Cameron Darrow's Blog, page 23
September 11, 2018
A Beginning Without an Ending
This time last year, I had finished zero novels, as Remember, November wasn't even out to my beta readers yet. Now, I have not only finished, but published, two. And one big reason why is the cumulative advice that I have synthesized down to this:
A beginning without an ending isn't a beginning, it's a scene that doesn't go anywhere.
It took me a long time to internalize this, and to really get it. I have been writing stuff for almost twenty years, but never actually finished anything. When I finally made the commitment to finishing a novel, it was because I knew where it was going. Sitting down and planning out the end of the story is the only reason I finished it. The 'planner vs. pantser' debate is one for another post, so I won't go into it here, but outlining made a world of difference to me, and now I'm in the middle of writing the third book in this series already.
The first scene I wrote for Remember, November was November waking up in the open grave with her memories gone. I knew that was a great opening, but my hard drive is littered with those, and I knew it. So I didn't pursue this story or any others until I figured out where it was going to go. I wasn't going to waste this one like I had so many others. It took months of thinking and pouring over ideas before the story took the shape you've (hopefully) read, but it was worth it.
It took a massive shift in how I think about my writing and my process for me to finish my first novel, and I'm glad I forced myself to do it. The old adage of 'done is the engine of more' turned out to be absolutely true for me, and it was finding my ending that enabled me to be done with something for the first time, and continue that story on into a sequel, and now a series.
Every book presents a different challenge, but every challenge you overcome makes the next one that much easier. You have to learn how to finish, as weird as that sounds, but when you do, there is no better feeling. Sure, you immediately start to second-guess every choice you made, but that's true of all art, because there is no perfect, correct answer. But you can't second-guess until you've first-guessed. Gotta do that first.
How does that apply to a whole series? Much the same way. I don't want to go into it too much, but I will tell those of you who have read this far that I do know what the final scene of the entire series is. Just give me time to get there!
To wrap up, I want to acknowledge that this was really more of a post for the writers among my readers, but I feel an obligation to, however I can in my small way, pay forward the advice that has changed so much for me. I know I'm nobody, just a small-time indie author, but I wasn't even that a year ago, and now you're reading this.
To me, that's a big difference.
Thank you.
A beginning without an ending isn't a beginning, it's a scene that doesn't go anywhere.
It took me a long time to internalize this, and to really get it. I have been writing stuff for almost twenty years, but never actually finished anything. When I finally made the commitment to finishing a novel, it was because I knew where it was going. Sitting down and planning out the end of the story is the only reason I finished it. The 'planner vs. pantser' debate is one for another post, so I won't go into it here, but outlining made a world of difference to me, and now I'm in the middle of writing the third book in this series already.
The first scene I wrote for Remember, November was November waking up in the open grave with her memories gone. I knew that was a great opening, but my hard drive is littered with those, and I knew it. So I didn't pursue this story or any others until I figured out where it was going to go. I wasn't going to waste this one like I had so many others. It took months of thinking and pouring over ideas before the story took the shape you've (hopefully) read, but it was worth it.
It took a massive shift in how I think about my writing and my process for me to finish my first novel, and I'm glad I forced myself to do it. The old adage of 'done is the engine of more' turned out to be absolutely true for me, and it was finding my ending that enabled me to be done with something for the first time, and continue that story on into a sequel, and now a series.
Every book presents a different challenge, but every challenge you overcome makes the next one that much easier. You have to learn how to finish, as weird as that sounds, but when you do, there is no better feeling. Sure, you immediately start to second-guess every choice you made, but that's true of all art, because there is no perfect, correct answer. But you can't second-guess until you've first-guessed. Gotta do that first.
How does that apply to a whole series? Much the same way. I don't want to go into it too much, but I will tell those of you who have read this far that I do know what the final scene of the entire series is. Just give me time to get there!
To wrap up, I want to acknowledge that this was really more of a post for the writers among my readers, but I feel an obligation to, however I can in my small way, pay forward the advice that has changed so much for me. I know I'm nobody, just a small-time indie author, but I wasn't even that a year ago, and now you're reading this.
To me, that's a big difference.
Thank you.
August 29, 2018
Thank you
Many people are discovering From the Ashes of Victory with the launch of Fires, and I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who has read both or either of the books in the series this past week. I hope you enjoyed them! I'm hard at work on the third one, so please look forward to it.
You're giving me a chance, and I am very grateful for it.
You're giving me a chance, and I am very grateful for it.
August 22, 2018
Influences
People often want to know who a writer's influences are, either before they jump into their work, or afterward, wondering where what they just read came from. So, here is a short, but by no means comprehensive list of writers who occupy the most space on my bookshelves:
Neil Gaiman, Naomi Novik, Scott Lynch, Mercedes Lackey, Douglas Adams, and many others. Those were just the first ones that I saw when I looked over at the shelf next to my desk.
