MathiasCavanaugh.com

So, 2014 is underway.  Time to layout the plan for this year.

As of right now, I am still shopping my manuscript for Under the Darkened Moon around.  Been a little lazy about it, and will keep chugging away.  Nothing’s changing on this front.

I now have 3 short stories that, I think, and so does my focus group, are ready to go out into the world.  These will be submitted to various contests and publications throughout 2014 to see if they can garner any attention.

Hopefully one or more of them will be noticed and published.  If not, I plan on releasing them in various formats for download.  Plans are right now that they will be free, in preparation for what might be the need to self-publish my manuscript at some point in the furture.

I’ll keep everyone appraised of my progress on these plans as the year unfolds.  Wish me luck!

Under the Darkened Moon is not yet done, but it is getting close. A few more chapters need polishing. Then it will be off to whatever is next on the list once the novel is sent off to fend for itself in the slush piles of literary agents and publishers. And boy, is that list of potential projects long. I have so many that it is going to be hard to choose.

There are a lot of short stories I am working on. I have considered finishing up enough of those to wrap them up into an small book of maybe 100 pages or so and get something published and available for sale. Right now I am preparing to get two stories (Frist and Second Lessons & The Yoke) critiqued by my writers group. Second Chances is available to do something with too. So that could be the start for this idea. (more…)

I just realized my Tickler List is over 90 entries long, all sci-fi and fantasy. Each one of those entries is a story I want to tell. Some are short stories. Others are single novels. Others still are series.

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If anyone asks me about my current main project, Under the Darkened Moon, I do not lie about it.  I freely admit that I plan it to be the first of a series of stories set in the world of Arrnna.  Even if I write something else in the meantime.  However, even though the story is part of an epic fantasy saga I have purposefully tried to write the novel in a less than epic fashion.  Hey, you have to get published first is the way I see it.  Then you have to prove your story can sell second.  Trying to sell an epic five, six or seven book series to a publisher without a track record is certainly a daunting task.  Selling one book with the hook that there can be much more if the publisher desires is certainly more doable.  So it is important for me to make sure that the story in Under the Darkened Moon wraps up completely by the end of it.  I would hate to sell the first book of a saga and never be able to complete it because I never get to sell the second.

Some people that have been reviewing the drafts, giving it good reviews too, have pointed out that the book seems like it could be easily stretched into a two book set.  Originally, to tell the truth, it was headed that way.  The entire story was at first around 300,000 words (two books of approximately 150,000 words each).  But really about half of that story was only of interest to me as the author.  It really was not things the reader needed to know and it seemed to drag in parts.  So I edited the book down to about 140,000 as of right now.  Hey, I look at it like this; if I sell this book and get a chance to sell another, I can always go back and tell the story in those “lost” 150,000 words as a collection of short stories to supplement the novel.

I am about halfway through my current edit.  I hope to have it done sometime around June.  Whether or not it will get another polish or not is still up in the air.

Last night I sat down wanting to touch up some things with my short story “The War Within”. But I couldn’t quite get in the mood. The story still needs work however I just could not figure out what to work on exactly.

Some parts are right as I want them. So rather than do something I would later regret I started free writing the short story “Sacrifice” and adapt to a story in a whole other world.

Unlike “The War Within” which gives some background to a secondary character in my project called “Dark Moon”, “Sacrifice” gives flesh to a character that I have written about in short stories (unpublished) before. However she is much more the main character in those stories.

I think the exercise was a good one. It got me off my current rut with “The War Within” and quickly I had a new story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Right now it stands at 1,500 some words but there is a lot of straight dialogue without any added features to break it up. I plan on fixing that to make it more than just he said, she said, he said, she said, he said which is boring and can confuse the reader without pointers every now and again to let the reader know exactly who is speaking.

I have also decided to tell much of this story through flashbacks. Normally I abhor flashbacks but for this story I am going to try them. It seems to work.

I have updated the site to include basic information on what are now two short stories I am working on. The first is being called “The War Within” which is the short story spawned by project “Dark Moon”. This story focuses on a particular event which helped form the world view of a secondary character in the later.

The second story is being given the working title of “Sacrifice” and is a short story spawned by elements I had started to put into “The War Within” but which did not seem to fit that story’s main character. They did however fit another character from another short story I wrote nearly two decades ago for a writing class in college. I am adapting those pieces of story that I scrapped to a new story in a completely different world.

More on all these projects soon.

I am still actually writing the full length novel hoping a short story presents itself. I have two ideas so far on that front from what I have written. Again, there are lots of back stories that could make good short stories but I have to be interested in telling them first and foremost. Only two are interesting to me right now.

It is funny how writing fiction seems to work for me. My mind is about 10 chapters ahead of my fingers. I even already have and ending, which seems logical and sound, flushed out. This is at times a little confusing though because sometimes the story starts to wander away from that ending. By knowing the general ending it helps me keep the story on track I suppose.

What I am doing is keeping notes on where I want the story to go with each successive chapter. Some days I just do not feel like writing but feel like only putting down ideas. And it all seems logical at the time. But when I sit down to actually flush out the notes into actual chapters things are working out a lot differently. But usually better at the time of actually writing it. Some plot lines get dropped all together because while they looked good at the time simply did not actually further the story as they were flushed out into the first draft. Or while they may have furthered the story, they would have added pages and pages and pages of story that when I thought about it were not going to actually add anything to the story.

Of course the whole story is still a rough draft.

Things appear to be happening slower in the story than I have outlined which helps too meaning I need less of these plot points to get from start to finish and make a full length novel. It just seems that I have to add dialogue and scenes to make the progression from plot point to plot point more logical. So that is what I am doing. There will always be hang ups though.

Then of course there are the ah-crap moments where when what I outlined just does not actually work out to be the way things have to happen.

Oh well.

Up to 87,000 words now in the story that I did not set out to write. Again, all very rough of course.

Well, I am sitting here today wondering where to start. I thought I would just sit here at the keyboard and brainstorm a little bit letting my thoughts come out and see if they lead me to a conclusion.

I have a bunch of half completed novels from years past. But that just not seem like a good starting point to me as an unestablished author in the fantasy/sci-fi field. Finishing up an existing transcript and sending it out without any credentials in the fantasy and science fiction genre would probably be a fool’s errand.

I think my best bet would be to try and get a short story or two or three or four published in a reputable publication. I have a lot of short stories that I have written in years past. But reading them over, and knowing what I know now, they need a lot of work. The basic stories are good, but they could use some tweaking, but some of the prose is not its best.
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