Tag: fantasy world

Inspiration, Lethean, Shifting Isles

Epiphany, Self-discovery, and Other Writerly Insights

G.R. Lyons

10857995_1655437044682890_3877588118554457830_nThe more time I spend writing, the more I realize the truth in this statement. It’s amazing how much I’ve learned about myself because of the writing process, and I keep having these little flashes of insight that jump out and surprise me. Sometimes, they even shock the hell out of me.

I recall expressing this very sentiment once, a few years back, about how I was learning about my own philosophical and emotional growth by watching how a particular character grew and developed over the course of writing her story. My sister’s response was, “Yes, but you wrote it, right?”

Right. Exactly. Which probably meant it should have been a conscious thing. Yet, the more I think about my writing, the more I realize there are things coming out that I never even really knew were in my head, and the meaning I’ve been able to derive from those things has impacted me in various ways over the years. Some, trivially. Some, of vital importance.

Somewhere in the middle range of that would be about where I’d put the insight I got tonight while thinking about the latest manuscript I’m attempting to wrestle out of my brain. After three solid months of flying over my keyboard and producing three complete 90-100k word manuscripts, I came to a screeching halt when I tried to attack the fourth. That was in November, and I’ve pretty much been dragging the brake pedal ever since. Four months of almost zero progress. Ugh.

It drove me nuts. (Alright, that’s already too many automotive-related metaphors. Clearly I’ve been working in the family business too long).

I feel a massive void when I get writer’s block, like a piece of my soul is missing. It gets to the point that I want to tear my hair out and throw a fit because I can’t understand why. And, of course, I can’t just step back and let it go, give myself a breather, and come back to it later. I keep trying to force it, which, of course, never works.

So, I start looking for excuses or explanations:

-I’m not exercising enough, so maybe I need that to clear my head. Except, well, really, I’ve gotten along with my writing just fine without exercise before.

-I’ve been under a lot of stress at work for the last year. And that’s an understatement. But now that stress is (mostly) behind me, and has cleared a TON of space in my head. So it shouldn’t be an issue, right?

-I’m suffering a bit of a personal crisis, one that is difficult to talk about in the decidedly red zone in which I live. Hell, it’s the kind of thing that’s not even often accepted in blue circles; and, since I quite decidedly subscribe to neither of those colors, it leaves me feeling a bit stuck in the middle. But, surely, since my writing has always been an escape from real life, why should this one issue hold me back when others in the past have not?

-It’s this time of year. I always get stuck this time of year. Right? Maybe? No, maybe not.

-I’m too distracted by excitement over releasing The Prisoner at the end of the month. Yes, true, quite true, but even that shouldn’t really be stopping me from staying on schedule with the rest of the series.

Well, then, WHAT THE HELL COULD IT BE?!?!

Thus, we arrive at a moment, earlier this evening, whilst in the shower (and, really, why is it that those flashes of insight or plot inspiration always happen when one is covered in soap and nowhere near a pen or a keyboard?!?! *sigh*). All along, these last several months, I’ve been laughing at myself over the fact that I can see bits of myself in many of my main characters in this upcoming series, and was inwardly joking about which one most closely resembled me.

Then it hit me: The protagonist in the current manuscript is someone with whom I absolutely cannot identify whatsoever.

*blink dumbly*

*stare at the wall*

*bang head against said wall*

Bloody hells, why did I not realize this before?

Then, in a rush of tumbled thoughts that followed that insight, it struck me immediately, over the course of all my work, which books were easiest to write and which were most difficult.

Wanna guess which were most difficult?

Yeah, the ones with protagonists I just couldn’t get into, because it was unfamiliar territory.

And if I as the writer can’t identify with a character, how in seven hells am I going to make him or her convincing enough for a reader to identify with as well?

So, not counting the first few novels I wrote a few years back and which will never see the light of day, I started really thinking about my protagonists:

In The Lethean (Lethean Trilogy, Book 1), both Victoria and Landon are bookish and independent. *insert big glaring sign over my head that reads, “That’s me.”*

In Hale and Farewell (Lethean Trilogy, Book 3), Hale is part of a team out of necessity but is naturally an independent player. She likes to work alone. Yep. Me.

In The Prisoner (forthcoming work), Benash loves his routine. Even though he really hates it, he also loves it because it’s safe and reliable. Yep. Me for sure.

In S.P.I.R.I.T. Division (forthcoming work), Asenna is a neat freak, a bit OCD, and a perfectionist. Sounds familiar.

