Tag: high fantasy

Updates! Including an Unexpected Novel Ambush, Discussions of Food, and Some Art

On By R. J. HowellIn Art, Sketches, and Doodles, Prophecy's Exile, writingLeave a comment

*creeps out of stress-cave*

*attempts to dust blog off with dirty rag*

Well, hi! Um. I may have neglected this blog a bit these past many months. Life has been…hectic. While I hope that it will soon become less hectic, it’ll probably remain fairly hectic for the next few months, though I’m hoping to restart the Month of Books series. I miss the Month of Books and I’ve read some fantastic stuff recently that I’d like to share.

I also may have been ambushed by a new novel. There I was, working on Prophecy’s Incarnate, when out of nowhere, I introduced this one-off side character who gets mentioned but never is on-screen, and I found myself wondering, Huh. Who’s this guy? Aaaaand next thing I know, I’m writing a spinoff prequel novel that, in the space of slightly less than three months (egads), I have written over 100,000 words of. Yes, I almost succeeded in two consecutive NaNoWriMo challenges, though sadly not in the month of November.

Is this stress-related? Oh, definitely. Am I enjoying it greatly? Also, definitely.

For unlike Gev’s story, Asheru’s is…almost entirely plotless. It’s just this guy. Living his life. Doing things. Having tiny adventures. Mostly just living with his family. Very slice-of-life. Where Gev is my under-emoting potato, Ru is my exceedingly emotive dandelion who has feels about everything and opinions. Mostly about cooking. Why, yes, I am currently writing a character who is 100% in love with food—the eating of it and the making of it, and I get to write about cooking.

*whispers* Spoilers, but I love to cook. I also love to eat tasty food, so you have no idea how much of a joy it is to write a character who understands food and can describe it to an excessive degree. Gev? He eats and it tastes good more often than not, but he doesn’t describe it deeply. My previous book, Dead God’s Bones? Kossa mostly eats because otherwise, he’d starve and die? It’s a means to an end. Maiv has a similar kind of single-minded focus, but can at least describe a nice take-out dinner. Luko likes to eat, but lacks the vocabulary to describe it in any depth, because why would he? The book before that? Bunch of semi-immortals on a mostly liquid diet, so food…wasn’t really a high point.

It is so much fun to write a foodie who rants philosophic about chili oil.

So I’m a 100k into an unmarketable spinoff prequel that takes place about six years before Prophecy’s Exile and I have no idea what I’m going to do with, but hey! It’s a thing. I’m aiming for about 160k, but it might end up longer. Since it’s utterly unmarketable by itself, I’m caring less about fitting it into the proper boxes for a query and more about just writing the story however I want. It’s gloriously freeing.

Speaking of things, I also decided to paint what had started as a sketch of an Indros warrior on a war-garn that was mostly for me to work out armor and saddle designs, and it, er…got out of hand.

Cue random lore-dump: It’s a bit tricky to see, since the rider’s leg is shadowed, but he is buckled into the saddle. Because garn, particularly war-garn cavalry, pitch and rock and rear and jump nearly twice their height from a standing position, and the most common injury for Indros cavalry are broken legs if their garn rolls and they don’t have time to release the saddle straps. The saddle is designed for one rider, and has a high back like a chair. The armor is a lacquered wood laminate, which can basically be painted pretty much any color they wish, though it’s usually in family/bloodline colors. The wealthier the warrior (or their family) the more intricate the carvings and inlaid with more gold and enamel. End of lore-dump.

As I was painting this, it occurred to me it looks almost exactly like a Magic: The Gathering card illustration, so for the fun of it, I made it into one. I have been told it’s a rather expensive card for what you get, but in my defense, it’s been easily a decade since I played.

In other news, a short story of mine is slated for inclusion in Neon Hemlock’s Luminescent Machinations and, I am told, will have an accompanying illustration that I absolute can’t wait to see. More on this as things progress.