You can probably see more of those influences in Remember, November than The Fires of Winter, as is true for many first-time authors. Fires is more uniquely my voice, which even now I am still discovering the more I write. I try not to read a whole lot while I'm in first-draft mode, as I don't want the tone to be overly influenced by what I'm reading. Learned that the hard way when I had to re-write entire chapters of something because it changed wildly due to an injection of Terry Pratchett that wasn't there when I started.
But the mantra I've taken away from all of these writers collectively is 'say it better.' I love a clever bit of description or word play that makes me put the book down so I can savor it before ruing the fact that I didn't think of it first. English is very flexible, and we have so many ways of saying the same thing, there's no reason to use the same ways over and over again.
They're also responsible for my love of character, but that will have to wait for another post.
Neil Gaiman, Naomi Novik, Scott Lynch, Mercedes Lackey, Douglas Adams, and many others. Those were just the first ones that I saw when I looked over at the shelf next to my desk.
You can probably see more of those influences in Remember, November than The Fires of Winter, as is true for many first-time authors. Fires is more uniquely my voice, which even now I am still discovering the more I write. I try not to read a whole lot while I'm in first-draft mode, as I don't want the tone to be overly influenced by what I'm reading. Learned that the hard way when I had to re-write entire chapters of something because it changed wildly due to an injection of Terry Pratchett that wasn't there when I started.
But the mantra I've taken away from all of these writers collectively is 'say it better.' I love a clever bit of description or word play that makes me put the book down so I can savor it before ruing the fact that I didn't think of it first. English is very flexible, and we have so many ways of saying the same thing, there's no reason to use the same ways over and over again.
They're also responsible for my love of character, but that will have to wait for another post.
August 21, 2018
Launch day
Fires is my second novel, and I don't feel like I know any better about how to feel on launch day. All the hard work, sweat and tears is out there in the world now. All the ideas, the story lines, the characters and what they go through... they get to exist in other people's heads now, and that is still a weird feeling. It was all contained in mine for so long, letting it out feels like having a baby, except that it's a full-grown adult and it's already left the house to go hang out with its friends.
The closer I get to finishing a final draft of anything, the more anxious I get for it to come out, but once it does, all I can do is second-guess every single choice I made. I was confident in most of them yesterday, but today I don't think I'll be able to sleep because I'm questioning everything.
But now that Fires is out, it feels truly done. Though I have filled many pages of my Book III notebook and written 10,000-ish words for it, I can fully make the mental switch and get to work on it in earnest.
If you have been reading my books, thank you so much. If you only read this, though, thank you, too. I'm glad you found it and at least took the time to read what I had to say.
The closer I get to finishing a final draft of anything, the more anxious I get for it to come out, but once it does, all I can do is second-guess every single choice I made. I was confident in most of them yesterday, but today I don't think I'll be able to sleep because I'm questioning everything.
But now that Fires is out, it feels truly done. Though I have filled many pages of my Book III notebook and written 10,000-ish words for it, I can fully make the mental switch and get to work on it in earnest.
If you have been reading my books, thank you so much. If you only read this, though, thank you, too. I'm glad you found it and at least took the time to read what I had to say.
November sale, too!
Also, if you haven't yet read Remember, November, or want to convince someone else to, it will be 99 cents in the US store and 99p in the UK store this week.
The Fires of Winter is out!
The Fires of Winter is now available in the Kindle store for purchase or through Unlimited!
I hope you enjoy it!
I hope you enjoy it!
August 17, 2018
Why set it after WWI?
The From the Ashes of Victory series opens on Christmas Day, 1918, a month after the Armistice that brought an end to the fighting in the First World War. Why there? Why not during the war, with witches in the trenches flinging magic around? Millie laments that she never gets to do that, after all.
Because I wanted to write a series about what happens when the war is over. The tremendous social, political and personal fallout of such a cataclysmic war is just as ripe for the exploration of character as the war itself. Especially for women. Endless work has been written about the men who fought in the war, but not much about who they left behind, especially in fiction. The time following the end of WWI saw incredible upheaval in the social order, and I thought that it was a great place to see what would happen if you put the most extraordinary of people in these extraordinary circumstances.
As I note in Remember, November, women can't even vote yet in this time period. If you can't vote, but you can perform miracles with a thought, what does that do to you? What if you're a woman who loves other women, but also bulletproof? Do you become resentful, or vengeful? Do you work towards changing it?
The Roaring Twenties get a lot of attention for being a time of change, but this period now is where it starts. It's when those ideas we associate with the 20s were still new and revolutionary. Think about Victoria's bobbed hairstyle, for example. It's iconic, and synonymous with the 20s, but having hair that short at this time? She might as well have had a mohawk.
There is a French documentary on Netflix called 'Women at War, 1914-1918' that encapsulates a lot of the threads I touch on in this series, and I highly recommend it. It's entirely composed of colorized film from the era and makes it more 'real' than anything else I've seen. If you want to see the kind of factories Victoria and Millie worked in, they're there.
That said, this is a fantasy series, and it's not 100% accurate, but I do want to pay homage to the people who helped shape the 20th and 21st centuries by drawing attention to things that don't get a lot of it, like the fact there were female arms factory workers 30 years before Rosie the Riveter, the Order of the White Feather, and that there were women serving in combat in 1918.
