Cameron Darrow's Blog, page 12

The Title of Book IV is...

I am very happy to finally be able to announce that the title of From the Ashes of Victory Book IV will be Colours of Dawn!

This book has been a long time coming, and you've been very patient. Just a few more bits 'n bobs to finish on it and it will be done. The best I can do for a release date is 'soon', but that's a lot closer than it was.

I cannot wait to share it with you.

Box Set Announcement!

My first big announcement for this month is that on November 11, I will be releasing a box set of the first three books in the 'From the Ashes of Victory' series! This set will include Remember, November, The Fires of Winter and Hall of Mirrors, plus a short story!

Short story?

Yes! In addition to the novels, I've written a short little series of vignettes called Snapshots From the Ashes of Victory: A Christmas in Paris that will also be in the set. It's about 6,000 words long and is really a series of little snippets (snapshots) of two characters' trip to Paris together for a very special occasion. I hope you find it's a delightful little bit of dessert after the main course of three lengthy novels. Don't read it until you've read the first three books!

Check your local Amazon for pricing, but it will also be available available on Kindle Unlimited if you prefer.

This is only the first of a slew of announcements for this month, so keep watching this space.

November Goodness!

If you've read the From the Ashes of Victory series, you know how important the month of November is. It's a reflection of real-world events surrounding the end of WWI, and in my fictionalized world, for the characters and what the end of the war means for them.

So that's why this year, I'm making November special for the series again, in a new way.

Emphasis on new.

All of the stuff I've been teasing comes to a head this month! Tons of announcements and things for you to see and read are on the way over the next few weeks!

I am still dotting 'i's and crossing 't's, but barring something unforeseen happening, there will be at least one new story from this universe (suspiciously vague wording I know), at least one new piece of information you've been dying to know, and a few other surprises I've been working on for the last few weeks.

It's been too long since the last book, and so I want to set the stage for Book IV by celebrating the series with the month that started it. I hope you will join me in the little party I have planned for Victoria, Millie, Katya and the others both here and on Twitter. I will be making the announcements in both places, so keep your eyes peeled, and watch this space!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some dots and crosses to make.

Got Nuthin'

Nothing I have to say is important enough to take me away from where I am in the process on Book IV.

Made myself cry twice this week. Bam! Teased.

Back to work!

2020 Positivity

This week I was able to check off a huge milestone for Book IV, one I had pushed really hard to get done by the middle of this month. No, it's not done yet, but all of the major (knock on wood) rewrites are finished, and now it's time to start editing! Given the trials and tribulations that this book has gone through, it felt really good to finally pass that milestone.

Too good. This year, as it has for all of us I think, has made moments like this much more impactful. They're like these huge spikes in an otherwise flat line (full of deep pits) that are all the taller for how infrequent they are. And for the first few hours, it was amazing. I felt fantastic, better than I have in what feels like forever.

Then I got suspicious. Like I'm not allowed to have moments like this anymore. Surely, something is going to come along and snatch it from me, there has to be some colossal negative coming swift on the heels of allowing myself to feel good about accomplishing something, right? When I went out to get a celebratory adult beverage afterward, I half expected to be hit by a bus on the way home for my hubris. WTF?

That's not fair. But it's where I (and likely a lot of you) am/are right now. I felt guilty about feeling good about myself. It's not supposed to work that way! This soaring peak of positivity was made harrowing by the view straight down because 2020 has, in a word, sucked. Not being an original thought doesn't make it any less true. But think about it: feeling positive about something feels bad. Well, maybe not bad, per se, but at least... carries an echo of negativity? How about that?

But I'm doing better. I've managed to stay jazzed about what I've accomplished, thanks in part to finally making a major decision and getting the work of carrying it out officially underway.

It's mid-October already, which means roughly two months until Christmas. I'm not nearly popular enough to survive trying to draw attention to anything of mine around the holidays, which means I have even less time to get done everything I want to share with you this year.

But I want to. For me, and for you, I want to end 2020 positively, and launch into 2021 with all the momentum I can muster.

New-new, re-new, re-vamp; up, out and forward.

Small Update

Busy, busy, busy. Book IV is coming along, but a bit slower than I would like. Other Ashes-related goodness in the hopper as well, but I've learned my lesson about mentioning anything specific too early.

I want to share everything so you know that I'm actually working my butt off, but I just can't until it's ready.

Sorry, they're ready.

What Are You Doing!?