Still querying Dead God’s Bones, but it’s quieted as I’ve started to question the trajectory of my career and what I want as a writer. More and more, I question if I need the validation of a traditional publishing deal, or if what I really want is someone (preferably many someones) to read what I’ve written and—my hope—enjoy it. And whether or not I need a traditional publishing deal to accomplish that desire. I’ve been mulling. My mulling has, so far, been rather fruitless. I watch developments on Twitter with a mounting sense that something in publishing is going to give and change of some sort is immanent. But we’ll see.

So that’s it for now.

-dun dun dun- The Query Trenches!

On By R. J. HowellIn Art, Sketches, and Doodles, Dead God's Bones, writingLeave a comment

The first batch of queries for Dead God’s Bones have officially been submitted! The novel has embarked upon its journey to agents and I am now, once more, wading into the query trenches. The number of submissions this time around is, quite honestly, small, but I’m trying a new approach to querying. With In Blood, I tended to shotgun query (even when they were personalized, they weren’t, per say, strategic). In the end, I submitted 43 queries, had two partials and one full request, but ultimately shelved the book.*

With DGB, I’m going for strategic. I am also trying damn hard to not only choose agents to submit to with intention and careful consideration of who and what they represent and what I, personally, am looking for in an agent, but to actually express this in the query letter itself. The letters are, by extension, taking a great deal longer to write, but I feel a more confident in the submission. With IB, I always feared I was pestering. With DGB, I have done my homework and chosen these agents specifically, so I feel less like I’m wasting their time. What will the end result be? I have no idea, but the immediate effect is that I feel more centered. So there’s that.

Fly, novel! Fly to inboxes! Fly and be read! And maybe garner a request or two!

In other news, still plugging away at the new novel. At 110K or so, and things have, necessarily, slowed. Because I need proper nouns. Like names. And locations. And words in this conlang I’ve been putting off semi-constructing. So! For the past week or so, I’ve been poking at phonetics and grammar and working on making it have a consistent “sound” so I can mash consonants and vowels together in a way that has an internal rational behind it so I can finally name some things. So far, I have letters and phonemes. Rules for what can and can’t follow certain things and what syllable you stress. Most of this will not be in the book, but I need to know something of it, otherwise, it’ll all be a garbled mess.

As for drafting, I’ve gotten to the point where the book starts drawing in some horror elements. My main character, Gev, has a sixth finger growing out of the back of his hand and can’t touch anyone, else he’ll curse them with extra unwanted digits sprouting from unexpected places. Soon, he’s off to meet the wizard in the magic, floating rock-castle-thing for a consultation. Drama will occur. The finger will be addressed. And then it’s smooth-sailing to the end of the book.

Well.

Smooth-sailing for me. For Gev? Not so much.

Also, have a potato-Gev, courtesy of a joke with a coworker that led to some spudsy doodling.

* This was not due to rejections, but rather, a new understanding that, really, that book, as much as I love it, had little marketability and wasn’t up to snuff, not for publishing. So it has been shelved, but fondly.

DGB Updates and Art

On By R. J. HowellIn Art, Sketches, and Doodles, Dead God's Bones, UncategorizedLeave a comment

After a many month break, I’ve returned to Dead God’s Bones refreshed and ready to get it into shape for querying, because I will NOT have a repeat of In Blood, where I sat on a completed manuscript for three years waiting for…god knows. For the time to be right? For that sudden bolt of inspiration that turns it from a so-so novel into a great one? For my courage to stop cowering in a corner?

Either way, we shall not have a repeat. DGB is going to be submitted, and in a timely manner, before I change too much as a writer and as a person and grow to loathe the thing I’ve made.

So I took a chance.

I posted a call for betas on Reddit.

I’ve been frequenting the Reddit beta readers forums to find beta projects I’d like to work on, but this is the first that I’ve ever put out a call. It’s…a little intimidating. Most of the time, my betas are drawn from a group of other writers I personally know, some through my grad program, some through undergrad, and some through my in-person critique group. I don’t have much need to foray into the wilds of forum boards to find betas.

But, this time around, I wanted someone who doesn’t know me, who hasn’t read an excerpt of this novel somewhere, who will be, more or less, objective. I also find myself in need of someone who loves pointing out mistakes, seeing that I apparently created continuity errors during my last editing pass and I’m not all that great at catching them myself. Thus, beta reader. Thus, Reddit.