In Return to Tanas (forthcoming work), Graeden doesn’t like restrictions and regulations, especially when the prevent him from doing the right thing, or something he wants to do that would harm no one. As a libertarian / anarchist myself, that’s remarkably familiar territory.

In The Five-Hour Wife (forthcoming work), Jani is a reclusive writer with a side job that’s her true passion, and she idolizes talented individuals from a distance. Yeah, I don’t know anyone like that. *ahem*

And so on and so forth. Then I compare these to the two books so far that have given me the most trouble.

In Uncommonly Strong (Lethean Trilogy, Book 2), I had a remarkably difficult time writing Joseph and Sati’s story. Joseph I could semi-sorta relate to, but writing Sati was like pulling teeth. With tweezers instead of pliers.

Thomas and Spencer, on the other hand…

I loved writing that couple. I loved their quirks, their relationship, everything about them. Thomas and Spencer were so ridiculously easy to write.

For a while, I thought I was simply distracted by the dynamic of Thomas and Spencer because of a few personal quirks of my own, but tonight it hit me:

Thomas was the real hero of the story. Not Joseph. Thomas. The one who was always supporting Joseph and doing everything he could for the sake of Joseph’s happiness. The rock in the family, despite his own sufferings. The one who always put aside his needs and feelings in order to make sure everyone else was alright first. Thomas was the one in the hospital urging Joseph to hold on, and there was no way Joseph was going to survive that moment without his brother’s support.

Why the hell didn’t I write that story with Thomas and Spencer in the lead roles? Looking back, that would have made much more sense, and it all probably would have fallen together a lot more easily than it did.

Then I look at this current manuscript with which I’m struggling (Broken, Book 4 in the next series), and I realize that there is absolutely nothing about Daivid that feels familiar. Nothing with which I can identify.

No wonder writing him feels like pulling teeth all over again.

Clearly, I’m going to have to go through a few dozen more “What if” scenarios to see if I can’t tease out the right detail to make Daivid’s story work.

Because, if I can’t, then the rest of the series either falls apart or remains at a grinding halt.

And I am so ridiculously eager to get to the book and series that follow this one (gods, I must be insane, juggling all these story ideas in my head), that I simply must make this one work so that everything will tie neatly together and progress the story along.

News, Publishing, Shifting Isles, Teasers and Excerpts

Looking Ahead

G.R. Lyons

I’ve just gone through and added a few updates to the site, mostly to keep myself motivated and on-track. The last few months have been…

Well, you know the saying: You make plans, and life happens. Oh boy, does it happen.

Between massive stress at work and a bit of a person crisis, I’ve been having a really hard time focusing on writing. The odd thing is that I’m actually ahead of the schedule I’d set for myself, but over the last few months, I’ve been slipping farther and farther behind and letting myself get distracted and upset by life in general. So, to keep myself going and get this next series out, I’ve already posted projected release dates for each of the next fourteen novels, as well as some preliminary information about other works that I’ll be releasing after those. Hopefully having posted deadlines will keep me moving and give me something to look forward to.

Starting late next month, I’ll be releasing the Shifting Isles series, a set of fourteen books set in a fantasy world. At my current writing pace, I should be able to put out a new volume every three months. That is certainly the goal, anyway. That puts the series wrapping up in June 2018, after which I’ll be releasing a standalone novel and another series, all set in the same world but at different time periods. I’ll be posting more information about the Shifting Isles series, the standalone novel, and the following series as more time passes and more information can be released without offering spoilers.

I know, this is like Marvel-level teasing, but I just can’t help myself.

The hard part is that all of this is teasing me as well. The new series idea (which won’t start releasing until 2019) is really grabbing my attention lately and making it difficult to focus on drafts for the upcoming SI series — another reason for the posted deadlines. Now I have to put the new ideas aside and get these SI drafts done so I can finally move on to the editing stages.

So, on that note, back to writing!

Inspiration

The Writercoaster

G.R. Lyons

One thing I’ve been learning over the last few years since I started writing — and what continues to strike me each time it occurs — is that creating is a ridiculously emotional experience.

You start out with an idea, and feel on top of the world. It’s the greatest idea ever. You’re super excited and can’t wait to see it come to life.

Then you hit the snags: the plot holes that won’t fill, the characters who won’t cooperate, the target word count that remains elusive, the research that returns a fact that makes your entire story unravel, etc. Then frustration sets in. This is the worst idea ever. Why are you even doing this? You must be out of your mind.

