This weekend I pulled the trigger on publishing my Torn Veil trilogy. It’s been a long time coming, and I have to say that I’m super excited to get these out into the public domain.
The trilogy began with Wall of Ghosts, which I remember first putting into a word document back in February of 2017. I was in a hotel room, pretty stoked on some energy due to finishing up registration and a training class for a new job I was hired for. And I decided that I wanted to celebrate by putting to the keyboard a real, honest attempt at my novel.
I had made a stab at writing Wall of Ghosts a couple years before, but I admittedly just wasn’t ready for the responsibility nor did I have the drive to get the job done. But with all that time to plan and consider the different avenues the book might take, I was able to put together a decent first couple chapters and in the span of a single afternoon at TGIFriday’s, I had a full outline for the novel written out on one of my own, custom designed story bibles.
I kept myself to the promise of trying to write a couple of times a week, with the goal of getting at least eight pages in per chapter. This was single spaced, on a full letter sized page. Wall of Ghosts was completed in roughly six months, and I had given it to a couple of colleagues to read over but something felt missing. There was more to the protagonist’s story, he had a deeper history and it felt like it needed to be said.
So, I started writing That Night in the Park, which has subsequently gone through maybe a half dozen rewrites as I struggled to find the right tone and motivation for the protagonist. I kept to the same guidelines, and yes, I did have an outline written, but still didn’t quite know where I was going to go towards the end of the book. That’s the problem with writing by the seat of your pants. The only way you can answer some questions is by writing them out yourself.
I needed to get my wisdom teeth out and then I got a bad case of walking pneumonia, so I was laid up for about a month and a half. The Light Rail was written in about the same time period, with me cranking out a chapter a day, sometimes, since I didn’t exactly have anything else to keep me occupied.
That all was finished about a year and a half ago. But then, oh, did I need to edit.
Each novel required significant reworking and adjustments, and I needed to fix some plot holes that became more and more obvious as time went on. But eventually, it became clear to me that I was just stalling. Either my stories were good, or they were not, and there really was no way of telling until I pressed “Publish” and wait.
With Pirate Island and Autumn Park complete, I went over the trilogy one final time with the Grammarly tools and finally pulled the trigger.
These past couple of days I’ve been struggling with the idea of audio books, or at least fiddling with some of the text to make audio clips for advertising. I’m pretty satisfied with how they all sound, now that I’ve got some experience with the audio recording tools and resources I’ve got at my disposal.
I want to thank all the people who were able to help me with my book, the beta readers who let me know what worked and what didn’t.
My next major project, once I have some halfway decent trailers completed for the novels, is my fantasy role playing game and sci-fi role playing game. Both of these projects are what I refer to as 90% done projects, things that I’ve almost finished but just petered out on. I spent some of this past week editing and writing up an important section for the fantasy game and realized as I was hitting save that, honestly, I probably only have 12-20 more pages to write and the writing portion of the job will be completed. There’s some additional artwork components that I’ll need to work on, but I’m discovering the visual arts component, while time consuming, isn’t really all that complicated by comparison once I have a good idea of what I want to portray.
Felton is also there, lurking in the shadows. I’ve been working on a very simplified script, so I can maybe come up with a 16 page comic for The Uninvited Guest. We’re going to see how that goes.
Anyway, just wanted to give a bit of an update. Hope all of you are having a great week!