Egads.

The plan is to start querying either at by the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. I think I’m just going to have to embrace this book at 180k, since trimming just seems to lend itself to further expansion elsewhere, and by the end of an editing pass, it’s nearly the same length. So I guess 180k is where it needs to be for now, and I want to get started on the next step, since this is as good as I’m going to get it at this point in my writing skill level. Which brings me to queries.

So far, I have two versions, the long one and the short one. For funsies, I’ve posted the longer one here, since I used the shorter one for my Reddit call.

Three years ago, Investigator-Prefect Kossa en Bekhir failed to capture a serial murderer targeting magical practitioners in the city of Balara. It nearly ended his career. Now, the killer is back, and has graduated from preying on low-ranking government officials to the upper echelons of society, their throats slit and bodies drained of blood.

Complicating matters, he’s partnered with his boss’ daughter—a newly-minted investigator-brevet with no experience, a hair-trigger of a sword-arm, and questionable loyalties. As the investigation into the murders becomes increasingly convoluted, Kossa draws connections between the murderer’s method and his own secret past. For Kossa en Bekhir doesn’t exist. His name is a lie, his voice is a magical fabrication, and his skin bears the scars of the hundred-and-twenty stroke legacy of a dead man found guilty of treason. Every step forward brings him closer to a place he never wanted to revisit: the home that betrayed him and ripped the magic from his veins. 

He won’t survive the encounter a second time.

DEAD GOD’S BONES is a 180,000-word adult high fantasy set in a sub-tropical island city rife with drugs and dragons. It’s THE ANKH-MORPORK NIGHT WATCH meets THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA and A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE.

Another beta pass, maybe two, and I plan to descend once more into the query trenches and send this out. I’ve already started preliminary research on agents and putting together my list. Once again, feeling rather out of my depth, but there we are.

Oh, I did say there would be art, didn’t I?

I’ll be honest, I haven’t freehand doodled with an actual pencil on actual paper in almost a year. I discovered I’m out of practice, but not in the way you might think. I was able, for the most part, to accurately translate what was in my head to my hand to the page. Rather, my muscles have apparently atrophied and I don’t have the fine motor control. Which was…frustrating. Need to build that back up. Also, forgive the off proportions, I wasn’t working from reference.

So these three are the main viewpoint characters of Dead God’s Bones, Kossa at the top, Maiv to the middle-right, and Luko bottom-left. As you might note, yes, in my head, they’re totally elves. On the written page, it’s less apparent, though they are varying shades of blue, ranging from a pale noon horizon blue to an almost blue-purple, and their sclera is black rather than white.

You can’t see it, but the impetus for beginning this was a desire to draw Kossa’s marriage ear-cuff…which can’t really be seen because I drew his head too small. I’ll probably draw another at some point or a closeup of his ear and just the ear. A lot of my doodles are born of a need to visually work out some worldbuilding detail, and it spirals out from there.

Also, don’t believe Luko. He does get paid, just not right now due to plot reasons.

The End!

On By R. J. HowellIn writingLeave a comment

erwan-hesry-WPTHZkA-M4I-unsplash

I…did it. I’m done. Holy bleepin’ hell, I just typed “END” and finished this goddamned book.

Hah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

*continues to cackle*

*starts choking*

Ahem. Anyway.

No, the book isn’t really “done.” Not quite yet. I still need to go through and replace all my placeholders with actual words, stitch together any sections where I skipped ahead while I was writing and never went back to fill in the gaps, and I still need to fix that one scene that’s really more of a script than a scene (lots of conversation, very little actual description of…anything, really. White-room syndrome galore).

After that, I print the whole thing, stick it in a binder, and start cutting with the pencil lead of doom. There’s a LOT of bloat in this book, and it needs to become a lean, mean, fiction machine. After that, it’s betas, more revisions, possibly more betas, and then I start packaging it together for submission.

Final word count for this finished draft: 185,638.

And only three days past my self-imposed deadline of the 15th.

Huzzah!