I think a lot of writers (guilty) fall into the trap of having two characters 'talking in a white room.' Meaning, there's no sense of place or their surroundings, it's just us showing off how good our dialogue is. I try to be mindful of this, and give some sense of where this scintillating conversation is being had. I try to mix up locations, too. This is a bit difficult sometimes, because I don't have a lot of locations in my books, but there's always an extra room or a cafe or something.

One of the big bugbears for me personally, however, is what the characters are doing while they're talking. My first drafts are horrific in this regard, just huge blocks of dialogue with no stage direction or anything.

In movies/TV there's what's called a 'walk and talk', making conversations happen while the characters are, get this, walking, just to give it some sort of dynamism, and make it visually interesting. Period pieces always have a stroll through a garden, sci-fi down the corridors of a starship, fantasy has a whooollle lotta walking (sometimes the entire quest!), that kind of thing.

This isn't always easy. The Ashes books have some intensely emotional conversations about the most intimate subjects, and I set the tone by having them in small, intimate places. A hotel room, a tiny kitchen. It's hard to make it dynamic physically, mostly moving hands and shifting expressions.

In these cases I end up using a lot of internal dynamism like heart rate, sweating, emotional walls crumbling, etc. but that's really more limited to the POV character. I do a lot of glances and looks too, but if you've read a lot of my work, you might have noticed I have a thing with eyes. I don't know why, I just always have in my writing.

It usually ends up being one of the last things I add to a scene, breaking up dialogue and giving a sense of motion to it. Midnight Magic, my last (and therefore freshest in my memory) book, had this happen a few times. There's parts, especially with Aurelai, where there's things being explained, but she's not doing anything. Just talking. I had to consciously go in and have her move around, pick things up, look at a tree, anything to make it less static. I just did this to a scene for Book IV as well, but I also found a way to make it more poignant, which is nice.

For good examples from the Ashes series, go find scenes between Millie and Ivy in a greenhouse and you'll see what I mean. There's all sorts of interesting (and weird) plants that Ivy grows that were a joy to think up. It populated the scene, made it memorable, and Millie's little WTF moments punctuated what would have otherwise just been some advice-giving with tiny bits of world-building by showing that Ivy doesn't have to stop bullets for us to see how powerful she is.

Blocking, stage direction, DO SOMETHING, whatever you want to call it, you gotta keep your characters moving.

A New Mantra

Okay, not new, but more like... an addendum. In an old post (I think. Somewhere around here, I've rambled a lot), I mentioned that my mantra when I'm writing is 'Say It Better.' I don't share Stephen King's utter aversion to adverbs, but I do try to avoid them. (They have their purpose, just like telling instead of showing does sometimes. Also, that's exactly what adverbs are: telling not showing.)

'Say It Better' to me just means being more creative with language, painting a picture, putting the reader in the character's head, finding ways to symbolize action without just describing it. An example of one of my favorite bits of 'Say it Better' ever is from Terry Pratchett: 'The storm stomped around the mountain on legs of lightning.'

That's perfect. I aspire to that in my writing all the time, which is why I drink so much take my time and do so many rewrites, even with an outline.

Which brings me to the new mantra I'm adding to 'Say It Better': 'Give Yourself Something to Fix'.

Even with the context of the rest of the story, and even with an outline (or both), sometimes it's hard to sit down and start a new scene. It's just... blank. Where are the characters? What were they doing right before this? How does it connect to the scene before? How much time has passed? etc. Or, as has been vexing me lately: how do I 'Say It Better'? I have a line in Hall of Mirrors that says:

"Katya watched as Vita did just that, her eyes working at her memories, stitching them together into a tapestry that unfolded across her face."

I love that line, and am quite proud of it. The problem is, every time I sit down to write, I want that to come out of my fingers with every keystroke. It will never happen, but I still sit there hoping it will. In the meantime, nothing else is getting done.

So. 'Give Yourself Something to Fix' means getting down the basics, and then going back to make it pretty later. Even though I'm currently writing my fifth novel, all I have in my head are the finished versions of the previous four. I simply can't remember the entire process I went through writing them, so naturally my dumb brain thinks that I only wrote the final draft (I didn't), and expects that level of quality with every new word I put down.

But that's completely unrealistic, and I have to fight through all the self doubt and remember that writing is 1% inspired genius and 99% turd polishing, and that's optimistic. I've been trying to keep this actively (adverbs!) in mind, and I'm making better progress in the additional work on Book IV now. I got a bit stuck for a little bit, and had to work out why.

I think I did, and I hope sharing it can help you, too.

Bringing Balance to the Force

You know what's really tempting to use as an easy way to get information across? Exposition.

