State of My Various Writing Projects

I like to write, but I have a problem with starting new projects and not finishing them. It’s not that I lose interest, it’s more that I write and write until my head gets all turned around and I have no idea whether what I’ve just written is any good. Sometimes I’ll know just how to edit things in order to get them to a better place, but it’s always difficult for me to work on a project that I’m second-guessing myself on. Here is a post-mortem of the various projects that I’ve got sitting in folders, most of which are in half-completed states. I would call it a post-mortem, but I don’t consider most of these projects to be dead.

The Timewise Tales

This was NaNoWriMo 2013, and is currently the closest thing I’ve ever gotten to writing a full book. Right now it’s sitting at just under 90,000 words, which is of a publishable length. The building action and climax have all been written, and the only thing that remains is to write another chapter or two that wraps things up. Most of the falling action is already in place, actually. The story is about time travel, and uses the “stable time loop” version of it; history is set in place, and immutable. There are three principle point-of-view characters. Issah is a scholar who is more or less unhappy with the hand that fate has tossed him, as he learns early on that he’ll lose one of his eyes and there’s nothing that he can do about it. Wendel is the son of a cobbler who spends much of the book having adventures and seeking out his lost love, Ellebeth. Ellebeth gets caught up in a time storm early on and her story is more or less an exploration of that concept.

So here’s one of the big problems I have – I always have to start my description with “So there’s this thing called a time storm that rearranges people and places in a timewise fashion. When it hits a city, it leaves behind a jumble of buildings and a group of people who are mutually unintelligible owing to a difference in language, from which follow plagues and chaos.” That’s much more of a mouthful than I really want to give before even getting to the plot of the book. All three main characters get caught up in one of these time storms, Ellebeth and Wendel get separated, Wendel and Issah discover they have a limited ability to walk through time, and then the rest of the book is about Wendel working against time itself to get back to his lady love, Issah trying to live happily while knowing with certainty that things will turn out poorly for himself, and Ellebeth forging her own fate in a destroyed city. But I can’t really explain that without first explaining that there is this thing called a time storm, and that’s a problem because I worry that people’s eyes glaze over before I’ve even gotten to any of the characters.

Here’s one of the other big problems I have – two of the three characters don’t do a whole lot. Ellebeth forges ahead and rises to a position of power in the melded city left behind by a time storm, and that’s all fine because she’s learning and growing as a person. Wendel is just trying to get back to her – that’s his primary motivation in life, and what he spends years doing, in sort of a deconstruction of going to incredible length for true love, but since the winds of fate are against him, there’s not a lot for him to do. He comes across this ballad written about his search for Ellebeth, and tries to do everything in it, which takes up the bulk of his action, but I worry that he’s lacking in actual agency, since he learns early on that he won’t see Ellebeth for a decade or more – it’s like he’s going through the motions. And Issah doesn’t want much more in life than to read books and learn things, but he’s fated not to by his own nature. So for Issah and Wendel, I worry that they’re not following proper character arcs, and that their involvement with time removes some of the aspects of proper characterization from them. They both behave in very human ways, but I’m not sure that it’s clear that it’s building anywhere.

The beginning needs to be reworked some, to more properly set up the principle characters, and I need to go back and edit for continuity because everything wraps in on itself in paradoxical ways. But there’s a good chance that after some proper distance I’ll come back to this one and edit it into something that works properly as a book, which I could sell to an agent. I really wish it had a better elevator pitch.

The Wayward Souls

Detective Jan-Fong dies, and two hundred years later his soul gets put into a new body so that he can help solve the attempted murder of the king.

See? That’s a proper elevator pitch. It has a hook, and the whole plot is set up. You know from just that sentence that the book is probably going to end when the murder of the king is solved. That’s one of the things that I like a lot about this one. It’s sitting at 46,000 words right now, with the plot on its way to conclusion with a few twists and turns left, but I think that when finished it will be much, much more marketable that The Timewise Tales.

The book takes place in a Chinese-inspired fantasy setting of my own design where the soul is a clearly visible small white thing that pops out of your mouth when you die and dissipates into the air in a few minutes unless stored in a glass bottle. It’s a fish-out-of-water story in a lot of ways, since in the two hundred years that Jan-Fong has been dead there have been two different revolutions within the Golden Empire, and huge advances in technology. The Golden Empire is undergoing a sort of an industrial revolution fueled by crushed up souls, and the technology to take a soul out of a body without inducing death is a new one, along with the ability to put a soul into a new body. Further complicating matters is that Jan-Fong is thought of by most people as the greatest detective to have ever lived, owing to the fact that a popular series of thirty-four books were written about him after his death. He’s good, but he’s not the Sherlock Holmes that he’s been described as. His partner is Alana, a female detective who is more or less assigned to him as a punishment. The body that Jan-Fong wears used to belong to her lover, before he was desouled for crimes against the crown. She’s his guide through the world that he finds himself in, though she cares much more about getting things done than baby-sitting him.

Anyway, there wasn’t actually an attempt on the king’s life – his soul was stolen. Much of the book is given over to the attempt to track down the assassin who stole it and to figure out all the conflicting plots in play. I like the world, and I think the plot is pretty sound, but I’m stalled out at a certain point and don’t know whether it’s due to writer’s block or because it’s just a hard thing to write. This is one that I’ve picked up and set down a number of times. The current chapter I’m writing (and the half-chapter leading up to it) have gone through a half-dozen revisions. I think eventually I’ll get it. Some of the early stuff needs to be rewritten, and I think I’ll shift around some of the events so that there’s more of a dramatic impact, but this is definitely a project with some promise that’s on hiatus.

The Gift and the Burden

To Be Continued