Update One: A New Hope
Three chapters and nine thousand words into The Eye of Fury, the next Éo book, and it's starting to feel like I'm writing again. It’s been about a year and a half since finishing the first draft of the Hand of Sorrow, and I packed into those eighteen months editing, concept drafting, writing pitches, querying, the unspeakable day job, and the best and hardest part, raising a brand-new baby.
Anyone who might suggest two kids are as easy as one are dirty liars.
New demands require new tools. My preferred writing desk would look something like Bilbo Baggins' desk from the now classic movies, full of notes and ornate inkwells and esoteric maps and sundries, and very little of that is at all practical in my life. The (pre-child) Skeptic started with notes in a journal with a fountain pen and was drafted through a rotation of word processors and note-taking apps. The Hand of Sorrow started the way The Skeptic ended, with both drafting and world building on a laptop. It became clear that carrying a laptop and a baby was impractical, and sitting quietly for any length of time in front of a blinking cursor was impossible. I started carrying a small pocket notebook and a gel pen, and while a single chapter filled a whole book, the words were manifested into some physical form.
I tried to keep the same pace with The Eye of Fury, and quickly learned that the not insignificant amount of time it took to sit with my computer and type my increasingly illegible handwriting had completely evaporated, as though some witch cursed me to live my life in a twenty-three hour day.
So onto the next thing in an attempt to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of every minute of writing time, I have “upgraded”, though that’s not the exact right word, but consumer capitalism has not provided my vocabulary another, and now write on an iPad through a handwriting recognition app that turns scribbles into font.
It's nice to have real-time feedback on how bad my handwriting is.
It's probably worth a short essay on how objects change our minds — I notice a difference in my writing from pen to keyboard, both in its final form and in the way it makes me feel. Keyboards for editing, pens for writing, that’s the way that works for me, even if the “pen” in a hunk of plastic and magic from our good friends and future overlords at Apple.
(And yes, I came real close to naming this post “Update Four” and just letting people wonder about what they might have missed.)
Project status
The Skeptic: a finished and edited novel at 99k words and sitting there for me to send queries.
The Hand of Sorrow: a finished and edited novel at 146k words, actively sending queries.
The Eye of Fury: a novel in progress with about 9k words typed.
Quinthack: not a novel — a 5e hack that attempts to modularize character creation and simplify rules while remaining comparable with existing models.
Unnamed Tarot Project-just a concept, but one I'm excited about, a spinoff of my Éo world building that reimagines the elements as Matter, Energy, Time and Space.
The Gods are All Liars-a novel which, if I can figure out what it is about, will be one of my favorite things I've ever written, currently sitting at 16k words of mess.
