Deadlines? What deadlines?

I’m no closer to getting Illusion of Truth edited. That isn’t good. I’m not sure when the anthology is going to be released, which is also pretty bad. I haven’t drafted a single word in Corruption of Blood. So what the heck have I been doing all week? How can I say I’ve had steady progress when I don’t have anything to show you for it?

I’ve been working on characters, a lot of characters. This is part of my old process, which was a part I neglected as I experimented. I had been told that some authors discover their character’s voice and personality as they write about them. The thought is that unleashing your imagination will make the characters more real as you discover their personality traits. As things happen to them, you determine their reactions. In turn, you learn more about the characters. I’ve heard good things about this method. In particular, the prep time per character is much reduced. All you need is some basic information, a short amount of work on how they deal with the plot, and off you go. I just worked up the primary characters and the more minor ones I did minimal work.

This did not work for me at all. My characters came off as one-dimensional to me. Worse, some of them sounded a lot alike. The ones I needed to be scared sounded angry. The ones who were supposed to be angry were angry. The ones who were supposed to be confused were angry. Apparently, I’m angry.

So, for the last week, I’ve been reworking my characters, filling in my sheets for every one of them. It takes a long time, but now I’m really seeing and getting the feel for each of them. I’m guessing that I have about another week of this before I can move on to the next step, which is putting together my synopsis.

That’s another step I skipped at the beginning. Again, the idea was to have an idea of where the plot is supposed to go, put together some specific direction, but let my imagination take me there. The problem is that this is supposed to be a mystery. If I don’t know how Blake is going to solve it, I won’t put in the necessary steps for the reader, either. I love mystery novels because they are puzzles. I hate them when they don’t have any way to solve it. Writing this way meant I was missing the pieces, the bread crumbs for the reader. So, after I get my characters figured out, the synopsis it will be.

The last step before writing (in this case, re-writing) is the scene list. Obviously, if I didn’t do the other parts, I didn’t do this. Without it, I’ve honestly been lost. Blake seems to be just hoping around without direction. My actual writing has really suffered as I meander around from situation to situation. It isn’t working, so back to the scene list I go.

I’m guessing that with the characters taking a week, the synopsis taking another week, the scene list taking two weeks, I’ll get back to drafting in a month. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, I’ve put up some more write ups for the Pantheistic religion. I’ll keep doing that on the web page until I get up the gumption to put up the history.

Let me know if there is anything specifically you’d like to see.

Thanks for your support!