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Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Talking Shop: Eric's Writing Challenge Update 17

Hello brave fellow travelers. I come to you once more with tiding of my keyboard peckings.

I thought that keeping you all up to speed on the revisions to the space opera would be a more straightforward process. It hasn’t been straightforward because the actual revision process hasn’t been straightforward. I’m picking through the feedback I got, which bears only a tangential relationship to the linear. That means my revisions haven’t been linear. I go from chapter 5, where I change one paragraph, to chapter 23 where I add a scene, to the ending where I weep bitter tears and think:

You can make this better!

So, when I try to write an update on the process, I’m not sure how to categorize it for you with anything more substantive than:

“Yeah, stuff is happening.”

If I tried to quantify it, I think I’d say I’m about 50% to 60% of the way there. But it may well be closer to 80% and I wouldn’t know it. So, yeah, stuff is happening. I have set myself a hard deadline for completing this round of revisions by the 21 of February, which I hope is realistic and not just naïvely aspirational.

In other news, because my imagination is a jackass, I’ve written about 10,000 words of a new novel. No, it’s not Rinn’s Run, Part 2. No, it’s not the never quite finished urban fantasy. No, it’s not the sequel to The Midnight Ground. It’s a whole new story, with a whole new hero, set in what I think is a whole new fictional universe. I want to call it space opera, but it leans into science-fantasy territory. It’s as least as much science fiction/space opera as Star Wars. Right now, I’m just calling it Mage Gladiator. Make of that what you will.

Why am I writing that? Because my imagination won’t leave me alone about it. It crops up while I’m doing other things. The characters haunt my dreams. I have scenes that I cannot get out of my head. So, it’s basically a sanity-preserving action. Okay, say it with me:

“Yay for sanity!”

So, until next week, when I’ll report back about whatever my imagination is doing to me, keep reading!

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Eric Dontigney is the author of the highly regarded novel, THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, as well as the Samuel Branch urban fantasy series and the short story collection, Contingency Jones: The Complete Season One. Raised in Western New York, he currently resides near Dayton, OH. You can find him haunting obscure sections of libraries, in Chinese restaurants or occasionally online at ericdontigney.com.

 

1 comment:

  1. I'm currently working on inserts for my 2nd novel.

    I'm assuming because Bruce hasn't published any more of my reviews those aren't getting used. Bruce, if that's the case, get in touch, let me know. I can probably sell those elsewhere with minor reworking.

    ReplyDelete