Ummm...oops...

I've figured out why I'm having so much trouble with the novel.

There's a fair number of characters in the story, aside from just Brynna, Georges, Scott and Lily.  There's the staff and residents of the coven, Special Agent Eckes and his team, Kath and Marina...that's a lot of people.  And in trying to juggle all those people, it feels like I've lost track of the main character.  This was supposed to be Brynna's story and I seem to be spending less time with Brynna than I am with the other characters.  When I turn my attention to the novel, I find myself thinking about Kath and Marina rather than Brynna.  It's starting to seem like Brynna's a guest star in her own novel.

So I have some work to do.  I have to drag the story back to Brynna and away from the others.  I do have plans for all those characters; Kath and Marina have their own story (titled "When The Magic Came By", the secret origins of Kath), and there is one story concerning Eckes's team (titled "Waiting", centered on Janis Mendoza, one of Eckes's werewolf agents).  So everyone gets their own stories...I just have to learn some discipline.

I do need to have Marina in the forefront for the last third of Chapter 22; she's going to do something Adam Seyfert (Eckes's mystic) can't do.  They need information from the Hunters, who are understandable unwilling to cooperate.  The answer is to have a mystic reach into their minds and pull out the information.  Seyfert can't do it because it's considered enhanced interrogation and therefore not allowed by the FBI.  Marina, not being a federal agent, is under no such constraint and literally rips the information from the mind of the Hunters' leader, leaving him a babbling mess.

After that, I have to move everyone to the side except for Brynna, Georges, Scott and Lily.  Well, Georges is still a captive of the Hunters so he's not front and center.  I'm not going to worry about the middle chapters, where the novel began to slip away from Brynna; I'll tackle them when I start editing.

Now I have to keep reminding myself whose story this is.

10/05/2011: "A Voice in the Darkness" Progress

Amazing how finding a new job can change your outlook.

I'm feeling pretty good about "A Voice in the Darkness".  I like where the story's going, so I'm feeling confident I'll be able to finish the story soon.  I thought there might've been a problem with the story's timeline but a quick read through showed there wasn't.

So as of right now, "A Voice in the Darkness" is 8,324 words.  Maybe I'll be able to bring this in under 10,000 words but I'm not promising anything.

My Cluttered Mind: Decisions...Decisions...

My Cluttered Mind: Decisions...Decisions...: I've pretty much decided that I'm going to go into epublishing. While the novel is nowhere near ready for publication (I'm not even finishe...

Decisions...Decisions...

I've pretty much decided that I'm going to go into epublishing.  While the novel is nowhere near ready for publication (I'm not even finished with the first draft yet), I have thought for a while about gathering my completed stories into an anthology.  The eleven stories total about 85,000 words.  Yeah, some of the stories are long.

I'm not ready to dive in yet.  A couple of the stories need some work.  Okay, one needs a lot of work; I don't remember why, but for some reason I finished the first draft and did nothing else with it.  So now I'm doing an aggressive, line-by-line edit of it.  In some circles, this is called rewriting.

I might put together a little essay to include with the stories, something that explains why I'm a writer, why I started and why it's now impossible for me to stop even if nothing else gets published.

The only thing that I'm a bit concerned about is the method of payment.  If payment has to go through PayPal, then I won't be dealing with them.  I won't go into details but let's just say that I have issues with PayPal.

Why am I going this route?  Well, if you can't get published in the more traditional manner, it's time to go a different route.