You know what's really hard to do right? Exposition.

Exposition is the parts of writing where you're conveying information that the reader needs that isn't necessarily moving the story. A lot of world-building is exposition, especially in fantasy, where the world is entirely original.

'Vil'kes'man'a'tha is a quiet, unassuming hamlet set at the foot of the Ominous Mountains, home to 537 dwarves, who toil away day and night mining unobtanium for the evil King Bastardface the Comically Cruel, who ascended to the throne five years previous upon the death of his father, King Notsonice The Jerk...'

That kind of thing. Sucks to read, doesn't it? It's a huge barrier to why so many people don't like fantasy (inconceivable!); just paragraphs of description and detail *insert coughing fit that sounds like 'Lord of the Rings'*, but so much of the time, it's information that the reader needs for that most precious of storytelling elements: context. Who? What? Where? All important questions that need answering.

The trick is to do it little by little, doling out information as necessary through dialogue and actions. This is why it's so common to use a cypher character who knows as little as the reader does (Frodo) who has everything explained to them by someone who does (Gandalf), thereby telling the reader.

So what if you don't use a cypher character? From the Ashes of Victory starts in media res, from the POV of characters who already know what's going on (Millie), or someone who has to learn, but is divorced from any actual answers (November). So it was tricky to get the world they inhabit across. November establishes that there is super-powerful magic that exists by stopping a bullet, but it's Selene who has to explain Manifests to Millie (the reader). November is just confused and terrified by what she does.

Millie learning about Manifests is exposition. But I did it over two scenes, where we see everyone at ADAM's reaction to what November did, then the next morning when Millie finds out just what it was that happened over breakfast (with a hangover). In that case, Millie acted as a cypher character, because she was just as lost as you, the reader, but for the majority of the rest of the book, she is anything but. Her relationship to Elise was the same way: how do they know each other? Why can't Millie say how she feels? Is Elise even interested? What's so special about a kind, empathetic, caring, gentle, beautiful, warm-hearted French girl anyway?

But magic itself? Drips and drabs. Millie lights a candle, witchlights, Ivy's tea is weird, that Selene and Ivy are way older than they seem, there's little hints here and there. That too is exposition, just delivered very differently. And well, I hope.

Midnight Magic was different. I had to get a bunch of info out up front (magic types, why Vimika is poor if she can do magic, etc.), and I think I managed a nice balance between being engaging and getting across what I needed to. One of the problems is that the book is really short, and without context, Aurelai's situation makes no sense, necessitating a bunch of stuff being presented up front. Only then could we get to the kissy parts. But this is one of the tricky balances of fantasy romances. You're building the world and the characters' relationship at the same time, and you can't put either of those things off.

So, I'm writing Book IV of a series, how can there be any exposition left? Because a bunch of stuff happened between III and IV, and I have to decide what is important enough to tell you immediately, and what can wait to come out later. It's really tempting to just vomit the Cliff's Notes version of everything you missed, but then you would fall asleep and never get to the the super [REDACTED] ending!

This is one of the things I'm really grinding away at right now, so that's why it's top of mind at the moment, so I just thought I'd put together a little writing explainer and a hint at what to expect in the next book at the same time.

EDIT: I can't spell my own character's name right.

The Devil in the Details

Last week was spent writing wholesale new scenes for Book IV, just straight-up word vomit to get out what needed getting out, adding what was missing, you get the picture. This week was spent revising old ones, and it took exactly the same amount of time.

Why? Mostly emotion. Searching for nuance and trying to get a subtle point across is a lot harder than 'she did the thing.' Trying to find the little gradations that add up to an overall arc is more finicky than an action scene or even a big revelation. One is overturning a bucket of sand, the other is moving the same sand grain-by-grain, but only the pretty ones, while also throwing out all the ones that have crab poop on them. How can you tell? Exactly. You have to look really hard.

It involves a lot of thinking and a lot of feeling, and is a lot more tiring, even though you end up with a fraction of the (new) word count. And in the first half, it's more important to get right. Setting things up, giving them a shape and trajectory, setting the tone and where the characters are emotionally takes a lot of work, much more so than all the fun payoffs at the end, which seem to just snowball into each other and write themselves.

I think it was Neil Gaiman who said something like 'The second draft is where you make it look like you know what you're doing.' And it's true. There are good days and bad days, even good bad days (not a lot done, but maybe a big breakthrough idea) and bad good days (like when you write 2,000 words and then end up having to chuck them because you went down a tangent that ended in a brick wall), but they add up and even out in the end.