Suddenly, you find a solution. Aha! The pieces fall into place: changing a setting sparks the right scenario to fill in a plot hole, adding a bad habit to a character makes him more believable and throws in a subplot, adding or subtracting a minor character radically changes the mystery of the backstory, etc. You’re a genius! You’re excited again! This is going to be a masterpiece and you can’t wait to share it!

Then life gets in the way — work, money, families, relationships, etc. — and you either don’t have time to write, or you’re so plagued by stress that you just can’t focus. That source of happy escapism just isn’t quite enough to pull you away from reality, and when you try to sit down at the computer and type a few pages, nothing comes to you. You try to force it and it makes it worse. You finally just give up and walk away, wondering if you’ll ever see yourself write, “THE END.”

The next day, you wake up, an idea in your head before you even manage to get your stumbling, half-awake self out of bed to shut off the alarm. You head straight to the computer and start typing, and keep typing all day, charging ahead with the end in sight.

And then, it happens. You finish writing the climax, wrap up the little end bits, bring your hero to success, and type those last few words.

THE END.

Elation! Wondrous, marvelous joy! You’ve done it! Look at what you’ve accomplished! A whole book! Still a rough draft, yes, but a whole book! You’re amazing! You’re ecstatic! You can’t stop smiling, and maybe even laugh out loud at the computer screen.

Two seconds later, you find yourself sitting back with a joyful sigh of relief, and then it hits you:

Now what?

*stare at the screen, blink dumbly, scratch your chin*

 

On Monday night, I finished the first draft for the third book in my next series. I wanted to have at least the first three or four books written before I started editing the first book and preparing it for sale. Since it’s an extended fantasy series and I’m doing world building as I go, I wanted to make sure I could plant little pieces in each book that would hint back / forward to other books in the series.

Alright, so this was also an excuse to put off editing. I hate editing. That’s when the writing process really starts to feel like work, rather than fun.

I’ve got three complete rough drafts now, and once I finished the third, I was sorely tempted to right on to writing the fourth, rather than taking a break to go back and edit the first.

So, as I sat there on Monday night, thinking, “Now what?”, I couldn’t decide which way to go: on to the fourth, or back to the first?

I finally shut off the computer, post-book depression already settling in.

I went to bed, and couldn’t fall asleep because ideas for Book 4 kept bouncing around in my head, but then I started noticing so many elements missing that I knew I couldn’t dive right into it quite yet. I had some more outlining to do.

The next day, post-book depression hit even harder, and since then I’ve just been staring at my computer and my notebooks, and not adding a single thing to them.

This will probably last a few days, as it normally does, and then I’ll be back in the saddle, writing or editing, and back on the upswing of the coaster, excited about what’s coming up next.

To be followed, of course, by the inevitable frustrations.

“Gods, why am I doing this? What was I thinking? Write a whole book? A whole bloody book? I must be mad! I can’t do this! It’ll be awful. I’ll sound stupid. No one will like it!”

Which — also of course — will be followed by, “Gods, this is amazing! I love it! I have to share it! It’s brilliant! It’s wonderful! Look at what I’ve done!”

Up and down, up and down, every single time. I wonder if this is the kind of thing to which one ever gets used.

Hat-Tips, Links, and Shout-Outs, Inspiration

Take pains; be perfect

G.R. Lyons

ad5fd8beb858b65c90fdcb0882b69842I found this image on Pinterest this morning, and though it has an element of humor to it, it also really strikes home on something that really bothers me about the modern world.

Where are all the men of the mind? Where are the people who actually care about what they do, and how they do it? Where are the people who believe in doing something, and in doing it well?

It’s so frustrating, on a daily basis, having to deal with people who have no competence whatsoever. I find myself doing other people’s jobs for them more often than not because they simply aren’t capable (or, even worse, just don’t care). It is such a rare and precious thing these days to encounter someone who actually does something well, and I tend to be almost worshipful of that.

So many of us stop at “just good enough” or the bare minimum. So few go the extra mile. So many do just enough to get by. So few take pains to do something completely and well.

Should we be perfect? Of course not. We’re human. That’s impossible. But there is an enormous difference between doing just enough and doing something with competence.

I’m guilty myself when it comes to certain things. I know that. I’ll be the first to admit it. But as I look out at the world, I find it becoming so rampant and all-encompassing that it’s utterly depressing.

Perhaps that’s another reason why I disappear into my stories, and idolize certain people. There’s no true craftsmanship anymore, except in rare occasions — and when I see it, I feel almost brought back to life.

