Prince ENKI, Galactic Guardians and Dragon Stones found in my fishing bowl
The CHRONICLES OF PRINCE ENKI (Book Three) Coming Real Soon!
Okay. I’m feeling a weight lifting as I type. I just finished my first draft of my third fiction book (Working Subtitle: Dragon Stone Treachery). I'm taking a wee break for a day, then will start writing my fourth book. Why am I so motivated? Well, because I crossed a milestone today--a writing milestone.
Before I wrote my first novel, I had a few ideas swimming in my mental fish bowl, but kept avoiding the work of grabbing my story rod, bait, tackle and line that was required before I could begin pulling one of the stories from the abstract into reality. That all changed after I picked up Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” for the second time. Why the second time? I wasn’t seriously ready to fish for his tips on the first go at it. I was to impatient to wade through anecdotal stuff at the time. I wanted a short, sweet, quick and easy formula for novel writing. Little did I know, at the time, I all had to do was to just keep fishing--or to simply continue reading King’s book. The second time is when I was determined to not only catch a fish, but clean it, cook it, fry it and enjoy eating it down to the bones. I patiently read King’s book until I got to the part where he was hit by that van…then the water from my fish bowl literally spilled from my eyes. Yes, I stopped and cried. Like many, I like and love Stephen King.
I sat the book down for a day or two, until I finished dealing with his tragedy. Then I patiently poured over the rest of his book, keeping his recovery in mind, in the process. As I journeyed down his recovery road, I found the courage to follow his advice. I began to “free-flow” write (what come call being a ‘pantser’—not to be confused with being a pansy—or whimp). I used the pantser method with one thing in mind-write to surprise myself. And, boy did I! I just wrote until I was done. I didn’t edit (okay, I did at first, but eventually stopped), I didn’t criticize my writing and I didn’t put my fishing pole down. I let it calmly sit in the water and watched the fish jump up from my mental fishing bowl right into my mental frying pan. Some of the fish that were kind of expected, however, some came as a complete surprise. When they showed up, I was totally surprised!
Were there any drawbacks to this method? The only drawback I found from following the pantser model came during my rewriting phase. My goodness! What were my first rewrite responses? I spent about eight weeks writing my first and second novels, but I took just about the same amount of time to get both novels from first to final draft status—or longer. Why? Because using King’s model, after you write your novel, he recommends setting the novel aside for a while (I chose two weeks for my first novel, and one month for my second), then I used my fresh eyes to read over my novels. My first responses ranged from “Daaaaayum” to “What in thee holy hell was I smoking (figuratively speaking, of course) when I wrote this." But I also had some “Wow…that’s wicked good," moments. So, it wasn’t all bad. But I had to "gut a lot of trash" from the fish of both novels before I felt comfortable with releasing it to the world.
My books were the first two installments in my series, “The Chronicles of Prince ENKI.” So, I was a bit weary after writing them.
That's when I got a brilliant idea to go fish in another pond entirely--to find fish for a different book, outside of my series. I took off to fish in another pond. But a funny thing happened! I got stuck three times. I was using King’s same ‘pantser’ model, but nothing seemed to work. That’s when I realized something--I sure some of you have already guessed—I needed to finish what I started. My characters, Prince ENKI, his brother Prince ENLIL, the Dracos, my young Galactic Guardian, Terrance Mitchell and his bully-turned-advocate Rainy Florez and a new character hibernating inside a crystal for over 5 million years—Meera, all begged for continuance.
And, I’m so glad I brought them back to life.
I’ll share another blog about the process…or should I say, hybrid process I developed for my third book, that’s over 20,000 words more than my longest previous novel.