I've decided to make this into a writing journal. I've discovered that I do not want to make this a personal journal. I'm not the kind of person to hang their laundry in public, and the emergent entity that is the Internet is, I'm sure, not particularly interested. Which is a good thing. The moment it starts caring what I had for breakfast is the moment I go offline. So, that in mind, I'll stick to talking about writing, with, no doubt, the occassional ill-tempered rant about random things.

Current Projects
Water Ways, Iron Roads - Fantasy Novel, 140,000 words. First draft.
The Winter of the Earth - Young Adult/Middle Reader Novel. 30,000 words. First draft.
The Cold Folk - Short story. Idea/outlining stage.

I received my first critiques of novel Water Ways, Iron Roads yesterday from Beth Bernobich and Ian Creasey, two writers whose works I respect (thanks to both of you). They have been a salutary lesson in how much I still have to learn about writing novels. After some years of practice, I think I've become reasonably good at short stories. They are, essentially, fairly simple things, if you can develop the skills. You have a beginning and an end, and you get from one to the other as quickly and directly as you can, passing through the minimum number of necessary steps to get there. A novel just isn't like that. The same principle may, in theory, apply, but there are many, many more pages to fill. A single motivation for a character and a single plot arc for each are simply not enough to write a convincing novel. I knew that when I started, of course, but knowing and doing are completely different things. I'm still convinced this novel has a lot of potential. I think the ideas are reasonably fresh, and the concept of the novel is powerful. But I haven't yet pulled it off.

I'm waiting for a couple more critiques on the novel, and then it'll be on to the second draft. That in itself is a pretty threatening idea. The novel is over 600 pages. Just reading it takes a fair amount of time. Revising it seems a task to large to think about. Which is why I'm not going to think about it anymore right now.

My children's novel, The Winter of the Earth, which I finished (in first draft) last week is thankfully far shorter, although no less complex in conception. I'm letting it settle for a while before I look at it again. I find that if I look back at a story to soon I detest it. Every minor flaw is a disaster and every clumsy sentence is evidence that I have no talent. It takes me at least a month to be able to look at a story in the face again.

Which is why I'm now going to spend a month or two trying to write some new short stories. Most of the stories I wrote in the last couple of years have either been sold or retired (there are still four or five that I hope will find the right publisher, but four or five does not make a career). The first of these stories is tentatively called The Cold Folk. I'm setting it in a fairly traditional pseudo-Medieval fantasy environment, which is a first for me. I try not to talk to much about stories until at least the first draft is done, but I can say that, when you strip away all the fantasy from this one, it is essentially about a young man struggling to choose his own path, away from the restrictions of his family. I was originally going to tell it from the point of view of the "young man", but have now dropped that idea. There is more mystery and a tighter plot if I tell it from another person's POV. Other stories I am still thinking through are Thieves a modern, alternative reality fantasy and an alternative reality Victorian fantasy called The White King. I may return to Bifurcation Point, a science fiction story I first attempted a year and a half ago, but I don't totally have a grasp on the story of that one still.