. This weekend something came up and Sunday was a busy day for me so I wasn’t able to get any writing done either.

Ergo the only time I really manage to write is at work but since it’s the end of the semester I am busier than usual wrapping things up for this semester and getting ready for the semester after the Spring Festival holiday. Hopefully I’ll get everything done this week and can then focus on finishing the first draft over the next two weeks. I do have a two week holiday coming up but at least half of that will be traveling which might cramp the writing a bit.

This week’s research has been reading a novel by Elizabeth Moon. It is not the first novel I’ve read by her. She wrote the excellent sci-fi Vatta series and my favorite trilogy about a paladin, the Deed of Paksenarrion. The novel I am currently reading is the first in a series of five that follows the Deed of Paksenarrion: Oath of fealty.

Since I’ve begun writing I’ve found that whenever I read a book I’m kind of split into two personalities. The first one is that of the reader who just goes along enjoying the story. The second one is the aspiring writer looking at writing styles, scenes, characters and basically looking at everything that goes into a novel, mostly looking for tips.

Oath of fealty starts off kind of slow. The beginning is kind of showing different scenes of the last novel of the previous trilogy and kind of feels more like an epilogue. This eventually wraps up and we get into the three main storylines. One is of a new king adjusting to his kingdom, one is of an estranged noble going back to her home to root out all the evil traitorous family members she has and the last one is of a mercenary company going out on contract.

The interesting thing I noticed is that each of the storylines has its own style. The king one is more objective where there are not so much feelings and emotions involved, more just the day to day things being recounted. The estranged noble is more paragraphs of how the main character is feeling and mostly about her actions. The occasional dialogue is short and often brushed over with a “she told so and so to do such and such.” The mercenary one is almost all dialogue and action with very little description. I don’t know if Elizabeth Moon was trying for this effect of if that is just how it came out. Overall I like the estranged noble plot the best, mostly because it also has the most interesting plot so far. It is the only one where the character is on a mission and is having to deal with difficult things. The other two are just more day to day meanderings as we follow the main characters around. It will be interesting to see where this series goes but I do recommend to anyone who enjoys fantasy to read the original trilogy first.