As an example: I was walking around my local neighborhood one day, a few years ago, and passed by a house with the most exquisite concrete work I’d ever seen.

I know, a rather silly example, is it not? But completely true. Concrete, as a rule, doesn’t exactly inspire, but I was so struck by how beautifully this path and stairway was constructed that I actually had to stop and stare. I’d never seen anything like it done with such care and precision.

And the same can be applied to just about anything else we encounter on a daily basis. The saying “They just don’t make things like they used to” is painfully accurate. The same could also be said, not just for things, but for services. Actions and behaviors are done with minimal effort, just as things are made with minimal care and quality. But on that rare occasion when one finds something well-made, or a service well-provided, ah! Now there is something to treasure — perhaps even to celebrate.

Yet it remains such a rare thing, and the lack so disappointing. After spending an entire day in the company of the general public, as well as those who work in related industries and can’t seem to do their jobs to save their lives, at the end of the day I simply crave escape.

Thus, my stories. True, my characters aren’t perfect (indeed, they can’t be, or there would be no stories to tell), but they allow me to take a step back from a disappointing world and delve into something a little bit better, where I can encounter a phenomenal musician, or a dedicated security officer, or a precise scientist. For a few hours, I can turn my back on the dull, the mundane, and the “just good enough”, and immerse myself in the lives of people who truly care about what they do, and in doing it well.

This isn’t even restricted to the realm of work, either. The same can be said of relationships or just about any other aspect of life. I was watching Miss Austen Regrets last night, and one line in particular stood out to me: “My darling girl, this is the real world. The only way to get a man like Mr Darcy is to make him up.”

Whether it be within families or romantic relationships, people just don’t seem to take the time and care they once did. Everything is a matter of taking people for granted, or making assumptions, or not communicating, rather than really trying to be present for the people we claim to love. Mr Darcy seems not to exist in the real world because no one strives to be him — and by this, I don’t mean just someone like the character, but the general idea behind that sentence, in terms of all people: We have all these ideas of how families and relationships ought to be, but few of us seem to take pains to be those people for others, so neither can we find those people for ourselves.

Hence, again, I find people disappointing, and disappear into the lives of my characters, or the characters of others. Fiction gives the relief of being able to live, just for a moment, in the lives and with the people we’d wish to encounter in the real world, yet find sorely lacking. We devour works on brave adventurers and romantic heroes and daring achievers because we find those grand, inspirational, competent people missing from the real world.

So, yes, funny as it is, I wouldn’t even mind finding someone in the real world who was competent at adultery. At least it would be a competence! Something done well, if one can be said to commit adultery well. I suppose it’s possible, morality aside…

Alright, we won’t go there. Perhaps we should stick to competence in zoology. Anyway, moving along…

So, please, for the love of all that is holy, whatever you do — in your work, your studies, your relationships, your hobbies — take pains, and do it well. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but at least go a step beyond.

And for those who show competence, go the extra mile, and do things well, you have my eternal thanks and adoration. I would actually love to meet you and shake your hand.

In the meantime, I suppose it’s back into my fictional world I go. I have a date with a man who is trying to escape from prison.

 

 

[Post title is from Act I, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream]

Inspiration, News, Publishing, Shifting Isles

The Prisoner

G.R. Lyons

It’s amazing to me, even after five years of living and breathing made-up lives, that inspiration can come from the most unexpected places or in the silliest, simplest ways.

Now that I’ve got the next series — 14 books set in a fantasy world — more or less outlined, I’m diving into writing the first book, The Prisoner. Months ago, I’d already started putting down material for it, and got about 70 pages in when I hit a painfully hard brick wall.

The story just wasn’t going where I wanted, and I started losing interest. It seemed no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to flow properly. So, I set aside those 70 pages in a separate Fragments file and started over.

The second attempt didn’t go much better. It was an improvement, true, but still lacked the proper plot flow. So I stopped again. I was quickly digging myself the same grave in which I’d found myself while writing Uncommonly Strong, and after that disappointing experience, I certainly did not want to slog through the same frustration again. I wanted the exciting experience I’d had writing The Lethean, and especially Hale and Farewell: the kind of experience where the story just flows because you love the characters and know exactly where they’re going, even if some of the details surprise you along the way.