The end of empires, the toppling of a world order that had been in existence for centuries, the Russian Revolution, poison gas, tanks, aircraft, the First World War changed the world. But this series is about the people it changed, the terrible toll it took on them, and the new world they shape as a result.
A war the Allies won took everything from these witches, leaving them only with gifts of extraordinary power, and each other.
Let's see what rises from the ashes of victory.
Because I wanted to write a series about what happens when the war is over. The tremendous social, political and personal fallout of such a cataclysmic war is just as ripe for the exploration of character as the war itself. Especially for women. Endless work has been written about the men who fought in the war, but not much about who they left behind, especially in fiction. The time following the end of WWI saw incredible upheaval in the social order, and I thought that it was a great place to see what would happen if you put the most extraordinary of people in these extraordinary circumstances.
As I note in Remember, November, women can't even vote yet in this time period. If you can't vote, but you can perform miracles with a thought, what does that do to you? What if you're a woman who loves other women, but also bulletproof? Do you become resentful, or vengeful? Do you work towards changing it?
The Roaring Twenties get a lot of attention for being a time of change, but this period now is where it starts. It's when those ideas we associate with the 20s were still new and revolutionary. Think about Victoria's bobbed hairstyle, for example. It's iconic, and synonymous with the 20s, but having hair that short at this time? She might as well have had a mohawk.
There is a French documentary on Netflix called 'Women at War, 1914-1918' that encapsulates a lot of the threads I touch on in this series, and I highly recommend it. It's entirely composed of colorized film from the era and makes it more 'real' than anything else I've seen. If you want to see the kind of factories Victoria and Millie worked in, they're there.
That said, this is a fantasy series, and it's not 100% accurate, but I do want to pay homage to the people who helped shape the 20th and 21st centuries by drawing attention to things that don't get a lot of it, like the fact there were female arms factory workers 30 years before Rosie the Riveter, the Order of the White Feather, and that there were women serving in combat in 1918.
The end of empires, the toppling of a world order that had been in existence for centuries, the Russian Revolution, poison gas, tanks, aircraft, the First World War changed the world. But this series is about the people it changed, the terrible toll it took on them, and the new world they shape as a result.
A war the Allies won took everything from these witches, leaving them only with gifts of extraordinary power, and each other.
Let's see what rises from the ashes of victory.
Spoilers
I know many people are discovering Remember, November now, maybe even more than when it was released, so I have tried to keep my descriptions of what happens in Fires vague in order to avoid spoiling the ending. It's a direct sequel, and addresses the ending of November squarely, and I don't want to give it away beyond what's in the description.
I'm trying to find the balance as to how much to say, and I hope I haven't been too vague for you. Hopefully, you'll understand what I mean when you read The Fires of Winter.
I'm trying to find the balance as to how much to say, and I hope I haven't been too vague for you. Hopefully, you'll understand what I mean when you read The Fires of Winter.
What is The Fires of Winter about?
If my previous post was to tell you that Fires exists, then this one is to give you a reason to read it.
If you've read November, then you know what happened to Victoria. Fires deals with her struggle to come to grips with what happened, and the psychological and emotional scarring that came with it.
As for Millie, she is as happy as she has ever been, but she is still trying to figure out her role in all of this. The arrival of the new witches throws a monkey wrench into that process, and we get to see how she handles it.
About those new witches, I want to let the story introduce them to you, so no hints!
Sometimes dark, sometimes funny, it's about extraordinary women in extraordinary times, all of whom, I feel, deserve to have their stories told. It's a book about characters first, and getting to know them through their struggles with their pasts and what they may mean for their futures.
A future I hope you are as interested in reading about as I am in writing it.
If you've read November, then you know what happened to Victoria. Fires deals with her struggle to come to grips with what happened, and the psychological and emotional scarring that came with it.
As for Millie, she is as happy as she has ever been, but she is still trying to figure out her role in all of this. The arrival of the new witches throws a monkey wrench into that process, and we get to see how she handles it.
About those new witches, I want to let the story introduce them to you, so no hints!
Sometimes dark, sometimes funny, it's about extraordinary women in extraordinary times, all of whom, I feel, deserve to have their stories told. It's a book about characters first, and getting to know them through their struggles with their pasts and what they may mean for their futures.
A future I hope you are as interested in reading about as I am in writing it.
August 11, 2018
Going forward-->
I will try to be more active here, and keep you more up-to-date on things as they happen. I'm sorry I haven't really done anything here, or given you a reason to keep up with me, so I will try to from now on.
Book III of 'From the Ashes of Victory' is well underway. The notebook is filling up, and I will do my very best to keep up the pace I set between November and Fires.
Thank you for joining me on the ground floor, and being understanding as I flail about. I hope the work makes up for any absence I may have here.
Book III of 'From the Ashes of Victory' is well underway. The notebook is filling up, and I will do my very best to keep up the pace I set between November and Fires.
Thank you for joining me on the ground floor, and being understanding as I flail about. I hope the work makes up for any absence I may have here.
