Hopes

Working on Bridge of The Broken while my agent's readers finish off The Last Captain. My enjoyment of the new is tempered by ever-present concern over what will happen, whether I met the bar with The Last Captain.

When I submitted A Friend to The Watch, my first novel, I was more excited than nervous, thinking I had conquered all. I tried to be clever about making my protagonists, members of the watch, act like modern police officers. I tried to be clever about a lot of things. In the end, I overestimated the quality of both my cleverness and my work. Needless to say, it didn't turn out; deservedly so.

It took me some time to recover from the failure of it.

An incident at WFC 2009 thrust home for me just how much I had invested in A Friend To The Watch working out for me. Like most useful lessons, it was painful.

That sharp lesson in mind, I at last acted on the sound advice of my agent, putting A Friend to The Watch away and concentrating on The Last Captain.

I threw the kitchen sink into it; many of the experiences I've had, more of the thoughts and feelings those experiences gave rise to, I put in. It wasn't easy, and like the lessons I spoke of, it was even a bit painful at times. In the end I produced something that certainly feels better, more true -something I hope will succeed where the first effort failed.

The wait will be all the more grinding for the hope I have in it.

I will write on.

The Shiny New Shit

I've been pondering new projects, partly because I will soon finish the first draft of The Last Captain, and partly because I will soon finish the first draft of The Last Captain.

"What's that?" you say.

Simply put: my mind, like that of most people, prefers to shy from hard thought and go with what's easy, shiny, and new. Writing openings is easy. Tying it all together for a coherent ending is fucking hard.

At any rate, I gave into the whispers in my head this morning, and wrote this little bit of dialogue, for a piece I am tentatively calling Confessions of a Necromancer:

“Not everything you see before you always was,” Ebenezer confided to me the first time he had me strapped to his table.

Being gagged as well as bound, I couldn’t very well reply.

As a natural byproduct of being constantly surrounded by the mindless dead, he had the ability to carry on a conversation without a partner. So it was that my silence didn't deter him from speaking at all, “You see, once I was a golden boy like you, walking in the light of the gods and basking in the adoration of women fair and foul.”

I shook my head, more in fear of the bonesaw he’d picked up in one delicate, bone-white hand than denial of his unlikely tale.

.......

Hopefully writing their mutterings out will allow me to get on with The Last Captain