Once I finally got a proper outline done for The Prisoner, that helped quite a bit, but I still couldn’t make myself sit down and continue writing. My love for the characters had simply died, and I wasn’t moved to tell their story anymore (not even that of the female lead, and it was her character that triggered the original concept, though she quickly got switched from heroine to antagonist when I realized the story worked better not centered around her character arc). I tried forcing it, and that just made it all worse.

It was getting to the point that I almost wanted to give it up — except for the fact that I’ve quit everything I’ve ever tried in my life and I’ll be damned if I ever allow myself to give up writing. Thus, I finally just made myself set the whole thing aside so I could get my mind on other things, and hopefully clear my head enough to re-attack it later.

I turned from writing to reading, and as I was going through one series, I became totally engrossed in a character who was beautifully complex and conflicted. Despite the fact that the plot really didn’t pull me in, I found myself still rapidly turning the pages because I was dying to know how things would turn out for this man.

The whole time I read him, I was picturing him looking something like Tom Hiddleston à la Loki — pale, dark, fierce, and a perfect fit for this particular character’s personality (in my mind, at least).

And that’s when it hit me: This was exactly what I was looking for in my own character, but all the while I’d been trying to picture him quite differently.

The Prisoner has gone through quite a transformation from the way I had originally envisioned, but once the male lead came into play instead of the original female lead, one of the very first scenes that I put down was inspired by an insignificant detail — probably just a word or a facial expression — in a Bollywood movie starring Hrithik Roshan, one of my favorite actors. Consequently, his appearance became the foundation for the character I was trying to write.

I love imagining my stories in movie form, camera angles and all, because it helps me play out the scenes and brings it more fully to life in my mind (I’m sure I’m not alone in this habit). When I first started writing The Prisoner, I was going through it with the idea of Hrithik Roshan playing this character, because that was how I originally pictured the lead.

Beyond that one scene, though, I just couldn’t fathom him in any other part of the story. I tried to picture his face, his voice, his movement, and it just flat wasn’t working. I couldn’t see this character going through the dialogue and motions of the story while wearing Hrithik’s form, no matter how much I tried to force it just for the sake of sticking with the image I’d chosen.

Switch to something closer to Loki, though, and the whole character just instantly blossomed to life for me. That face I could see in all the expressions. That voice I could hear in all the dialogue. In one scene, when my character is told to give up his weapons, and he replies with utter calm and self-confidence, “No, I think I’ll be keeping these,” I hear that line in exactly the voice Hiddleston uses at the end of Thor 2, when Thor walks away and Loki drops his Odin disguise, and says, “No, thank you.” That low growl of a voice. That is exactly what I hear in this character’s dialogue. It’s just an absolutely perfect fit.

My love for and interest in the lead character skyrocketed, and all because of a simple change of look and demeanor.

As I went back to writing, I started filtering through the old material that I’d set aside and, to my indescribable joy, found that almost all of it was in fact usable, just with a few detail changes and with a little shuffling of the scene order. Once I had the right look and feel for the character and my interest in his complexities, goals, and moral weaknesses had returned, I realized the only thing making those scenes non-functional was my own lack of interest in the character himself, since I couldn’t fully picture those scenes in all their necessary depth. Now I can, and they work, and the story is coming together nicely.

I went through the file of my third rewrite attempt (amounting to about 26k words), and filtered in all the discarded content from my Fragments file, putting it all in places better suited to the plot, and immediately jumped to 43k words. Those rearranged sections will require some hefty editing, but the overall concepts and scene flow work so much better now than I had originally imagined. I’ve got ideas coming out of my ears, and now the only struggle is deciding which scene to write first because I want to write several at once: I’m that excited about this story. It’s all I can do to put off writing the climactic escape because a part of me wants all the rest of the story filled in first.

What a beautiful problem to have.

I guess I should have paid better attention to my own writing.

“Not all prisons are made of iron bars.”

Well, amen to that.

Inspiration, Lethean, Publishing, Teasers and Excerpts

Trilogy: Complete!

G.R. Lyons

Hale and FarewellThree books, two years, and one very happy author.

With the launch of Hale and Farewell today, the Lethean Trilogy is now complete! I can’t tell you how excited I am to be releasing this third volume in the series. I absolutely love the story and the characters: Hale, the tough warrior-woman being pulled in different directions; Nagi, the aspiring scholar with a heart of gold; Weber, the tireless leader of the vast Underground network. Even the less-than-savory characters, such as Marcus and Bergin, have sides to them that I find interesting.

