The Door to Canellin

Well, let's just have a status update, shall we?  I want to kind of change the focus of this blog from talking about the trials and tribulations of self-publishing, to talking about the projects I'm working on.

So for this update, I'll talk about where I am on my various projects.

The Door to Justice is rolling along.  I've got about 100 pages of 300 marked up for editing and revision.  None of the revisions are major, mainly just polishing and refining my words, although at least three scenes are being added.  Over the years, I believe my writing style has changed and matured.  That doesn't mean I'm gravitating toward writing for mature readers.  I love young adult fantasy.  I love keeping a somewhat lighter tone to my work, and gearing it toward younger readers.  But every writer grows and learns.  The way I might have phrased something when I wrote the first draft of The Door to Justice back in 2007 is very different than I would phrase it now.  Current events, other media, other things I've read, all these are things that influence style.  And a lot of things have changed in my life in the past almost 8 years.  All in all, I think The Door to Justice as a first draft was better than the first draft of The Door to Canellin, but Canellin got a lot of work in the 5 years between first draft and publication.  Justice needs at least as much loving care and attention to be a worthy sequel, although I'm not going to dawdle... it'll be out this year, guaranteed.

The Codex Chronicles, untitled book 1, is in outline stage and I'm very pleased with where it's going.  The characters are fresh and new to me, but I'm really getting to know them.  It'll take a bit of effort to be able to learn their voices well enough to start writing the prose, but I already know them well enough to be able to decide their reactions to the events.  The story follows a pair of eleven year old twin brothers, Timothy and Jameson Angel as they discover secrets in their hometown, and even in their own family, that rock their worlds.  Timothy is a genius who is going to be graduating high school at the age of twelve, and already far surpasses students more than twice his age.  Jameson is also extremely intelligent, but no match for his brother, however, he's a talented athlete.  While his passion is baseball, he also studies martial arts and gymnastics.  Through a mysterious new online friend of Jameson's, the young Cody, Timothy and Jameson are sucked into the sinister happenings at a local research facility.

Rocket Girl is currently being morphed from a half-finished comic book miniseries script to a fully fledged novel.  I'm expanding certain ideas, pulling back on some, and generally just trying to make a book out of the concept.  There are a lot of challenges in this.  There are scenes, particularly in the beginning, where the visuals really tell the story.  Turning those visuals into prose can be a daunting task.  Rocket Girl is set in a world in which super-heroes came onto the scene in 1938, and operated through the mid-1960s.  But two heroes, Big Brother and Lady Rocket, made a mistake while battling their arch villain, The Mad Mentalist, and there was a disaster that caused every super-powered human on Earth to lose their powers.  In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths as a result.  Super-heroes were blamed for the disaster, and the history books paint them as dangerous vigilantes.  Our story picks up in the present day, where young Bobbi Weyer has already discovered that she has super-powers and decided to follow in the footsteps of her hero, Lady Rocket.  Little does she know that her powers are a sign that the plague that devastated the heroes is wearing off, and soon more people will begin to develop super-powers.

So there you have it.  An update on where I stand in the three major projects I'm working on, and a bit of information about each.  Keep checking back for more information, and eventually some samples from the new projects!