Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I’ve been doing some thinking recently. (Don’t we all? Don’t we all engage in thinking constantly? What does that phrase really mean, when you think about it?)

I’ll start again.

I have been engaging in a form of creative introspection recently. Life has been throwing distractions and stresses at me (nothing horrific: I remind myself I still live a life of ridiculous comfort in comparison to most of my fellow world citizens, my problems are mostly first world ones, or universal, and so not exceptional when looked at from an appropriate distance. Distance, of course, is sometimes something hard to acquire when you are mired in the immediacy of your day to day life.), and so I needed to take the time to run an internal audit. (That was a long bracket before coming back to the main point. I apologize.) I wouldn’t say I’m great at that kind of thing, but I’m a writer, so navel gazing comes with the territory, and if modified a bit, may be more of a positive thing. I hope.

Anyway. I decided to reflect on what I truly want to do next, to write next. To try not to impose too much conscious control over the decision, to let my mind and body have a conversation, and burp out an answer that smelled right. Gross.

Regular followers of my blog (hi guys – love you!) are aware that I have recently discussed a few different writing projects. There is my desire to write an old school epic of a sort I think is really needed in the fantasy genre right now, and I found a shape for it that I think will be awesome: old school and timeless but still a wee bit unexpected. I really want to write that book, and its anticipated sequels.

I’ve also wanted to try cranking out a quick pulpy fantasy with multiple protagonists and races in honor of my inner 16 year old (following a quote I saw attributed to Michael Moorcock that he wrote for his inner 16 year old – I figured that wouldn’t be too bad a place to start to go back to writing the kind of fantasy I loved as a kid and young teen, and try to combine it with Moorcock’s enviable economy of words, along with his crazy out-there concepts that were just awesome to my not-yet-forgotten high school self. Yes it was called secondary school in Scotland. I know.). I had been certain I was going to do this next, and had begun planning for same.

I also have more World Belt novels to write. I’ve written three so far, introduced three protagonists and the world they share. There is definitely the story of what happens next. I know what the next chapter would be, and that will take the books from three standalones (singletons) to two standalones and the beginning of a series. I don’t want to commit to that without more interest in the first three books. Which means I need to promote them etc.. We’ve had this chat before – I’m working on it. Genuinely, I actually am, solved one problem, have started small amounts of advertising, will expand same and start learning from my inevitable mistakes.

So am I trapped in a form of analysis paralysis, procrastination by multiple project overwhelm? Maybe I was, a little bit, plus the life happening stuff.

But I decided to assess where my artistic gut was leading me, not what I wanted to write, or thought was the correct thing to write, but what I needed to write. The subject matter I returned to most often, that demanded to be made whole. I return to all of these a lot, snippets of ideas, snatches of conversation, new images, new lenses through which to view previously imagined events. Those ideas are not even dormant within me, they’re just not dominant right now.

The Red Palace is. Its time is now. Not from a market analysis or find a niche to fill concept point of view; it just needs to be written, by me, now. I’ve tried to deny it and push it away. I’ve tried to be intellectual about it and consider it too on the nose, too obvious and trite, to talk myself out of it. That’s fear talking, and I’m done with it. If it’s too forking obvious, so be it.

So I found my old files and discussion bits I wrote about it. They were a few years old, more years than I thought, to be honest. Probably because this book has been bubbling away, bugging me this whole time even as I came up with other roads to follow. I decided to read them, see if I got lost in the minutiae again, decided it was too much of a pain in the ass, or found again that the path to execution was littered with technical issues I didn’t want to solve.

I wrote a five and a half page outline of the book from start to finish. The main plot beats, some dialogue fragments to capture moments, the ending. Everything you need. I already have two starts, one a prologue. The theme is a sledgehammer to the face, so that’s taken care of. There are subtleties to explore should I wish. The scene mechanics are deceptively simple, but will actually take a lot of work in construction, because I have multiple strong characters and viewpoints to relate – which is what I wanted to do in my Moorcock inspired book, so I’m getting some practice in before I take that one on!

My artistic gut says yes. This is what I need to write next. I have no idea how long it will be, I don’t think terribly so, but I’m prepared to be surprised. This idea has the strength to push aside the world’s distractions and make itself known. I’m going to trust in it, and write.

Until next week my friends, when I find all this talk of burps and creative guts was due to an excess of cheese and lack of fiber in my diet.