As for the story, the idea for it started with the climactic battle, since it put an interesting and intense spin on the Lethean soul connection. Once I knew how it had to end, the rest of the story just seemed to fall into place — with a few surprises along the way, of course. The story is told in order but with occasional flashbacks filtered in to better illustrate what is happening in the present, as well as character motivations. Weber’s flashback to his introduction to the Underground was a complete surprise as I was writing it, but I just ran with it and it totally worked.

What I love best about this book is that it really makes me feel something as I read it. Some parts make me laugh, some make me cry. Weber’s speech right before the climactic battle gives me good chills every single time, and Hale’s final battle and her ultimate realization makes me grin uncontrollably.

If you want to read a sample, click here for the prologue and first two chapters. You can also purchase the book from CreateSpace, as well as on Amazon in Print or Kindle formats.

For anyone on Pinterest, you can check out my boards for the different novels. There’s not much to them yet but I’m slowly building them as I find things (and I’ll gladly take suggestions for pins from anyone who has read the books!). Here’s one I really had to search for but was totally worth the effort:

Hale's eyes
Hale’s mismatched eyes

And now, I’ll leave you with an extra little excerpt:

“There have been times in our history when Lethean were feared and condemned as witches or tools of the Devil; then times when we were respected and sought out for our ability to tell truth from lies. At other times, we simply stayed in hiding, wanting to live as normal lives as possible, since people stopped wanting truth. There was no longer a use for us, when people wanted to live in a fantasy world where they expected things to come to them merely by whim and wish, a world where they could put on blinders to reality and deny basic human nature. But now, when people are looking for truth again…”
She fell silent, and he finished for her sadly, “You may be the last.”

News, Shifting Isles

Building my own world

G.R. Lyons

While gearing up to get The Lethean and its sequels published, I’m working on manuscripts for the next series project, though it certainly didn’t start out as a series.

Over the last several years, I’ve been jotting down notes and incomplete chapters for various book ideas, though never quite able to make much of any of them. I wound up with some twenty-odd files with different concepts, characters, and plot ideas, but they had two problems.

1) No complete story concept for any one of them.

And, 2) All were in a variety of genres.

At first this didn’t seem like such a bad thing. I was still getting my feet wet and deciding whether I wanted to pursue writing as a career, and I wasn’t quite sure with which genre I felt most comfortable. Something about the idea of spanning multiple genres appealed to me.

As time went on, however, I started to feel all too overwhelmed by these various projects, and lost motivation to work on them because I kept bouncing from one to another as ideas came to me and had to keep switching gears to do so.

Then I woke up one morning with a wild idea:

Could I string them all into one series?

It was a crazy notion. How on earth was I going to take all these different novel concepts and connect them in some way that made any sense whatsoever?

Once I had the idea, though, I couldn’t let it go (yes, I can be quite stubborn), so I wrote down all the titles on little slips of paper, and spent three full days pushing these slips around my coffee table, trying to figure out how the characters and plot in one could smoothly lead to those in another.

I struggled and arranged and fought and rearranged, got angry and walked away, got a spark of inspiration and came back — rinse and repeat, three days in a row.

“If I change this character to be a little more like this, then he could live in this country or be the son of this other character in this other book, and if I tweak the timeline in this one a bit, I can make it fall right into place before this other story, and…”

On and on it went, and finally, by some miracle (and by a couple ideas being thrown out, since I was never too strongly enamored of them anyway), the last little piece of paper slipped into place, and I had fourteen book concepts that all fit into one cycle.

It also threw me quite firmly into the fantasy genre.

This is perfectly wonderful to me, since I began to realize I’m most comfortable writing when I get to literally make it all up. No trying to squeeze magic or the paranormal into the real world (like I struggled with in The Lethean). No, this would be anything and everything I could possibly imagine.

And now I’m having an absolute blast putting this fantasy world together. It’s already an overwhelming proposition in terms of work, but as I sit here making notes and writing chapters, I can only imagine how much fun writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien had when creating their own fantasy worlds.

Everything from the gods and creation of the world, to inventing cultures and religions, to creating countries and their demographics, and forming characters with their own unique physical and personality traits — hell, even making up words, calendars, holidays, and rituals has been a truly delightful experience. I’m having way too much fun disappearing inside my little fantasy world of the Shifting Isles, and I can’t wait to bring it all to light.

Here I sit, laughing at myself, thinking that I used to scratch my head over the fact that Scott Lynch had already managed to name and summarize all the forthcoming books in his Gentleman Bastard series, and wondering how he could have possibly predetermined it all. Now I know.

And oh, what fun it is.  😀