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

A Month of Books: April

On By R. J. HowellIn A Month of Books1 Comment

 

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison: This was an absolute delight. Yet another book from about four, five years ago that I managed to somehow miss (and I have no excuse, I was at the Nebulas the year this book was nominated). The story is a fantastic inversion of the classic “scion to the throne becomes king/emperor and everyone lives happily ever after” trope, depicting the sudden ascension to the throne in a far more realistic (and challenging, and baffling) way. Poor Maia. I’d never really considered how much a loss of privacy being emperor would be. I adore the world-building, and I love that the elves/goblins’ ears flick and move with their emotions, and how Katherine Addison approached the whole informal/formal speech modes. There are, however, a massive cast of characters, many of which with similar sounding names, and due to me having read the e-book, it wasn’t easy to flip back and consult the cast list, though for the most part, my confusion was momentary and sorted itself out by the end of the paragraph. And I read somewhere there’s a sequel in the works, and it’s a mystery, and I love the combination of fantasy and mystery…

Knife Children by Lois McMaster Bujold: A reread, but mostly because the first time I read it, I’d woken up at four in the morning, discovered that she’d released a new novella, and proceeded to devour it in one sitting (so to speak). This time, I went slower and savored it. For me, it’s the epilogue, with the conversation between Barr and his father, that resonates the most. The rest of the story is classic Bujold, delivering everything I’ve come to want and anticipate in her work, and is delightful. The epilogue, though, has this one, brief section that touches on the concept that in bringing/creating a life, one also inevitably creates a death, and the phrasing of that idea… it left me mulling over it for days after.

The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty: If you have not read The City of Brass, reeeeead it. And then come back here. Though I try not to have too much in the way of spoilers in these mini-reviews, this being book two of a series I adore, I can’t guarantee there won’t be a spoiler or two. This trilogy is one of those hard-to-define, cross-genre creations that’s superb in its combination and the execution of its elements and story (it’s a fantasy, historical fantasy, portal fantasy, with a hint of urban fantasy, combining it with Middle Eastern culture and history and tradition and it’s, gah! It’s amazing. Read The City of Brass, read The Kingdom of Copper, and join me in fan-girling over this author ’cause this is just  incredible stuff). More than that, Chakraborty routinely takes me by surprise. Whenever I think I see where the story is going, recognize the tropes and patterns in the storytelling, it jinks sideways and that fills me with such delight. I love the feeling of getting to the end of a book, and things are slotting together, but in a way that’s both inevitable yet, at the same time, completely unexpected, and I start cackling under my breath, and when I finally turn the last page, close the book, I drum my fists on the table demanding “More! More!” The Kingdom of Copper is precisely that sort of book, and I absolutely can’t wait to see how everything comes together in The Empire of Gold. Sadly, I must wait until January 2020, but part of me is grateful I didn’t read The Kingdom of Copper the moment it was delivered to my doorstep. Now, the wait is only… *does math* eight and half-ish months instead of a full year.

The Trouble With Vampires by Lynsay Sands: Ah, book 29. Isn’t that a lovely thing to be able to say? Book 29 of a series? Anyway, I do like that many of these have that mystery element. They usually catch me totally by surprise ’cause I’m too busy watching the romance to kick my analytical brain in gear and start looking at suspects. And, oh, I so love the humor in these. They make me snicker so much. I make a happy squee noise whenever I hear there’s a new one coming out soon, and the new installment fulfills all expectations with a nice mix of romance, humor, and mystery, though this one delivers a twist. The usual explanation-spiel about the history of immortals (often mistakenly called vampires), the lost city of Atlantis, and nanos gets truncated in this one, but a new possible threat from a group called the Brass Circle is introduced, so I’m curious to see where the next one goes. We’re running out of singles! By my count, there’s only Zanipolo from the Notte branch of the family and maybe the new girl introduced at the end, and after that…? Will the series jink like it did with that Enforcers trilogy? Or will the next book introduce more characters? Or *gasp* could it possibly be drawing to a close? (Noooooo! I need my vampires from Atlantis fix!)

Not as many books this month as I may have hoped; I got distracted by binge-watching the first four seasons of Grimm. It devoured a lot of my reading time.